COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



cordlngly, unless we are so arrogant as to lay 

 claim to the possession of some direct means 

 of insight into the Divine purposes/ what is 

 left for us but to content ourselves with the 

 humbler means of research lying everywhere at 

 our disposal — with being " servants and inter- 

 preters of nature," as the great master of in- 

 ductive inquiry so wisely and modestly said ? 



Not only does the teleological theory thus 

 appear to be useless, from a scientific point of 

 view, but its claim to philosophic validity is 

 open to serious doubt. Looking at it histori- 

 cally, we observe that its career has been that 

 of a perishable hypothesis born of primeval 

 habits of thought, rather than that of a perma- 

 nent doctrine obtained by the employment of 

 scientific methods. From time to time, with 

 the steady advance of knowledge, the search 

 for final causes has been discarded in the sim- 



statement is its disjunctive form. Obviously that v^^hich is the 

 cause of everything cannot be the explanation of anything. We 

 cannot explain any particular group of phenomena by a refer- 

 ence to divine action, because such a reference is merely a 

 reference to the source of all phenomena alike, and hence can- 

 not give us specific information concerning any particular 

 group. Laplace w^as therefore quite justified in saying **Je 

 n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothese." 



^ As Descartes somewhere says, ** Nous rejetterons entiere- 

 ment de notre philosophic la recherche des causes finales ; car 

 nous ne devons pas tant presumer de nous-memes que de 

 croire que Dieu nous ait voulu faire part de ses conseils." 

 190 



