No one who, with an open mind, has followed the preceding argument,
will come to the conclusion that the author, in rejecting the
concept of purpose for extra-human facts, intended to side with those
thinkers who reject this concept in order to be able to regard, first,
everything outside human action and, next, human action itself, as
a purely natural process. Against such misunderstanding the author
should be protected by the fact that the process of thinking is in
this book represented as a purely spiritual process. The reason for
rejecting the concept of purpose even for the spiritual world, so
far as it lies outside human action, is that in this world there is
revealed something higher than a purpose, such as is realised in human
life. And when we characterise as erroneous the attempt to conceive
the destiny of the human race as purposive according to the pattern
of human purposiveness, we mean that the individual adopts purposes,
and that the result of the total activity of humanity is composed of
these individual purposes. This result is something higher than its
component parts, the purposes of individual men.