THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL TELEOLOGY 345 



study. I confess we do not even know this yet. We do 

 not see any complication or progress in human history that 

 might not be explained as a cumulation in the easiest way. 

 As far as we know, the State in the widest sense of this 

 word is the sum of the acting of all the individuals 

 concerned in it, and is not a real " individual " itself. 



Of course, even if some kind of construction or real 

 individual unity in culture were proved, the problem of 

 an immanent autonomous cultural and historical factor 

 would still be unsolved. There might perhaps some day be 

 found such a factor in the so-called " unconscious >: or 

 " subconscious " sphere, but teleology in history, if there 

 were such a thing at all, might also be " machine-like " qua 

 teleology. Of course that would not mean to say in this 

 case that human culture is to be understood mechanically 

 the entelechian individuals which form part of it would 

 contradict such an hypothesis from the very beginning 

 but it would express that the individual construction at a 

 given state of culture qua construction is the effect of a 

 construction of an earlier state, which again follows from an 

 earlier construction, and so on ad infinitum ; the word 

 construction relating here to the velocity and arrangement 

 of matter in space and the arrangement of organic individual 

 persons. In either of the two possible cases just mentioned 

 there would be something above a mere sum of historical 

 individuals, whether it were active at present or had been 

 active at a certain moment of the past. 



Thus the problem of historical teleology in any sense 

 must remain an open question a categorical task. 1 



1 If history were evolution throughout, no place would be left for the 

 concept of a "historical possibility"; if it were partly evolutionary, this 

 concept would be applicable in but a very restricted manner. The discussion 



