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Updated: June 25, 2025
Lamarck mainly undertook the first line, in a theory which has been so assailed by ridicule that it rarely receives the credit for ability to which in its day it was entitled, But he assigned partly unreal, partly insufficient causes; and the attempt to account for a progressive change in species through the direct influence of physical agencies, and through the appetencies and habits of animals reacting upon their structure, thus causing the production and the successive modification of organs, is a conceded and total failure.
Onu. I am convinced. I shall push my arguments no further, for I will not support the sophisms of that school which supposes that living nature has undergone gradual changes by the effects of its irritabilities and appetencies; that the fish has in millions of generations ripened into the quadruped, and the quadruped into the man; and that the system of life by its own inherent powers has fitted itself to the physical changes in the system of the universe.
All animals therefore, I contend, have a similar cause of their organization, originating from a single living filament, endued indeed with different kinds of irritabilities and sensibilities, or of animal appetencies; which exist in every gland, and in every moving organ of the body, and are as essential to living organization as chemical affinities are to certain combinations of inanimate matter.
Hence, you must not only perfect science, but you must perfect the morals and the habits of the human family, before you can exempt them from decay and death. The instincts of men, the appetencies which they possess in common with the whole animal creation, are each made the source of disease, and premature decay.
Miserable and pernicious creed, that holds possible the lasting and intimate union of the first, purest, highest, noblest, and most celestial powers of soul and spirit, with confirmed appetencies, foul and degrading lust, cowardice, cruelty, meanness, hypocrisy, avarice, and impiety!
In this early formation of the embryon from the irritabilities, sensibilities, and associabilities, and consequent appetencies, the faculty of volition can scarcely be supposed to have had its birth. For about what can the fetus deliberate, when it has no choice of objects?
The vicious and the wicked are so common upon the earth, so pertinacious in their evil courses, so attached to their irregularities, only because there are but few governments that make man feel the advantage of being just, the pleasure of being honest, the happiness of being benevolent on the contrary, there is hardly any place where the most powerful interests do not solicit him to crime, by favouring the propensities of a vicious organization; by countenancing those appetencies which nothing has attempted to rectify or lead towards virtue.
From the first we rise with a confused and miserable sense of weakness and of power of lofty aspirations and degrading appetencies of pride swelling into blasphemy, and humiliation pitiably grovelling in the dust of purity of spirit soaring on the wings of imagination, and grossness of instinct brutally wallowing in "Epicurus' stye," of lofty contempt for the opinion of mankind, yet the most slavish subjection to their most fatal prejudices of a sublime piety towards God, and a wild violation of his holiest laws.
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