320 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



the line of movement leading up to the end is essential to 

 the existence of the purposive state itself, and thus, in a 

 further sense, purposive activity is of organic character, for 

 the movement towards the end depends upon, and is 

 executed by, a process which depends on it. There is that 

 mutual relation of origin and end which we found in our 

 analysis of an organism holding in the interactions of part 

 with part. The doing is determined by what is done. 



This account of purpose is only set into clearer relief by 

 the explanation which would reduce it to mechanical cate- 

 gories. The evolutionist will tell us that the biological 

 reason why certain purposive tendencies exist in the living 

 being is that they form the arrangement best fitted to secure 

 certain results of value to the life of the species. Be it so. 

 Then this shows that, however the purposive consciousness 

 has come into being, its nature is so to organise things as to 

 secure results, and that its efficacy in securing results is 

 precisely the cause of its arising wherever it has arisen. 

 It may be objected that an abstraction like causal efficacy 

 can explain nothing. But, of course, the causal efficacy 

 always has some concrete shape. It is the edge by which it 

 will cut that determines the shape given to the tool. In 

 the purpose it is an organisation of elements of thought and 

 feeling, of physical acts and of external things that consti- 

 tutes the efficacy of the action. The purposive state has 

 historically come into being, because that sort of organisa- 

 tion does yield that sort of result. It is maintained in being 

 by its own knowledge that it is tending in this direction. 



ii. I conclude that the main objection to teleological 

 explanation is not sustained. There is an intelligible sense 

 in which events or processes may be regarded as determined 

 by their relation to results which are to come out of them 

 in the future. This explanation may be applied to an event 

 or series of events arising out of a purpose, but so far as the 

 series is merely referred to a purpose that appears to stand 

 outside it, the events seem to follow from it as a mechanical 

 sequence. The explanation, however, can also be applied 

 to the purpose itself, and when the originating purposive 

 act is brought into the account, the whole system the 



