Excerpt from The Mechanistic Principle and the Non-Mechanical: An Inquiry Into Fundamentals With Extracts From Representatives of Either Side
Two world-conceptions stand in a strongly marked contrast to each other. One is the mechanistic, the other the teleological, and the struggle between the two is quite severe. It appears that in the combat no quarter is nor can be given. The former conception is held mostly by scientists, by men of thought who are accustomed to rigid method, by believers in theory; the latter by men of action, by jurists, preachers, moralists, reformers, poets, and all those who deal with the human will in practical life, among them also by sentimentalists, by all those to whom hopes and wishes are arguments.
The facts of our experience seem to favor both views in two different realms; the world of inanimate nature is a world of rigid causation where the laws of mechanics rule supreme, Init the world of human action seems to make an exception. In the domain of social relations, the will seems to interfere with the mechanical processes of things and a new kind of causation is introduced, the causation of purpose. All mechanicalism means rigid necessity while the causation of purpose is directed by design and provident forethought.
All life pursues a purpose; even the smallest ameba wants to live. Its aim is self-preservation, and this tendency to self-preservation characterizes all life.
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