THE LIMITS OF EVOLUTION 39 



Here, in seeing that Final Cause — causation at 

 the call of self-posited aim or end — is the only full 

 and genuine cause, we further see that Nature, the 

 cosmic aggregate of phenomena and the cosmic bond 

 of their law which in the mood of vague and inac- 

 curate abstraction we call Force, is after all only an 

 effect. More exactly, it is only a cause in the sense 

 in which every effect in its turn becomes a cause. 

 Still more exactly, it is the proximate or primary 

 effect of the creating mind ; within and under which 

 prime effect, and subject to its control as a sovereign 

 conception in the logic of creation, every other effect 

 — every phenomenon and every generic group of 

 phenomena — must take its rise, and have its course 

 and its exit. Throughout Nature, as distinguished 

 from idealising mind, there reigns, in fine, no causa- 

 tion but transmission. As every phenomenal cause 

 is only a transmissive and therefore passive agent, so 

 Nature itself, in its aggregate, is only a passive trans- 

 mitter. But because of its origin in the Final Causa- 

 tion of intelligence, its whole must conform to the 

 ideal that expresses the essential form of intelligent 

 being, and all its parts must follow each other in a 

 steadfast logical ascent toward that ideal as their 

 goal. Thus Teleology, or the Reign of Final Cause, 

 the reign of ideality, is not only an element in the 

 notion Evolution, but is the very vital cord in the 

 notion. The conception of evolution is founded at 



