HKB
does he deal with the matter? The question is if such changes do take place in the species of organic beings or not. And again Herr Duehring has no reply.
"If a plant in the course of its growth takes a direction by which it gets the most light the result is nothing but a combination of physical forces and chemical agents, and if we are to call it an adaptation, not metaphorically but strictly, confusion is certain to arise in the motion." This man is so exacting with other people because he is quite well acquainted with the intentions of nature and speaks of the subtlety of nature, even of its will. There is confusion, indeed, but with whom, with Haeckel or with Herr Duehring?
And the confusion is not only spiritual but logical. We have seen that Herr Duehring put forth all his efforts to make the purpose idea in nature real. "The relation of means and end does not by any means show a conscious intention." But what is adaptation without conscious intention, without any intrusion of design of which he complains so loudly, but an unconscious teleology?
If the color of tree frogs and leaf eating insects is as a rule green and that of beasts that inhabit the desert sandy-yellow, and that of polar animals white, they have certainly not come into possession of this coloring intentionally or through any kind of mental process, on the contrary the coloring can only be explained by means of the operation of physical substances and chemical agents. And yet it cannot be denied that by these colors these animals are particularly adapted to the conditions in which they are and it is certain that they are by their means rendered less visible to their enemies. Just of a similar nature are the organs by which certain plants seize and consume certain insects (the means being on their under side, suited to this purpose and adapted to this end). Now if Herr Duehring insists that the adaptation must be realised through the operation of thought, he only says that the purpose must be carried out through mental operation, must be conscious and intentional. Thus again, just as in the philosophy of realism we arrive at the Creator with a purpose, at God. Formerly this kind of declaration was called "deism" and Herr Duehring says that we had not much regard for it, but it now appears that the world has gone backwards in this respect also.
From adaptation we come to heredity and here according to Herr Duehring Darwinism is quite out. "The whole organic world, Darwin explained, came from a single germ, is, so to speak, the brood of a single being. Independent similar products of nature according to Darwin do not exist without heredity and his retrogressive philosophy must come to a full stop when the end of the thread of ancestry is reached, or the original vegetable form."