This chapter introduces the most important terms of Hegel’s account of teleology, viz. ‘external purposiveness’ and ‘inner purposiveness’, which Hegel inherits from Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement. Kant claims that our inclination to judge nature as analogous to the products of human art, and therefore as having ends as our actions have ends, is not properly justified from an objective standpoint. Consequently, the concept of a ‘natural end’ seems irremediably problematic for him. For Hegel, in contrast, the concept of an ‘objective end’ is an entirely appropriate concept, and, indeed, the concept of a true purpose, which we can apply similarly to both nature and spirit. Hegel sees himself as recasting and reviving Kant’s undertaking with the notion of ‘inner purposiveness’.

Meredith’s novels abound in sentences, understood not just as the verbal form that contains a subject and a predicate, ending in a period, but as sententiae or maxims, which express a general truth or opinion in striking and memorable terms. A long-time feature of argument and rhetoric, sententiae are intimately associated with the development of oral and written prose, though their presence in Meredith’s work has led to the accusation that his novels are excessively poetic. This essay adopts a genealogical approach to Meredith’s style by tracing the development of his earliest sententiae to their recognizably mature form. With roots in the “wisdom” tradition in ancient prophecy and philosophy, Meredith’s sententiae reflect an ideal of cultivated speech historically associated with intelligent conversation and drama, which he then assimilated to narrative fiction. The singularity of the Meredithian sentence – a metaphorically dense and syntactically complex assertion that blends idiosyncratic expression with judgments of common sense – thus arises from synthetic hybridity, overlaying didacticism with description and intellection with image.

Kant’s thesis that there is in human nature an innate, universal, inextirpable, and radical propensity to evil belongs to his attempt to choose fragments of (Christian) revelation and see if they cannot be seen to lead back to the religion of pure reason. Though Kant regards this thesis as unproven, he offers it as an interpretation of the Christian doctrine of original sin that can be used in moral discipline, though not in moral dogmatics. To understand Kant’s concept of evil, we must understand his concept of freedom and disentangle it from incomprehensible metaphysical speculations with which it has often been associated in the literature. Kant’s concept of moral evil is extremely abstract, consisting in the choice of some nonmoral incentive over the moral incentive. Evil can never be made entirely intelligible because evil is action, hence done for reasons, but there can never be a sufficient or decisive reason for doing it because the moral incentive is rationally prior to all nonmoral incentives. But Kant thinks evil can be made intelligible to an extent by seeing it as part of nature’s purposiveness in developing human species predispositions in the social condition.