2 Professor Henderson argues that the order of nature is teleological, but he seeks to share Darwin's agnosticism when it comes to the admission of Mind or Purpose back of nature. Upon this subject, he says, “clear ideas and close reasoning are no longer possible, for thought has arrived at one of its natural frontiers” (p. 281). His positive thesis is (1) that the relation between the original elements and the freedom of evolution is not a chance relation; (2) that the connection between the two “is a causal connection”; (3) that the connection is only intelligible “as a preparation for the evolutionary process”; (4) that “we are ignorant of the existence of any cause except mind which can produce results that are fully intelligible only in their relation to later events “(p. 271); and (5) that the relation must be conceived as “teleological,” because “there is no other way to describe it” (p. 279). It seems to me that what Professor Henderson says as a scientific specialist may be used to serve the purposes of theistic argument without being discounted by what he says of the frontiers of knowledge.
I do not see that the argument against chance and in favor of teleology is broken by Professor R. B. Perry's criticism in his article, “Purpose as Systematic Unity,” in The Monist, July, 1917. Professor Perry compares life to a die with the same number on all the faces, while the environment is a die with a million of faces only one of which matches the first die. “That the two should match in any single instance is highly improbable; the chances are millions to one against it. But if it should happen that there was only one trial, its happening to be successful would prove nothing as to there being anything more than chance at work” (p. 373). But the teleological character of the inorganic world is seen not in the appearance of one element among millions of other possible elements, but in the simultaneous appearance, among other less favorable possibilities, of certain necessary elements, necessary compounds and necessary properties of compounds, all of maximum advantage for life. It is as though there were a million of dice thrown together and all at the first throw turned up sixes. It is this coincidence of factors indefinitely numerous and all coöperating to the maximum freedom of organic evolution that Henderson thinks is staggering to the advocates of chance.
