

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY 147 



tures do not make these much more intelligible. 

 They do not give us the kind of answer that we 

 want in our endeavour to understand these 

 creatures better. Their development, their be- 

 haviour, and the correlation of their internal 

 activities, cannot be understood except on the 

 assumption that they are historical beings as 

 Bergson has so well insisted. 



Here the scientific position, all too briefly in- 

 dicated, ends; but it is open to the philosopher to 

 go farther. All that we have said is that the 

 mechanistic formulation of living creatures does 

 not answer the distinctively biological questions, 

 but for some minds it is imperative to go farther. 

 Where Science ends Philosophy begins; and in 

 Dr. Hans Driesch's Science and Philosophy of the 

 Organism we have one of the finest recent illus- 

 trations of a welcome partnership of the two 

 disciplines. We need not attempt to discuss his 

 strenuously thought-out theory of Vitalism, the 

 point for us here is simply that after giving three 

 scientific proofs that the mechanistic theory will 

 not work, he goes on to a philosophical construc- 

 tion the conception of the "Entelechy " an im- 

 material autonomous factor which punctuates the 

 transformations of energy that go on within the 

 body. The "Entelechy" is the living creature's 

 innermost secret, its directive soul, and whether 

 Dr. Driesch has been successful or not, he has 



