138 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



assume that would be to go beyond the limits of chemistry 

 in chemistry itself. 



No Machine Possible Inside the Harmonious Systems 



And now we turn to the last possibility which is left 

 to us in our endeavour to " understand " the localisation of 

 the differentiation in our harrnonious-equipotential systems 

 by the means of physics and chemistry. Outside causes 

 have failed to account for it, chemical disintegration of a 

 compound has failed too. But could there not exist some 

 sort of complicated interactions amongst the parts of the 

 harmonious system themselves ? Could there not exist 

 some kind of a real machine in the system, which, if once 

 set going, would result in the differentiations that are to 

 take place ? Then we might say that the " prospective 

 potency" of the system is in fact that machine ; we should 

 know what the letter E of our equation stood for : viz., 

 a resultant action of many complicated elemental inter- 

 actions, and nothing more. 



Weismann, we know already, had assumed that a sort 

 of machine was the prime mover of morphogenesis. We 

 have seen that his theory cannot be true ; the results of 

 experiments most strongly contradict it. But, of course, 

 the experiments only showed us that such a machine as he 

 had imagined to exist could not be there, that development 

 could not be governed by the disintegration of a given 

 complicated structure into its simplest parts. But might 

 not some other machine be imaginable ? 



We shall understand the word " machine ' in a most 

 general sense. A machine is a typical configuration of 



