288 DRIESCH'S THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT V 



' place '. l Such purposiveness is internal, for the organism is at 

 once its own cause and an end to itself, not merely a means to 

 other ends, like a machine whose purposiveness is relative and 

 whose cause is external. 



Such is the principle of the teleological judgement. It is a 

 'heuristic principle' 2 rightly brought to bear, at least problemati- 

 cally, upon the investigation of organic nature, ' by a distant 

 ' analogy with our own causality according to purposes generally/ 3 

 and indispensable to us, as anatomists, ' as a guiding thread if we 

 e wish to learn how to cognize the constitution of organisms 

 ' without aspiring to an investigation into their first origin/ 4 



For ' we cannot adequately cognize, much less explain, 

 ' organized beings and their internal possibility, according to 

 ' mere mechanical principles of nature ', and it is therefore absurd 

 ' to hope that another Newton will arise in the future who shall 

 ' make comprehensible by us the production of a blade of grass 

 ' according to natural laws which no design has ordered '.*> 



Could our cognitive faculties rest content in this maxim of 

 the reflective judgement it would be impossible for them to 

 conceive of the production of these things in any other fashion 

 than by attributing them to a cause working by design, to 

 a Being which would be c productive in a way analogous to the 

 ' causality of an intelligence '.* 



Natural science, however, needs not merely reflective but 

 determinant principles which alone can inform us of the possi- 

 bility of finding the ultimate explanation of the world of 

 organisms in a causal combination for which an Understanding 

 is not explicitly assumed, since the principle of purposes ' does 

 { not make the mode of origination ' of organic beings ' any more 

 ' comprehensible 'J And then, in a passage 8 remarkable for 

 its prophetic insight, Kant proceeds to show how this might 

 be. ' The agreement of so many genera of animals in a common 

 ' scheme . . . allows a ray of hope, however faint, to penetrate into 

 f our minds, that here something may be accomplished by the aid 

 ' of the principle of the mechanism of nature (without which 

 ' there can be no natural science in general). This analogy of 



1 66. 2 78. 3 65. 4 72. s 75. c 75. 



7 78. 8 79. 



