CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 365
effect must have a cause which resembles it in the particular respect which claims the inquirer's attention.
Among other consequences of this view it follows that, since the details as well as the whole of the material universe are construed to show adaptation to a preconceived end, this " natural order " of things must be the outcome of preexisting design residing in the " first cause," which is postulated by virtue of this imputed design and is designated the " Great Artificer."
There is an element of conation in this original modern postulate of cause and effect. The shadow of the artificer, with his intelligence and manual skill, is forever in the background of the concepts of natural law. The " cause " dealt with in a given case is not thought of as an effect ; and the effect is treated as a finality, not as a phase of a complex sequence of causation.
When such a sequence is under inquiry, as in the earlier, pre-Darwinian theories of evolution, it is not handled as a cumulative sequence whose character may blindly change from better to worse, or conversely, at any point ; but rather as an unfolding of a certain prime cause in which is contained, implicitly, all that presently appears in explicit form.