Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/68

 54 J. ELLIS MCTAGGAET : self-conscious being as a means for carrying out some plan which he has conceived. In " outward design " the Means and the End can exist independently for the End can exist as a purpose in the mind of the agent, even if there are no possible Means to carry it out ; while the objects which are used as Means do not derive their entire existence from that use, but existed before the End was formed, and would still have existed if it had never been formed. It is clear that this is entirely different from the idea of Teleology at which the dialectic has now arrived, in which the End has no existence, and indeed no meaning at all, except in so far as it is manifested in the Means, while the Means are equally devoid of meaning and existence except in so far as they carry out the End. Hegel's Teleology corresponds, as he remarks himself, to Kant's idea of Inner Design ; the best example of which is the unity in multipli- city of an organic being. The use by Hegel of the words End and Means here seems to me very unfortunate. For, in ordinary language, the cardinal point in the significance of these terms is that the Means, as Means, exist only for the sake of the End, while the End exists for its own sake. The End has ulti- mate value, the Means only derivative value. Now there is nothing of this sort in the Hegelian use of the words. The whole point of the category is, as we have seen, that the plurality, which he calls the Means, is just as fundamental and important as the unity, which he calls the End. But the contrary is almost irresistibly suggested by the associa- tions of the words, and even Hegel himself seems sometimes to forget in what a different sense from the common one he is professing to use them. To his use of the word Teleology there seems much less objection. It is to be noted that, using the words in Hegel's sense, there can be no such thing as an unrealised End, or in- adequate Means. An End only exists at all in so far as it is the unity which unites the Means i.e., which is realised by them, and, conversely, the Means only exist in so far as they are unified by, and express, the End, and can there- fore offer no resistance to its realisation. At the same time we must notice that with this use of the words the conception of a realised End loses altogether that implication of value which it has when the words are used in their ordinary significance. In the latter case, the conception of a realised End involves value, because, in the first place, it has a distinct meaning. An End entertained is not necessarily realised, and the realisation brings in a