Organic nature

“ It is our part to transform Nature’s large conception into our own smaller organic mould, not otherwise than the plants, to whom we are far back akin, who dig their flexible roots deep into the moist and fruitful earth, and so are able to lift up glorious heads toward the sky. ”

“ Wherever the order of organic nature is exposed to the view of zoologists and botanists, it expels this conception; and the conception survives only in connexion with imagined places, where the order of organic nature is unknown. ”

“ And this, moreover, is also the result to which the genuine Science of Nature must lead, viz: that the difference between organic and inorganic nature is only in Nature as object, and that Nature as originally-productive soars above both. ”

“ Well, I think the sensible answer is that all vegetation is developed from seeds, spores, or whatever was designed to continue the chain of being from one plant to another. For the life of me I can't see how mere organic or inorganic matter can produce life. It can only sustain and nourish the life which exists in it or is placed in it, and which by a law of nature develops when the conditions are favorable. ”

“ I have now briefly glanced at all the main facts of organic nature with reference to beauty; and, as a result, I think it is impossible to resist the general conclusion, that in organic nature beauty does not exist as an end per se. All cases where beauty can be pointed to in organic nature are seemingly due—either to natural selection, acting without reference to beauty, but to utility ”

“ This, for our present purposes, is the best view of the present condition of organic nature which I can lay before you: it gives you the great outlines of a vast picture, which you must fill up by your own study. ”

“ The observer of organic nature knows by what insensible grades the individuals of his various classes, plants or animals, fade into each other, yet his distinctions, however faint at the outline, are clear enough in the colour. So, too, the observer of inorganic nature must assume the lines which nature does not draw. ”

“ As the brute creation as well as human beings share in a physical organization which expresses each variety of life, there is not the same sharply-dividing line between the various categories of animal life as there is between organic and inorganic Nature. ”

“ IT was some forty years ago that the organic chemists, represented by such masters as Dumas and Liebig, worked out the beautiful idea of the balance of organic nature. They showed that the vegetable and animal kingdoms carry on antagonist processes—each for ever undoing the work of the other. ”

“ The earth is now covered with vegetable life, but there must have existed a time when “darkness was upon the face of the deep,” and organization had not yet commenced tracing its lovely net-work of cells upon the bare surface of the ocean-buried rock. At length the mystery of organic creation began: into this science dares not penetrate, but it is privileged to begin its search a little beyond this point, and we are enabled to trace the progress of organic development through a chain of interesting results which are constantly recurring. ”

“ The lectures to working men here referred to, six in number, were duly delivered once a week from November 10 onwards, and published in the form of as many little pamphlets. Appearing under the general title, "On our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature," they wound up with a critical examination of the portion of Mr. Darwin's work "On the Origin of Species," in relation to the complete theory of the causes of organic nature.
Jermyn Street, December 2, 1862. ”

“ Organic being, as such, is the final term to which the generalization must be carried before the true scope of organic evolution can be adequately grasped by the mind. Individuals perish and are decomposed; species become extinct; genera, families, and whole classes, are swept from the earth. The broadest divisions into which the organic kingdoms of Nature have been classified have each their periods of ascendency and decline. But organic evolution ever continues. Progress in organization is the constant result. ”

“ To understand rightly the daily accumulating stores of organic reliquiæ, requires more than a slight knowledge of existing nature,—more even than an acquaintance with animal and vegetable forms. The philosophy of their existence must be considered—the variations of their structure, with respiration in air or in water—life in fresh or salt water—in trees or on the ground—carnivorous or herbivorous food—their geographical distribution dependence—on climate and atmospheric conditions. ”

“ If it is once allowed, that the productions of Nature follow in an uniform order, and advance by imperceptible degrees and links, we shall have no difficulty in conceiving there are organic bodies existing, which belong neither to animals, vegetables, nor minerals. ”

“ All nature seems to turn to this new principle. "The elements of the inorganic world are subserving the purposes of organic life." The Creator has bound them to organic life. Every plant selects its food from the elements of earth by a chemistry of its own. The atmosphere around us is no less to the vegetable kingdom than a great pasture field. Every leaf is feasting, and every fiber is touched by the light. ”

“ These terms, however, Organic and Inorganic, Vital and Physical, Animate and Inanimate, Living and Dead, are very unphilosophical, since their use implies an entirely false view of Nature, The classification of objects into Animal, Vegetal, and Mineral, is a good arrangement for study ”

“ The nature and method of assimilating their food is the only means by which the distinction between plants and animals in their lowest forms can be clearly determined: the former subsisting on inorganic, and the latter on organic, matter. ”

“ We shall then be sure to detect many unsuspected relations between the animals and plants of certain localities, and we shall become much better acquainted with those complex reactions between the vegetable and animal kingdoms, and between the organic world and the inorganic, which have almost certainly played an important part in determining many of the most conspicuous features of living things. ”

“ It seems, indeed, to be a law of Nature that the ultimate destiny of organic matter is to 'circulate,' and that if it does not do so quietly, as in the ordinary processes of nutrition in plants and animals, it [130] merely bides its time, and ultimately attains its end with more or less destructive violence. ”

“ The rocks, rivers and mountains are its chapters. Beasts, birds and reptiles are its verses, and the Great Spirit is its author. And within this book will be found all that does or ever did exist. The constituent parts are the mineral, animal and vegetable kingdoms of the world. Each has within itself a principle of organic life, but of itself cannot produce either animal or vegetable life, but a combination of these elements, by a chemical process, known only to nature, produces something unlike either the constituent parts. ”

“ Can it be thought, that certain forms of the body, as those of quadrupeds and birds, requisite for the perfection of sensation, would cost nature more organic particles than the production of less important animals?
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Let us now pass to the comparison of animals and vegetables, with respect to situation, form, and size. The earth is the only place wherein vegetables can subsist. The greatest number grow above the surface, and are attached to the soil by roots. ”

“ "Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves;
(p. 027) First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume; 300
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing. ”

“ It would be travelling beyond my proper limits here to discuss how far organic beings in a state of nature are definitely modified by changed conditions. In my 'Origin of Species' I have given a brief abstract of the facts bearing on this point, and have shown the influence of light on the colours of birds, and of residence near the sea on the lurid tints of insects, and on the succulency of plants. ”

“ Darwin's views aside, the whole analogy of natural operations furnishes so complete and crushing an argument against the intervention of any but what are termed secondary causes, in the production of all the phenomena of the universe; that, in view of the intimate relations between Man and the rest of the living world; and between the forces exerted by the latter and all other forces, I can see no excuse for doubting that all are co-ordinated terms of Nature's great progression, from the formless to the formed—from the inorganic to the organic—from blind force to conscious intellect and will. ”

“ Such is however the condition of mortality, that the first law of nature is, "Eat or be eaten." We cannot long exist without the destruction of other animal or vegetable beings, either in their mature or their embryon state. Unless the fruits, which surround the seeds of some vegetables, or the honey stolen from them by the bee, may be said to be an exception to this assertion. See Botanic Garden, P. I. Cant. I. l. 278. Note. Hence, from the necessity of our nature, we may be supposed to have a right to kill those creatures, which we want to eat, or which want to eat us. ”

“ Food takes a mid-place, and then come the organic conditions; by which I mean the conditions which depend upon the state of the rest of the organic creation, upon the number and kind of living beings, with which an animal is surrounded. You may class these under two heads: there are organic beings, which operate as 'opponents', and there are organic beings which operate as 'helpers' to any given organic creature. ”

“ According to my conception, the physical and chemical changes which organisms experience during life through the action of the environment, through light or want of light, air, warmth, cold, water, moisture, food, etc., and which they transmit by heredity, are the primary elements in the production of the manifold variety of the organic world, and in the origin of species. ”

“ It may be said, therefore, that on these expanded membranes Nature writes, as on a tablet, the story of the modifications of species, so truly do all changes of the organisation register themselves thereon. Moreover, the same colour-patterns of the wings generally show, with great regularity, the degrees of blood-relationship of the species. As the laws of Nature must be the same for all beings, the conclusions furnished by this group of insects must be applicable to the whole organic world; ”

“ Various observers have maintained that there were conditions under which the lower forms of organic life were developed independently of all such accessories, but other, and equally competent, naturalists who have attempted to investigate the subject, have obtained conflicting results. ”

“ Now, as in an animal a piece of bone, muscle, or skin, and in a plant a fragment of the wood, leaf, or fruit, may be considered as organic, but cannot be called an organism, all substances, except plants and animals, observable in and upon the body of the earth, so far indeed as they are parts of the terrestrial organism, are to be regarded as organic and as parts of a living thing, but not as organisms possessing an independent life. ”

“ And they shall be eaten—and their eaters eaten; and thus the organic world, which grew up by this devouring process from the smallest plant to man, slowly drops back by form after form through the lower world of animals and plants, until every grain of vitality is sucked out of it, and it falls at last, utterly juiceless and lifeless, into the mineral world from which it came. ”

“ The plant, in virtue of a power peculiar to itself, which no art or skill of man can imitate, transmutes dead inorganic matter into organic matter, suited to the sustenance of animal life, and without which animals cannot live. ”

“ No explanation of such a kind could possibly be satisfying. And more and more it is becoming clear that even what we call the inorganic world is as subtle and swift in its responses as what we call the organic. ”

“ The theory applied to organic being is substantially this: there is, potentially, in every organism a higher manifestation. Its evolution is secured by the relation of its organic tendency to its environment. ”

“ Of the party above referred to as not satisfied with this conception described by Professor Huxley, there were two classes. The great majority were admirers of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation—a work which, while it sought to show that organic evolution has taken place, contended that the cause of organic evolution, is “an impulse” supernaturally “imparted to the forms of life, advancing them, ... through grades of organization.” ”

“ Those which we have in common with the vegetable, which are necessary merely to our individual, bodily existence, are called the functions of organic life, because they are common to all organized matter. Those, on the other hand, which are peculiar to animals, which in them are superadded to the possession of the organic functions, are called the functions of animal life. ”

“ We see innumerable sub-divisions of animals and plants, but we see no other such great subdivision of organic life as that whereby it ranges itself, for the most part readily, as either animal or vegetable. ”