248 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
against genetic and genetics, thus greatly facilitating the expres- sion of a large class of ideas with which the social philosopher must constantly deal. The only serious lack, then, is a similar antithetical term to be set over against genesis, to denote the distinctively social process which results from the application of the indirect, intellectual, or telic method. In order to supply such a term I propose to revive the Greek form telesis* giving to it the required meaning.
There are two kinds of telic progress, or telesis, individual and collective. The former is the principal kind thus far employed. The latter is as yet so rare as to be almost theoretical. Society itself must be looked upon as mainly unconscious. Its operations are the result of the combined activities of its individual mem- bers. But the individual is conscious and seeks his ends by the aid of all the faculties he possesses. In societies at all advanced the individual units possess a developed intellectual faculty which they employ in precisely the same way that non-intellectual beings employ their unaided conative faculties, only with vastly greater results. This mind power acting in conjunction with the
1 Gr. rAwij. This word was little used by the Greek philosophers and writers, and only, so far as I am aware, in the primary sense of the verb reX^w, to complete, fulfill, accomplish. Still, there seems no good reason why it may not take on not only all the meanings of that verb but also all those of the noun, T\O$, from which all words containing this root are derived. That word also meant primarily an end accomplished, but it was made to serve in a great number of cognate significations. Plato used it in the sense of an end of action or "final cause," and from this have sprung all the derivatives employed by philosophers. Teleology was not used by the Greeks, but we find telic (TeXc6s) in the various senses of rAoj, and especially used by the Stoics in an ethical sense, final. Mediaeval and modern writers have always felt justified in employing any of the derivatives of rAos in the Platonic sense. The adjective TeXrTt/c6j (fit for finishing) was used in religious ceremonies in connection with the office of consecration or initiation, where it may be rendered initiative, or mystical, and some modern mystics, as Cudworth have revived it in that sense. An Italian writer, Sig. L. Ferrarese, in a volume entitled, "Saggio di una nuova classificazione delle scienze," 1828, has employed the word telestics in a sense similar to that in which Dr. Small and myself have used telics. The latter would seem to be the preferable form. I am indebted for the reference to Ferrarese's work to Professor George E. Vincent of The University of Chicago, but I have thus far been unable to consult the work itself. I am not aware that the word telesis has hitherto been revived in any modern language.
