192 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



An harmonious-equipotential system is, as we know, 

 of such a kind that out of any one of its cells any part 

 of the organism may originate. But, as morphogenesis 

 depends in the main on chemical and aggregative trans- 

 formations, this means that in each cell of a harmonious 

 system the same number and kind of chemical-aggregative 

 reactions are possible} Only part of these possible reactions 

 become actual in each cell, and these actual reactions are 

 different according to the relative position of the cells. This 

 transformation from possibility into actuality is the funda- 

 mental work done by entelechy, based upon its elemental 

 action in suspending possible becoming and relaxing the 

 suspension when required. 



What does this imply ? 



It seems to me that it is a phenomenon of quite funda- 

 mental importance. 



If we agree to distinguish between a " diversity of 

 elemental composition >; of a system and a " diversity of 

 distribution^ we may say 



Entelechy, though not capable of enlarging the amount of 

 the diversity of composition of a given system, is capable of 

 augmenting its diversity of distribution in a regulatory 

 manner, and it does so by transforming a system of equally 

 distributed potentialities into a system of actualities which 

 are unequally distributed. 



Thus, what first appeared as a mere description of 

 " differentiation " now appears as the immediate effect of 



1 The word "possible," of course, is not to be understood here in the sense 

 of "infinitely actual" (see page 186, note 1), as in a certain theory of 

 catalysis. It is entelechy that suspends actuality in the present case ; with- 

 out entelechy there would at ouce happen all sorts of chemical reactions 

 until "physico-chemical equilibrium" was reached. 



