not to speak of a final cause
God is the final cause, and Mary
Shelley would have been well aware that a
great many people in England could
purport to speak definitively on a
subject from which Victor backs skeptically away. Victor is perhaps
remembering that Newton in his last
years wrote a two-volume commentary on the Book of Revelation, where the
final cause, in the conventional teaching of Christianity, is cryptically
revealed. The secondary and tertiary grades of causation would be, for
example, the rationale behind the laws of the universe enunciated with
such clarity by Isaac Newton. An example closer to the fictional point
would be to understand why and how the Grand Unified Field operates, since
both Victor Frankenstein and Robert Walton have been engaged in trying to
fathom isolated aspects of it. See Letter
1.2 and note.
