Page:White and Blue 1911-02-14 v014 n014.djvu/19

 of the traditional discussion." Conclusions similar to these are held quite generally among men carefully trained in the criticism of world views.

Now the most profound evidence for the purposive character of the process of evolution in general, and of the evolution of organic forms in particular cannot be considered in a brief paper like this. But there is a class of evidence for the purposive character of the evolution of organic forms which can be grasped by any body, since it is inductive and makes an appeal to familiar facts, which I merely wish to illustrate here. For this purpose I select a rough anology between human purposive activity and the process by which organic forms seem to have come into existence.

Any human purpose changes and grows only as it itself is modified. New purposes are never formed except on the basis of old ones, and the old purpose always survives and manifests itself as a potent factor or element in the new purpose. Thus there is telescoped into any purpose now manifesting itself a long system of the purposes that have in the history of the individual and the race been used in making it possible. That is, I could not have the purpose in the form in which I now have it which is expressed when I utter the word LOVE, if our Anglo-Saxon ancestors had not uttered themselves through the word LUFE or if similar activity had not in Sanscrit been previously uttered through the word LUBH. The earnest form survives in the present one, and it would not be possible to utter the word love without at the same time incorporating in some way the old forms, thus epitomising the history of the word. We could not now say BENEFIT if the old English had not used BENEFET, the earlier French, BIENFAIT, and the still earlier Romans, the adverb BENE and the verb form FACTUM, and we cannot now utter the word without involving those old forms used in the Latin language.

Now in regard to any purpose whatever from the grossest to the most ethereal, it never exists save as it involves sensation elements through which its character is able to be comprehended by others, and yet it can never be grasped by others save in terms of these sensations awakened within them. All purposes are invisible, inaudible, intangible, and none of them can be comprehended in terms of sensations alone. The purposes expressed by one are accompanied by sensations of sound in another, but his purpose becomes known to the other only as it assumes a form that is judged to adequately express the purpose of the other as is shown by how the two get along with each other. If the word CHURCH means a building to one and a body of men and women to the other, confusion at once appears and often irritation on the part of both. When this confusion disappears we have the only guarantee there is that the one knows the purpose of the other. Purpose, the only form of causation we know or can conceive of, is thus forever and utterly invisible, intangible, and incapable in any way of being summed up in terms of sensation.

This well established truth that purpose, the only kind of causation we know or can conceive of, is incapable of being seen, should be held steadily in mind by all those who are trying to comprehend the creative power or powers in nature, of whose purposes nature is what man has been able to construct as the phenomenal sign. The world of power is itself unseen but is presupposed in the visible or sensed world as is the world of power and purpose in a foreign tongue presupposed by those who first hear it as a mass of unintelligible sounds, but who later find in it only expression of meaning.

What can be sensed when we study the human purpose being expressed when the word LOVE or the word BENEFIT is being uttered, contains signs as we have shown above of all the purposes which have been involved in a long process of development. The present purpose telescopes a long system of purposes which have been used in the development and are now present in the completed purpose; and the present word, or heard or seen sign of the purpose also contains elements that have been involved in former expressions of the purpose.

In trying to comprehend, therefore, the power at work in nature, or of whose purposes nature is the phenomenal sign to us, we must not expect to see it. It is not to be seen, and, since its activities are not to be reproduced by us as we commonly reproduce and thus come to know the purposes of a friend with whom we are talking, its presence in nature is not subject to the test of mutual understanding. Thus all we need to know or ordinarily know of the purpose present in the extra human world is to be learned very indirectly not by sight, not by hearing and communication, but by examining the sensations we have and the way of their appearance to see if there are any signs in them of purpose. We are limited, that is, if there is any purpose in the extra-human world, to the discovery of analogies between the ways of the extra-human world and human ways. Now there are analogies many and profound between the two realms of activity, the human and the extra-human. Of these analogies we are in this paper to consider but the one existing between our ways of acting and the ways of the power back of organic forms. See Royce, The World and the Individual, Vol. II, ch. V, for an extended discussion.

The present purpose existing when the word LOVE is being uttered is the outcome of an historic development, and its phenomenal sign the sound or the seen word is a parallel development. Various stages in the course of its development we see when we study the philology of the word in LUFE, LUBH, etc., and we also find in the present sound or seen word, signs traces, or remnants, many of which persist a though seemingly not needed or functional at the present time, as where traces of the old Latin words BENE and FACERE, words no longer used, are discovered in our word benefit, or as when we find in our word LOVE a silent e, a vestigal structure that would not exist save that it was needed in the course of an historic development and is needed now. Likewise the o must still be used though if the word were not a development accompanying an evolving purpose and we could invent a seen word today we should perhaps use a u instead of an o and omit the silent e.

The organic forms of the present are analogous to the present word forms that we see, in that stages in their development can be traced in the sluffed-off forms seen in the fossil remains embedded in successive layers of the earth's crust, just as similar stages in the development of words are found in a study of ancient languages deposited and preserved on the written page. Similarly, just as the utterance of any word at the present time involves the telescoping, as it were, of a long line of developing activities and epitomises the historic development of the word, so the study of the formation of any and every organic form of the present time, as the study of embryology shows, epitomises, as is often said, the entire history of the development of organic forms.

The inference from the analogy is, that since intelligent purpose is needed to account for the forms we now see in language and every human product, so intelligent purpose is