Steinbeck, excerpts from Sea of Cortez

Non-teleological ideas derive through “is” thinking, associated with natural selection as Darwin seems to have understood it. They imply depth, fundamentalism, and clarity-seeing beyond traditional or personal projections. They consider events as outgrowths and expressions rather than results; conscious acceptance as a desideratum, and certainly as an all important prerequisite. Non-teleological thinking concerns itself primarily not with what should be, or could be, or might be, but rather with what actually “is”–attempting at most to answer the already sufficiently difficult questions what or how, instead of why.
Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez.

Our own interest lay in relationships of animal to animal. If one observes in this relation sense, it seems apparent that species are only commas in a sentence, that each species is at once the point and the base of a pyramid, that all life is relational. […] It is a strange thing that most of the feeling we call religious, most of the mystical outcrying which is one of the most prized and used and desired reactions of our species, is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality.
(Ibid.)