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Updated: June 19, 2025
It is interesting to find him, in 1867, criticising Haeckel for his repudiation of the principle of Design. "The Doctrine of Evolution," he says, "is the most formidable opponent of the commoner and coarser forms of teleology."
Lewes, viz., as respectively designating a theory that is verifiable and a theory that is not. Consequently, by the term "scientific teleology" I mean to denote a form of teleology which admits either of being proved or disproved, while by the term "metaphysical teleology" I mean to denote a form of teleology which does not admit either of being proved or of being disproved.
It satisfies well enough the need for teleology, and with that the need for a supreme, universally powerful and free intelligence; but it gives neither support nor nourishment to the essential element in religious feeling, through which alone faith becomes in the strict sense religious.
A second very common objection to Mr. It is nearly twenty years since I ventured to offer some remarks on this subject, and as my arguments have as yet received no refutation, I hope I may be excused for reproducing them. I observed, "that the doctrine of Evolution is the most formidable opponent of all the commoner and coarser forms of Teleology.
But generally the antagonists of teleology are guilty of the inconsequence which, although from the principles of their system to be rejected, is indelibly impressed on our thinking mind and especially on our moral consciousness, that they still discriminate between higher and lower, and particularly that they willingly assign to the moral disposition and demand, and to the morally planned individual, the priority among existences.
The Teleology which supposes that the eye, such as we see it in man or one of the higher Vertebrata, was made with the precise structure which it exhibits, for the purpose of enabling the animal which possesses it to see, has undoubtedly received its death-blow.
The teleology of conscience is very simple, and its genesis and development purely natural. The "ought" seems more objective than "conscience," more impersonal. Just so does "beauty" seem more impersonal and objective than our pleasure in contemplating nature and art.
It is time to turn to the exposition of Darwinism by its avowed advocates, in proof of the assertion that it excludes all teleology. The first of these witnesses is Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, himself a distinguished naturalist. Mr.
He urges the usual objections to teleology derived from undeveloped or useless organs, as web-feet in the upland goose and frigate-bird, which never swim. What, however, perhaps more than anything, makes clear his rejection of design is the manner in which he deals with the complicated organs of plants and animals. Why don't he say, they are the product of the divine intelligence?
This was a teleology which placed a designing mind at the back of the evolutionary process, and arranging it with a view to a preconceived end. The process then becomes, to use Spencer's phrase, a "beneficent" one, since it eliminates the poorer specimens and leaves the better ones to perpetuate the species.
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