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 I:L1:2 and note.