(THE DESTINY OF MAN)
Among the manifold currents in the spiritual life of humanity
there is one which we must now trace, and which we may call the
elimination of the concept of purpose from spheres to which it does
not belong. Adaptation to purpose is a special kind of sequence of
phenomena. Such adaptation is genuinely real only when, in contrast
to the relation of cause and effect in which the antecedent event
determines the subsequent, the subsequent event determines the
antecedent. This is possible only in the sphere of human actions. Man
performs actions which he first presents to himself in idea, and he
allows himself to be determined to action by this idea. The consequent,
i.e., the action, influences by means of the idea the antecedent,
i.e., the human agent. If the sequence is to have purposive character,
it is absolutely necessary to have this circuitous process through
human ideas.
In the process which we can analyse into cause and effect, we must
distinguish percept from concept. The percept of the cause precedes
the percept of the effect. Cause and effect would simply stand side by
side in our consciousness, if we were not able to connect them with
one another through the corresponding concepts. The percept of the
effect must always be consequent upon the percept of the cause. If
the effect is to have a real influence upon the cause, it can do so
only by means of the conceptual factor. For the perceptual factor
of the effect simply does not exist prior to the perceptual factor
of the cause. Whoever maintains that the flower is the purpose of
the root, i.e., that the former determines the latter, can make good
this assertion only concerning that factor in the flower which his
thought reveals in it. The perceptual factor of the flower is not
yet in existence at the time when the root originates.
In order to have a purposive connection, it is not only necessary to
have an ideal connection of consequent and antecedent according to
law, but the concept (law) of the effect must really, i.e., by means
of a perceptible process, influence the cause. Such a perceptible
influence of a concept upon something else is to be observed only in
human actions. Hence this is the only sphere in which the concept of
purpose is applicable. The naïve consciousness, which regards as real
only what is perceptible, attempts, as we have repeatedly pointed out,
to introduce perceptible factors even where only ideal factors can
actually be found. In sequences of perceptible events it looks for
perceptible connections, or, failing to find them, it imports them
by imagination. The concept of purpose, valid for subjective actions,
is very convenient for inventing such imaginary connections. The naïve
mind knows how it produces events itself, and consequently concludes
that Nature proceeds likewise. In the connections of Nature which are
purely ideal it finds, not only invisible forces, but also invisible
real purposes. Man makes his tools to suit his purposes. On the same
principle, so the Naïve Realist imagines, the Creator constructs all
organisms. It is but slowly that this mistaken concept of purpose is
being driven out of the sciences. In philosophy, even at the present
day, it still does a good deal of mischief. Philosophers still ask such
questions as, What is the purpose of the world? What is the function
(and consequently the purpose) of man? etc.
Monism rejects the concept of purpose in every sphere, with the sole
exception of human action. It looks for laws of Nature, but not for
purposes of Nature. Purposes of Nature, no less than invisible forces
(p. 118), are arbitrary assumptions. But even life-purposes which
man does not set up for himself, are, from the standpoint of Monism,
illegitimate assumptions. Nothing is purposive except what man
has made so, for only the realisation of ideas originates anything
purposive. But an idea becomes effective, in the realistic sense,
only in human actions. Hence life has no other purpose or function
than the one which man gives to it. If the question be asked, What is
man's purpose in life? Monism has but one answer: The purpose which
he gives to himself. I have no predestined mission in the world;
my mission, at any one moment, is that which I choose for myself. I
do not enter upon life's voyage with a fixed route mapped out for me.
Ideas are realised only by human agents. Consequently, it is
illegitimate to speak of the embodiment of ideas by history. All such
statements as "history is the evolution of man towards freedom," or
"the realisation of the moral world-order," etc., are, from a Monistic
point of view, untenable.
The supporters of the concept of purpose believe that, in surrendering
it, they are forced to surrender also all unity and order in the
world. Listen, for example, to Robert Hamerling (Atomistik des Willens,
vol. ii, p. 201): "As long as there are instincts in Nature, so long
is it foolish to deny purposes in Nature. Just as the structure of a
limb of the human body is not determined and conditioned by an idea
of this limb, floating somewhere in mid-air, but by its connection
with the more inclusive whole, the body, to which the limb belongs,
so the structure of every natural object, be it plant, animal, or man,
is not determined and conditioned by an idea of it floating in mid-air,
but by the formative principle of the more inclusive whole of Nature
which unfolds and organises itself in a purposive manner." And on
page 191 of the same volume we read: "Teleology maintains only that,
in spite of the thousand misfits and miseries of this natural life,
there is a high degree of adaptation to purpose and plan unmistakable
in the formations and developments of Nature--an adaptation, however,
which is realised only within the limits of natural laws, and which
does not tend to the production of some imaginary fairy-land, in which
life would not be confronted by death, growth by decay, with all the
more or less unpleasant, but quite unavoidable, intermediary stages
between them. When the critics of Teleology oppose a laboriously
collected rubbish-heap of partial or complete, imaginary or real,
maladaptations to a world full of wonders of purposive adaptation,
such as Nature exhibits in all her domains, then I consider this just
as amusing----"
What is here meant by purposive adaptation? Nothing but the consonance
of percepts within a whole. But, since all percepts are based upon
laws (ideas), which we discover by means of thinking, it follows that
the orderly coherence of the members of a perceptual whole is nothing
more than the ideal (logical) coherence of the members of the ideal
whole which is contained in this perceptual whole. To say that an
animal or a man is not determined by an idea floating in mid-air is a
misleading way of putting it, and the view which the critic attacks
loses its apparent absurdity as soon as the phrase is put right. An
animal certainly is not determined by an idea floating in mid-air,
but it is determined by an idea inborn in it and constituting the
law of its nature. It is just because the idea is not external to
the natural object, but is operative in it as its very essence, that
we cannot speak here of adaptation to purpose. Those who deny that
natural objects are determined from without (and it does not matter,
in this context, whether it be by an idea floating in mid-air or
existing in the mind of a creator of the world), are the very men who
ought to admit that such an object is not determined by purpose and
plan from without, but by cause and law from within. A machine is
produced in accordance with a purpose, if I establish a connection
between its parts which is not given in Nature. The purposive
character of the combinations which I effect consists just in this,
that I embody my idea of the working of the machine in the machine
itself. In this way the machine comes into existence as an object of
perception embodying a corresponding idea. Natural objects have a very
similar character. Whoever calls a thing purposive because its form
is in accordance with plan or law may, if he so please, call natural
objects also purposive, provided only that he does not confuse this
kind of purposiveness with that which belongs to a subjective human
action. In order to have a purpose, it is absolutely necessary that
the efficient cause should be a concept, more precisely a concept of
the effect. But in Nature we can nowhere point to concepts operating
as causes. A concept is never anything but the ideal nexus of cause
and effect. Causes occur in Nature only in the form of percepts.
Dualism may talk of cosmic and natural purposes. Wherever for our
perception there is a nexus of cause and effect according to law,
there the Dualist is free to assume that we have but the image of a
nexus in which the Absolute has realised its purposes. For Monism,
on the other hand, the rejection of an Absolute Reality implies also
the rejection of the assumption of purposes in World and Nature.