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The Philosophical
Dictionary
Final Causes
All the pieces of the
machine of this world seem, however, made for each other. A few philosophers
affect to mock at the final causes rejected by Epicurus and Lucretius. It is,
it seems to me, at Epicurus and Lucretius rather that they should mock. They
tell you that the eye is not made for seeing, but that man has availed
himself of it for this purpose when he perceived that eyes could be so used.
According to them, the mouth is not made for speaking, for eating, the
stomach for digesting, the heart for receiving the
blood from the veins and for dispatching it through the arteries, the feet
for walking, the ears for hearing. These persons avow nevertheless that
tailors make them coats to clothe them, and masons houses to lodge them, and
they dare deny to nature, to the great Being, to the universal Intelligence,
what they accord to the least of their workmen. Of course one must not
make an abuse of final causes; we have remarked that in vain Mr. Prieur, in "The Spectacle of Nature," maintains
that the tides are given to the ocean so that vessels may enter port more
easily, and to stop the water of the sea from putrefying. In vain would he
say that legs are made to be booted, and the nose to wear spectacles. In order that one may
be certain of the true end for which a cause functions, it is essential that
that effect shall exist at all times and in all places. There were not ships
at all times and on all the seas; hence one cannot say that the ocean was
made for the ships. One feels how ridiculous it would be to maintain that
nature had worked from all time in order to adjust herself to the inventions
of our arbitrary arts, which appeared so late; but it is quite evident that
if noses were not made for spectacles, they were for smelling, and that there
have been noses ever since there have been men. Similarly, hands not having
been given on behalf of glove-makers, they are visibly destined for all the
purposes which the metacarpal bones and the phalanges and the circular muscle
of the wrist may procure for us. Cicero, who doubted
everything, did not, however, doubt final causes. It seems especially
difficult for the organs of generation not to be destined to perpetuate the
species. This mechanism is very admirable, but the sensation which nature has
joined to this mechanism is still more admirable. Epicurus had to avow that
pleasure is divine; and that this pleasure is a final cause, by which are
ceaselessly produced sentient beings who have not
been able to give themselves sensation. This Epicurus was a
great man for his time; he saw what Descartes denied, what Gassendi affirmed, what Newton demonstrated, that there
is no movement without space. He conceived the necessity of atoms to serve as
constituent parts of invariable species. Those are exceedingly philosophical
ideas. Nothing was especially more worthy of respect than the moral system of
the true Epicureans; it consisted in the removal to a distance of public
matters incompatible with wisdom, and in friendship, without which life is a
burden. But as regards the rest of Epicurus' physics, they do not appear any
more admissible than Descartes' channelled matter.
It is, it seems to me, to stop one's eyes and understanding to maintain that
there is no design in nature; and if there is design, there is an intelligent
cause, there exists a God. People present to us
as objections the irregularities of the globe, the volcanoes, the plains of
shifting sands, a few small mountains destroyed and others formed by
earthquakes, etc. But from the fact that the naves of the wheels of your
coach have caught fire, does it ensue that your coach was not made expressly
to carry you from one place to another? The chains of
mountains which crown the two hemispheres, and more than six hundred rivers
which flow right to the sea from the feet of these rocks; all the streams
which come down from these same reservoirs, and which swell the rivers, after
fertilizing the country; the thousands of fountains which start from the same
source, and which water animal and vegetable kind; all these things seem no
more the effect of a fortuitous cause and of a declension of atoms, than the
retina which receives the rays of light, the crystalline lens which refracts
them, the incus, the malleus, the stapes, the tympanic membrane of the ear,
which receives the sounds, the paths of the blood in our veins, the systole
and diastole of the heart, this pendulum of the machine which makes life.
Hanover
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