PART I 



"No kind of causality based upon the constellations of single 

 physical and chemical acts can account for organic individual 

 development.... Life, at least morphogenesis, is not a specialised 

 arrangement of inorganic events ; biology, therefore, is not applied 

 physics and chemistry : life is something apart, and biology is an 

 independent science." 



"The Science and Philosophy of the Organism" by Hans 

 Driesch, being the Grifford Lectures for 1907, p. 142. 



Although one may subscribe to the opinion expressed in the 

 above quotation from Driesch, nevertheless on reading the whole 

 book it strikes one that Driesch's "Entelechy" is something much 

 more than the minimum contained in that statement, and is 

 indeed a somewhat mystical conception. 



To fill in the sentences omitted in the above quotation of 

 Driesch, the omission of which was indicated by the asterisks: 

 "This development is not to be explained by any hypothesis 

 about configuration of physical and chemical agents. Therefore 

 there must be something else which is to be regarded as the 

 sufficient reason of individual form-production. We now have 

 got the answer to our question, what our constant E consists in. 

 It is not the resulting action of a constellation. It is not only 

 a short expression for a more complicated state of affairs, it 

 expresses a true element of nature." 



Then again later "our vitalistic or autonomous factor E con- 

 cerned in morphogenesis" is named "Entelechy," p. 144. But 

 Driesch's Entelechy does seem to me to be a more complex con- 

 ception than that of a "true element of nature" or a form of energy 

 in any way comparable to the single physical forces. It is a 



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