November 26, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



763 



pret the causal processes at work in those 

 living beings below us in the scale of com- 

 plexity and behind us in the evolutionary 

 order. Bunge says: 



The essence of vitalism consists in this, that 

 we follow the one correct road to knowledge, that 

 which starts from the known of the inner world 

 in order to arrive at the unknown of the outer 

 world. Mechanistic theories follow the opposite 

 and misleading course — they set out from the 

 unknown in order to arrive at the known. 

 Johannes Miiller in his doctoral dissertation de- 

 fended the thesis psychologus nemo nisi physi- 

 ologus. The time will come when the contrary 

 thesis, physiologus nemo nisi psychologus, will 

 need no defender. 



Of this type of vitalism Strecker's book is 

 representative; it urges the necessity of re- 

 versing the customary logical procedure of 

 biology, of " beginning with man, in whom the 

 causation of development is now going on, 

 and reading riichwarts nach dem Primitiven 

 that which we find in man, namely, the proc- 

 esses of inner life." Similar views have been 

 elaborated by Pauly, in his " Darwinismus 

 und Lamarckismus." The oddest outcome of 

 this tendency is the production by France of 

 a system of " plant-psychology," expressed 

 most fully in his " Das Leben der Pflanze," 

 1905, 190Y, and in papers in his magazine. 

 Though this certainly has a queer sound, it is 

 not quite so grotesque as may be supposed. 

 The doctrine of Pauly and France, at least, is 

 merely a kind of Lamarckism, with the poten- 

 tial animistic elements in the Lamarckian 

 conception of " needs " very much emphasized. 



Over against these stand such vitalists as 

 Driesch, Reinke, K. C. Schneider, who find 

 the doctrines just mentioned reprehensibly 

 anthropomorphic. But in their flight from 

 the hobgoblin of anthropomorphism, some of 

 these theorists fall into the arms of what — to 

 the average biologist unaccustomed to them — 

 will seem monsters of still more frightful 

 mien. Driesch, for instance, having, as he be- 

 lieves, proven that such phenomena as morpho- 

 genesis, restitution and purposive behavior, 

 have a teleological character not to be ex- 

 plained by the operation of any of the forces 

 or entities ordinarily recognized by science. 



feels obliged to assume the existence of cer- 

 tain non-physical, but also non-conscious, 

 agents for these effects. By culling diligently 

 in scattered places in Driesch's second volume, 

 one may gather the following list of the attri- 

 butes of these agents, generally called 

 " entelechies " (or, collectively, " entelechy ") : 

 (1) They are not in space; (2) they are not 

 quantitative ; (3) they are, therefore, not forms 

 of energy ; (4) they have " in no case anything 

 of a psychical nature," though metaphorically 

 or " by analogy " they may be said to know 

 and will — a figurative mode of speech to 

 which, it should be noted, their discoverer is 

 himself much addicted; (5) they seem to be 

 capable of seK-multiplication — for " the pri- 

 mordial entelechy of the egg creates derived 

 entelechies"; (6) their function is not to 

 cause in the organism chemical reactions 

 which otherwise would not occur, but only 

 " to suspend for as long a time as (they) want 

 any one or all of the reactions which are pos- 

 sible with such compounds as are present, and 

 which would happen " if the entelechy did not 

 intervene; (7) this function they probably per- 

 form, not by acting directly upon ordinary 

 processes of chemical union, but by " activa- 

 ting " certain catalytic agents, which are the 

 physically perceptible instruments of their 

 teleological control. Such are entelechies in 

 general; they are divided into two principal 

 classes with distinctive habits; namely, 

 morphogenetic agents and behavior-directing 

 agents, the latter specifically known as 

 " psychoids." Even these last are not con- 

 scious; they only accompany consciousness. 

 For Driesch has a curious psycho-psychoidal 

 parallelism of his own, quite distinct from the 

 usual psycho-physical parallelism. It is not 

 clear just how Driesch's entelechies differ from 

 Eeinke's " dominants," except that the dom- 

 inants seem to be more numerous. Both form 

 hierarchies somewhat like that of the German 

 army. Neither sort of agent either creates or 

 nullifies energy; both Eeinke and Driesch are 

 very solicitous to avoid conflict with the first 

 principle of energetics, though they show less 

 deference to other physical principles that ap- 

 pear empirically to be equally well grounded. 



