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cause is a principle in nature, and indicates a fundamental mode 
of tlie operation of nature’s forces. 
No study of nature, no account of her products, is complete 
which leaves out of consideration the final causes, the ends sub- 
seroed in these products, and severally in their parts. The Duke 
of Argyll has pointed out how Darwin, seeking to explain the 
development of organic species upon a mechanical hypothesis, 
constantly employs (with apparent inconsistency) the language 
of teleology. The case of Darwin is not, in this respect, an iso- 
lated one, and all such instances are simply to be explained on 
the ground that the facts speak for themselves in language too 
loud to be mistaken ; and that they cannot be fully appre- 
hended or described without reference to the adaptations and 
purposes manifested in them. In fact, were there no final 
causes in nature, there would be in it no reason, nothing upon 
which the reason of man could rest in his study of nature. 
The eye demands light for its own activity ; in like manner, 
human reason must find in the world, which furnishes the 
material for its activity, something adapted and cognate to 
itself, something rational, or, in other words, the marks of 
reason (among which marks final causation is a fundamentally 
essential one), in order to its own exercise. Since man, as 
matter of fact, does find material for the exercise of reason in 
the study of nature, it seems to follow, even from the outside, 
experimental point of view of natural history, that there is 
reason in nature, or that nature is under the at least partial 
control of final causes. 
With the conclusion that the final cause is a principle 
working immanontly in nature tallies the significant assertion 
of German idealism (see I. H. Fichte’s recent work, Die 
theistische Weltanschauung, Leipzig, 1873, p. 225), “that 
nothing extraneous to any individual existence can transform 
it, but can only excite it to self-wrought development.” That 
is to say : external conditions may furnish the occasion for 
special developments, which are always, in the normal order of 
tilings, simply new adaptations, but the efficient and guiding 
force is within. Thus the conception of immanent (final) 
causation, or of God as working in things and not merely 
operating upon them from without, coheres with whatever facts 
may have been demonstrated as regards the variation of 
organisms. That would be indeed an unintelligent or impotent 
(final) cause, which, under changed conditions, either did not 
or could not adjust its work to these new conditions. Huxley’s 
account of teleology {Lay Sermons and. Addresses, xiii. : Criti- 
cisms of “ The Origin of Species ,} ) is therefore unjust, unless 
he wishes to describe notions held by the unthinking and not 
