Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

But is it really plausibly a priori that actual living things reproduce, locomote, digest, excrete and respire (or any sufficiently large set of these)?  For example, can’t we imagine an alternative history in which physiologists discover that the humans don’t do any digestion themselves--rather, our stomachs contain insects that digest our food for us, excreting waste products which are exactly what we need to live.

Neuter or sterile insects.

Who can believe, for example, that a new-born baby is aware of the necessity of food for preserving life? Or that insects, in laying eggs, are concerned for the preservation of their species?

Animals, especially and at all times internally; though in insects the heat is not perceptible to the touch by reason of the smallness of their size. 21. Horse dung and like excrements of animals, when fresh.

To the heat of animals no negative is subjoined, except that of insects (as above-mentioned) on account of their small size. For in fishes, as compared with land animals, it is rather a low degree than an absence of heat that is noted.

For the lowest, as in insects, is hardly perceptible to the touch, but the highest scarcely equals the sun's heat in the hottest countries and seasons, nor is it too great to be borne by the hand.

In one very limited sense, as we shall hereafter see, this may be true; but it is preposterous to attribute to mere external conditions, the structure, for instance, of the woodpecker, with its feet, tail, beak, and tongue, so admirably adapted to catch insects under the bark of trees.

In the case of the misseltoe, which draws its nourishment from certain trees, which has seeds that must be transported by certain birds, and which has flowers with separate sexes absolutely requiring the agency of certain insects to bring pollen from one flower to the other, it is equally preposterous to account for the structure of this parasite, with its relations to several distinct organic beings, by the effects of external conditions, or of habit, or of the volition of the plant itself.

This philosophical naturalist, I may add, has also quite recently shown that the muscles in the larvae of certain insects are very far from uniform.

We may instance Rubus, Rosa, and Hieracium amongst plants, several genera of insects, and several genera of Brachiopod shells.