BOOK II. § 1. The Known and the Unknown. material objects. We know something which we must hold true of whatever existents may really occupy the unknown region. We have objective thoughts which we cannot but apply to it, though we have no independent grasp, or positive knowledge of the objects thereby thought of. Our knowledge of objects thought of, other than thought itself objectified by reflection, does not go beyond matter and its conditionates, matter being the first and only real condition positively known to us. This, however, leaves between the known and the unknown worlds a wide margin open for the possible advance of positive knowledge. The line of demarcation is not fixed, but extensible within certain limits. It may include within it whatever can be brought, by inductive or deductive methods, into dependent connection with modes and forces of matter. The limit consists in the knowledge of real conditions, however that knowledge may be acquired. And with our present powers, as we have seen, the only objects which we can positively think of as real conditions are material. It is when we attempt to transcend this limit that we go wrong in philosophy, as in science. With regard, then, to what we have called the unknown region of the universe, the general result of the foregoing reasoning is to substitute in theory a world of real but not positively known conditions and conditionates for an absolutely unknowable existence, imagined either as the cause of the known world, or as the noumenal reality of which the known world is the phenomenal manifestation. These latter conceptions are practically equivalent to restricting reality to the known world, with its BOOK II. CH. III. § 1. The Known and the Unknown. BOOK II. § 2. Design in Nature. ambitiously put forward to do duty as philosophical explanations. 2. The mischief done by the conception of Cause does not stop at the bare relation between the known and the unknown. There is a variety of it which is constantly applied within the field of positive science, the conception of Final Cause, otherwise known as End, Purpose, or Design in Nature, and supplies the basis of what is called Teleology. Given the conception of Cause as an efficient agent or agency, then that of Final Cause is a modification of it, by including in addition the reason, or motive which guides its efficiency into this or that channel, or determines it to effect this or that result. A Final Cause may therefore mean either the reason determining an efficient cause, or the efficient cause as determined by a reason. both cases alike it is a conception taken directly from the common-sense form of experience, and built upon the analogy of human voluntary action, as construed thereby. In Now in Nature as made known to us by positive science, the facts are innumerable which readily lend themselves to an interpretation of this sort, and they are facts which admit of no doubt. Both the organic and the inorganic kingdoms of Nature are full of instances which can only be described as harmonies between one structure and another, harmonies between structure and function, harmonies between one function and another, harmonies between antecedent and subsequent actions, precisely analogous to what in human operations is taken as evidence of preconceived purpose or design. Nor is this confined to the world of living beings, or to their relations with their non-living environment. The mutual adaptation of parts, and regular interchange of energies, in the mechanical, physical, and chemical dominions, give to the whole material world the appearance of a Cosmos, and make its ceaseless action seem like the result of a calculated mechanism. So that, to adopt Aristotle's expression, Nature seems everywhere to work for a purpose, just like man. Summing up these facts, which as facts are indisputable, under the name apparent design, let us see what justification there is for interpreting them as due to a Final Cause; which in other words is asking, whether the design apparently displayed in them was really pre-existent in the shape of a plan, reason, or felt motive of any kind. I confine myself, of course, to considerations founded on what has been said in the two foregoing Chapters. And in the first place I remark, that if we surrender the conception of a Cause existing in the unknown world, we necessarily surrender with it that of a Final Cause existing in that world. But on this I do not mean to insist. Nor again do I intend to lay any weight on the fact that, if either a Cause or a Final Cause exists in the unknown world, in any way determining the known, its existence must ex hypothesi be incapable of direct verification. This does not need saying, and yet we might conceivably have valid grounds for inferring their existence (always supposing them to be something logically construable to thought), grounds drawn wholly from experience of the known, just as we have grounds BOOK II. § 2. Design in Nature. BOOK II. § 2. Design in Nature. for inferring the existence of the unknown reality itself. in The way in which this question is usually treated is to begin by assuming, that preconceived design is a vera causa, in a large and well-marked class of human actions, and then to consider whether or not such harmonies of unconscious Nature as those indicated above warrant the inference, that preconceived design was a necessary cause or con-cause in bringing those harmonies into existence. Sometimes it is argued, that a conscious intelligence must have existed in the unknown world as the producer, and still exists as the sustainer, of the known world of Nature. Sometimes a distinction is attempted between conscious and unconscious intelligence (as if the latter were not a contradiction in terms), and an unconscious intelligence is inferred either in the known or in the unknown world, or in both, as the explanation of the harmonies to be accounted for. But in every case the basis of the argument consists in the assumption, that what is called the human Mind acts from some felt motive, or for some preconceived end. The supposed fact that it does so supplies at once the basis of inference and the conception of the thing to be inferred, namely, the operation of final cause or causes in Nature, as distinguished from the agency of man. Without the supposed purposive action of the human mind, we should never have framed the idea of the efficiency of final causes. I am not going to criticise any of these arguments, nor can I even treat the question in the same way. What I have to point out is, that |