EXPERIMENTAL MORPHOGENESIS 143 



What we have proved to be true has always been called 

 vitalism, and so it may be called in our days again. But 

 if you think a new and less ambitious term to be better 

 for it, let us style it the doctrine of the autonomy of life, 

 as proved at least in the field of morphogenesis. I know 

 very well that the word " autonomy ' usually means the 

 faculty of giving laws to oneself, and that in this sense it 

 is applied with regard to a community of men ; but in our 

 phrase autonomy is to signify the being subjected to laws 

 peculiar to the phenomena in question. This meaning is 

 etymologically defensible, and besides that I perhaps may 

 remind you of a certain chapter of Professor Ward's Gifford 

 Lectures, in which he holds the view that, psychologically 

 and epistemologically, there is more than a mere verbal 

 relation between the civil and the natural " law." 



Vitalism then, or the autonomy of life, has been proved 

 by us indirectly, and cannot be proved otherwise so long as 

 we follow the lines of ordinary scientific reasoning. There 

 can indeed be a sort of direct proof of vitalism, but now is 

 not the time to develop this proof, for it is not of the purely 

 scientific character, not so naive as our present arguments 

 are, if you choose to say so. An important part of our 

 lectures next summer will be devoted to this direct proof. 



" Entelechy " 



But shall we not give a name to our vitalistic or 

 autonomous factor E, concerned in morphogenesis ? Indeed 

 we will, and it was not without design that we chose the 

 letter E to represent it provisionally. The great father 

 of systematic philosophy, Aristotle, as many of you will 



