Y (JENERAL REFLECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS 299 



Knowledge through material and efficient causes is rounded 

 into a whole through a knowledge of the final cause, which, in 

 the last analysis, is just as much a rent causa as they are; for in 

 our total ignorance of what constitutes the invariable connexion 

 we observe between antecedent and consequent it is as true that 

 the second causes the first as the converse. Only because of the 

 inherent desire of the human mind to predict from the past, 

 which is known, to the future, which is not, have we come in 

 ordinary usage to restrict the term to the antecedent. 



The ultimate end of the human or any other race we cannot 

 tell, the ultimate end of the universe we cannot tell, any more 

 than we can imagine its absolute beginning, unless we find these 

 ends in the freedom of the moral consciousness of man. But 

 the end of an organism, the production of specific form and 

 the maintenance of that form which itself has produced, does 

 seem self-evident and plain, though we must never forget that 

 form is variable and subject to change, that species are not 

 immortal any more than individuals, and that the effort to achieve 

 that form does not invariably succeed. 



Here, however, we touch on the fringe of a problem the 

 problem of evil too large to be discussed in this place. 

 Putting this aside, a purposiveness is an unmistakable charac- 

 teristic of the functions of living things, of the production and 

 preservation of form, a characteristic which still remains when 

 those functions have been expressed in terms of the chemistry 

 of the proteids. It is only, however, by a remote analogy with 

 our own ' causality according to purposes ' that we can speak 

 of organic functions as purposive ; it is only as if they were 

 guided and controlled by an intelligence ; their purposiveness is 

 indeed only the expression of our inability to comprehend their 

 beginnings except in terms of their ends ; it is relative to us, 

 though not, therefore, any the less real. 



Biology, then, although built upon the ultimate conceptions 

 of chemistry and physics, has yet peculiar features of its own. 

 Its relation, indeed, to these lower sciences is just what their 

 relation is to one another. A survey of the whole hierarchy 

 displays to our view a series in ascending order of complexity ; 

 each member of this series has its own ultimate conceptions,, the 



