384 COSMIC FHILOSOPEY. [px. in. 



means of insight into the Divine purposes,^ what is left for 

 us but to content ourselves with the humbler means of 

 research lying everywhere at our disposal — with being 

 "servants and interpreters of nature," as the great master 

 of inductive inquiry so wisely and modestly said? 



Not only does the teleological theory thus appear to be 

 useless, from a scientific point of view, but its claim to 

 philosophic validity is open to serious doubt. Looking at 

 it historically, we observe that its career has been that of 

 a perishable hypothesis born of primeval habits of thought, 

 rather than that of a permanent doctrine obtained by the 

 employment of scientific methods. From time to time, with 

 the steady advance of knowledge, the search for final causes 

 has been discarded in the simpler sciences, until it is now 

 kept up only in the complex and difficult branches of 

 biology and sociology. As Laplace observes, final causes 

 disappear as soon as we obtain the data requisite for resolv- 

 ing problems scientifically. Even Dr. Whewell, the great 

 champion of the teleological method in our day, admits that 

 it must not be applied to the inorganic sciences ; which 

 amounts to the confession that, wherever we know enough, 

 we can very well do without it.^ Creative design, however, 

 if manifested at all, is probably not confined to a limited 

 department of nature ; and therefore the rejection of teleology 



^ As Descartes somewliere says, " Nous rejetterous entierement de notre 

 philosopWe la recherche des causes finales ; car nous ne devons pas tant pre- 

 Bumer de nous-memes que de croire que Dieu nous ait voulu faire part de ses 

 conseils." 



3 Laplace, Essai sur Us ProldMlifis, p. 87 ; Whewell, History of the In- 

 ductive Sciences, vol. iii. p. 430. Even in biology the principle does not 

 always work well : — *' A final purpose is indeed readily perceived and ad- 

 mitted in regard to the multiplied points of ossification in the skull of the 

 human fcetus and their relation to safe parturition. But when we find that 

 the same ossific centres are established, and in similar order, in the skull ol 

 the embryo kangaroo, which is born when an inch in length, and in that of 

 the callow bird that breaks the brittle egg, we feel the truth of Bacon's com« 

 parison of final causes to the Vestal Virgins." Owen, The N'nture of Limbs, 

 p. 39. Or, as Prof. Huxley very happily observes, they " might be more fitly 

 teiTued the hetairce of pliilosophy, eo constantly have they led men astray. 

 Lay Semums. v. 255. 



