136 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



analysis of the differentiation of harmonious - equipotential 

 systems, and of the genesis of complex - equipotential 

 systems, and from our intimate study of the process of 

 acting, going on upon an historically created basis and 

 with the criterion of an individualised correspondence 

 between cause and effect, we have learnt that no machine, 

 of whatever kind and whatever degree of combination, can 

 afford us the means of understanding what happens here 

 in the organism. There was a natural factor at work, 

 autonomic and not resulting from a combination of other 

 agents, but elemental in itself ; this factor acted teleologi- 

 cally : it therefore may be called a factor of dynamical 

 teleology. 



It misht seem that we ought to have been able to 



o o 



accomplish our proof more easily : might we not have said 

 simply that the single processes going on in a machine are 

 of course of the statical-teleological type, but that the act 

 of constructing this machine is of course a dynamical- 

 teleological one, being due to my will ? That argument 

 would have been simple indeed, but it would have been 

 also wrong : for psychological terms were excluded from 

 our discussion, which was purely one of natural science. 

 We had to prove exclusively by natural science that 

 there was no possibility of a statical - teleological ex- 

 planation, and this, I trust, we have succeeded in doing. 



After this terminological work we shall now begin to 

 study what that impossibility means. 



Let us begin with a descriptive enumeration of the im- 

 portant characteristics of our entelechy. 



