ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes that recent developments of science have undermined the common objections of men of science to the full recognition of the purposive activity of man. Science rightly seeks causal explanation of all phenomena; and the category of causation is the indispensable foundation of all science that seeks to go beyond the merely descriptive stage. Psychology during the nineteenth century sought to build itself after the model of the physical sciences with their atomic theories and their exclusively mechanical causation. The historians, like the psychologists and the workers in the various social sciences, are finding that the mechanical theory of man does not work; that it has led them into a blind alley from which they must return in order to reach the road of progress. Interventional teleology, so dear to the theologians, is the one kind of teleology that is logically incompatible with the spirit of science.
