I] OF THE FINAL CAUSE 5 



Inherited from Hegel, it dominated Oken's Naturphilosophie and 



lingered among his later disciples, who were wont to liken the course 



of organic evolution not to the straggling branches of a tree, but to 



the building of a temple, divinely planned, and the crowning of it 



with its pohshed minarets*. 



It is retained, somewhat crudely, in modern embryology, by those 



who see in th^ early processes of growth a significance ''rather 



prospective than retrospective," such that the enlbryonic phenomena 



must "be referred directly to their usefulness in building up the 



body of the future animalf": — which is no more, and no less, than 



to say, with Aristotle, that the organism is the reAo?, or final cause, 



of its own processes of generation and development. It is writ 



large in that Entelechyij: which Driesch rediscovered, and which he 



made known to many who had neither learned of it from Aristotle, 



nor studied it with Leibniz, nor laughed at it with Rabelais and 



Voltaire. And, though it is in a very curious way, we are told 



that teleology was "refounded, reformed and rehabihtated " by 



Darwin's concept of the origin of species §; for, just as the older 



naturalists held (as Addison || puts it) that "the make of every kind 



of animal is different from that of every other kind; and ye. ti^ere 



is not the least turn in the muscles, or twist in the fibres of any one, 



which does not render them more proper for that particular animal's 



way of life than any other cut or texture of them would have been " : 



so, by the theory of natural selection, "every variety of form and 



colour was urgently and absolutely called upon to produce its title 



{Arch. f. Entw. Mech. xx, 1906), says "una certa impronta di teleologismo qua 

 e la e rimasta, mio malgrado, in questo scritto." 



* Cf. John Cleland, On terminal forms of life, Journ. Anat. and Physiol. 

 XVIII, 1884. 



t Conklin, Embryology of Crepidula, Journ. of Morphol. xin, p. 203, 1897; 

 cf. F. R. Lillie, Adaptation in cleavage. Wood's Hole Biol. Lectures, 1899, pp. 43-67. 



X I am inclined to trace back Driesch's teaching of Entelechy to no less a person 

 than Melanchthon. When Bacon {de Augm. iv, 3) states with disapproval that 

 the soul "has been regarded rather as a function than as a substance," Leslie 

 Ellis points out that he is referring to Melanchthon's exposition of the Aristotelian 

 doctrine. For Melanchthon, whose view of the peripatetic philosophy had great 

 and lasting influence in the Protestant Universities, affirmed that, according to 

 the true view of Aristotle's opinion, the soul is not a substance but an ivreX^xeia, or 

 function. He defined it as Sufa/xis quaedam ciens actiones — a description all but 

 identical with that of Claude Bernard's '''force vitale.'' 



§ Ray Lankester, art. Zoology, Encycl. Brit. (9th edit.), 1888, p. 806. 



!l Spectator, No. 120. 



