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It is manifest, then, that setting out from certain known fundamental conditions to vital activity, we may deduce from them sundry of the chief characteristics of organized bodies. Doubtless these known fundamental conditions have been inductively established. But what we wish to show is that, given these inductively-established primary facts in physiology, we may with safety draw certain general deductions from them. And, indeed, the legitimacy of such deductions, though not formally acknowledged, is practically recognized in the convictions of every physiologist, as may be readily proved. Thus, were a physiologist to find a creature exhibiting complex and variously co-ordinated movements, and yet having no nervous system; he would be less astonished at the breach of his empirical generalization that all such creatures have nervous systems, than at the disproof of his unconscious deduction that all creatures exhibiting complex and variously co-ordinated movements must have an “internuncial” apparatus by which the co-ordination may be effected. Or were he to find a creature having blood rapidly circulated and rapidly aerated, but yet showing a low temperature, the proof so afforded that active change of matter is not, as he had inferred from chemical data, the cause of animal heat, would stagger him more than would the exception to a constantly-observed relation. Clearly, then, the a priori method already plays a part in physiological reasoning. If not ostensibly employed as a means of reaching new truths, it is at least privately appealed to for confirmation of truths reached a posteriori.

But the illustrations above given go far to show, that it may to a considerable extent be safely used as an independent instrument of research. The necessities for a nutritive system, a respiratory system, and a vascular system, in all animals of size and vivacity, seem to us legitimately inferable from the conditions to continued vital activity. Given the physical and chemical data, and these structural peculiarities may be deduced with as much certainty as may the hollowness of an iron ball from its power of floating in water.

It is not, of course, asserted that the more special physiological truths can be deductively reached. The argument by no means implies this. Legitimate deduction presupposes adequate data; and in respect to the special phenomena of organic growth, structure, and function, adequate data are unattainable, and will probably ever remain so. It is only in the case of the more general physiological truths, such as those above instanced, where we have something like adequate data, that deductive reasoning becomes possible.

And here is reached the stage to which the foregoing considerations are introductory. We propose now to show that there are certain still more general attributes of organized bodies, which are deducible from certain still more general attributes of things.

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In an essay on “Progress: its Law and Cause,” elsewhere published,[8] we have endeavoured to show that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, in which all progress, organic or other, essentially consists, is consequent on the production of many effects by one cause–many changes by one force. Having pointed out that this is a law of all things, we proceeded to show deductively that the multiform evolutions of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous–astronomic, geologic, ethnologic, social, etc.,–were explicable as consequences. And though in the case of organic evolution, lack of data disabled us from specifically tracing out the progressive complication as due to the multiplication of effects; yet, we found sundry indirect evidences that it was so. Now in so far as this conclusion, that organic evolution results from the decomposition of each expended force into several forces, was inferred from the general law previously pointed out, it was an example of deductive physiology. The particular was concluded from the universal.

We here propose in the first place to show, that there is another general truth closely connected with the above; and in common with it underlying explanations of all progress, and therefore the progress of organisms–a truth which may indeed be considered as taking precedence of it in respect of time, if not in respect of generality. This truth is, that the condition of homogeneity is a condition of unstable equilibrium.