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COMPARATIVE ANATOMY. 277
of human artifice wrought by the lamplight of know
ledge. 1
Our admiration for the consummate perfection and fit
ness for their ends in all the works of Nature, is at the
bottom based upon our viewing them in the same light as
we do our own works. In these, in the first place, the will
to do the work and the work are two different things ;
then again two other things lie between these two : firstly,
the medium of representation, which, taken by itself, is
foreign to the will, through which the will must pass
before it realizes itself here; and secondly the material
foreign to the will here at work, on which a form foreign
to it has to be forced, which it resists, because the
material already belongs to another will, that is to say,
to its own nature, its forma substantialis, the (Platonic)
idea, expressed by it : therefore this material has first
to be overcome, and however deeply the artificial form
may have penetrated, will always continue inwardly resist-
1 The appearance of every animal therefore presents a totality, a
unity, a perfection and a rigidly carried out harmony in all its parts
which is so entirely based upon a single fundamental thought, that even
the strangest animal shape seems to the attentive observer as if it were
the only right, nay, only possible form of existence, and as if there
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natural
could be no other than just this very one. The expression
used to denote that a thing is a matter of course, and that it cannot be
otherwise, is in its deepest foundation based upon this. Gothe himself
was struck by this unity when contemplating whelks and crabs at Venice,
"
and it caused him to exclaim : How delightful, how glorious is a living
thing ! how well adapted for its condition ; how true, how real !
(" Life," vol. iv. p. 223). No artist therefore, who has not made it bis
business to study such forms for years and to penetrate into their meaning
and comprehension, can rightly imitate them. Without this study his
work will seem as if it were pasted together : the parts no doubt will be
there, but the bond which unites them and gives them cohesion, the
spirit, the idea, which is the objectivity of the primary act of the will
presenting itself as this or that particular species, will be wanting.
[Add. to 3rd ed.]
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