Final Causes in the Age of Reason

Abstract

The story has often enough been told of how the seventeenth-century founders of modern science repudiated the use of final causes, of purposes, ends or aims, in the explanation of physical phenomena. The scientist's concern was with how nature worked, to seek out those "inexorable and immutable laws," as Galileo called them, which govern natures operations. The reasons why, or the purposes of nature, were no longer any part of the scientist's business. Nature cares nothing, says Galileo, "whether her abstruse reasons ... be or be not exposed to the capacity of men." Descartes is no less clear on the point. He lays it down that "we shall not seek for the reason of natural things from the end which God or nature has set before him in their creation; for we should not take so much upon ourselves as to believe that God could take us into his counsels." Galileo and Descartes are agreed that nature's purposes are inscrutable. Bacon adds another reason for excluding them from inquiry, namely, that final causes are useless for the production of works, which for him is the true aim of natural science. "The inquisition of final causes," he tells us, "is sterile, and like a virgin consecrated to God, produces nothing."