322 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
regarded as improbable? After all, the pelvic fin of many living teleost fishes, the
undeniable serial homolog of the pectoral, moves sufficiently far forward to lie in
front of the pectoral. If this more radical movement occurs in modern species, why
balk at a less profound metastasis to separate forelimb from skull? "But it may be
objected that the ordinary costal or haemal arch has been detached from its
centrum for the purpose of this comparison. True! And the scapular arch in
mammals, birds and reptiles, is a haemal arch so dislocated, —a statement which I
do not hesitate to make under a pledge to demonstrate the proper centrum and the
rest of the segment or vertebra to which it belongs" (p. 50).
Having thus brought the entire skeleton, with all its complexity and adaptive
variety, into homology with the archetypal vertebra, Owen could proclaim both the
glory and the generality of formalist morphology. On the largely rhetorical subject
of glory, Owen joined Agassiz in refuting the Paleyan link of functionalism to
God's beneficence. Shall we not regard a generalized archetype, a sublime and
abstract pattern for all manifest variety, as a loftier testimony to a truly omnipotent
God than the mean material fitting, however exact, of some unique and particular
object to an immediate environment? "The satisfaction felt by the rightly
constituted mind must ever be great in recognizing the fitness of parts for their
appropriate functions; but when this fitness is gained, as in the great toe of the foot
of man or the ostrich, by a structure which at the same time betokens harmonious
concord with a common type, the prescient operation of the One Cause of all
organization becomes strikingly manifested to our limited intelligence" (p. 38).
Archetypal thinking also exalts our own status, for if God ordained the
archetype, he certainly recognized all potential modifications in advance, and the
concept of human existence therefore long predated our actual appearance: "The
recognition of an ideal Exemplar for the vertebrated animals proves that the
knowledge of such a being as man must have existed before man appeared. For the
Divine mind which planned the Archetype also foreknew all its modifications" (pp.
85 - 86).
In fact, the entire geological history of vertebrates may be interpreted as a
movement towards humanity, guided by natural forces ordained by God as
secondary causes. Owen's oft-quoted last paragraph provides a genuine expression
of evolutionary views in this limited sense (transformations within an archetypal
framework under unknown, but natural, laws established by God to implement His
plans of progress):
To what natural laws or secondary causes the orderly succession and
progression of such organic phenomena may have been committed we as
yet are ignorant. But if, without derogation of the Divine power, we may
conceive the existence of such ministers, and personify them by the term
"Nature," we learn from the past history of our globe that she has advanced
with slow and stately steps, guided by the archetypal light, amidst the
wreck of worlds, from the first embodiment of the Vertebrate