Download (PDF, 23.58MB) - Plurality Press

276 THE WILL IN NATURE.
rent purposes lie calls TJJV /caret \6yov fyvai*? and explains
by it how the material for upper incisors has been employed
for horns in horned cattle. Quite rightly : since the only
ruminants which have no horns, the camel and the musk-
ox, have upper incisors, and these are wanting in all
horned ruminants.
No other explanation or assumption enables us nearly as
well to understand either the complete suitableness to
purpose and to the external conditions of existence I have
here shown in the skeleton, or the admirable harmony and
fitness of internal mechanism in the structure of each.
animal, as the truth I have elsewhere firmly established :
that the body of an animal is precisely nothing but the will
itself of that animal brought to cerebral perception as
representation through the forms of Space,
Time and
Causality in other words, the mere visibility, objectivity
of the Will. For, if this is once pre-supposed, everything
in and belonging to that body must conspire towards the
final end : the life of this animal. Nothing superfluous,
nothing deficient, nothing inappropriate, nothing insuffi
cient or incomplete of its kind, can therefore be found in
it ; on the contrary, all that is required must be there,
and just in the proportion needed, never more. For
here artist, work and materials are one and the same.
Each organism is therefore a consummate master-piece of
exceeding perfection. Here the will did not first cherish
the intention, first recognise the end and then adapt the
means to it and conquer the material ; its willing was
rather immediately the aim and immediately the attain
ment of that aim; no foreign appliances needing to be
overcome were wanted willing, doing and attaining were
here one and the same. Thus the organism presents itself
as a miracle which admits of no comparison with any work
1 See Aristotle,
t T~IC avayKdiaQ (pvaewg K. T, X.
" De Partibus Animalium," iii. c, 2 sub fin&m : irwg