Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/162

 related as means, and it may be maintained that what appears as an end may have been merely produced mechanically under external conditions.

It is here, in fact, that characterisation of a permanent sort begins. The end maintains itself in the process; it begins and ends, it is something permanent, something exempted from the process, and which has its basis in the subject. The contrasted points of view may, accordingly, be put thus. Are we to keep to the point of view from which things are regarded as determined by other things, i.e., by the element of contingency in them, by external necessity, or to that from which they are regarded as determined by the end? It has been already remarked that external necessity stands in contrast to the end, is something which is posited by, whose existence depends on, an “Other;” the concurrence of circumstances is the producing factor, something different is the result; the end, on the other hand, is what remains, what gives the impulse, what is active, what realises itself. The conceptions of external necessity and conformity to an end are mutually opposed.

We saw that external necessity returns back into the absolute necessity which is its Truth, that this is implicitly freedom, and that whatever is implicit must be posited. This characteristic appears as subjectivity and objectivity, and thus we get the idea of End. We must therefore say, that in so far as things exist for us in immediate consciousness, in reflected consciousness, they are to be characterised as in conformity to an end, as having an end in themselves. The teleological view of things is an essential one; but this way of regarding things is at once seen to have in it a distinction, that between inner and outer necessity, and the inner again can itself, in accordance with its content, be a finite conformity to an end, and thus it comes to be once more included within the relation of external conformity to an end.

1. External Conformity to an End.—Suppose an end has