330 THE PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY 



elements. It contains the intelligence or entelechy of 

 the workman. 



What is this entelechy ? Sooner oi later in all our 

 speculation on organic happening we must cross the 

 arbitrary line which divides the space of our concepts 

 from the non-spatial — the intensive from the extensive. 

 Just as the physicists have left materiality behind them 

 in their speculations and treatment of the phenomena 

 of radiation, so biolog}/ must attempt to trace back 

 the materiality of the organism to something which is 

 immaterial. Just as physics has now abandoned the 

 idea of matter as something which consists of discrete 

 particles, or atoms, having extension in space, and 

 which therefore exclude each other, so biology must 

 seek the origin of living things, not in the hypo- 

 thetical " biophoridae," or other ultimate living material 

 particles, but in the intensive manifoldness of entelechy. 

 There is a manifoldness in the potentiality which the 

 simple and homogeneous ovum possesses of becoming 

 the heterogeneous adult organism. This manifoldness, 

 says the mechanistic biologist, consists of a manifold- 

 ness of extended material units, the determinants of 

 Weismann, and the organisation that arranges these 

 units — what is this organisation ? It cannot be a 

 three-dimensional machinery, as all close analysis of 

 the facts of development and regulation shows. It is 

 then something that is intensive, something which is 

 not in space, but which acts into space, and the result 

 of which is manifested in spatial material arrange- 

 ments and activities. Vague and incomprehensible as 

 is this concept of the activities of the organisms, it is 

 only vague and incomprehensible because we have been 

 accustomed to express all chemical and physical 

 happening in terms of the fundamental concepts of 

 matter and energy, and the science of the last two 



