236 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



Justification of our Cautiousness 



We have charged entelechy with the minimum amount 

 of non-physicochemical performing that is possible in regard 

 to its dealing passively and actively with inorganic 

 causality. From the point of view of energy we only admit 

 entelechy as a factor which suspends occurrences that would 

 be possible according to the inorganic order. Perhaps we 

 have charged entelechy with too little, though what we 

 have done stands in harmony with our actual knowledge, 

 which has shown us limits of regulability at many points. 

 Let us not forget that there may exist many realities, which 

 we do not know yet and possibly shall not know for some 

 hundred years, on account of their minuteness perhaps 

 the word " realities ' to be understood here in the sense of 

 " possible objects of experience," as long as metaphysics is 

 excluded. Let us not forget how late the phenomena of 

 radio-activity have become known to us. In other words : 

 there may be still more fundamental actions done by 

 entelechy than those which we at present know of and 

 therefore admit. May not entelechy have an individual- 

 ising action upon electrons directly ? And what about 

 the first origin of life ? But here we are already touching 

 some problems which belong to the next chapter. 



Perhaps it will really become necessary some day to 

 admit that entelechy not only suspends potentials, but that 

 it creates potentials perhaps by coupling or chaining 

 uncoupled differences of intensity and thereby creates 

 energy; something similar would be expressible in purely 

 dynamical terms. We have no reason to deal more fully 

 here with such an assumption, which, of course, would have 



