142 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



The Autonomy of Morphogenesis Proved 



No kind of causality based upon the constellations of 

 single physical and chemical acts can account for organic 

 individual development ; this development is not to be 

 explained by any hypothesis about configuration of physical 

 and chemical agents. Therefore there must be something 

 else which is to be regarded as the sufficient reason of 

 individual form-production. We now have got the answer 

 to our question, what our constant E consists in. It is not 

 the resulting action of a constellation. It is not only a 

 short expression for a more complicated state of affairs, 

 it expresses a true element of nature. Life, at least morpho- 

 genesis, is not a specialised arrangement of inorganic events ; 

 biology, therefore, is not applied physics and chemistry : life 

 is something apart, and biology is an independent science. 



All our results at present, indeed, are negative in their 

 form ; our evidence was throughout what is called per 

 exclusionem, or indirect or apagogic. There were excluded 

 from a certain number of possibilities all except one ; a 

 disjunctive proposition was stated in the form : E is either 

 this, or that, or the other, and it was shown that it could 

 not be any of all these except one, therefore it was proved 

 to be that one. Indeed, I do not see how natural science 

 could argue otherwise ; no science dealing with inorganic 

 phenomena does ; something new and elemental must 

 always be introduced whenever what is known of other 

 elemental facts is proved to be unable to explain the facts 

 in a new field of investigation. 



We shall not hesitate to call by its proper name what 

 we believe we have proved about morphogenetic phenomena. 



