176 Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path
Advocates of the concept of purpose believe that if they
relinquish this concept they must also abandon all order
and unity in the world. Here is Robert Hamerling:
As long as there are drives in nature, it is foolish
to denypurposes there. Just as the formation of a
limb in the human body is not determined and con-
ditioned by anidea of this limb hovering in the air,
but by its connection with the greater whole—the
body to which the limb belongs—so too the forma-
tion of every natural creature, whether plant, ani-
mal or human, is not determined and conditioned
by anidea of it hovering in the air, but by the for-
mative principle of the greater whole of nature,
which lives itself out and organizes itself purpose-
fully.^1
And again, in the same volume:
The theory of purpose claims only that,despite
the thousand discomforts and distresses of this crea-
turely life, a high purposefulness and planfulness is
unmistakably present in the forms and evolutions of
nature—but a planfulness and purposefulness that
realizes itself only within natural laws and cannot
aim at a sluggard’s world in which life would face
no death, and growth no decay, with all of the more
or less unpleasant, but finally unavoidable interme-
diate stages. If opponents of the concept of purpose
oppose, to the miraculous world of purposefulness
that nature reveals to us in all areas, a laboriously
1.Atomistik des Willens, Vol. 2.
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