THE INDIRECT JUSTIFICATION OF ENTELECHY 219 



t 



imagined to be done without relation to the quantity of the 

 energetical state of a system as such. Now it seems to me 

 that there may be non-energetical modifications in this state 

 of two different kinds, one of which we already know from 

 qualitative energetics. 



Entelechy in its Relation to the, two Forms of Mechanical 



Energy 



I am thinking in the first place of entelechy as suspend- 

 ing the becoming that otherwise would happen. The process 

 of compensation of potentials, in the most general mean- 

 ing of the word, such as differences of coupled intensities, 

 could as we know be suspended by entelechy. Does 

 anything similar happen in pure mechanics with its two 

 and only two kinds of energy ? Kinetic energy and poten- 

 tial mechanical energy, of course, would be the only fields 

 accessible to the action of entelechy. Now it would 

 certainly not be a legitimate hypothesis to assume that 

 entelechy is able to transform any potential energy into the 

 kinetic form by removing some kind of obstacle that has 

 hitherto impeded this transformation, for this process of 

 so-called " Auslb'sung " to use the untranslatable German 

 word requires a certain finite amount of energy in any 

 case, and entelechy is not energy. But the problem 

 acquires a very different aspect as soon as we assume that 

 kinetic energy, i.e. " happening," is always the given 

 material entelechy has to work with, but that entelechy is 

 able to transform actual happening into a state of mere 

 potentiality by suspension, and that it can only set free such 

 " potentials >: as it has itself created by its suspension of 



