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emphasizes the presence and efficiency of final causes in nature. 
By new arguments and fresh illustrations he renders freshly 
impressive and convincing the argument for design in nature. 
But he seems fatally blind to what his argument implies. It 
is too obvious to need arguing, that an idea implies a conscious- 
ness of some kind possessing it. The independent existence 
of ideas, say as conceived by Plato, is hardly a part of any 
modern conception of the world, nor is this notion of them 
entertained by Hartmann. But this is the only possible 
alternative to the doctrine furnished by familiar experience, 
that ideas belong necessarily and only to a conscious subject. 
Hartmann’s doctrine that there is in natural things an uncon- 
scious (!) intelligence and will, is logically so absurd in itself 
(being a contradictio in adjecto), and so unsupported and even 
contradicted by analogy, that — especially in a discussion which, 
like the present, must be brief — there is obviously no occasion 
to refute it by argument. Hartmann would avoid the necessity 
of acknowledging a personal God. We may leave the assump- 
tion, by which he seeks to reach this end, undiscussed, and 
content ourselves with accepting the powerful aid of the 
author’s arguments in favour of the final cause as a principle 
in nature. 
That the notion of final causation is a necessary regulative 
principle for our cognition of nature is affirmed by Kant, who, 
however, denies our right to consider it as having a known 
objective significance. This is a logical consequence of the 
fundamental doctrines of the Kantian philosophy. If, as Kant 
teaches, we know only phenomena, and cannot frame any just 
notions as to their causes by the use of human categories of 
thought (all of which, according to him, have only conditional, 
subjective validity), it is evident that the idea of final cause 
can be used by us only in judging of phenomena as they are 
for us, and that, we are equally unjustified, whether we affirm 
that everything is produced in nature by the exclusive opera- 
tion of mechanical or of intelligent (ideal, “ final ”) causation. 
He who is unconvinced of the correctness of the theoretical 
basis of the Kantian philosophy (and the demonstration of its 
untenableness, as above intimated, has been already accom- 
plished), may reject it, and, welcoming Kant’s demonstration 
of the necessity of the notion of final cause as a principle of 
cognition, may extend it, in the absence of other than Kant’s 
arguments to the contrary, to the realm of nature besides. 
We may, then, hold materialism, which claims to rest on 
science, to be demonstrably inadequate to account for the 
apparent marks of the action of final causes in nature; its 
claims are repudiated in the confession which science makes 
