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Updated: May 3, 2025
Yes, and with it goes out all that made Evolution a simple and therefore popular explanation of the world; and there comes in that "organic" conception of the process which clamours for theism and finalism as its only coherent complement. We have already said that progress in commerce may be regress in art or in religion or in morality.
Mechanism and finalism are therefore, here, only external views of our conduct. They extract its intellectuality. But our conduct slips between them and extends much further. Once again, this does not mean that free action is capricious, unreasonable action.
For that reason it is important to intimate exactly what we are going to take of it, and what we mean to leave. Let us say at once that to thin out the Leibnizian finalism by breaking it into an infinite number of pieces seems to us a step in the wrong direction. This is, however, the tendency of the doctrine of finality.
For organ and function are terms of different nature, and each conditions the other so closely that it is impossible to say a priori whether in expressing their relation we should begin with the first, as does mechanism, or with the second, as finalism requires.
If it would positively exclude theism or finalism it must ascribe all seeming order and adaptation to the persistence of some blind force, subduing all things to itself, to "existence," or to "life" striving to assert and extend itself.
Vision will be found, therefore, in different degrees in the most diverse animals, and it will appear in the same complexity of structure wherever it has reached the same degree of intensity. We have dwelt on these resemblances of structure in general, and on the example of the eye in particular, because we had to define our attitude toward mechanism on the one hand and finalism on the other.
It is this more comprehensive reality that true finalism ought to reconstruct, or, rather, if possible, embrace in one view. But, on the other hand, just because it goes beyond intellect the faculty of connecting the same with the same, of perceiving and also of producing repetitions this reality is undoubtedly creative, i.e. productive of effects in which it expands and transcends its own being.
But radical finalism is quite as unacceptable, and for the same reason. The doctrine of teleology, in its extreme form, as we find it in Leibniz for example, implies that things and beings merely realize a programme previously arranged. But if there is nothing unforeseen, no invention or creation in the universe, time is useless again.
Like radical finalism, although in a vaguer form, our philosophy represents the organized world as a harmonious whole. But this harmony is far from being as perfect as it has been claimed to be. It admits of much discord, because each species, each individual even, retains only a certain impetus from the universal vital impulsion and tends to use this energy in its own interest.
But there is, we are told, an internal finality: each being is made for itself, all its parts conspire for the greatest good of the whole and are intelligently organized in view of that end. Such is the notion of finality which has long been classic. Finalism has shrunk to the point of never embracing more than one living being at a time.
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