348 ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY 



cause and its own effect — in virtue of its acting 

 from the contemplation of its own self-recognised 

 Ideal. The action of such a causa siii is purposive, 

 but its own self-consciousness provides the aim, 

 and the aim is just its own complete being, as this 

 really is ; namely, as self-defined in the light of 

 the Divine Perfection. Such purposive causation 

 through an ideal is inherently free causation : the 

 being that acts from it is always self-prompted and 

 self-fulfilled, and so is free. No other conceivable 

 mode of causation is free. Since the time of Aris- 

 totle this operation of an ideal has gone by the 

 name of "final" cause — the causality in a con- 

 sciously put "end," or aim. Sometimes it is called 

 by the more sounding title of "teleological " cause 

 — the cause whose logic, or explanation, is in a 

 T€\o^, the Greek name for a goal ; that is, again, 

 an aim, an ideal, the highest term of a thinking 

 agent's self-expression. To sum up its nature in 

 a single phrase, let us call it simply the free attrac- 

 tion of an intelligence by its own ideals, preemi- 

 nently by its Ideal of ideals. 



Final Cause, then, or the Ideality at the logical 

 heart of conscious life, — to that we are to look for 

 release from the perplexity about the determinism in 

 Divine supremacy and the self-determinism in human 

 or other non-divine freedom. And in finding the 



