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Updated: June 18, 2025
Here the teleological proof comes in: From the finality of the world we reason to the existence of a Being, as the author of the world, who works in view of ends and who wills and carries out that which is best, to the supreme intelligence, goodness, and power of the Creator.
Kant is in so far a positivist that he limits the mission of knowledge to the reduction of the temporo-spatial relations of phenomena to rules, and declares the teleological power of values to be undemonstrable.
If we finally see in all these inorganic and organic processes a striving towards ends and we must see it, as soon as we in general observe order, the category of higher and lower, and the appearance of the higher on the basis of the lower we are, with all our teleological observations, again referred to the metaphysical, and still more decidedly to the goal-setting metaphysical; and a metaphysical which sets and reaches goals is nothing else than that in philosophic language which in the language of religion we call a living Creator and Ruler of the world and the activity of his providence.
But an example may bring into clearer light the profound opposition between the ordinary teleological, and the Darwinian, conception. Cats catch mice, small birds and the like, very well.
Without holding to any belief in the supernatural or the teleological, and while adhering to the idea that there has been, and can be, no break in the causal sequence in this world, may one still hold to some form of vitalism, and see in life something more than applied physics and chemistry? Is biology to be interpreted in the same physical and chemical terms as geology?
All ends to which the course of things refers us, are to the religious view of the world ends which are appointed by God; all means which serve to reach the ends, are means which God created and chose; and every phenomenon and every event which manifests this teleological government of God to our mind, is a miracle to us.
Humour is the instrument of the critic. If the psychological explanation of laughter be, as some have supposed, the sight of "a teleological being suddenly behaving in an ateleological manner," then the mere act of laughter is in itself an act of comparison and of criticism. The true castigator of morals has never striven to make his subjects appear disgraceful, but to make them appear ridiculous.
From the mobility of animals, Cuvier, with his characteristic partiality for teleological reasoning, deduces the necessity of the existence in them of an alimentary cavity, or reservoir of food, whence their nutrition may be drawn by the vessels, which are a sort of internal roots; and, in the presence of this alimentary cavity, he naturally sees the primary and the most important distinction between animals and plants.
Or rather this for, this notion of finality, and feeling rather than notion, this teleological feeling, is born only where there is consciousness. Consciousness and finality are fundamentally the same thing.
The first is, that biology must certainly strive after precision, but that this precision consists not in subordination to, but in co-ordination with physics. Biology must rank side by side with physics as an “independent fundamental science,” and that in the form of tectonic. And the second point is, that the teleological point of view must take its place beside the causal.
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