y. The doctrine of final causes, on the
contrary, will never be definitively refuted. If one form of it be put
aside, it will take another. Its principle, which is essentially
psychological, is very flexible. It is so extensible, and thereby so
comprehensive, that one accepts something of it as soon as one rejects
pure mechanism. The theory we shall put forward in this book will
therefore necessarily partake of finalism to a certain extent. For that
reason it is important to intimate exactly what we are going to take of
it, and what we mean to leave.

Let us say at once that to thin out the Leibnizian finalism by breaking
it into an infinite number of pieces seems to us a step in the wrong
direction. This is, however, the tendency of the doctrine of finality.
It fully realizes that if the universe as a whole is the carrying out of
a plan, this cannot be demonstrated empirically, and that even of the
organized world alone it is hardly easier to prove all harmonious: facts
would equally well testify to the contrary. Nature sets living beings at
discord with one another. She everywhere presents disorder alongside of
order, retrogression alongside of progress. But, though finality cannot
be affirmed either of the whole of matter or of the whole of life, might
it not yet be true, says the finalist, of each organism taken
separately? Is there not a wonderful division of labor, a marvellous
solidarity among the parts of an organism, perfect order in infinite
complexity? Does not each living being thus realize a plan immanent in
its substance?--This theory consists, at bottom, in breaking up the
original notion of finality into bits. It does not accept, indeed it
ridicules, the idea of an _external_ finality, according to which living
beings are ordered with regard to each other: to suppose the grass made
for the cow, the lamb for the wolf--that is all acknowledged to be
absurd. But there is, we are told, an _internal_ finality: each being is
made for itself, all its parts conspire for the greatest good of the
whole and are intelligently organized in view of that end. Such is the
notion of finality which has long been classic. Finalism has shrunk to
the point of never embracing more than one living being at a time. By
making itself smaller, it probably thought it would offer less surface
for blows.

The truth is, it lay open to them a great deal more. Radical as our own
theory may appear, finality is external or it is nothing