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Updated: June 19, 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.
From the time of Bacon, the main object of speculation was to disrupt the scholastic teleology. In the result the State becomes dissolved into a discrete mass of individuals, and the self-interest of each is the starting-point of all inquiry. Hobbes built his state upon the selfishness of men; even Locke makes the individual enter political life for the benefits that accrue therefrom.
The latter hypothesis, in its nature un-provable, has, on scientific grounds, become so far improbable that few, even of the anti-Darwinian naturalists, now hold to it; and, whatever may once have been its religious claims, it is at present a hinderance rather than a help to any just and consistent teleology.
So, also, "it removes from the study of Nature the ideas of final cause and purpose" a sentence which reads curiously in the light of Darwin's special investigations, such as those upon the climbing of plants, the agency of insects in the fertilization of blossoms, and the like, which have brought back teleology to natural science, wedded to morphology and already fruitful of discoveries.
So far from being a "Teleologist in the fullest sense of the word," we should deny that he is a Teleologist in the ordinary sense at all; and we should say that, apart from his merits as a naturalist, he has rendered a most remarkable service to philosophical thought by enabling the student of Nature to recognise, to their fullest extent, those adaptations to purpose which are so striking in the organic world, and which Teleology has done good service in keeping before our minds, without being false to the fundamental principles of a scientific conception of the universe.
The one finds the explanation of evolution in that from which it started, the other in that to which it tends. The one explains the higher by the lower; the other the lower by the higher. This is a plain issue; either the world shows a teleology or it does not. If it does, the philosophy based on the inorganic sciences is wrong.
Whether modern natural science is right in this or not, whether or not it has neglected an element of truth in the old theory of Entelechies which it cannot dispense with, especially in regard to living organisms, it is beyond dispute that, from the most general point of view, and in particular with reference to teleology, religion does not need to concern itself in the least about this opposition. “Purposes,” “ideas,” “guidance” in the religious sense, are quite unaffected by the manner in which the result is realised; everything depends upon the special and particular value of what has been attained or realised.
To this question, then, let us next address ourselves. From the theistic pleading which we have just heard, it is abundantly manifest that the formal conditions of a metaphysical teleology are present: the question now before us is as to whether or not any actual evidence exists in favour of such a theory.
Considering their ubiquity, persistent vitality, and promptitude of action upon fitting occasion, the suggestion would rather be that, while Finally, Darwinian teleology has the special advantage of accounting for the imperfections and failures as well as for successes. It not only accounts for them, but turns them to practical account.
At a time when the assault against teleology had just begun, this noble author perceived the whole importance and weight of these attacks, and most energetically defended teleology. The Creation of the World.
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