Why, we may ask, were morphologists so unwilling to admit the creative power of life? Dohrn, for instance, was fully aware of the great transforming influence exerted by function upon form--his theory of _Functionswechsel_ regards as the most powerful agent of change the activity of the animal, its effort to make the best use of its organs, to apply them at need in new ways to meet new demands. Why then did he not go a step further and admit that the animal could by its own subconscious efforts form entirely new organs? Why did most morphologists join with him in belittling the organism's power of self-transformation? The reasons seem to have been several. There is first the fundamental reason, that the idea of an active creative organism is repugnant to the intelligence, and that we try by all means in our power to substitute for this some other conception. In so doing we instinctively fasten upon the relatively less living side of organisms--their routine habits and reflexes, their routine structure--and ignore the essential activity which they manifest both in behaviour and in form-change. We tend also to lay the causes of form-change, of evolution, as far as possible outside the living organism. With Darwin we seek the transforming factors in the environment rather than within the organism itself. We fight shy of the Lamarckian conception that the living thing obscurely works out its own salvation by blind and instinctive effort. We like to think of organisms as machines, as passive inventions[457] gradually perfected from generation to generation by some external agency, by environment or by natural selection, or what you will. All this makes us chary of believing that Nature is prodigal of new organs. Other causes of the unwillingness of morphologists to admit the new formation of organs are to be sought in the main principle of pure morphology itself, that the unity of plan imposes an iron limit upon adaptation, and in the powerful influence exercised at the time by materialistic habits of thought. Teleology had become a bugbear to the vast majority of biologists, and all real understanding of the Cuvierian attitude seems, in most cases, to have been lost, although, curiously enough, teleological conceptions were often unconsciously introduced in the course of discussions on the "utility" of organs in the struggle for existence. Evolutionary morphology, being for the most part a form of pure or non-functional morphology, agreed then in all essential respects with pre-evolutionary or transcendental morphology. But it contained the germ of a new conception which threw a new light upon the whole science of morphology. This was the conception of the organism as an historical being.