338 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



Definition of the Organism 



And now let us briefly summarise in a special form all 

 we have learnt about the organic living individual. Let 

 us close our discussion with an analytical definition of the 

 individual living organism. > 



As an object of science, or, in other terms, as a con- 

 stituent of ideal nature, or from the point of view of 

 enlarged phenomenalism, the living individual organism is 

 a typical constellation of different elements which are each 

 chemically and physically characterised ; " its typical con- 

 stellation is preserved in spite of so-called metabolism, i.e. 

 a permanent change of the material it consists of. The 

 organism exists in innumerable exemplars ; it exhibits the 

 phenomenon of development and possesses as its most im- 

 portant properties the faculties of regulation, reproduction, 

 and active movement. The character of all the properties 

 or faculties the living individual organism is endowed 

 with is such that the organism cannot be conceived as 

 a constellation of inorganic parts which is inorganic qua con- 

 stellation. There is something in the organism's behaviour 

 in the widest sense of the word which is opposed to an 

 inorganic resolution of the same and which shows that the 

 living organism is more than a sum or an aggregate of its 

 parts, that it is insufficient to call the organism " a typi- 

 cally combined body ' without further explanation. This 

 something we call entelechy. Entelechy being not an 

 extensive but an intensive manifoldness is neither a 

 kind of energy nor dependent on any chemical material ; 

 more than that, it is neither causality nor substance in 

 the true sense of these words. But entelechy is a factor 



