FINAL CAUSES. CHAPTER I. HISTORICAL REVIEW-INTRODUCTORY. THE hypothesis which represents Intelligence as the principle by which the original chaos was transformed into a world of order, is traceable to Anaxagoras of Clazomena, who was born about five hundred years before the Christian era. The special function which that philosopher invited Intelligence, or "Nous," to discharge, was to originate and maintain the most perfect form of motion, the rotatory. The remaining phenomena of the universe are the consequence of this primitive circulation of the inert mass of cosmical particles, aided by their own inherent qualities. Nous did not directly produce the phenomena, but determined their production by the origination of motion. The fundamental attributes of the Anaxagorean Mind are the power of causing motion and a kind of omniscience. But though "endued with universal cognisance," Nous or Mind is not immaterial or personal.1 According 1 So both Zeller and Grote. Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. i. p. 807, 3. Heft; and Grote's Plato, vol. i. p. 58. Α to Aristotle, Anaxagoras employed Mind as a machine for the establishment of the orderly system of the world, availing himself of the hypothesis only when every known interpretative expedient had failed, and in all other instances preferring any plausible explanation of a difficulty to resorting for a solution to the principle which he had previously invoked.1 For this philosophical inconsistency he incurs the censure of Plato and Aristotle. He had, they allege, undertaken to explain the arrangements of the world by a reference to the beneficent purposes of this primary agency; but instead of showing that every existing combination was fitted to promote some useful or admirable end, he explained the various dispositions of matter by analogies of a purely physical character. This desertion of the principle which Anaxagoras himself had asserted was a disappointment to the Platonic Socrates.2 Plato, following his great master, did not hesitate to correct the error of their predecessor. There is in the universe, says the Socrates of the Philebus, no insignificant Cause which orders and arranges years and seasons and months, and may be very justly named Wisdom and Mind. In the Memorabilia of Xenophon the doctrine of Final Causes is enforced with impressive eloquence and much interesting detail by Socrates, who pronounces the structure of the human body and the organisation of the human mind, no less than the visible external universe in which man appears as 1 Aristotle's Metaphysics, Book i. chap. iv. a god, the workmanship of a Supreme Intelligence, of the deities, in fact, or of a divine and beneficent Providence.1 Aristotle's view was by no means identical with that of Plato or Socrates. He was indeed of opinion that nature had tendencies and ends, and noted them in the swallow, in the spider, and the plant. With Aristotle, indeed, design pervaded nature, but the design which he detected was a design without a Designer; a principle of adaptation, a result produced neither by an extra-mundane nor an immanent Intelligence, but by a kind of self-accommodation and general adjustment of organic forces or external circumstances.2 Nearly three centuries after the death of Aristotle, a noble poet and daring thinker explicitly rejected the doctrine of Final Causes. The waste of space on our planet, the uninhabitable mountain ranges, the unsociable ocean, the tracts of marsh, rock, or forest, the zone of fire and the zone of ice, are instanced by Lucretius as unanswerable objections to the hypothesis of an Intelligent Designer.3 His eloquent and reflective countryman Cicero was of a very different opinion. He saw in the order and revolution of the planets a natural concurrence for the security of the world; he beheld in the sphericity of the earth, the levity of the air, the Philebus, Bekker, vol. iii. p. 172. 1 2 See Sir Alexander Grant's Ethics of Aristotle, Essay v. 224-226. He refers to Nat. An., ii. viii. 15, and De Cœlo, x. 13. 3 De Rerum Natura, Lib. v. 202-222. inexhaustibility of the sea, the unquestionable marks of judgment and reason; he appealed to the anatomical structure and the physiological processes of the human body for assured indications of the skill and diligence of nature and the care and ingenuity of Providence ; and maintained that the operations of the human mind were dependent on the Divine Power that presides over physical nature.1 The same argument, in its later and nobler form, is re-echoed by Philo Judæus, the contemporary of Josephus.2 The Platonising Hebrew declares that the Father and Ruler of the universe is a being whose character it is difficult to conjecture and hard to comprehend, but that as an idea of the statuary or painter may be formed from a statue or picture, so a notion of the Father, Creator, and Governor of the system. we call the world may be derived from the contemplation of that system; for there is no artificial work which exists of its own accord, and the world, with the animals and plants which it contains, with the steady flow of the sea, the admirable temperature of the air, the revolutions of the sun, the moon, and all the planets and fixed stars, is the most artificial, the most skilfully made of all works, and therefore testifies to the existence of an artist most accomplished, most perfect in knowledge. Of the early Christian writers who accepted and 1 De Natura Deorum, Lib. ii. 2 A Treatise on Monarchy, Book i. Works of Philo Judæus, translated from the Greek by C. D. Yonge, B.A., vol. iii. pp. 182-183. enforced the teleological hypothesis, we shall refer only to St. Paul and Minucius Felix. The everlasting power and divinity, the invisible things of God, declares the Apostle, are perceived through the things that are made, and the rains from heaven and the fruitful seasons are the witnesses of the living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea.1 What, asks Minucius Felix in his Octavius, is so clear and undeniable, when you lift up your eyes to heaven, and when you look down on all about you, as that there is a Deity of most excellent understanding, that inspires, moves, supports, and governs all nature? Scotus Erigena and Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages, Melancthon and Calvin at the Reformation, and more recently Reimarus in Germany, Voltaire in France, and Tucker and Paley, with many others, in England, have reiterated and expanded the argument from Design; and countless theologians, in every country and of every party, have employed their talents in enriching it with striking illustrations, where they have not succeeded in recommending it by their philosophy or their logic. In the speculative and scientific domain, the validity of the argument from Final Causes has been by turns asserted or denied. The phrase Final Cause was first introduced, though without theological prepossession, by Aristotle. Dugald Stewart is perhaps right in supposing that the strictures of Lord Bacon had a particular application to those illegitimate representatives 1 Rom. i. 20, and Acts xiv. 15-17. |