In the earliest dawn of recorded thought, teleology in some form or another has been the most generally accepted theory whereby the order of Nature is explained.  It is not, however, my object in this paper to trace the history of this theory from its first rude beginnings in Fetishism to its final development in Theism.  I intend to devote myself exclusively to the question as to the present standing of this theory, and I allude to its past history only in order to examine the statement which is frequently made, to the effect that its general prevalence in all ages and among all peoples of the world lends to it a certain degree of ‘antecedent credibility.’  With reference to this point, I should say, that, whether or not the order of Nature is due to a disposing Mind, the hypothesis of mental agency in Nature—­or, as the Duke of Argyll terms it, the hypothesis of ’anthropopsychism’—­must necessarily have been the earliest hypothesis.  What we find in Nature is the universal prevalence of causation, and long before the no less universal equivalency between causes and effects—­i.e. the universal prevalence of natural law—­became a matter of even the [vaguest] appreciation, the general fact that nothing happens without a cause of some kind was fully recognized.  Indeed, the recognition of this fact is not only presented by the lowest races of the present day, but, as I have myself given evidence to show, likewise by animals and infants[21].  And therefore, it appears to me probable that those psychologists are right who argue that the idea of cause is intuitive, in the same sense that the ideas of space and time are intuitive—­i.e. the instinctive or [inherited] effect of ancestral experience.

Now if it is thus a matter of certainty that the recognition of causality in Nature is co-extensive with, and even anterior to, the human mind, it appears to me no less certain that the first attempt at assigning a cause of this or that observed event in Nature—­i.e. the first attempts at a rational explanation of the phenomena of Nature—­must have been of an anthropopsychic kind.  No other explanation was, as it were, so ready to hand as that of projecting into external Nature the agency of volition, which was known to each individual as the apparent fountain-head of causal activity so far as he and his neighbours were concerned.  To reach this most obvious explanation of causality in Nature, it did not require that primitive man should know, as we know, that the very conception of causality arises out of our sense of effort in voluntary action; it only required that this should be the fact, and then it must needs follow that when any natural phenomenon was thought about at all with reference to its causality, the cause inferred should be one of a psychical kind.  I need not wait to trace the gradual integration of this anthropopsychic hypothesis from its earliest and most diffused form of what we may term polypsychism (wherein the causes inferred were almost as personally numerous as the