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Updated: June 22, 2025
When, starting with the inevitable preformation and constitutional bias, we sought to build up a simpler and nobler edifice of thought, to be a palace and fortress rather than a prison for experience, our critical philosophy would still be dogmatic, since it would be built upon inexplicable but actual data by a process of inference underived but inevitable.
Under the influence of this error, that a non-intelligent cause can produce nothing where contrivance appears, he is far from conceding to me that preformation which produces naturally the organs of animals, and the system of a harmony pre-established by God in bodies, to make them respond in accordance with their own laws to the thoughts and the wills of souls.
Even so do butterflies come out of silkworms, an instance where M. Swammerdam has shown that there is nothing but development. And I would have added that nothing is better qualified than the preformation of plants and of animals to confirm my System of Pre-established Harmony between the soul and the body.
But the first takes place in the preformation of organic bodies, or rather of all bodies, since there is organism everywhere, although all masses do not compose organic bodies. So a pond may very well be full of fish or of other organic bodies, although it is not itself an animal or organic body, but only a mass that contains them.
Various theories were elaborated, and the world of the invisibly minute was flooded with speculations. The most subtle of these, on the side of consistent Darwinism, is that of Weismann, a pronounced preformation theory which has been increasingly refined and elaborated in the course of years of reflection.
If we accept the idea that characters are represented by particular parts of the chromosomes, according to Morgan's scheme, our theory of development is the modern form of the theory of preformation.
Even so it is easy to believe that the soul is a spiritual automaton still more admirable, and that it is through divine preformation that it produces these beautiful ideas, wherein our will has no part and to which our art cannot attain. The operation of spiritual automata, that is of souls, is not mechanical, but it contains in the highest degree all that is beautiful in mechanism.
Being on other considerations already convinced of the principle of Harmony in general, I was in consequence convinced likewise of the preformation and the Pre-established Harmony of all things amongst themselves, of that between nature and grace, between the decrees of God and our actions foreseen, between all parts of matter, and even between the future and the past, the whole in conformity with the sovereign wisdom of God, whose works are the most harmonious it is possible to conceive.
Wolff had risen up as an opponent of the so-called preformation theory, still widespread at that time, according to which the entire plant with all its different parts is already present in embryonic physical form in the seed, and simply grows out into space through physical enlargement.
A step towards the mechanical solution of this problem was indicated in the “preformation theory” advanced by Leibnitz, and elaborated by Bonnet. According to this theory the developing organism is enclosed in the minutest possible form within the egg, and is thus included in the parental organism, in miniature indeed, but quite complete.
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