Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Ipsissimæ res. I think this must have been Bacon's meaning, though not a meaning which the word can properly bear.

These matters, however, I touch but briefly, meaning to treat of them more fully and exactly when I come to the discovery of the Latent Process of things.

In the first place, I have collected so large a body of facts, showing, in accordance with the almost universal belief of breeders, that with animals and plants a cross between different varieties, or between individuals of the same variety but of another strain, gives vigour and fertility to the offspring; and on the other hand, that CLOSE interbreeding diminishes vigour and fertility; that these facts alone incline me to believe that it is a general law of nature (utterly ignorant though we be of the meaning of the law) that no organic being self-fertilises itself for an eternity of generations; but that a cross with another individual is occasionally—perhaps at very long intervals—indispensable.

This relation has a clear meaning on my view of the subject: I look at all the species of the same genus as having as certainly descended from the same progenitor, as have the two sexes of any one of the species.

On the theory of natural selection we can clearly understand the full meaning of that old canon in natural history, "Natura non facit saltum."

On the theory of descent, the full meaning of the fact of fossil remains from closely consecutive formations, though ranked as distinct species, being closely related, is obvious.

But I must explain my meaning more fully.

Naturalists, however, use such language only in a metaphorical sense: they are far from meaning that during a long course of descent, primordial organs of any kind—vertebrae in the one case and legs in the other—have actually been modified into skulls or jaws.

I am far from meaning that this is invariably the case; and I could give a good many cases of variations (taking the word in the largest sense) which have supervened at an earlier age in the child than in the parent.

The meaning of rudimentary organs is often quite unmistakeable: for instance there are beetles of the same genus (and even of the same species) resembling each other most closely in all respects, one of which will have full-sized wings, and another mere rudiments of membrane; and here it is impossible to doubt, that the rudiments represent wings.