184 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



is at the same time an inorganic system surrounded by an 

 energetical medium. This limitation l will explain not 

 only the limits of regulability, but also disease and death, 2 

 at least in principle. The limits of regulability may be 

 founded upon some rather insignificant feature, and may 

 be in spite of that very marked in their effects. The 

 fragmental development of the isolated blastomeres of 

 some sorts of eggs is a good example of what I have said. 

 It may depend on some very unimportant peculiarity in the 

 consistency of the protoplasm that the isolated blastomere 

 of the Ctenophore egg is not able to restitute its simple 

 intimate protoplasmatic structure into a small new whole. 

 From the impossibility of performing this rather simple 

 regulation it follows that not a whole but a half animal 

 develops from the isolated cell. 



Entelechy burdened with as Little as Possible 



We have tried to formulate the relation between 

 entelechy and inorganic elemental agents in such a manner 

 that nothing may seem to be postulated which is not 

 founded on experimental facts, and that at the same time 

 the amount of specific performance burdened upon entelechy 

 may appear as small as possible. Our personal belief is 



1 The discontinuity of physical phenomena upon which the so-called 

 "theories of matter " are based, is, of course, also one of the conditions that 

 entelechy is limited by. Maxwell, MacKendrick, and Errera have discussed 

 the lowest possible size of an organism from this point of view. Compare 

 Errera, Butt. soc. roy. sc. mdd. et nat., Bruxelles, Janvier 1903; other 

 references will be found in this paper. 



2 It will be understood from our discussion of morphogenetic teleology 

 (page 134) that death, though practically the end of the individual's life, is 

 by no means its rAos at least not from the point of view of a philosophy 

 of nature. 



