188 SOME FINAL CONSIDERATIONS 



istics which constitute the most essential trait of development, 

 because it is only by their virtue that the result is not a chaotic 

 aggregate, but an organism — as soon as we do this, physics 

 and chemistry fail us. We can reduce the orderly course of 

 development only to preformed order in the constitution of its 

 starting point, the egg, in which the future embryo is contained, 

 not, it is true, in an actually spatial form, but potentially, non- 

 spatially, as an intensive multiplicity. 



If now we ask whence this order of the egg originated, we 

 can go still farther back in time, and trace the developmental 

 processes which gave rise to the egg, but always again we 

 encounter the order, given once and for all, which is the 

 characteristic of all life. In the phenomena of life, all order 

 is a consequence of previous order. Here we encounter the 

 great enigma of Life, which cannot be solved by means of a 

 causal approach. We must accept this order as an essential 

 characteristic of life, a basic phenomenon, of which no causal 

 explanation is possible. 



