THE INDIRECT JUSTIFICATION OF ENTELECHY 165 



an aprioristic principle is absolutely impossible. The ques- 

 tion, therefore, is not, " is the doctrine of entelechy in 

 harmony with the first principle of energetics ? " but, " how 

 is harmony to be established here ? ' In other words, the 

 principle of conservation is unimpugnable as an aprioristic 

 principle, but the type of its inorganic realisation may be 

 changed or enlarged without hesitation. 



Let us remember once more that the principle of con- 

 servation is merely quantitative, that it says nothing at all 

 about the quality or direction of events. What could this 

 principle mean in its relation to processes of life in which 

 entelechy is at work ? It seems to me that two different 

 answers to this question are a priori possible. Take an 

 organism in the midst of a given limited medium, and 

 imagine that we know, on the one side, the energetic value 

 of any possible event leading from the medium to the 

 organism, and, on the other side, the energetic value of any 

 possible event leading from the organism to the medium. 

 Then it is possible that the sum of the energetic values of 

 both kinds of events is the same, or that there is a differ- 

 ence, either in one sense or in the other. In the first case, 

 we should say that in passing through processes of life 

 energy is not changed in its quantity at all ; in the latter 

 case energy would seem to be changed by passing through 

 an organism ; it would either be partly stored in some un- 

 known form, or be awaked into actuality from some unknown 

 form of storage. Whatever might happen, we should find 

 a way to unite it with the general principle. The unknown 

 energy spoken of in the case of a difference of the amounts 

 of energy entering and leaving the organism, would be of 

 the potential or subsidiary kind ; and we should know 



