THE UNIQUENESS OF LIFE 157 



not fair samples of the inorganic world. An ingenious 

 machine, like a type-writing or a calculating machine, is 

 an elaborated tool, an extended hand, and has inside of it, so 

 to speak, a human thought. It is because of these qualities 

 that it is a little like an organism. Practically, however, 

 most of those who have an intimate acquaintance with living 

 creatures will agree with Driesch in the negative part of 

 his position that their behaviour is not very like the work- 

 ing of machines. For certain purposes it is not amiss to 

 think of the organism as an engine, but it is a self-stoking, 

 self-repairing, self-preservative, self-adjusting, self-increas- 

 ing, self-reproducing engine ! 



(c) Dr. J. S. Haldane states another objection. " In order 

 to i guide ' effectually the excessively complex physical and 

 chemical phenomena occurring in living material, and at 

 many different parts of a complex organism, the vital prin- 

 ciple would apparently require to possess a superhuman 

 knowledge of these processes. Yet the vital principle is 

 assumed to act unconsciously. The very nature of the vital- 

 istic assumption is thus totally unintelligible." Because we 

 do not understand vital phenomena in terms of mechanism, 

 we postulate an Entelechy, only to discover that we have no 

 idea how the Entelechy can know what to do. We believe 

 that a dog's appreciation of the meaning of certain circum- 

 stances is real and an effective factor in its ensuing be- 

 haviour, and there are various ways of thinking of the dog's 

 intelligent behaviour so that it does not appear magical or 

 miraculous, but we find it difficult to think of the Entelechy's 

 appreciation of an intricate chemical situation within the 

 body. Even if we suppose a hierarchy of psychoids with 

 division of labour, acting like the various men about a rail- 

 way station, some of whom put people into the proper trains, 



