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Updated: May 18, 2025
Aristotle, who was well aware of the diametrical opposition, represents, as compared with Democritus, the Socratic-Platonic teleological interpretation of nature, and in regard to the question of living organisms his point of view may quite well be designated by the modern name of “vitalism.” Especially in his theory of the vegetable soul, the essence of vitalism is already contained.
An extraordinary amount of ingenuity has been expended in this connection, in order to avoid here, where perhaps it is most difficult of all, the use of “teleological” principles, and to remain faithful to the orthodox, exclusively mechanical mode of interpretation.
But the great successor and pupil of its founder gives us in the Timaeus a picture of the depth to which natural science can be degraded in the effort to give a specific teleological meaning to all parts of the visible Universe.
The transition from these theories of nature to a teleological outlook from the highest and most human point of view is so obvious as to be almost unavoidable. And although a natural science which keeps to its own business and within its own boundaries has certainly no right to make this transition for itself, it has still less right to prevent its being made outside of its limits.
Even if the theory of the struggle for existence were correct, it would be possible to subject the world as a whole to a teleological interpretation. But these anti-Darwinian theories now emerging, though they do not directly induce teleological interpretation, suggest it much more strongly than orthodox Darwinism does.
Galen, the physician, asserts that experience is the only source of knowledge; lays great stress on the culture of mathematics and logic, observing that he himself should have been a Pyrrhonist had it not been for geometry. In the teleological doctrine of physiology he considers that the foundations of a true theology must be laid.
I saw also that his denial of design was only, so to speak, skin deep, and that his system was in reality teleological, inasmuch as, to use Isidore Geoffroy's words, it makes the organism design itself. True, he did not know he was a teleologist, but he was none the less a teleologist for this.
He fought against social Utopianism as against religious dogmatism, and fought against the dogmatism of property as against political authority; he sought to transform Socialism upon severely scientific and realistic lines, and to free it from all the fetters of dogmatic religion; and yet, just as Rousseau did, he placed at the head of his system a dogma: "Man is born free"; and at the conclusion of it the teleological phrase of a moral order of society two propositions which can never be proved by experience, but rather contradict all experience.
Here we at once come to the interesting negative fact that there is nothing in tradition to indicate that Socrates ever occupied himself with theological questions. To be sure, Xenophon has twice put into his mouth a whole theodicy expressing an elaborate teleological view of nature. But that we dare not base anything upon this is now, I think, universally acknowledged.
The Christian dispensation is teleological, palingenesiac, and the whole order, prior to the Incarnation, was initial, genesiac, and continued by natural generation, as it is still in all nations and tribes outside of Christendom.
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