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FINAL CAUSES IN THE AGE OF REASON RoBERT McRAE THE story has often enough been told of how the seventeenth-century founders of modern science repudiated the use of final causes, of pur~ poses, ends or aims, in the explanation of physical phenomena. The scientist's concern was With how nature worked, to seek out those "inexorable and immutable laws," as Galilee called them, which govern natures operations. The reasons why) or the purposes of nature, were no longer any part of the scientist's business. Nature cares nothing, says Galilee, "whether her abstruse reasons ... be or be not exposed to the capacity of men."1 Descartes is no less clear on the point. He lays it down that "we shall not seek for the reason of natural things from the end which God or nature has set before him in their creation; for we should not take so much upon ourselves as to believe that God could take us into his counsels."2 Galilee and Descartes are agreed that nature's purposes are inscrutable. Bacon .adds another reason for excluding them from inquiry, namely, that final causes are useless for the production of works, which for him is the true aim of natural science. "The inquisition of final causes," he tells us, "is sterile, and like a virgin consecrated to God, produces nothing."3 I~ his book entitled The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, Professor Burtt puts two lengthy quotations beside one another. One is taken from Dante's Divine Comedy and the other from Lord Russell 's A FTee Man's Worship. This unusual apposition of authors is intended to reveal the contrast between the teleologically ordered universe of the philosophers of the Middle Ages and the mechanical universe of the new science from which all purposes have been excluded. "Amid such a world/' says Lord Russell of the latter, "if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms ... that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins-all these things, if not -quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built. . . . " 4 1 Letter to the Grand Duchess Christine; quoted in J. H. Randall, The Making of the Modern Mind (Boston, 1940), 239. 2Principles of Philosophy, I, xxviii. . oQuoted by F. H. Anderson, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Chicago, 1948), 158. 4E. A. Burtt, The - Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (New York, 1927), 9. 247 248 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY I Whether or not this is the eventual outcome of the materialism and repudiation of final causes of the new science of ·the seventeenth century, Lord Russell's picture is most certainly not one which would have been acceptable to the founders of that science. It was not until the second half of the eighteenth century, in the fashionable salons of Paris, among the friends of Baron Halbach, that such an account might have received a sympathetic hearing. Even then, these cheerful salon atheists would have found Lord Russell's "unyielding despair" rather more heroic than our circumstances demand. The truth is that, apart from Spinoza, there was not a single philosopher or scientist of any importance who denied the existence of final causes in the world. It is true that final causes had been banished from the science of physics, but they had not been banished from the cosmology and natural theology which some philosophers at least did not hesitate to construct on the basis of that physics. The enthusiasm whic~ accompanied the revival of the corpuscular philosophy of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius stopped precisely at the point where these ancient philosophers had denied purpose or design in nature and had attributed everything to chance. It was at this...

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