Page:Philosophical Review Volume 14.djvu/544

528 even conflict; that some ground is necessary for deciding or reconciling the diversity and conflict; and that, if we would get an adequate view, we must finally describe the purpose, as Plato described it, as the Good.

In this way, the search for an adequate and finally intelligible principle for the comprehension of reality might lead us from the non-ethical conceptions with which we started to a view which interprets reality by means of ethical conceptions. The inquiry for a general theory of reality would in this way run into the inquiry into the nature of goodness, and ethics would be found to be not merely based upon metaphysics, but itself a part of metaphysics.

The above is merely a sketch of an argument. But I do not see how it could be elaborated in such a way as to demonstrate that the conception of goodness is logically implied in the conception of causal connection. The result is not due to an inner dialectic of the notion unaided by any contribution from experience. Mechanism may be shown to be inconsistent with itself and unable to exhibit the systematic unity of things. But why do we seek that unity in the conception of purpose? It is not enough to answer that through it unity is found in the fragments of the temporal process. For some other conception might be able to give this unity; and we need some positive reason for selecting the conception purpose. The reason is not far to seek if we allow thought to receive suggestions from the 'given' factors in experience. Purpose is a conception descriptive of actual experience, though of aspects of experience which, from their individual character, are unimportant for physical science, and are therefore neglected by the mechanical theory. Apart from the experience of acting for an end, it is impossible to see how the conception of purpose could have arisen at all. If we should imagine an intelligence without any purposive activity of its own, and into whose experience the fact of purposive action in no way enters, it might be conceived as viewing the course of events under the conception of regular sequence or of causality, and as forming for itself some kind of mechanical theory. It might also see that this mode of describing things was only a deceptive makeshift for