According to this argument, then, the living units of the animal
organism resemble in their action those of the social organism
sufficiently to warrant us in arguing from the one to the other, and in
concluding that there is purpose in the action of neither. But it is
obvious that, if the resemblance is great enough to justify us in
arguing from the animal to the social organism, it also opens the way
for the argument to travel the return journey, from the social organism
to the animal, and to reach the conclusion that there is purpose in
both. Let us therefore consider what each of these two opposite
conclusions requires us to believe.
On the one hand, before accepting the argument that there is no purpose
in the action of the social organism because there is none in that of
the animal, we must prove that there is none in that of the animal. But
that, as we have already urged, is exactly what has not been proved: the
utmost that science claims to prove is that the units of the animal
organism do behave in a certain way. That way is exactly the way in
which they would behave if they were designed to do so; and science
leaves it, so far, a perfectly open question whether they were or were
not so designed. The argument, therefore, that there is no purpose in
the action of the social organism, because none in the animal, breaks
down at the threshold. Yet it is on the unproved and unprovable
assertion that the appearance of purpose in the animal organism cannot
possibly be due to design, and must therefore be a delusion, that we
are expected to deny the evidence of our own experience and
consciousness and to believe that we, the units of the social organism,
have no purpose in the daily acts by which we extend trade or discharge
our social functions.
Thus the surmise that Nature mimics purpose, having none, is a
conjecture which, so far as it is applied to the pre-human stages of the
evolution process, simply plays upon our ignorance; and which, when
applied to that part of the evolution process which is carried on
through us, we know to be absurd. On the other hand, if there is such
similarity between the laws of the one part of the process and the laws
of the other part, it must be as allowable to argue from the part and
the laws which we do know to the part and the laws that we do not know,
as it is to explain the known by what is confessedly unknown. In other
words, if the evolution of the social organism is known to be due to
purpose, then it is a reasonable inference that animal evolution, which,
we are told, follows the same line and laws, is due also to purpose--and
if not to any purpose entertained by the cells of the animal organism,
then to that of a Will of which their action is the expression.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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