DISSERTATION CONCERNING THE END FOR WHICH GOD INTRODUCTION: Containing Explanations of Terms, and general Positions. To avoid all confusion in our inquiries and reasonings, concerning the end for which God created the world, a distinction should be observed between the chief end for which an agent or efficient exerts any act and performs any work, and the ultimate end. These two phrases are not always precisely of the same signification: And though the chief end be always an ultimate end, yet every ultimate end, is not always a chief end. 024 JOL { A chief end is opposite to an inferior end: An ultimate end is opposite to a subordinate end. A subordinate end is something that an agent seeks and aims at in what he does; but yet does not seek it, or regard it at all upon its own account, but wholly on the account of a further end, or in order to some other thing, which it is considered as a means of. Thus, when a man that goes a journey to obtain a medicine to cure him of some disease, and restore his health, the obtaining that medicine is his subordinate end; because it is not an end that he seeks for itself, or values at all upon its own account, but wholly as a means of a further end, viz, his VOL. VI. B 116 |