i6 THE THEORY OF [pt. 



as we do, or does it see them as two shades of grey as colour-blind 

 people do? while the behaviourist asks — Does it respond according 

 to difference of light-intensity or difference of wave-lengths ? Hormism, 

 in fact, recurs continually to psychical factors. Samuel Butler, for 

 instance, one of its principal exponents, wrote, "I want to connect 

 the actual manufacture of the things a chicken makes inside an egg 

 with the desire and memory of the chicken so as to show that one 

 and the same set of vibrations at once change the universal sub- 

 stratum into the particular phase of it required" (cf. ^ rov hwdixei, 

 6vTo<i ivreXex^ta fj tolovtov) "and awaken a consciousness of and a 

 memory of and a desire towards this particular phase on the part of 

 the molecules which are being vibrated into it". "The Hormist 

 contends", says Lloyd Morgan, "that something which is very 

 difficult to distinguish from a ' plan-in-mind ' on the part of the 

 embryo chick or rabbit does freely determine the course of events 

 in specific growth from egg to adult. This, I urge, is a metaphysical 

 hypothesis which goes beyond biology or psychology as branches of 

 science." 



Finalism as a Rock of Offence 



Finalism and dynamic Teleology are closely connected, for both 

 of them embody an attempt to go back to the Aristotelian inclusion of 

 the final cause as an integral essential of scientific explanation, and 

 to regard the Baconian attitude to teleology as a mistake. They solve 

 Kant's antinomy of the teleological judgment simply by deleting the 

 proposition, and leaving the counter-proposition. They are weakest 

 on their practical side, for their supporters do not suggest any altera- 

 tions which might be made in scientific method, although their 

 fundamental assumptions plainly require it. The principal repre- 

 sentative of finalism is Eugenio Rignano, and dynamic teleology 

 has been for the most part upheld by Hans Driesch. 



Rignano, in his Qii' est-ce-que la Vie? and his Biological Memory has 

 contended that, though the mechanical concept of the universe may 

 be perfectly satisfactory as a description of the world of physics, yet 

 animals and plants show so much purposiveness that mechanical 

 categories are absolutely inadequate for them. Biology, therefore, 

 cannot be complicated physics and chemistry, but must be something 

 sui generis and with its own methods and laws. "The long debate 

 between vitalists and mechanists," he says, "in attempting to give 



