THE PROBLEM OF UNIVERSAL TELEOLOGY 353 



individuality by using the term contingency, we may say as 

 follows : With reference to sidereal and planetary arrange- 

 ments as such, 1 and with reference to phylogeny and 

 history, we are unable at the present day to prove the 

 existence of any non- contingency. But this is no final 

 answer at all, the task founded upon the category of 

 individuality remains. With reference to a general harmony 

 between inorganic nature and the organisms, and among 

 the organisms themselves, there seems to be something more 

 than a mere task. 



The Concept of a Limited Teleology 



For, as we have said, there are some inklings of a 

 supra-personal harmony, at least from an anthropomorphic 

 point of view, some inklings of a general sort of statical 

 harmony in the whole of nature, as the old naturalists 

 asserted. In fact, this word " harmony ' : is the only one 

 that seems to be applicable to the few points we are able 

 to assert positively about our subject. In any case the 

 cosmos is such that organic life (and man's life in particular) 

 is guaranteed in it, at least on the earth's surface. 



The common objection to this reasoning is generally a 

 sort of enlarged Darwinism. It is pointed out that any 

 given state of the Organic is not the result of purposefulness 

 but the survivor out of innumerable other states, because 

 by contingency it discovered the secret of permanent 



1 This preliminary result is unaffected by certain analytical investigations 

 of the last few years, especially those of V. Goldschmidt, which have dis- 

 covered something like a general law governing the type of a planetary 

 system as a whole. If the distances of the single planetary orbits from the 

 centre do in fact always follow a comparatively simple formula, it may be 

 owing to the state of aggregation of their material at the moment of their 

 formation, and may be a mere question of probability. 



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