Chapter 12

Causes of different organisation in animals

471. SECOND QUESTION:

Why is the life instinct not satisfied with any kind of matter, and why, in order to activate the animal feeling, does it require matter to be organated in a given way? In other words, why must the term of the feeling be this particular aggregation of matter, this particular choice or form and not another?

If it is true that 1. in the animal the soul is the only substantial form of the body, 2. the felt exists by virtue of the sentient, and 3. feeling constitutes the animal in being, it must also be true that the specific fundamental feeling, not matter, is the cause of a specific organism in the animal; matter itself is cause of the various kinds of feeling. If the aggregation of matter determined the complex feeling, every little bit of matter would have a corresponding complex-animal feeling. But if feeling determined each little part and aggregation of its matter, these parts or aggregations would correspond exactly in number to the fundamental feelings in question.

472. If the fundamental feelings constituting a corresponding number of animals are definite and determined, why are not all conceivable fundamental feelings definite and determined?

The answer is found in data supplied by internal observation and experience. One particular datum tells us that the state of the body varyingly influences the contented state of the animal's feeling, that is, the animal experiences pleasure or pain according to the condition, changes and movements of its body.

Every fundamental feeling is therefore bound by certain laws which, modifying the feeling, endow it sometimes with a mode of perfection, sometimes with a mode of deterioration. When a fundamental feeling is susceptible of a mode of perfection, its action will strive to acquire this mode, and distance itself from the opposite extreme. This perfect mode or state is certainly in the feeling, not outside it. Consequently, what is felt will be ceaselessly moved and modified by the vital principle and the feeling itself, provided that this is active and has a continuous tendency to adapt to and settle in its more perfect, natural and contented mode of being. But whenever the felt is moved and modified, the body, together with the matter underlying the body is moved and modified. Thus, the vital or sentient principle, by adapting, settling and arranging itself, can place itself in its most natural state and most pleasant mode of being. Its operation either organises the matter in which it is acting or to which it can extend its action through contiguity, or at least seeks to control and organise the matter as it pleases. Hence, the stamp of the species, the moulding energy and the reason why every animal reproduces another animal like itself must be sought in the fundamental feeling, the seat of animal activity.

473. This enables us to understand and explain the vis essentialis of G. F. Wolff,(223) the epigenesis of Aristotle, Galen, Descartes, Harvey, J. Turberville Needham and Müller, the nisus formativus of Blumenbach, Barthez and others, the plastic forms of Cudworth, the attraction of parts and the superstructure of the organs of Maupertuis, the power to create and organise the foetus which Stahl attributes to the soul, the archeus and the formative spirit of Van Helmont. Although these authors certainly do not agree fully, and often say what is manifestly false by expressing their thought in totally incorrect ways (for example Van Helmont's seminal soul located in the matrix), they do agree in one, undeniable truth: an organising principle exists in nature. I believe that this principle is the vital principle and the sensuous instinct acting in unison with it [App., no. 7].

Notes

(223) Dissertatio sistens theoriam generationis, Halle, 1774.