The Journal of speculative philosophy: Ed. by Wm. T. Harris. microform

[Thesis Supported Before the Faculty of Letters, in Paris].

BY J. LACHELIER.

Translated from the French by SARAH A. DORSEY.

VI.

Before seeking to demonstrate the law of final causes, as we hope we have demonstrated that of efficient causes, it will not be useless to recall the reason which determined us to regard this law as one of the elements of the principle of induction; this reason borrows otherwise a new power from the preceding conclusions. We know now that simple phenomena which form the tissue of all the others are nothing more than movements; we know that the mechanical laws are the only ones which are primitive and immediate, and that other laws of nature express only a mediate connection derived from certain combinations of movements. Now, in order that this connection may be considered as constant, it evidently does not suffice that the movement should continue to obey the same laws; for the role of these laws limits them to subordinate each movement to a precedent, and does not

extend so far as to co-ordinate between them a series of movements. It is true that if we knew at a given moment the direction and swiftness of all the movements which are going on in the universe, we might be able to deduce vigorously from them all the combinations which ought to result from them; but induction consists precisely in the reverse of this problem, in supposing, on the contrary, that the whole of these directions and of this swiftness ought to be such as will be reproduced at a named point of these combinations. But, to say that a complex phenomenon contains the reason of simple phenomena which concur to produce it, is to say that it is the final cause of it. The law of final causes is then an element, and even the characteristic element of the principle of induction.

To render this verity more sensible, let us ask what basis we can make for the actual order of nature, if we have only, to guarantee us the maintenance of it, the law of efficient causes, or, what amounts to the same, universal mechanism. We have, to begin with, no reason to believe in the permanence of living species, because we have no idea of the imperceptible movements by which each original being is organized and developed; we might suppose, indifferently, either that each generation would give birth to a new species, or that it would produce only monsters, or that life would disappear entirely from off the earth. But the conservation of brute matter (corps brut) does not appear to us more certain than that of organized beings: because we admit generally that these bodies, without even excepting those which chemistry regards provisionally as simple, are composed of still smaller bodies: and there is no reason for considering more than the general laws of movement in order that these small bodies should continue to group themselves in the same order rather than to form new combinations, or even rather than not to form any. In short, the existence of these small bodies would be as precarious in our eyes as that of the great ones; for they, doubtless, also have parts, since they have extension, and the cohesion of these parts can only be explained by a concourse of movements which push them incessantly, one towards the other. They are only, then, in their turn systems of movements, and mechanical laws are in themselves indifferent whether to create or to destroy them. The world of Epicurus, before the encounter of atoms, offers us only a feeble idea of the degree of dissolution to which the universe, in virtue of its own mechanism, might be re

duced from moment to moment; we may represent to ourselves cubes or spheres falling in the void, but we cannot represent to ourselves even this sort of infinitesimal powder or dust without figure, color, without appreciable property by any sensation whatever. Such a hypothesis seems monstrous to us, and we are persuaded that even when such a particular law fails, there will subsist always a certain harmony of the universe; but whence shall we know this if we do not admit a priori that this harmony is, in some sort, the supreme interest in nature, and that the causes of which it seems the result necessarily are only means wisely concerted to establish it.?

The law of final causes is, then, as well as that of efficient causes, an indispensable element of the principle of induction; but there is between these laws a double difference, which it is not useless to notice. We may remark primarily that the diverse judgments by which we apply them to phenomena are hypothetical for the first, and categorical for the second: that is to say, that the first determines each phenomenon only through relation to a precedent of which it supposes the existence, while the second posits absolutely and without condition each of the real or presumed ends of nature. In way of compensation, the law of efficient causes is of a necessary and vigorous application, which does not admit of degrees; since as soon as all the conditions of a phenomenon are united, we cannot admit without absurdity that this phenomenon would not reproduce itself, or would reproduce itself otherwise than the mechanical law would exact of it. The law of final causes is, on the contrary, a flexible and contingent law in each one of its applications. It exacts absolutely a certain harmony in the whole of phenomena, but it does not guarantee to us either that this harmony will be always composed of the same elements, nor even that it will never be troubled by any disorder. We believe, as Kant has said, that there will be always in the world a hierarchy of genera and of species, which we may be able to seize; but it is impossible for us to decide if the product of a given generation will not be a monster, or if the species which exist to-day may not give birth, by an insensible transformation, to species entirely different. Nature is at once a single science, which does not weary itself in deducing effects from causes, and an art which essays without ceasing, new inventions; and if it is given to us sometimes to follow by our calculation, the uniform march of the science which works at the bottom of

things, induction, properly so-called, consists rather in divining, by a sort of instinct, the variable processes of the art which plays upon the surface of things.

It remains to demonstrate the law of final causes, that is to say. to show that this law results, as that of efficient causes, from the relation of phenomena to the thought; but this genus of demonstration, which has appeared to us the only valuable one, seems to us interdicted by the very use we have made of it just now. We have in fact established that the possibility of thought rested upon the unity of the object, and that this unity consisted in the mechanical connection of causes and effects. Have we not declared by that even that all other connection, and among others that of means with ends, was foreign to the essence of thought and indifferent to its existence? We have added that the objective existence of phenomena themselves was founded upon their necessary connection. Can we search in this same existence a new basis, and will the phenomena be more true and more objective because of this unity of the series, which makes each movement born of a precedent, when there is added to it the unity of system which makes many movements converge towards one common end? Is it not, on the contrary, evident that this second unity is entirely supererogatory, and that the thought, instead of introducing it itself into things, is reduced to wait upon it as upon a happy accident and a sort of favorite of nature?

We are tempted here to make a detour and to call upon sensibility to resolve the question upon which the understanding seems forced to recognize its incompetence. A world in which motion, without ceasing to obey its own laws, would not form any composition, or would form only discordant compounds which would destroy themselves, would be, perhaps, less conformed than ours is to the exigencies of thought; but it would be far from answering to that of our sensibility, since it would leave it in the first case absolutely empty, and would cause it, in the second, only painful modifications. We may then demand why, since our faculty of knowing meets with objects exactly proportioned to it, our faculty of feeling does not exert itself, or exerts itself only in a manner contrary to its nature. We may still further demand what good we serve in such a world, and why things whose existence wounds us, or is indifferent to us, have taken for us the place of absolute nothingness. Nevertheless, how

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