THE INDIRECT JUSTIFICATION OF ENTELECHY 205 



What then is our elemental vital factor in nature ? 



Let us only say in this place that entelechies remain 

 " elemental ' also with regard to their true ontological 

 character, just as they were elemental with regard to the 



law they obey. Entelechies are not energies, not forces, not 



o 

 intensities, and not constants, but entelechies. 



Entelechy, as we know, is a factor in nature which acts 

 teleologically. It is an intensive manifoldness, and on account 

 of its inherent diversities it is able to augment the amount 

 of diversity in the inorganic world as far as distribution is 

 concerned. It acts by suspending and setting free reactions 

 based upon potential differences regulatively. There is 

 nothing like it in inorganic nature. 



A Gap in the Scale of Natural Factors 



We have learnt that there is a sort of scale of constants 

 in the Inorganic, leading from simple physical constants to- 

 the constants of chemistry and crystallography. As far as 

 what happens is regarded exclusively in relation to univocal 

 becoming in general, we could say that this scale is con- 

 tinued in the Organic, and that entelechy is the next degree 

 of it. Morality, considered as a phenomenon in nature, 

 might perhaps be said to form the highest degree of all. 

 But there is a gap between the constant factors of the 

 Inorganic and the factors concerned in the phenomena 

 of life that is not to be filled, as far as the relation 

 of these factors to matter is taken into consideration. 

 Owing to this gap the scale of factors of becoming, if 

 taken as a whole, possesses only a certain descriptive 

 value. 



