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The matter cannot be left there, in fact it raises new problems: what constitutes the reaction? how are the various symptoms interrelated? are they different in deteriorating and acute cases? what is the teleological significance of the reaction? if it be an integral part of the manic-depressive group, how does it affect our conceptions of what manic-depressive insanity is?
It may be pointed out here that on the Lamarckian theory the conception of adaptations is not teleological: they do not exist for a certain purpose, but are the result of external stimulations arising from the actions and habits of the organism. The latter conception is the more general, for cases of somatic sexual characters exist which cannot be said to have a use or function.
Professor Huxley, of London, the zealous and oft-mentioned advocate of the descent of man from the ape, says what is so energetically contested by his warmest friends in Germany, by Büchner, Häckel, O. Schmidt, and others that the teleological and the mechanical mode of viewing nature by no means exclude one another.
But we confess frankly that it is incomparably easier for us to bring the origin of the higher groups of organisms in accord with a theistic and teleological view of the world through descent than the origin of each single species of organisms through a primitive generation; and we reach this result especially by the attempt at teleologically perceiving the palæontological remains of organic life on earth.
Professor Huxley well says, "It is necessary to remark 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." ... "The teleological and the mechanical views of nature are not necessarily mutually exclusive; on the contrary, the more purely a mechanist the speculator is, the more firmly does he assume a primordial molecular arrangement, of which all the phenomena of the universe are the consequences; and the more completely thereby is he at the mercy of the teleologist, who can always defy him to disprove that this primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve the phenomena of the universe."
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.
Now, in a view of the world which, like the Biblical, so decidedly sees a revelation of God in all that which takes place, in a view of the world to which everything natural has also, as a work of God, its supernatural cause, and everything supernatural, at present, or in the future, is transposed again into nature and history, not only all those above rejected conceptions of miracles lose their significance, but all remaining conceptions with which one otherwise tries to distinguish the miracles from all that is not miraculous, or to classify the different species of miracles, also diminish in importance, as do also all those distinctions of direct and indirect actions of God the distinctions of relative and absolute, of subjective and objective miracles: and there remains hut a single inviolable kernel and central point of the Biblical conception of miracles, and that is the above mentioned teleological character of miracles.
The antinomy of the teleological judgment thesis: all production of material things and their forms must be judged to be possible according to merely mechanical laws; antithesis: some products of material nature cannot be judged to be possible according to merely mechanical laws, but to judge them requires the causality of final causes is insoluble so long as both propositions are taken for constitutive principles; but it is soluble when they are taken as regulative principles or standpoints for judgment.
Conformably to the general law ruling the development of mind passage from indefinite to definite, from the incoherent to the coherent, from spontaneity to reflection, from the reflex to the voluntary period the imagination comes out of its swaddling-clothes, is changed through the intervention of a teleological act that assigns it an end; through the union of rational elements that subdue it for an adaptation.
The vital processes compel us to admit that it seems “as if intelligence determined quality and order.” Driesch still tries to reconcile causes and purposes as different “modes of regarding things,” but this device he afterwards abandons. We cannot penetrate to the nature of things either by the causal or by the teleological method.
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