226 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



that the machine is established only after all the divisions 

 are complete. Good ; but what then constructs this 

 machine in the definitive cells of our systems, say in the 

 eggs ? Another sort of machine perhaps ? That could 

 hardly be said to be of much use. Or that entelechy of 

 which we have spoken ? Then you would recur to our 

 first proof of vitalism and would burden entelechy with a 

 specific performance, that is with the construction of the 

 hypothetic machine which you are postulating in every 

 single egg. But of course you would break the bounds of 

 physics and chemistry even then. 



It seems to me that it is more simple, and so to say 

 more natural, not to recur to our first proof of life- 

 autonomy in order to keep to the " machine theory " in 

 this new branch of inquiry, but to consider facts as they 

 offer themselves to analysis. 



But then indeed we are entitled to draw an independent 

 second proof of the autonomy of life from our analysis of 

 the genesis of systems of the complex -equipotential type. 

 We say it is a mere absurdity to assume that a complicated 

 machine, typically different in the three dimensions of space, 

 could be divided many many times, and in spite of that 

 always be the whole : therefore there cannot exist any sort 

 of machine as the starting-point and basis of development. 



Let us again apply the name entelechy to that which 

 lies at the very beginning of all individual morphogenesis. 



Entelechy thus proves to be also that which may be 

 said to lie at the very root of inheritance, 1 or at least of 



1 And, of course, at the root of every new starting of certain parts of 

 morphogenesis also, as in regeneration and in adventitious budding ; these 

 processes, as we know, being also founded upon " complex-equipotential 

 systems," which have had their "genesis." 



