No:vEMBEB 15, 1912] 



SCIENCE 



673 



question; and to convey, accordingly, an er- 

 roneous impression both as ta what was said, 

 and as to what is the fact, concerning Pro- 

 fessor Driesch's view of the relation of vital- 

 ism to indeterminism. 



With respect to the article upon which he 

 animadverts, Jennings declares or plainly im- 

 plies : (1) that it purports to be an account of 

 Driesch's personal views concerning the rela- 

 tion of vitalism to " experimental indetermin- 

 ism," but that what it gives " is in reality an 

 exposition of the conclusions which Lovejoy 

 himself might draw from Driesch's data, as- 

 suming these to be the conclusions which 

 Driesch draws " ; (2) that in consequence of 

 this confusion the article erroneously main- 

 tained that Driesch is not an " experimental 

 indeterminist." Both these assertions require 

 correction. 



1. The article expressly distinguished be- 

 tween Driesch's actual views as a whole, and 

 the conclusions which I regard as properly 

 inferrible from a single one — ^though the most 

 emphasized and most characteristic one — of 

 his arguments. For the exposition of the 

 former I disclaimed responsibility, remarking 

 that I did " not wish to complicate the dis- 

 cussion with exegetical inquiries into the pre- 

 cise meaning of a rather difficult writer." 

 My discussion was explicitly limited to the 

 morphogenetic data brought together in " The 

 Science and Philosophy of the Organism," to 

 the exclusion of the arguments from animal 

 behavior, which are more markedly indeter- 

 ministic in their tendency. I endeavored to 

 point out the real " conclusions suggested by 

 Driesch's analysis of what is implied by the 

 totipotency of parts," etc., to show " all that 

 it logically need imply " ; and the reader was 

 definitely informed that these logically neces- 

 sary implications of Driesch's premises fall 

 short of the conclusions which he at times 

 deems himself entitled to draw. 



I do not say that Driesch himself clearly and 

 consistently adheres to this assumption [i. e., that 

 his entelechies, supposing them to exist, act in a 

 uniform manner and in correlation with specific 

 physico-ahemieal complexes] ; but in so far as he 



departs from it and gives color to the charge of 

 indeterminism, he introduces a foreign element 

 into his conception of a "harmonious equipo- 

 tential system," and confounds the second sort 

 of vitalism with yet a third essentially distinct one 

 [i. e., with experimental indeterminism]. And this 

 is one of the confusions which it is needful to 

 guard against in the discussion (p. 78). 



The reader of Jennings's recent letter would 

 certainly gather that I had failed to make this 

 distinction, and would never guess' that the 

 article under discussion contained such a 

 passage as that just cited. Jennings, in fact, 

 takes from the article sentences referring to 

 what I urged were the only proper inferences 

 from Driesch's premises, divorces these sen- 

 tences from their context, and cites them as 

 evidences of my misconception of the actual 

 and total position personally held by Driesch. 

 He quotes, for example, the phrase " a closer 

 scrutiny of the doctrine's implications," etc.; 

 the " doctrine " here referred to is not, as he 

 assumes, Driesch's entire system of vitalism, 

 but a more limited doctrine, formally defined 

 in the preceding paragraph.^ In two other 

 cases Jennings cites disconnected sentences 

 and assigns the demonstrative pronouns in 

 them to antecedents other than those intended. 



2. It is, however, true that two passages in 

 the article referred directly to Driesch's actual 

 position. One of these, already quoted, con- 

 sisted in the admission that Driesch in fact, 

 though without warrant from his premises, at 

 times construes his vitalism as equivalent to 

 experimental indeterminism. The other was 

 an ohiter dictum: "though I think Jennings 

 misconceives Driesch's position in ascribing to 

 him a wholesale ' experimental indetermin- 

 ism,' I do not wish," etc. Against this Pro- 

 fessor Jennings now quotes letters from Pro- 

 fessor Driesch in which the latter frankly calls 

 himself an experimental indeterminist. Since 

 I had elsewhere in the article noted that he 



^ It was to this kind of vitalism, as defined in 

 my earlier paper — "the second kind of vitalism 

 distinguished by Lovejoy" — as well as to 

 Driesch's personal doctrine, that Jennings in his 

 previous article imputed indeterministic implica- 

 tions (Science, June 16, 1911, pp. 927-28). 



