KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

12 Theory of the Organism
that this activity of God was unique and occurred only at the
creation of matter. After the creation only the laws of matter in
motion hold. God was thus thought to play a part in cosmogony but
not in physics. Robert Boyle in particular expressed this view again
and again: 6
I think also further, that the wise Author of things did, by establishing the
laws of motion among bodies, and by guiding the first motions of the small
parts of matter, bring them to convene after the manner requisite to compose
the world, and especially did contrive those curious and elaborate engines,
the bodies of living creatures, endowing most of them with a power of
propagating their species.
In such remarks the true sense of the term "preformation"
becomes clear: the organizational forms of all species of organism
are determined at the creation of the world. All species were preformed
by the divine watchmaker. The task of a theory of generation
and heredity was thus to explain the nature of this "power of propagating
their species" as well as to reveal the material means of
guaranteeing its continuity and constancy over time. The solution
that was to prevail for almost a century arose in the 1670's more or
less simultaneously in the work of a number of philosophers and
physicians. This solution consisted in assuming that all the germs
of all the individuals that were ever to live were created in a single
act of creation. According to this kind of explanation the miniature
copies of the future organisms have existed fully formed in the
germs since creation. There were then three different theorems
about how the germs had been stored since that time: panspermism
and two kinds of encasement, ovism and animalculism. 7 Pan-
6 Boyle, "Forms and Qualities," p. 15; cf. also p. 48: "I do not at all believe that
either these Cartesian laws of motion, or the Epicurean casual concourse of atoms,
could bring mere matter into so orderly and well contrived a fabrick as this
world; and therefore I think, that the wise Author of nature did not only put matter
into motion, but, when he resolved to make the world, did so regulate and guide the
motions of the small parts of the universal matter, as to reduce the greater systems
of them into the order they were to continue in; and did more particularly contrive
some portions of that matter into seminal rudiments or principles, lodged in convenient
receptacles (and as it were wombs) and others into the bodies of plants and
animals ..."
7 Descartes' follower Pierre Silvain Regis described the possibilities in his
Cours de Philosophie (first published in 1690, but completed perhaps as early as
1681) II,641: "Those who believe that the germs were produced at the beginning of
the world are not all in agreement about the place in which they were formed:
some believe that they were formed in the womb of the first Female of each species;
others maintain that they were formed in the testicles of the first male; and there