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Updated: June 7, 2025
The battle is one of greater importance than appears at first sight. It is a battle between teleology and non-teleology, between the purposiveness and the non-purposiveness of the organs in animal and vegetable bodies. According to Erasmus Darwin, Lamarck, and Paley, organs are purposive; according to Mr. Darwin and his followers, they are not purposive.
And where individuals have the power of choice and exercise that power; and where they have the power of adapting themselves to certain ends and exercise that power, there obviously is purposiveness. Purposiveness runs like a streak through every activity. It permeates the whole forest life. It is observable in plants no less than in animals.
But in these writings his main argument is that of his concluding chapter: the spontaneous adaptiveness of the organism, which nullifies all contingent theories to explain the purposiveness in ontogeny and phylogeny.
And when we note the evidence of purposiveness everywhere so abundant, we cannot resist the conclusion that this Activity also gives direction. It is not necessary to suppose that this Activity emanates from any thing or person outside Nature.
The purposiveness, which even Dr. It is seen that the organs external to the body, and those internal to it, are the second as much as the first, things which we have made for our own convenience, and with a prevision that we shall have need of them; the main difference between the manufacture of these two classes of organs being, that we have made the one kind so often that we can no longer follow the processes whereby we make them, while the others are new things which we must make introspectively or not at all, and which are not yet so incorporate with our vitality as that we should think they grow instead of being manufactured.
That is what is done when we are asked to take as our guide in voluntary choice a principle which ignores volition. The whole progress from animal to man and from savage to civilised man shows a gradual supersession of the principle of natural selection by a principle of subjective selection which steadily grows in purposiveness and in intelligence.
Now, where there is selection and where there is adaptation there must be purposiveness. Selection implies the power of choice, and we have seen how plants as well as animals deliberately and effectively exercise this power of choice. And adaptation implies adjustment to an end, and we have seen how wonderfully plants no less than animals adapt themselves to certain ends.
Since the former coincides with the understanding, we are here concerned only with the reflective judgment, judgment in the narrower sense, which does not cognize objects, but judges them, and this according to the principle of purposiveness. This, in turn, is of two kinds.
Assert sex as the predominant fulfillment, and you get the collapse of living purpose in man. You get anarchy. Assert purposiveness as the one supreme and pure activity of life, and you drift into barren sterility, like our business life of to-day, and our political life. You become sterile, you make anarchy inevitable. And so there you are.
Nature has purposiveness as an Artist has purposiveness. But that end is something which Nature, like the Artist, is always revising, re-creating, improving, perfecting. An Artist has the general end of creating Beauty, but he is always striving to enrich and intensify it, to create it in greater and greater perfection. And even so does Nature work.
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