"Final cause" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to us there is a strongly-marked distinction between a first cause and a final cause. And we should commonly identify a first cause with God, and the final cause with the world, which is His work. But Plato, though not a Pantheist, and very far from confounding God with the world, tends to identify the ...
— Philebus • Plato
... constitutes not merely a physical but a moral order. He would not deny that the Universe means something; that the series of events tends towards an end, an end which is also a good; that it has a purpose and a final cause. And yet this purpose exists in no mind whatever, and is due to no will whatever—except to the very small extent to which the processes of physical nature can be consciously directed to an end by the volitions ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... essential character, independently of all his works of creation and redemption. His "worthiness" of worship is inherent in himself, but outwardly manifested to intelligent creatures by the work of creation, of which he is the first Cause and the last End,—the efficient and final Cause. This doctrine, understood by the intellect and unbraced in the heart, would greatly tend to "hide pride from man." (Job xxxiii. 17.) Aside from the doctrine of the "cross," which is still counted "foolishness" by our modern self-styled "philosophers, psychologists and freethinkers;" there ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... the universe, and to rise by a continuous process from the monad to man. Now, I ask Mr. Darwin himself, what interest has he in maintaining that natural selection is not guided—not directed? What interest has he in substituting accidental causes for every final cause? I cannot see. Let him admit that in natural, as well as in artificial selection, there may be a choice and direction; his principle immediately becomes much more fruitful than it was before. His hypothesis, then, whilst having the advantage of exempting science from the necessity of introducing ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... person, and especially took great care of his hands by frequent ablutions. In his dress also he was as cleanly as the liberal use of snuff would permit, though the clothes-brush was often in requisition to remove the wasted snuff. "Snuff," he would facetiously say, "was the final cause of the nose, though troublesome and expensive in ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... admitted that the more immediate and final cause of the cuckoo's instinct is, that {217} she lays her eggs, not daily, but at intervals of two or three days; so that, if she were to make her own nest and sit on her own eggs, those first laid would have to be left for some time unincubated, or there would be eggs ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... is the sole and final cause of social life. Without psychic nature there could be no association. Personalized psychic nature is the sole and final cause of human social life. Numberless conditions determine by stimulation or imitation the manifestation of psychic life. These conditions differ ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... handsome sea-duck, of a species related to the eider ducks of arctic waters, became totally extinct about 1875, before the scientific world even knew that its existence was threatened. With this species, the exact and final cause of its extinction is to this day unknown. It is not at all probable, however, that its unfortunate blotting out from our bird fauna was due to natural causes, and when the truth becomes known, it is very probable that the hand of ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... himself, though the most malicious man in the world; and in this case compassion would stop him, if he could stop with safety, from pursuing his revenge any further. But since nature has placed within us more powerful restraints to prevent mischief, and since the final cause of compassion is much more to relieve misery, let us go on to the consideration of ...
— Human Nature - and Other Sermons • Joseph Butler
... sudden catastrophe which was perhaps the final cause of Mitya's ruin. For I am convinced, so is every one—all the lawyers said the same afterwards—that if the episode had not occurred, the prisoner would at least have been recommended to mercy. But of that later. A ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... life that a woman leads who cares only, works only for her husband and children; that a higher, more imperative thing is that she herself be developed to her utmost. Even so clear and strong a writer as Frances Cobbe, in her otherwise admirable essay on the "Final Cause of Woman," falls into this shallowness of words, and speaks of women who live solely for their ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... trying further to show that the God whom they worshipped arranged the whole of nature for their sole benefit: this idea was so pleasing to humanity that men go on to this day imagining miracles, so that they may believe themselves God's favourites, and the final cause for which God created ...
— A Theologico-Political Treatise [Part II] • Benedict de Spinoza
... potentially;" and that, to every man who has true insight, "the world feels, moves, speaks, and thinks."[132] The author of "The Purpose of Existence" makes it his grand object to show that "the evolvement of mind out of matter" is the primary law and final cause of the universe; that "this process commences with vegetation, extracting from matter the spirit of vitality;" that "this spirit is preserved amid the decay of vegetables, and transfused into animals, thus establishing the great working-principle of Nature, ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... generation not to be destined to perpetuate the species. This mechanism is very admirable, but the sensation which nature has joined to this mechanism is still more admirable. Epicurus had to avow that pleasure is divine; and that this pleasure is a final cause, by which are ceaselessly produced sentient beings who have not been able to ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... referred to some first active cause: so that a medicament implies a certain causality. But sanctity from which a sacrament is denominated, is not there taken as an efficient cause, but rather as a formal or a final cause. Therefore it does not follow that a sacrament need ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... philosophers of his age, he coquetted with those final causes which have been named barren virgins, but which might be more fitly termed the hetairae of philosophy, so constantly have they led men astray. The final cause of the existence of the world is, for Hutton, the production ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... said at last very earnestly. "I mean, I hope you hunt deep and find some ideas you forgot, or maybe never realized you had at the time. Let me put it to you differently. What's the place of ticklers in the natural scheme of things? What's their aim in life? Their special reason? Their genius? Their final cause? What ...
— The Creature from Cleveland Depths • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... WHOEVER considers the final cause of the world, will discern a multitude of uses that result. They all admit of being thrown into one of the following classes; Commodity; Beauty; ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... contrived for a purpose, he would be quite wrong. On the other hand, imagine another death-watch of a different turn of mind. He, listening to the monotonous "tick! tick!" so exactly like his own, might arrive at the conclusion that the clock was itself a monstrous sort of death-watch, and that its final cause and purpose was to tick. How easy to point to the clear relation of the whole mechanism to the pendulum, to the fact that the one thing the clock did always and without intermission was to tick, and that all the rest of its phenomena were intermittent and ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and standing with joined hands before him, said, 'If, O illustrious one, thou hast been gratified with the worship I have offered thee, it behoveth thee to solve a great doubt of mine. Whence am I and whence art thou? Tell me this fully. Tell me also what is the final cause. Why also, O best of regenerate ones, when the material cause in all beings is the same, their origin and destruction happen in such dissimilar ways? It beseems thee, O thou of great learning, also to explain the object of the declarations in the Vedas (about difference ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... precautions are taken on your part, and unless the measures I shall use have the effect I wish for in the next twenty-four hours. She is on the verge of a brain fever. Any allusion to the subject which has been the final cause of the state in which she now is must be most cautiously avoided, even to a chance word which may ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and this, Socrates, is the final cause of all our former toils)—a nature which in the first place is everlasting, not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning, in the next place not fair in one point of view and foul in another, or at one time or in one relation or at one place fair, at another time or in another relation ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... final cause!" said Oliver. "But, Seignior Le Balafre, you will be glad, doubtless, to learn that his Majesty is so far from being displeased with your nephew's conduct, that he hath selected him to execute a piece ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... text the first verse of Genesis, he paraphrased it: 'In the beginning, all things projected themselves from within outward, and evolved a Final Cause out of the depths of their individual consciousness.' As soon as he had got through his discourse and gratefully asked a blessing on all that we had 'learned and taught,' the sexton, who apparently entertained unusually high and comprehensive view of the duties of his calling, attended ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... mankind as far as he did those respecting the conceivable perfection of a model of government; and as in the one case he declared against all power which did not emanate from the people themselves, so, in his moral speculations, he was unwilling to refer any of the phenomena of nature to a final cause. When pushed, indeed, very hard, Bletson was compelled to mutter some inarticulate and unintelligible doctrines concerning an Animus Mundi, or Creative Power in the works of Nature, by which she originally ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... the proprietor's hobby. Under a system of equality, all economy which does not aim at subsequent reproduction or enjoyment is impossible—why? Because the thing saved, since it cannot be converted into capital, has no object, and is without a FINAL CAUSE. This will be explained more fully in ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... the formidable power of the Peishwa. Before long, Sumbhajee turned against them again, and they were left without a single ally to struggle as they could. Their intervention in Angrian quarrels was the final cause of the downfall of Portuguese power on the ...
— The Pirates of Malabar, and An Englishwoman in India Two Hundred Years Ago • John Biddulph
... his wife said in an early preface, I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour of the poet—as indeed he has himself said, to much the same effect, in a letter printed many years ago: I never pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at dominoes to ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater |
