ABSTRACT
The contingencies and accidents continue to pile up. The author never means to go to Tory Island or to get mixed up in neonate cognition any more than the author meant to write a book on kinship or meet a man called Tiger at the London Zoo or run a research foundation. While it has no intrinsic goals—it is, like Hardy's "Immanent Will," essentially without purpose—it can, paradoxically, provide a firm telos for the individual searching for clues to the pattern of existence. For even if Life, like a life, is really a series of accidents, the accidents have causes and results, and these results are what people call organisms and species, and they can understand their causes and consequences without ever having to invoke purpose at all. This view was alarming to the Victorians, and provoked Tennyson and Arnold to their poetical philosophizing.
