Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/100

Rh

Here, in seeing that Final Cause — causation at the call of self-posited aim or end — is the only full and genuine cause, we further see that Nature, the cosmic aggregate of phenomena and the cosmic bond of their law which in the mood of vague and inaccurate abstraction we call Force, is after all only an effect. More exactly, it is only a cause in the sense in which every effect in its turn becomes a cause. Still more exactly, it is the proximate or primary effect of the creating mind; within and under which prime effect, and subject to its control as a sovereign conception in the logic of creation, every other effect — every phenomenon and every generic group of phenomena — must take its rise, and have its course and its exit. Throughout Nature, as distinguished from idealising mind, there reigns, in fine, no causation but transmission. As every phenomenal cause is only a transmissive and therefore passive agent, so Nature itself, in its aggregate, is only a passive transmitter. But because of its origin in the Final Causation of intelligence, its whole must conform to the ideal that expresses the essential form of intelligent being, and all its parts must follow each other in a steadfast logical ascent toward that ideal as their goal. Thus Teleology, or the Reign of Final Cause, the reign of ideality, is not only an element in the notion Evolution, but is the very vital cord in the notion. The conception of evolution is founded at