V GENERAL REFLECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS 289 



' forms,' he says, ' which with all their differences seem 

 ' to have been produced according- to a common original type, 

 ' strengthens our suspicions of an actual relationship between 

 ' them in their production from a common parent, through the 

 ' gradual approximation of one animal-genus to another from 

 ' those in which the principle of purposes seems to be best authen- 

 ' ticated, that is from man, down to the polype, and again from 

 'this down to mosses and lichens, and finally to the lowest 

 ' stage of nature noticeable by us, namely, to crude matter. 

 ( And so the whole Technic of nature, which is so incompre- 

 hensible to us in organized beings that we believe ourselves 

 ' compelled to think a different principle for it, seems to be 

 ' derived from matter and its powers according to mechanical 

 ' laws (like those by which it works in the formation of crystals).' 



A purposiveness, however, must be attributed even to the 

 crude matter, otherwise it would not be possible to think the 

 purposive form of animals and plants. 



Although there are doubtless in the Kritik many obscuri- 

 ties and apparent inconsistencies, to which we cannot allude now, 

 the general meaning of Kant's reflections upon organisms is 

 perfectly clear. He who would ' complete the perfect round' 

 of his knowledge must think not only in beginnings but 

 in ends. The end in the case of a living being is plain it 

 is the maintenance and reproduction of its form ; the end in 

 the case of the cosmic process, though perhaps not so plain, 

 is to be sought in the ethical, or, in Kantian phraseology, the 

 ' practical ' concept of the freedom of the moral consciousness 

 of man. 



Such a position is quite intelligible, philosophically ; and it can 

 only be a matter of surprise that Driesch has not been able to abide 

 by it. In his later writings he has indeed executed a complete 

 change of front and repudiated the philosophical doctrine laid 

 down in the earlier treatise ; and the principal reason for this 

 volte-face is that there are cases in which the localization of 

 ontogenetic effects cannot be explained by any theory of forma- 

 tive stimuli. In the theory we have already considered the 

 causal harmony which secures the due co-ordination in space and 

 in time of the stimuli and responses into which the process of 



JENK1KSON U 



