Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/543

527 event. If we carry out this mode of conceiving things, we find ourselves speedily involved in the familiar infinite regress; and, as this cannot be completed, it cannot be made finally intelligible. Further, if we think we explain an event by referring it to its cause, or understand it by knowing its cause, we can see that such understanding or explanation is really quite empty and futile. If a is understood by understanding its cause b, then b must be understood in the same way by understanding its cause c, and that again by d, and so on. Accordingly, a is not understood till we understand b, nor b till we understand c, and this process must either go on indefinitely or return into itself. In the former case, we get no understanding of a at all; in the latter case, not only have we got away from causality with its determined succession in time, but we do nothing more than give the unknown as the ground of knowledge of the unknown.

The causal concept thus shows its own inadequacy to serve as a final view of reality as soon as we apply it thoroughly. It may be said also that it lays bare the reason of this inadequacy. It is the distinction of reality into separate facts coupled with the method of looking for the ground of one fact in another. The conception lacks system and unity. This defect has to be made good. And it can be made good only by a conception which exhibits the unity of the different facts which form parts of the process of experience or of reality. This cannot be done, as we have seen, simply by regarding each as proceeding out of another; we must find a whole to the realization of which they all contribute, and through which the nature and position of each part can be understood. In this way, we are led from the conception of cause to the conception of purpose as giving the point of view from which we may understand reality at once as a process and as a unity. Our mechanical conception is supplanted by a teleological. A further stage of reflexion may subject the conception of purpose also to criticism. Until purpose is qualified and defined, it may appear a mere form for asserting the unity of successive steps in a process, without in any way describing the essential character of this unity. And when we attempt to qualify purpose, we may find that purposes differ and