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Teleology The Realm of Matter: Book Second of Realms of Being. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; London: Constable and Co. Ltd., 1930, 118–35. Volume sixteen of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. In this selection, Chapter VII of The Realm of Matter, Santayana rejected teleology understood as an explanation of material nature based on the excellence or ideal end of a natural existence. But he did not deny natural correspondences such as the adaptation of an organ and its function, the fit of a creature and its environment, or the fulfillment of an impulse in its resulting action; and he was happy to regard these correspondences as teleology , albeit a teleology distinct from explanatory principles such as efficacious ends or final causes ( ES, 193). Final causes exist as wishes or ideas in human conduct, but they fail to account for the natural events in which they arise. Human art, as “an extension of natural teleology” ( ES, 194), exhibits correspondences between wishes or ideas and products of labor; but these wishes and ideas have a physical basis and are consequences, not causes of material changes. The effects of humans on material nature are the outcome of animal forces deeper than ideas. Final causes are impositions of human values on natural events. One attends to final causes not because of their material efficacy but rather because of their value to spirit. We have already seen that explanation by habit or law is a reduction of events to their rhythms or repetitions; we gain no insight into why or how a thing happens by saying that it has often happened before. Did we really wish to understand, we should inquire into the inner elements of such a mutation in any one of its instances: because a thing must happen each time by a concourse of motions there, and not because the same thing happens also in other places; although naturally it will happen again if the conditions which produced it here are repeated. Now a different form of mock explanation appears in what is called teleology, when the ground of things is sought in their excellence, in their harmony with their surroundings, or in the adaptation of organs to their functions and of actions to their intentions. Such correspondences exist: teleology, if it be only a name for them, is a patent and prevalent fact in nature. Indeed the adaptation of things to one another is involved in their co-existence: a thing can arise only by finding and taking its place where other things make room for it. Everything in the moving equilibrium of nature is necessarily cooperative . But the question becomes interesting (and unanswerable ) when we ask why, at any point, this so singular thing should have found such a singular set of conditions as to permit or compel it to exist there. A wider view, exploring antecedents and consequents, and discovering analogies, may enlarge the prospect, and, as happens in the books of naturalists, may so pleasLike explanation by law, explanation by purpose is verbal only. Nature a web of adaptations. 189 Teleology antly occupy the mind with pictures and stories, that we may stop asking for reasons. And to invoke adaptation itself, as if this were a cause of adaptation, would be to halt at a word, adding perhaps to it, as an element of power, the bated breath with which we pronounce it. Yet this human scale and these human emotions, which we impose so fatuously on the universe, bear witness, on the plane of thought, to the existence of organisms and of life on the plane of matter; for we should have no emotions and no scale to impose on other things if our own being were not definite, animate, and self-assertive. In human society teleology takes a special and conscious form: it becomes art. Not only do tropes—which here we call methods—everywhere dominate the scene, but very often the method is explicitly adopted or modified, and the action planned; foresight and intention occupy the first moment of it, and execution of that prevision occupies the second moment. Here the preformation of events and the pre-adaptation of instruments to their uses is a simple fact of history. Knowing how our passions and purposes watchfully realise their avowed ends, may we not reasonably assimilate obscure events to these deliberate actions, the causes of which seem clear to us and intimately confessed? As we do things when we wish, must...

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