president's address. 837 



a dependence upon events which have not yet occurred. In other 

 words, organisms appear to perfoi-m acts in order that more or 

 less definite results may be brought about; and the nature of the 

 living acts is therefore determined not merely by what has gone 

 before, but by what is yet to follow. " It is that which is about 

 to be that guides the growing thing and gives it unity.'' 



It is this adaptation of means to ends which is put in the fore- 

 front in all teleological interpretation. And a very little con- 

 sideration is sufficient to convince one that this notion of the 

 determination of means by ends not merely differs, but is radically 

 distinct from, that of physical determination by antecedent 

 phenomena. It amounts to a complete inversion of the order of 

 physical causation.* 



To assume that since the idea of determination by ends involves 

 a point of view essentially distinct from that of efficient causation 

 the notion of end or purj^ose must therefore be put aside as a 

 mere preliminary illusion of the intelligence — as a fiction which 

 we accustom ourselves to suppose — is , simply to beg the question. 



The validity of this or that principle of explanation cannot be 

 decided in a rough and ready fashion. It is not a question 

 simpl}^ of the relative success of either principle in enabling us to 

 string facts together in a more or less intelligible order. Both 

 principles may assist us in doing so, and may thus claim to be so 

 far regulative of experience. 



To decide upon the limits of the validity of each and all of 

 such principles or categories of explanation is the paramount 

 function of a genuine philosophical criticism. It is to this that 



* It is idle to fall back upon Hume's supposed metaphysical elimina- 

 tion of the idea of necessary connection, causal or other, in order to get 

 rid of the difficulty raised by this distinction between efficient and final 

 cause. This destructive criticism is quite as effective in destroying the 

 foundations of ordinary scientific reasoning as in getting rid of the teleo- 

 logical conception. And it has been abundantly shown that on such a 

 basis of philosophical scepticism as to the fundamental conceptions, e.g., 

 of cause and of substance, no system of human knowledge can possibly rest. 

 — Cf. Green's Introd. to Hume's Treatise on Human Nature. 

 54 



