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Updated: May 19, 2025
It is, literally speaking, infinitely improbable that the organs of adaptation we see in a forest, in plant and animal, should have come into existence through chance alone. The organs of adaptation are distinctly and definitely purposive structures not purposed, perhaps, but certainly purposeful.
The objects of the teleological and the aesthetic judgment, the purposive and the beautiful products of nature and art, constitute the desired intermediate field between nature and freedom; and here again the critical question comes up, How, in relation to these, synthetic judgments a priori are possible? Neither Burke nor Baumgarten satisfied him.
Schiller in order to describe his general philosophical position as distinct from the original question of the theory of knowledge, which had been treated by James under the name of Pragmatism. To the Humanist the best definition of life is one which displays it as throughout purposive, as a rational pursuit of ends. This raises the question of the validity of valuations.
It is never the task of the minister to heal a mind and never the task of a physician to uplift a mind. One moves in the purposive sphere, the other in the causal sphere. Their friendship can seriously endure only as long as they remain conscious of the fact that they have two entirely different functions in the service of mankind.
Now, such conscious, purposive, deliberate action may and probably does take place at almost the lowest stage of development of society; but not, we may surmise, at quite the lowest. What eventually is done consciously and deliberately is probably done in the first place much more summarily and automatically.
We indeed have no right to throw into a psychological subconsciousness all that which is not present but involved by intention in the ideas and volitions of our purposive life.
It is just as misleading as the claim, which we hear so often, that for instance Shakespeare was a great psychologist. No, the poet deals with human beings from the purposive standpoint of life and the mere resolving of complex purposes into parts of purposes is not psychology in the technical sense of the term.
For these facts are, firstly, that we spiritual selves exist, next that we have ideas of goodness and a determination to achieve it, next that plant as well as animal life on this Earth is purposive, then that the stars, numbering anything from a hundred to a thousand million, each of them a sun and many of them presumably with planets, are made of the same materials as this Earth, the plants, animals, and ourselves are composed of; that these materials have the same properties; that the same fundamental laws of gravitation, heat, motion, chemical and electrical action prevail there as here; and lastly that they are all connected with the Earth by some medium or continuum of energies, which enables vibrations, of which the most obvious are the vibrations of light, to reach the Earth from them.
The history of evolution convinces us that the highly purposive and admirably constituted sense organs, like all other organs, have developed without premeditated aim." Strauss, in his "The Old Faith and the New," gives to this idea its philosophic and universalistic finish.
The physician is thus ultimately just like the minister and just like anyone who deals with his neighbor, a purposive worker; but while the minister, for instance, remains on this purposive track, the physician puts a causal system into the service of his purpose.
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