324 WILLIAM MORTON WHEELER 
we ought not to let it play about in our laboratories, not because 
it would occupy any space or interfere with our apparatus, but 
because it might distract us from the serious work in hand. I 
am quite willing to see it spanked and sent back to the metaphys- 
ical house-hold. 
But, speaking seriously, it seems to me.that if the organism be 
inexplicable on purely biological grounds, we should do better to 
resort to psychological agencies like consciousness and the will. 
These have at least the value which attaches to the most imme- 
diate experience. And even the subconscious and the super- 
conscious are more serviceable as explanations than such anaemic 
metaphysical abstractions as the entelechy. Of course, psychic 
vitalism is one of Driesch’s pet aversions and he will have none of 
it, because he is a solipsist, but the fact that he is compelled to 
operate with a ‘psychoid’ and with an entelechy conceivable only 
per analogiam with the psychic, shows the inconsistency of his 
position. 
Before we can adopt any ultrabiological agencies, however, 
except in a tentative and provisional manner, an old and very 
knotty problem will have to be more thoroughly elucidated. I 
refer to the problem of the correlation and coédperation of parts. 
If the cell is a colony of lower physiological units, or biophores, 
as some cytologists believe, we must face the fact that all organisins 
are colonical or social and that one of the fundamental tendencies 
of life is sociogenic. Every organism manifests a strong predelec- 
tion for seeking out other organisms and either assimilating them 
or codperating with them to form a more comprehensive and effi- 
cient individual. Whether, with the mechanists, we attribute this 
tendency to chemotropism or cytotropism, or with the psychic 
neovitalists, interpret it as conscious and voluntary, we certainly 
cannot afford to ignore the facts. The study of the ontogeny of the 
person, 7.e., the person in the process of making, in the handsof 
recent experimentalists, has thrown a flood of light on the pecu- 
liarities of organization, but the animal and plant colony are in 
certain respects more accessible to observation and experiment, 
because the component individuals bear such loose spacial rela- 
tions to one another. Then too, the much simpler and more primi- 
