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The scholar nonconformist is no longer concerned with dogmatic difficulties; he has abandoned with the old teleology the old pagan theology, and now, believing in an immanent teleology, in an evolution that is creative and that has direction, believing also that Christ is the incarnation of God's purpose and the revelation of His character, he is pressing forward not to meet the difficulties of to-morrow, but to equip himself for meeting those difficulties when they arise with real intelligence and genuine power.
We have further to notice two characteristics which have been described by the Nancy school of psychologists; and which are of some importance for those who wish to understand the mechanism of religious experience. These have been called the law of Unconscious Teleology, and the law of Reversed Effort.
And while we are devoting our attention to them, we must not be unfaithful to the canon laid down in the previous chapter, namely that with reference to the question of teleology in the religious sense no real answer can be looked for from scientific study, not even if it be anti-Darwinian.
Nevertheless, all the points against teleology thus far quoted can be understood by us as attempts at rejecting the necessity of acknowledging a teleologically acting principle of the world or, to express ourselves more clearly, of a living God after having once rejected the deepest motive for this acknowledgment, namely: the self-testimony of God in the human conscience and mind.
Then, referring to the appeal which had been made to the existence of rudimentary organs as discrediting teleology, he says in his characteristic way: "Either these rudiments are of no use to the animals, in which case they ought to have disappeared; or they are of some use to the animal, in which case they are of no use as an argument against teleology."
But I reflect that the latter term is a loose one, seeing that it embraces all possible degrees of evidence short of actual proof. The question, therefore, I conceive to be, What amount of evidence is there in favour of this metaphysical system of teleology?
Nevertheless it is necessary to remember that there is a wider Teleology, which is not touched by the doctrine of Evolution, but is actually based upon the fundamental proposition of Evolution.
What he chiefly missed in her mind was the pedantic teleology the sense of order and accuracy, the sense of life as a mysteriously correlated piece of patchwork, but he understood after a while that such a quality in her would have been incongruous. Of the things they possessed in common, greatest of all was their almost uncanny pull at each other's hearts.
The other consequence of that elimination of the idea of design is that it forbids every difference between higher and lower, and changes everything into an indifferent and equivalent continual stream of coming and going. For the whole idea of higher and lower belongs to the category of teleology.
The truth is, that the argument from teleology must, and can only, rest upon the observable facts of nature, without reference to the intellectual processes by which these facts may be supposed to have been accomplished.
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