636 THE WONDER OF LIFE 



and biology is an independent science '....' There is 

 something in the organism's behaviour in the widest 

 sense of the word which is opposed to an inorganic resolu- 

 tion of the same, and which shows that the living organism 

 is more than a sum or an aggregate of its parts. . . . This 

 something we call " Entelechy ".' 



Driesch conceives of ' Entelechy ' as ' an agent at work 

 in nature ', ' of a non-spatial nature ', without a seat or 

 localization ; it is unmaterial, and it is not energy ; it is 

 not inconsistent in its agency with the laws of energetics ; 

 its function is to suspend and set free, in a regulatory man- 

 ner, pre-existing potentials, i.e. pre-existing faculties of 

 inorganic interaction. 



Argument from Organic Evolution. It is con- 

 venient to speak of ' cosmic evolution ', ' inorganic evolu- 

 tion ', ' the evolution of the solar system ', ' the evolution 

 of the earth ', ' the evolution of scenery ', and so on ; but 

 there is a risk of identifying processes which are really 

 very different. 



In biology it is usual to draw a distinction between the 

 two terms development and evolution. Development 

 (Haeckel's ontogeny) is the becoming of the individual ; 

 Evolution (Haeckel's phylogeny) is the becoming of the 

 race. How do these agree and differ ? In both there is 

 a succession of stages, and the scientific assumption is that 

 each stage is conditioned by the preceding stages. In 

 development the continuity between successive stages is 

 one of personal identity ; it is the same organism from 

 start to finish, though, as we have seen in the chapter on 

 ' The Cycle of Life ', there are some apparent contradic- 

 tions. In racial evolution, however, the stages are physic- 

 ally discontinuous. Although we speak of the continuity 



