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Updated: May 3, 2025
As in the mechanistic hypothesis, here again it is supposed that all is given. Finalism thus understood is only inverted mechanism.
It could not be partial, because, once again, the real process which gives rise to it has no parts. That is what neither mechanism nor finalism takes into account, and it is what we also fail to consider when we wonder at the marvelous structure of an instrument such as the eye.
But, in another sense, mechanism and finalism both go too far, for they attribute to Nature the most formidable of the labors of Hercules in holding that she has exalted to the simple act of vision an infinity of infinitely complex elements, whereas Nature has had no more trouble in making an eye than I have in lifting my hand.
But concerning the vital impulse itself a few explanations are necessary. It must not be forgotten that the force which is evolving throughout the organized world is a limited force, which is always seeking to transcend itself and always remains inadequate to the work it would fain produce. The errors and puerilities of radical finalism are due to the misapprehension of this point.
This may seem perilously near to finalism, yet it is no more necessarily so, than the process of photography; we only need a self-adaptive tendency in life-matter responsive to the stimulating-tendency of the environment.
Its principle, which is essentially psychological, is very flexible. It is so extensible, and thereby so comprehensive, that one accepts something of it as soon as one rejects pure mechanism. The theory we shall put forward in this book will therefore necessarily partake of finalism to a certain extent.
It is not intelligent, in the human sense of the word, and it is not an assemblage, for it is not made up of elements. Just so with the relation of the eye to vision. There is in vision more than the component cells of the eye and their mutual coördination: in this sense, neither mechanism nor finalism go far enough.
A mechanistic theory would maintain that the earth had been brought cart-load by cart-load; finalism would add that it had not been dumped down at random, that the carters had followed a plan. But both theories would be mistaken, for the canal has been made in another way.
If, on the contrary, Evolution is a creation unceasingly renewed, it creates as it goes on, not only the forms of life but the ideas that enable the intellect to understand it. Its future overflows its present and cannot be sketched out therein, in an idea. There is the first error of finalism. It involves another yet more serious.
Either the hypothesis of a finality immanent in life should be rejected as a whole, or it must undergo a treatment very different from pulverization. The error of radical finalism, as also that of radical mechanism, is to extend too far the application of certain concepts that are natural to our intellect. Originally, we think only in order to act.
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