Professor Huxley draws attention to the fact that Darwin's originality consists in showing how harmonies which had been regarded as implying the agency of intelligence and will, could be explained without any such intervention.[1]
However, such explanation is wholly inadequate concerning the conscious free purposes of man. For while man is a product of the evolutionary process he is also a determining factor—a factor of such consequence that it has made man the dominant species of the earth. The various forces of the universe operating for ages according to natural law and tendency, with no evidence of purposeful activity, nevertheless develop out of themselves an order of being whose essential nature it is to adapt means to ends, not only those most immediate, but also those most remote. The appearance of man in the evolutionary series is an indication that the later stages of an apparently continuous development may not be due to the same causes only as the earlier stages.
The making of a man may not have been the definite end of the evolutionary process, but man himself has made it the end. He has compelled the processes of nature to minister to his well-being and progress. If the world was not made for him, he has nevertheless appropriated the world to his own use and purpose.
By reason of this teleological endowment, man's development is a conspicuous illustration of orthogenetic evolution, of a straight-forth progress toward an end which is the realization in the most complete manner of the sum-total of his varied possibilities. This is something more than the ability to attain certain specific ends as they may become objects of desire from time to time in the course of the daily routine of life. For man possesses a capacity also of coordinating the various separate ends of his experience in some single aim which comprehends them all, and which exercises a unifying function over his activities and desires. Moreover, the ends of the individual are also coordinated with those of his fellows in such a manner as to constitute a society, ordered by the play of those human forces which tend to unify the various parts of the social organism. And in every such organism there is an exhibition on a large scale of an immanent finality.
- ↑ Huxley, "Criticism on the Origin of Species," Collected Essays, Vol. II, p. 102.
