From the Unconscious to the Conscious 



And, as we have seen, the greater cannot 

 proceed from the less unless potentially contained 

 in it. 



Teleological ideas, unless they are founded in 

 pantheistic ideas and start from them, necessarily end 

 in the commonplace and childish theories, so easy to 

 turn into ridicule, according to which all the components 

 of the universe must have been made for each other. 

 To dismiss this idea it is only necessary to point out, 

 as Russel Wallace does, that every adaptation necessarily 

 presents the semblance of an intentional design. 



Starting from pantheism on the other hand, both 

 the mechanical means and the teleological end are of a 

 different kind, involving as they do a single meta- 

 physical hypothesis. They imply the idea that our 

 comprehension of Space and Time is relative to our 

 understanding; and that when we rise above these 

 relative ideas, we see, and ought to see, neither beginning 

 nor end, neither origin, termination, nor arrival ; neither 

 past, present, nor future, but simply a harmonious 

 whole. It must not be said that the universe has been 

 constructed for a given end by stated means; nor that 

 the means necessarily determine the end. 



Mechanical and teleological distinctions are vain. 

 They vanish in the absolute. As Bergson says, we thus 

 come to * a metaphysical system in which the totality 

 of things is placed in eternity, and in which their 

 apparent duration expresses merely the infirmity of a 

 mind which cannot know everything at once.' 



This is what Laplace had previously expressed in 

 the well-known dictum that ' to an intelligence, which, 

 at a given moment, should know all the forces which 

 move Nature and the relative situations of all beings; 

 and if, moreover, that intelligence were powerful enough 

 to 'analyse these data, it would comprise under the same 

 formula the movements of the greatest bodies in the 

 universe and those of the smallest atom; nothing would 



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