6 INTRODUCTORY [ch. 



to existence either as an active useful agent, or as a survival" of 

 such active usefulness in the past. But in this last, and very 

 important case, we have reached a teleology without a rdXos, as 

 men like Butler and Janet have been prompt to shew, an "adapta- 

 tion" without "design," a teleology in which the final cause becomes 

 little more, if anything, than the mere expression or resultant of a 

 sifting out of the good from the bad, or of the better from the worse, 

 in short of a process of mechanism. The apparent manifestations 

 of purpose or adaptation become part of a mechanical philosophy, 

 "une forme methodologique de connaissance*," according to which 

 "la Nature agit tou jours par les moyens les plus simplest," and 

 "chaque chose finit toujours par s'accommoder a son miUeu," as in 

 the Epicurean creed or aphorism that ^atnTe finds a use for every- 

 thing J. In short, by a road which resembles but is not the same as 

 Maupertuis's road, we find our way to the very world in which we 

 are living, and find that, if it be not, it is ever tending to become, 

 "the best of all possible worlds §." 



But the use of the teleological principle is but one way, not the 

 whole or the only way, by which we may seek to learn how things 

 came to be, and to take their places in the harmonious complexity 

 of the world. To seek not for end^ but for antecedents is the way 

 of the physicist, who finds "causes" in what he has learned to 

 recognise as fundamental properties, or inseparable concomitants, 

 or unchanging laws, of matter and of energy. In Aristotle's parable, 

 the house is there that men may live in it ; but it is also there because 

 the builders have laid one stone upon another. It is as a mechanism, 

 or a mechanical construction, that the physicist looks upon the 

 world; and Democritus, first of physicists and one of the greatest 

 of the Greeks, chose to refer all natural phenomena to mechanism 

 and set the final cause aside. 



* So Newton, in the Preface to the Principia: "Natura enim simplex est, et 

 rerura causis superfluis non -luxuriat"; "Nature is pleased with simplicity, and 

 affects not the pomp of superfluous causes." Modern physics finds the perfection 

 of mathematical beauty in what Newton called the perfection of simplicity. 



t Janet, Les Causes Finales, 1876, p. 350. 



X "Nil ideo quoniam natumst in corpore ut uti Possemus sed quod natumst id 

 procreat usum." Lucret. iv, 834. 



§ The phrase is Leibniz's, in his Theodicee: and harks back to Aristotle — If one 

 way be better than another, that you may be sure is Nature's way; Nic. Eth. 

 10996, 23 et al. 



