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By Root 549 0

learn to perform a difficult task. As we become expert and our activity habitual, our purpose appears to migrate from our minds to our muscles, which without conscious guidance repeat familiar operations. We might say, paradoxically, that we become less purposeful as we become more proficient. Moreover, all our consciously directed activities are supported by the autonomic functions of our bodies, including the pulsations of the heart, circulation of the blood, and metabolism, without which we can accomplish nothing. Our explicit purposes shade into implicit purposes in a manner that makes it difficult to separate them sharply; the distinction between them, although conceptually clear, is not profound.

Our conscious purposes are often directed toward ends that are optional, attainable by alternative routes, expertly or by trial and error. The vital physiological processes that support them require

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such precise and unremitting control that nature has not entrusted them to flickering consciousness, but the way they integrate with and support our conscious purposes points to a common origin, the purposiveness of life. Our strongest, most abiding purposes, our yearning for happiness, fulfillment, or a satisfying existence, appear not to be originated so much as discovered by us. Deliberation defines and directs strivings that rise from profound depths, the cosmic foundations of the living world. Only the more inconstant and trivial of our purposes appear to spring from a source no deeper than our conscious minds.

The constructive element we have been seeking in evolution, needed to complement mutation, recombination, and selection, appears to be of the nature of a final cause, an implicit purpose, the will of each creature to survive. It strives to make the best of its genetic endowment, however defective this may be, and to perfect itself according to its kind. The mutations it may have received were not designed to conform to its genetic constitution, but it adjusts them as best it can, like a mason fitting an oddly shaped tile into a mosaic. This will to grow and survive, however great the obstacles, is the only strong motive that we can detect in evolution. It is a phase of harmonization, the cosmic process that brings order into chaos, and in living organisms reveals itself most clearly as growth. This teleological movement is not directed toward specific ends, such as the production of a definite number of species of predetermined forms and attributes, but to the more inclusive end of increasing the organization of the cosmos and the values that arise from harmonious integration. The details are determined by the interplay of physical forces and the interactions of organisms.

A teleological impulsion might pervade the world without becoming explicit in the minds of animals. We often wonder how far they are aware of the ends of their activities. Does a bird, for example, build with a mental image, innate or learned, of the nest she is trying to complete? Is she conscious that she is making it for eggs and nestlings? I believe that she does and is, and that other highly organized animals are cognizant of the ends of at least the more elaborate of their activities; but I can offer no proof beyond

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inferences from their behavior. But neither can those who declaim against teleological interpretations of nature and animal behavior prove that I am wrong. Pending greater insight, we should keep our minds open while we hold, tentatively the more generous interpretation.

Much of the opposition to the teleological interpretation of nature, or at least certain of its aspects, appears to spring from the practice (approved by Webster's dictionary) of using "purpose" and "end" as synonyms, and of equating teleology with conscious purpose. We should pay attention to the sentence from Aristotle's Physics already quoted. I do not know how it may be in the original Greek, but I surmise that the translation would more accurately convey the philosopher's meaning if we wrote: "It is absurd