iv MECHANISM AND TELEOLOGY 299 



pulls, the forces and resultants, initial and later velocities 

 and so forth, we should in each case seek for a relation 

 more and more atomistic, as it were, and self-contained in 

 character. With more and more certainty as we made our 

 analysis precise, we should be able to lay down without 

 limitation, that given the cause the effect must follow, let 

 all concomitant circumstances be as they might be. Thus, 

 while the category of teleology leads us to conceive of each 

 object, event or process as implicated with concomitant 

 processes of some arrangement, the category of mechanism 

 leads us to consider it as dependent upon, following along 

 its own peculiar line of causation, which, if accurately 

 stated and fully known, holds its own no matter what the 

 accompanying circumstances may be. So even if in 

 tracing the cause of a given motion of our lever, we are 

 driven back through axle and crank to take account of the 

 entire machinery, yet all this comes into the account only 

 as a part of the history of the movement studied. Each 

 bit of the machine might be destroyed the moment it had 

 performed that particular motion upon which the process 

 that we are explaining depends. Provided that its motion 

 was complete, our process will go through. The destruc- 

 tion which renders it ideologically absurd does not 

 mechanically affect it. So in fact in a machine which is 

 in some way out of gear, the mechanical continuance of 

 some displaced process which is no longer fulfilling its true 

 function may continue indefinitely, perhaps to the destruc- 

 tion of the machine. In fact, as the mechanical operation 

 of cause and effect is indifferent to concomitants, so a 

 fortiori it is indifferent to results or to values. For the 

 cause of a thing we look always to the past. More strictly, 

 we seek to produce the effect which we desire to explain 

 without break of continuity into the past, and it is this 

 self-contained continuous strand of active being which, 

 when for clearness we analyse it into an earlier and later, 

 we call cause and effect. In tracing such a self-determined 

 strand in time, we never think of the earlier as determined 

 or conditioned by the later, for this would be to think of 

 the existent as determined by what does not exist. We 

 think of that which exists now as giving rise by continuous 



