"Teleological" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and practical piety of Socrates reinforcing itself with a very full and complete statement of a teleological argument, based upon final cause, or adaptation of means to ends. It is in the Memorabilia[6] that we get the clear statement of this, and, therefore, it is a Socratic teaching which can, fortunately, be definitely distinguished from the Platonic treatment of ...
— The Basis of Early Christian Theism • Lawrence Thomas Cole
... edition the author bemoans the "horrible plaudits" that "have accompanied every effort to establish man's brutal descent"); also The Church Journal, New York, May 28, 1874. For the effort in favour of a teleological evolution, see Rev. Samuel Houghton, F. R. S., Principles of Animal Mechanics, London, 1873, preface and p. 156 and elsewhere. For the details of the persecutions of Drs. Winchell and Woodrow, and of the Beyrout professors, with authorities cited, see my chapter on The Fall of Man and ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... ground for himself and his antagonists. In one essential respect, however, he goes beyond Hume. The course of nature is for him an unmeaning expression unless it be referred to some author; and he therefore makes extensive use of the teleological method. This position is assumed throughout the treatise, and as against the deists with justice, for their whole argument rested upon the presupposition of the existence of God, the perfect ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... formal considerations adduced in the last chapter supply the conditions for constructing what may be termed a metaphysical teleology. I use these terms advisedly, because I think they will serve to bring out with great clearness the condition to which our analysis of the teleological argument has now ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... reality an easy corollary on his system, though one which he does not appear to have caught sight of. I saw also that his denial of design was only, so to speak, skin deep, and that his system was in reality teleological, inasmuch as, to use Isidore Geoffroy's words, it makes the organism design itself. In making variations depend on changed actions, and these, again, on changed views of life, efforts, and designs, in consequence of changed conditions of life, he in ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... believe that we live in a world of chance, any more than Darwin could, yet I feel that I am as free from any teleological taint as he was. The world-old notion of a creator and director, sitting apart from the universe and shaping and controlling all its affairs, a magnified king or emperor, finds no lodgment in my mind. ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... origin of religion is not that of an 'innate idea,' nor of a direct revelation. People, he says, reached the belief in a God from the Argument for Design. Science conceives herself to have annihilated teleological ideas. But they are among the probable origins of religion, and would lead to the belief in a Creator, whom the Greenlander thought beneficent, and after whom he yearned. This is a very different initial step in ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... of teleological judgment, as stated by Kant in his third Critique. Teleology is the union of theoretic with practical philosophy. But the system would not be complete, unless we could show the identity of the two worlds, theoretic and practical, ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... Century; and it is opposed to all the Jacobin innovations and utopias. It does not believe in the possibility of "happiness" on earth as conceived by the literature of the economists of the Seventeenth Century; it therefore spurns all the teleological conceptions of final causes through which, at a given period of history, a final systematisation of the human race would take place. Such theories only mean placing oneself outside real history and life, which is a continual ebb and flow and ...
— Readings on Fascism and National Socialism • Various
... characteristic distinguishing aesthetic expressions from other expressions is their superior unity. In the latter, the unity lies in the purpose to be attained or in the content of the thought expressed; it is teleological or logical. The unity of a chair is its purpose, which demands just such parts and in just such a mechanical arrangement; the unity of a business conversation is governed by the bargain to be closed, requiring such words and such only, and in the appropriate ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... required for satisfying men's wants; in the increasing security of person and property; in widening freedom of action: whereas, rightly understood, social progress consists in those changes of structure in the social organism which have entailed these consequences. The current conception is a teleological one. The phenomena are contemplated solely as bearing on human happiness. Only those changes are held to constitute progress which directly or indirectly tend to heighten human happiness. And they are thought to constitute progress simply because ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer |
