554 ON INCREASE IN COMPLEXITY [pt. m 



That there is at present a certain gulf between physico-chemical 

 research and the "form" and "shape" of the morphologists is a fact 

 which must be faced. In present-day biology, there lives on, still 

 very hale and hearty, the essence of the distinction made by Aristotle 

 between vXt] and eloo<;, matter and form. It is probably at bottom 

 this which inspires the statements so often made by morphologists 

 that do what one will with chemical methods, the meaning of form 

 in animals will always elude one's grasp, for it belongs to another 

 order of existences, a range of concepts intrinsically remote from 

 physics. In so far as the form of living organisms is an expression 

 of a degree of organisation higher than anything with which the 

 sciences of the non-living world have to deal, it is true that we have 

 to deal with something very different from mere heaps of molecules, 

 but crystal form and the colloidal state, which exhibit an inter- 

 mediate degree of organisation, exist in the inorganic world and can 

 be dealt with by the quantitative methods of physics and chemistry. 



Examples of the extreme morphological point of view are common; 

 thus Cunningham in 1928, discussing chemical embryology, re- 

 marked of two eggs in the same incubator, "Why are the bones 

 formed in one case the bones of a chick and in the other case the 

 bones of a duckling?" For him the fundamental problem is, not 

 how does the rabbit get out of the hat, but why a particular kind of 

 hat should produce a particular kind of rabbit. In one sense the 

 question is simply a special case of the general question, why is the 

 universe what it is and not something else? and thus reduces to a 

 query concerning the fundamentally alogical character of the universe. 

 With such conundrums the scientific investigator is not concerned 

 and Cunningham should have addressed his inquiry to meta- 

 physicians. Cunningham's question had already been raised by 

 C. D. Broad. "The ultimate question", said he, "is, how do these 

 particular material systems called organisms come to have their 

 particular structure or components. So long as we explain their 

 origin by laws, whether mechanical or otherwise, we are merely 

 referred back to earlier collocations of matter, and so on ad infinitum. 

 The explanation in terms of a designing mind on the analogy of 

 humanly constructed machines seems to involve a circle or to end 

 in a mind so different from any that we know that the analogy fails 

 and it is hardly worth while calling it a mind. The explanation by 

 entelechies rests on a confusion and avoids no difficulty which is 



