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It was Carl Gegenbaur again who solved the difficult problem of tracing the skeleton of the limbs of the Vertebrates to a common type. Few parts of the vertebrate body have undergone such infinitely varied modifications in regard to size, shape, and adaptation of structure as the limbs or extremities; yet we are in a position to reduce them all to the same hereditary standard.
While it places the intellectual, moral and spiritual faculties at the top as supreme, it is just as vitally interested in the care of the body, education, discipline, self-culture, choice of occupation, matrimonial adaptation, heredity and all the practical affairs of life.
I declaimed, with rather a free adaptation to my own need. Her brow positively refused to unknit. "Have you nothing to do but spout bad quotations from Shakespeare on a hilltop?" she wanted to know, in a particularly disagreeable tone. "Plenty; I have yet to win that narrow pass," I said. "Hardly to-day," she told me, with more than a shade of triumph.
Does not this confirm us in the view that the original and still surviving function of our intellectual life is to guide us in the practical adaptation of our expectancies and activities?
We can trace the psychological stages from the manifest content in varying delusions back to a more or less constant unconscious striving the latent content. The tendency of this latent content to appear as delusions depends on a defect of adaptation, which must have a physical basis probably of a general nature. The delusions, in many cases, are symbols of the latent content.
Our French fellow-citizens in Quebec use an adaptation of it as a statement of their law. It took longer before Germany as a whole obtained a uniformity of law. The very strength of the national aspirations roused by the war against Napoleon stood for a time in the way of codification.
Thus, community in embryonic structure reveals community of descent; but dissimilarity in embryonic development does not prove discommunity of descent, for in one of two groups the developmental stages may have been suppressed, or may have been so greatly modified through adaptation to new habits of life as to be no longer recognisable.
It seems to me convenient to use the word purpose as meaning generally the end to which certain means are adapted, both in these two cases and in any other that may hereafter become known, provided only that the adaptation is accounted for by the necessity or utility of the end. And there seems no objection to the use of the phrase 'final cause' in this wider sense, if it is to be kept at all.
Still, I do lean to believing this class of mysteries, and I see nothing more incredible in the apocalypse of the wreck and other marvels of clairvoyance, than in that singular adaptation of another person's senses, which is a common phenomenon of the simple forms of mesmerism.
Her unbetrayed regret was for the loss of what she would have called "respectability"; and the giving up, long ago, in the little city which had been their home, of the servant girl had been the first wrench. Until they came to Hampton they had always lived in houses, and her adaptation to a flat had been hard a flat without a parlour.
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