World Purpose and Life Purpose 173CHAPTER 11
WORLD PURPOSE AND LIFE PURPOSE
(Human Destiny)
Among the many currents in humanity’s spiritual life, we
may follow up one that may be described as the overcom-
ing of the concept of purpose in areas where it does not
belong.Purposefulness represents a particular kind of se-
quence of phenomena. It is only truly real when, in con-
trast to the relationship of cause and effect in which an
earlier event determines a later one, just the opposite hap-
pens and a later event has a determining effect upon an
earlier one. This only happens with human actions. Hu-
man beings perform actions of which they haveprevious-
ly made mental pictures, and they allow themselves to be
determined in their actions by those mental pictures. With
the help of a mental picture, what comes later (the action)
has an effect upon what came earlier (the actor). Yet the
detour through the mental picture is absolutely necessary
for a purposeful chain of events.
In processes that break down into causes and effects, we
must distinguish percepts from concepts. The percept of
the cause precedes the percept of the effect; if we could not