240 CHARLES DEKONINCK 



restricted to conscious action? That is a further assumption 

 and it ought to be justified. Darwin justified it when he spoke 

 of the plant Hving on the edge of the desert. He showed us 

 that he was stretching the meaning of the word " struggle for 

 existence " and " struggle for survival," a survival, which, of 

 course, is understood as a good. Dogs struggle to acquire food 

 because they like it. But if a plant is going to struggle after its 

 food, can you mean that the plant likes it.'' We assume that 

 a plant by definition at least has no sensation, so how could 

 the plant like iood? Yet plants struggle, as Darwin points out. 

 We have to stretch our words, with Darwin. But Sir Julian 

 refuses to stretch them: he does not allow a new, related, 

 meaning whose difference is based upon a proportion found 

 between the things intended by the same word. 



Allow me to mention in passing the over-emphasis on change 

 in Darwin and in Huxley, an over-emphasis which has been 

 recently criticized rather ably by Loren Eiseley in a book 

 written on the occasion of Darwin's centenary. These thinkers 

 have so emphasized the passage from one form of life to another 

 that they have lost sight of the remarkable stability that can 

 go along with this change. Now the stability of an organism 

 needs explanation too, and change alone is not going to explain 

 stability. We bring in this example simply to point out the 

 idea of what we mean by action for an end in nature or what 

 is called final cause, although I am wary of the term final 

 cause, so easily misunderstood. It is not found in Aristotle who 

 teaches that things act " for the sake of something." " Causa 

 finalis " is found in scholastic philosophy. St. Thomas uses it, 

 as a matter of fact, but I am wary of it in English because it 

 tends to be technical. With Aristotle a man acts for a purpose 

 and beasts act for a purpose too; and, while plants do also, 

 this is very obscure and we must at any rate extend the 

 meaning of purpose. The term " good " has likewise several 

 meanings — a whole orderly group of them co-ordinated some- 

 how one with the other, all covered by that single term 



good "; as for instance in a " good steak," a " good man." 





