Internalism and Laws of Form 303
[imperieusement exiges] for respiration, one might and could conclude [on a du et
pu conclure, in more euphonious French] that two different organic systems must
exist... In this situation, respiration sets the most important question to treat under
our views" (1818, pp. 12-13).
After presenting his homological solutions, Geoffroy buttresses his formalist
philosophy by explicit defense of the key claim that internal laws and constraints
establish a primary and controlling pattern, with adaptive modification as
secondary, consequential and limited: "This influence of the exterior world, if ever
called upon to become a perturbing cause of organization, must be bound
necessarily within very straight limits: animals must oppose to them [exterior
forces] several attributes inherent to their nature ... This struggle cannot fail to end
to the advantage of interior organization, which has laws [droits] against which
nothing can prevail" (1818, pp. 208-209).
Finally, Geoffroy cuts to the heart of the deepest philosophical issue in the
debate by noting that the realized use of archetypal elements for two such different
purposes as breathing in air and water requires that the elements themselves be
fashioned with great redundancy in potential utility: "double means have been
prepared for a single function" (1818, p. 448). The archetype, by maintaining this
potential for a full range of eventual expression, cannot be optimal for any
particular role. Since archetypes exert logical and temporal priority over any
particular expression, pure form endowed with redundancy of functional
expression must hold sway over utility and adaptation: "Nature has conceived her
plan for construction of a vertebrate animal under a double point of view: she had
to choose a form of composition, so that the ideal animal could accommodate itself
equally to the two environments that envelop our globe. Above all, it was
necessary ... that these two domains of the external world, which so rigorously
impose two such different modes of respiration, must call upon the single and only
basis of [morphological] organization" (1818, p. 448).
Perhaps Geoffroy had anticipated the forthcoming struggle when he made his
florid appeal, in the closing words of his Discours preliminaire (1818, p. xxix), to
the attention and approbation of the next generation: "Oh might I learn that [my
conclusions] have been useful for the youth of our schools. What group in our
beautiful France is more worthy of interest? What devotion, what application, what
ardor for study! Oh admirable youth, so occupied with noble productions of the
mind, you seem absorbed in a single thought, in the thought that led Virgil to say:
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas [Happy is he who can know the causes
of things]."
Throughout the 1820's, as events moved to their eventual climax in the 1830
debate, Geoffroy continued to codify and fortify his formalist philosophy—while
Cuvier, who had once viewed Geoffroy's work with mild interest from a different
perspective, moved (or felt pushed) to overt opposition. *
*Since their debate has so often been misunderstood as an argument about
evolution, something should be said about this anachronistic error. Cuvier's philosophy
did foreclose any possibility of evolution. Geoffroy did accept a limited form of
transmutationism, and