326 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



particularly in so far as they have served to create typical 

 agents or factors in immediately given nature. Thus the 

 law of Newton is not only an expression of the generality 

 of attraction, formulated with respect to quantity, but ~by 

 the law of Newton we are entitled to endow the bodies here 

 before us with potential energies and forces as parts of the 

 given world in its contingent specificity. Though remaining 

 in the domain of concepts we here proceed from a Platonic 

 to an Aristotelian point of view. Thus, in our instance of 

 the child pushing a stone from the table so that it falls, the 

 constituents of the general law of Newton are concerned in 

 any factor concerned in the causal series of events inaugurated 

 by the child. The child not only pushes " a stone," but a 

 stone endowed with a definite amount of potential energy 

 with regard to the earth : it is for this reason that the stone 

 will fall when in its course it leaves the surface of the table. 

 But explaining and causal reference remain two very different 

 kinds of necessary connexion all the same one of them 

 logical, the other ontological. 



Now all we have said holds with regard to entelechy 

 also. The concept of entelechy as an effective extra-spatial 

 intensively manifold constituent of nature, based upon the 

 category of individuality, explains, say, the restitution of the 

 Ascidian Clavellina in general. The restitution, however, of 

 the particular specimen before us is referred " causally " or 

 historically, not by the mere act of my cutting the auimal 

 into two parts, and not even by my creating a special 

 restitutive stimulus unknown in detail by the operation. 

 The historical reference lies in the fact that my cutting the 

 animal and thus creating a restitutive stimulus affects a 

 given organism that actually is the point of manifestation of 



