THE INDIRECT JUSTIFICATION OF ENTELECHY 257 



The Concept of Divisibility not Applicable to Entelechy 



At the risk of shocking you with an apparent absurdity 

 I might say that entelechy has the power of preserving 

 its specific intensive manifoldness in spite of being divided 

 into two or more parts. The fact which we have called 

 the genesis of complex-equipotential systems seems to favour 

 this view at the first glance, and so do all the experiments 

 relating to the development of isolated blastomeres of a 

 germ into whole organisms of smaller proportions. More- 

 over, we directly founded our second proof of vitalism 

 upon the evidence that, though a typical machine - like 

 constellation of agents, different in its arrangement along 

 the three axes of space, cannot be divided and remain 

 whole at the same time, yet there exists in the living 

 organism a something which does show these two incom- 

 patible characters. 



The question now arises whether in a deeper sense we 

 are entitled to speak of entelechy as remaining whole in 

 spite of its " division " into parts. 



It is very difficult to free the philosophical analysis of 

 entelechy from all that is familiar to us from our acquaint- 

 ance with extensive phenomena ; and yet we must free 

 it from all that belongs to extensity. It was the great 

 achievement of Kant to show that space is the inevitable 

 form of our intuition of the Extensive. Now, as to 

 entelechy, there is no intuition, and therefore space and 

 all sorts of relations about space have practically nothing 

 to do with entelechy. Entelechy itself is conceived only ; 

 it is perceived only in its extensive results. Entelecliy 

 is not spatial, but only acts into space I do not say " in ' 



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