June 16, 1911] 



SCIENCE 



931 



Thus the bringing in of entelechy as a de- 

 terminer is at most a pad to soften the experi- 

 menter's fall; a way of distracting his atten- 

 tion for a moment from the dolorous fact that 

 his method of work has failed. It merely puts 

 off for one single step the admission that the 

 principle on which experimental investigation 

 is based breaks down when applied to biology. 

 Physical science and vitalistic science are 

 then distinguished by a fundamental differ- 

 ence in the principles of investigation, of the 

 highest practical consequence. 



Some attempts are made to console the bio- 

 logical experimenter for this difficulty; to 

 make light of the difference in investigation 

 in the two fields. Professor Lovejoy comforts 

 us by saying that, in the case of the develop- 

 mental processes on which Drieseh partly 

 bases his argument, you could " if you go back 

 to an early enough stage in the given se- 

 quence of processes " find " perfectly definite, 

 perceptible and experimentally ascertainable 

 constant antecedents " for the observed pro- 

 cedure; this in view of the fact that men do 

 not gather figs of thistles, nor whales of sea 

 urchin's eggs; to get a given type of adult 

 you must at least have the egg of that type. 

 Thus only that immense field of developmental 

 processes which lies between the egg and the 

 adult would be exempted from experimental 

 determinism! This might yield some solace 

 to those whose life work does not lie in this 

 field, were it not that Lovejoy quite leaves out 

 of account Driesch's arguments and conclu- 

 sions for the other fields of animal activities, 

 particularly for behavior. In behavior, ac- 

 cording to Driesch's vitalism, what the animal 

 does depends as much on the non-physical 

 entelechy as it does in development, and yet 

 there is no single type toward which each act 

 tends.^ 



^ Thus Professor Lovejoy can not be followed 

 when he states that "All that Drieseh maintains 

 is that such a [morphogenetic] process once 

 started continues toward its normal consummation 

 even if, after the start, some of the usual ma- 

 chinery instrumental to the consummation is lost 

 and the rest has to redistribute and redifferentiate 

 itself in order to keep things moving in the cus- 

 tomary manner." This is only one of the ob- 



Again, some have assured the writer that we 

 may accept this kind of vitalism and still go 

 ahead with our work just as if experimental 

 determinism still held; that in fact cases 

 where it doesn't hold probably occur only 

 under rare and recondite conditions, which we 

 may never meet. This vitalism, reserved like 

 the religion of some individuals for Sunday 

 consumption only, receives no encouragement 

 from any close examination of vitalistic 

 theory. Taking as an example Driesch's work- 

 ing out, we find that we may expect the vital- 

 istic factor to show its action continually in 

 all sorts of work with living things. Accord- 

 ing to Drieseh the precise work of the vital- 

 istic factor is to " suspend for as long a period 

 as it wants any one of all the reactions that 

 are possible with such compounds as are pres- 

 ent, and which would happen without entele- 

 chy. And entelechy may regulate this sus- 

 pending of reactions now in one direction and 

 now in the other, suspending and permitting 

 possible becoming whenever required for its 

 purpose. . . . This faculty of a temporary sus- 

 pension of inorganic becoming is to be re- 

 garded as the essential ontological character- 

 istic of entelechy." " That is, when there are 

 in juxtaposition a number of substances 

 which, according to purely chemical laws, 

 would interact, giving certain results, entele- 

 chy may (or may not) interfere, preventing 

 the union of certain of these, until the result- 

 ing products are determined by those that 

 have been allowed to interact. Thus from the 

 same mixture of chemicals we shall get some- 

 times one product, sometimes another (de- 

 pending on the purposes of entelechy) ; the 

 variety of results thus obtainable from a given 

 complex is of course very great. Now, all liv- 

 ing things are complexes of great numbers of 



served facts on which Drieseh bases his vitalistic 

 theory; he has published an entire book on vital- 

 ism in behavior, and a large proportion of ' ' The 

 Science and Philosophy of the Organism" is de- 

 voted to the same subject. One gets a very inade- 

 quate idea of the real nature of his theory by 

 supposing it limited to morphogenesis; his con- 

 clusions reach far beyond this. 



^' ' ' The Science and Philosophy of the Organ- 

 ism," II., 180. 



