To continue this brief survey of some recent exponents of those final causes which, if they are dead, certainly wont He down, here is a quotation from Professor Agar’s Contribution to the Theory of the Living Organism (2nd edition, 1951). After discussion of the significance of organs of perception and their function he says : ‘The anticipatory aspect of perception compels us to recognize the reality of final causation in all perceiving organisms. Anticipation implies the power of directing action in accordance with that anticipation; otherwise it would have no function. The function of the capacity of anticipating future occurrences is to influence present action in relation to that anticipation. Causation in this sense is teleological or final causation. It is directed towards bringing about a situation which is not yet existent.’ Once again the argument seems to depend on a prior assumption that living organisms are in some way essentially different from non-living, and such an assumption is unwelcome to those of us who have a natural sympathy with monist rather than with dualist interpretations of the things of nature.

Dr L. E. R. Picken, the Cambridge zoologist, writing in 1955 of the significance of final causes in the development of biological structures, says: ‘Claude Bernard expressed the opinion that science is not concerned with first causes (origins); he might well have added that scientists are also scared to death of final causes (ends). But it is clear that the biologist at least cannot be indifferent to final causes—to ends—any more than was Aristotle himself, whose entire analysis of types of causation is coloured by his biological studies.’