Justice & Law Quote by Johannes P. Muller

Muller is gunning for a tempting but crude idea: that life has a “control room” you can locate, dissect, and point to with a scalpel. In the early 19th century, anatomy was delivering spectacularly concrete findings, and physiology was racing to translate the mess of living behavior into tidy, organ-based functions. This line pushes back. The “organizing principle” he invokes is deliberately upstream of parts. It’s the thing that makes parts make sense.

The phrase “according to an eternal law” does double duty. It borrows the authority of physics - law as inevitability - while still leaving room for a quasi-vitalist worldview, where life isn’t reducible to mechanics. Muller is careful: he doesn’t say the principle is supernatural, only that it’s lawful and formative, responsible for differentiation (“different essential organs”) and animation (the spark of function). But he refuses to pin it down to a single organ, implicitly criticizing any theory that treats the brain, the heart, or the nervous system as the sovereign seat of “life.”

The subtext is methodological as much as metaphysical: if you hunt for essence in one location, you’ll mistake a component for a cause. Muller is edging toward a systems view before the vocabulary exists - organization as distributed, emergent, relational. It’s also a rhetorical maneuver to protect complexity from premature reduction. In an era hungry for anatomical certainties, he insists that what organizes the body can’t be found like an extra piece of tissue; it’s a principle evidenced by the whole, not housed in a part.