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COMPARATIVE ANATOMY. 273
race multiplies and the length of his childhood and life,
which demand secure preservation of the individual. All
these great requirements had to be satisfied by means of
intellectual powers, which, for this reason, predominate in
him. But we find the intellect secondary and subordinate
everywhere, and destined exclusively to serve the purposes
of the will. As a rule too, it always remains true to its
destiny and subservient to the will. How nevertheless,
it frees itself in particular instances from this bondage
through an abnormal preponderance of cerebral life, whereby
purely objective cognition becomes possible which may be
enhanced to genius, I have shown at length in the aesthetic
part of 1
my chief work.
Now, after all these reflections upon the precise agree
ment between the will and the organisation of each animal,
if we inspect a well-arranged osteological collection from
this point of view, it will certainly seem to us as if we
saw one and the same being (De Lamarck s primary
animal, or, more properly, the will to live) changing its
shape according to circumstances, and thus producing all
this multiplicity of forms out of the same number and
arrangement of its bones, by prolonging and curtailing,
strengthening and weakening them. This number and
arrangement of the bones, which Geoffrey de St. Hilaire 2
called the anatomical element, continues, as he has tho
roughly shown, in all essential points unchanged: it
is a constant magnitude, something which is absolutely
given beforehand, irrevocably fixed by an unfathomable
necessity an immutability which I should compare with
the permanence of matter in all physical and chemical
this respect all the four-footed mammalia surpass him. [Add. to
3rd ed.]
1
[See Third Book of the W. a. W. u. V. ; later also, in "
my Parerga,"
vol. ii. 50-57 and 206. ( 51-58, and 210 of the 2nd edition.)
2 "
Principes de Philosophic Zoologique," 1830.
T