Such an illustration can be generalized. Our world is indubitably a world in time. That means much more than the fact that its events can be placed in accordance with a map or dated in accordance with a calendar. It means that they are events in genuine careers, each with its own particular character and its own possibility of a future, like the seeds in the garden. Things with histories have not only structures in space and are, accordingly, related geometrically to one another; they have not only chemical structures and are thus analyzable into component parts; they have also structures in time. They are not now what they will be, but what they will be is always continuous with what they are, so that we must think of them stretched out, so to speak, in time as well as in space, or as being so many moments as well as so much volume. What they become, however, depends not only on their own time structures, but also on their interplay with one another. They are helped and hindered in their development. The results reached at any time are such as complete those which have gone before, for each career is the producer, but not the product of its past. It seems clear, therefore, that there is purpose in history. But "purpose" is a troublesome word. It connotes design, intention, foresight, as well as the converging of means upon a specific end. Only in the latter sense is it here used, but with this addition: the end is to be conceived not in terms of any goal ultimately reached, but in terms of the career of which it is the termination; and in this career, the present is continually adding to and completing the past. The growing seeds end each in its own specific flower or fruit. They are each of its own kind and named accordingly. It is only because each of them has its specific structure in time that their growth presents that convergence of means toward an end by which we distinguish them and for which we value them. In purpose construed in this way there is evidently no need of design or intention or foresight. In making a garden there is such need. The purposes of nature may be deliberately employed to attain the purposes of men. But apart from beings who foresee and plan there appears to be no evidence of intention in the world. When we speak of nature's designs, we speak figuratively, and impute to her rational and deliberate powers. But we can not clearly affirm that the rain falls in order that the garden may be watered, or that the eye was framed in order that we might see. The evidence for design of that character has been proved inadequate again and again with every careful examination of it. To say, therefore, that nature is full of purpose does not mean that nature has been framed in accordance with some preconceived plan, but rather that nature is discovered to be an historical process, the conversion of the possible into the actual in such a way that there is conserved a progressive record of that conversion.