Should we be right in laying stress upon the psychological side of Lamarck's theory, and disregarding the materialistic dress in which, perhaps under the influence of the materialism current in his youth, he clothed his essentially vitalistic thought? Everything goes to prove it--his constant preoccupation with psychological questions, his tacit assimilation of organ-formation to instinctive behaviour, his constant insistence on the importance of _besoin_ and _habitude_. Let us not forget the profundity of his main idea, that, exception made for the lower forms, the animal is essentially active, that it always _reacts_ to the external world, is never passively acted upon. Let us not forget that he pointed out the essentially psychological moment implied in all processes of individual adaptation. With keen insight he realised that conscious intelligence counts for little in evolution, and focussed attention upon the unconscious but obscurely psychical processes of instinct and morphogenesis. Not without reason have the later schools of evolutionary thought, who developed the psychological and vitalistic side of his doctrine, called themselves Neo-Lamarckians. We shall say then that Lamarck, in spite of his materialism, was the founder of the "psychological" theory of evolution. Lamarck stood curiously aloof and apart from the scientific thought of his day.[344] He took no interest in the morphological problems that filled the minds of Cuvier and Geoffroy; he had indeed no feeling at all for morphology. He did not realise, like Cuvier, the _convenance des parties_, the marvellous co-ordination of parts to form a whole; he had little conception of what is really implied in the word "organism." He was not, like Geoffroy, imbued with a lively sense of the unity of plan and composition, and of the significance of vestigial organs as witnesses to that unity. He seems not to have known of the recapitulation theory, of which he might have made such good use as powerful evidence for evolution. Even with the German transcendentalists, with whom in the looseness of his generalisations he shows some affinity, he seems not to have been specially acquainted.