V GENERAL REFLECTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS 297 



ever, it certainly is, for it is only the performance of its functions 

 (h-T6\e\ia) by the organism complete in all its parts that makes 

 the mere mechanism of development comprehensible to us ; the 

 process, therefore, exists for the sake of the end. Only as efficient 

 cause is the soul prior in time ; only so far as it is prior in thought 

 can it be said to be a final cause. 1 



Such a teleology is, it is obvious, indistinguishable in principle 

 from the position in which Kant leaves us. It is the position 

 adopted by Driesch, as we have seen, in the Analytische Theorie, but 

 abandoned in the Vitalismus in favour of a theory of ! pyschoids '. 



Now, quite apart from the meaning which Aristotle may or 

 may not have intended to convey, there appear to be grave 

 objections to this belief. 



This ' psychoid ', to which the name ' Entelechy ' is surely 

 misapplied, this rudimentary feeling and willing, which is aware 

 of the form it desires to produce, must be, psychically, at least 

 as complex as the phenomena it is designed to account for, and 

 stand, therefore, as much in need of explanation as they, which 

 will involve us at once in an infinite series of such entities. In 

 fact, to borrow the epithet which Driesch himself has bestowed 

 on the nuclear architecture imagined in the Roux-Weismann 

 hypothesis, it is only a photograph of the problem, and not 

 a solution at all. Again, when we ask what the modus operandi 

 of this cause is we get no reply either from Driesch or from any 

 other neo-vitalist, though this is just the knowledge that we so 

 urgently stand in need of. The objection that the intervention 

 of a psychical cause in a physical process is unintelligible, an 

 objection which would probably appeal to many, may be waived, 

 for in the last resort the connexion between any even simply 

 mechanical causes and effects is equally hard to understand. 

 It may, however, be seriously doubted whether these entities are 

 not being ' multiplied beyond necessity ', and whether the progress 

 of science would not be better served by an adherence to a simpler 

 philosophy. 



' Vere scire est per causas scire/ The maxim of the great 

 founder of modern inductive science is the watchword of 

 embryologists to-day. By exact observation and crucial experi- 

 1 De Part. II. 1. 7. 



