v EVOLUTION AND TELEOLOGY 341 



one system, and from this it would be deducible that it 

 would form an organic whole, with a development deter- 

 mined by purpose and moving towards more perfect har- 

 mony of organisation. Such a system, it may be said, is 

 real, and to discover and understand it is the goal of our 

 rational endeavour. On the practical side, to make a 

 corresponding whole is the endeavour of the rational in 

 action. But though contained within the real it is not all 

 that is real. In part, the real is fundamentally irrational, 

 and that is the source of the ubiquitous limiting conditions 

 which give us so much trouble when we seek to absorb 

 them into our system. Dualism would then be a final 

 truth, yet not such a dualism as to impair the validity of 

 the effort of our minds, both practical and speculative, 

 towards unity of system. 



5. Between these possibilities, I doubt if it would be 

 possible to decide on the ground hitherto taken. As long 

 as we are depending on an ideal of thought, we are relying 

 on a conception which must have value if the effort of 

 thought has value, but which need not necessarily be true. 

 Let us then revert from the ideals of thought to the prin- 

 ciples actually implied in the process of reasoning. One of 

 these principles, as previously shown, is the Law of Uni- 

 versal Causation. If that is so, then, according to our 

 present argument, the general statement c Every event in 

 time has a cause,' or ' Every event in time has an antecedent 

 such that, from precisely similar antecedents, precisely 

 similar events always follow,' is a generalisation which must 

 be true of Reality as a whole, if the methods of science 

 are sound. That is to say, from the general validity of 

 reasoning, we can infer, as being implied therein, a general 

 truth about reality. The truth in question is one which 

 concerns causation, and if we can thus deal with causation 

 in general, it is possible that we can deal in a similar way 

 and no less cogently with the two species of causation which 

 we have distinguished. That at least is the experiment 

 which we are about to try. 



In the first place, the precise assumption which we 

 make, when we enquire into the interconnection of distinct 



