INTRODUCTORY DISCUSSIONS 131 



or to do away with what I dislike. The " purpose " of my 

 acting always is a certain state of the medium that " ought 

 to exist " an engine, for instance ; it is always external 

 with respect to myself, and therefore the concept of a " self- 

 purpose " may be declined a limine. All my acting towards 

 a purpose is based upon knowledge of the " means " by 

 which the purpose may be attained, and upon judgment of 

 the " suitability " of those means. 



From this it is but one step to call another man's acting 

 purposeful : he acts purposefully, whenever I see him 

 acting in such a manner that I can imagine myself acting 

 like him under similar conditions, that is, if I can imagine 

 that, under the circumstances in which the other human 

 being is placed, I should have some liking or disliking, 

 and should act in some way in order to gratify or to obviate 

 it. It follows from this that purposefulness in the acting 

 of other men is always judged of by analogy alone. This 

 is true, if we pass from man to the higher animals : even 

 the actions of an ape or a dog may be said to be intelligible 

 in some degree. 



But things become more difficult as soon as we pass 

 to the lowest organisms, still regarded as acting, and to 

 processes of morphogenesis and metabolism : in what cases 

 have we the right to claim certain such processes as 

 purposeful or teleological and others not ? 



Mere analogy would fail here to justify the application 

 of the term, for, in fact, we cannot imagine ourselves in the 

 situation of a newt repairing its foot : we are certainly un- 

 able to regenerate our own foot if it is lost in an accident, 

 and even if our body could repair it, the process would 

 probably go on in a so-called unconscious manner. We 



