284 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



combination of single events relating to extensities, and 

 thence it follows by analogy that the behaviour of the bodies 

 of other men will also not be explainable in such a way, 

 that to account for it a sort of intensive manifoldness, an 

 entelechy or psychoid, must also be introduced. So we 

 reach quite the same conclusion, by our new and direct 

 method, as we have reached already indirectly, by analysing 

 action as a natural phenomenon. The next step leads from 

 men to higher animals which show at least some similarities 

 in behaviour, and we even may be led to the lowest organisms 

 in this way as far as their behaviour in acting is concerned. 

 But, of course, such a method of demonstration would fail 

 as soon as phenomena of the instinctive or metabolical 

 or morphogenetic kind are studied, and it is here that the 

 indirect proof, as applied by us in so many of the previous 

 lectures, is the only one admissible. 



" Understanding " Vitalism 



The present rather subtle discussions have not been 

 undertaken with the object merely of proving vitalism as a 

 fact of theoretical biology ; I hope at least that this has 

 been done sufficiently by our previous analytical researches. 

 Our object is philosophical in this section and not merely 

 scientific : we did not want here to prove vitalism but to 

 prepare its epistemological justification, which is much more. 

 If in fact we have got a direct sort of proof of the autonomy 

 of life-phenomena, or at least of some of them, by a mere 

 analysis of phenomenological Givenness, by an analysis of 

 the complete series of conscious events as such, by an analysis 

 of self-consciousness, in other words, we can fairly claim 



