GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

$O ETBXGS AMD POLITICS: THE GREEKS
we shall maintain, man's fear of the unknown and the steps
which he takes to remove or to mitigate his fear arc, under
all the various guijo which they assume, the essential core
of the religious impulse in the contemporary world.
Similarly we shall deduce from the discovery that
civilized man has developed by traceable steps from the
savage, that at heart his nature is still that of the savage,
and that his civilization is only a veneer. As for man's
ideal aspirations which express themselves in the sacrifice
of the martyr, the endurance of the hero, the works of the
artist, or the ardours and vigils of the saint, these, we shall
insist, are only transformations of savage impulses or
sublimations of animal wants.
The Teleological Mode of Explanation. In contrast
to explanations in terms of origin ideological explana-
tions look not to what a thing has been, but to what it
is endeavouring to become, and interpret its nature in the
light of its goal rather than in that of its source. The
explanation of a thing in terms of its original nature, or
constituent parts, may serve well enough when the thing
in question is a piece of matter it is, the ideologist
would point out, distinctively the method of the physical
sciences to take a thing to pieces and see what it is made
of but it is inadequate when the subject of enquiry is a
living and developing organism, and grossly inappropriate
when the organism in question is a human being.
Geneticists, for example, have attempted to exhibit the
characteristics of a living organism as the automatic resultant
of the combinations of its inherited genet. Such an
explanation, although it may give us valuable information,
must, the ideologist insists, always be inadequate; and its
inadequacy
is due to the fact that there is more in the
fully devdoped man than in the genes from which his
nature took its rise. For would you, the tdeologist would
ask, if you were trying to describe human nature, be
justified in taking as your sample specimen an embryo,
a baby, or even an adolescent? Would you not rather