ABSTRACT
In the last two lectures we first sketched the geography of a total world which stretches from the dispersed, peripheral realm that we call the human cave, to a mystical pole of unity where the lifelines stretching from this region have a common point of intersection: we then sketched the special appearances of a high-latitude circle in this world, the circle we called that of the intelligible world or the noetic cosmos. Geography is for us, however, merely a preparation for ecology: the role of the world we have been constructing is to house the intelligent beings whose lot is cast in it, and to provide the background and points of encounter in which they may fulfil their destiny. Among those intelligent beings the most important for us is man, and we may therefore say that our whole cosmology, like the cosmos it sketches, is constructed for the sake of man. This teleology is not the absurd, ego-centred construction that it seems: we saw at the end of our first series of lectures that it was only in terms of some such teleology that the immense tensions and antinomies in the experienced world could conceivably be ironed out. It must be because they are all needed for the emergence of rational interpersonal life, and for the logical, aesthetic, practical, personal and other values that it embodies, that such surds are as they are. They are chasms which exist as necessary presuppositions of the rational bridges we build across them, and in building which we, as rational persons, in effect build ourselves as well.
