286 DRIESCH'S THEORIES OF DEVELOPMENT V 



organization of the germ is demanded. This organization is not, 

 however, to be looked for in the similar orientation of similarly 

 polarized particles. On the contrary, it is to be found in the 

 existence of definite cytoplasmic organ-forming substances whose 

 arrangement must be simple enough to allow of the divisibility 

 of the whole into totipotent parts, complex enough to account for 

 that limitation of the potentialities of these parts which, sooner 

 or later, inevitably ensues. And lastly, when modified in this 

 important respect, Driesch's views are no longer hopelessly at 

 variance with Roux's position, provided that we discard the 

 vicious fallacy of qualitative nuclear and cell-division, and 

 substitute for the idea of complete morphological preforma- 

 tion ab origins the successive preformation by the action of the 

 parts on one another in the organs of each stage of the structures 

 that are to be developed out of them in the next. To use Roux's 

 own terms, development, in its early stages at least, is both a pro- 

 cess of t self- ' and of ' dependent ' differentiation ; or, as Nageli 

 expressed it, it is by the continued combination and permutation 

 of a few original elements that inheritance is brought about. 



Driesch, however, is not merely a scientific thinker who 

 is fully alive to the prime importance of pushing the causal 

 analysis to its extreme limit. He is also a philosopher ; and as 

 a philosopher he realizes that when science has said all it has to 

 say the account may still need to be completed from a new and 

 distinct point of view. In the case of living organisms this 

 new standpoint is the teleological. The harmony causal 

 harmony and harmony of composition deduced from develop- 

 ment, the functional harmony exhibited by the organs of the 

 adult, all appear to be directed to an end, which is the repro- 

 duction or the preservation of the specific form, and it is only 

 when this end is understood that the mere reference to beginnings 

 which a knowledge of the mechanism gives acquires a genuine 

 significance. Purposiveness, in a word, is a characteristic of all 

 organic functions and cannot be ignored. 



This principle is borrowed avowedly from Kant's Kritik of the 

 Teleological Judgement. Like the scientists of to-day, Kant lays 

 it down as a rule that the mechanical method, by which natural 

 phenomena are brought under general laws of causation and 



