July 21, 1911] 



SCIENCE 



79 



of whose parts performs its specific function, 

 in relation to the action of the whole, only hy 

 virtue of its composition and its spatial rela- 

 tions to the other parts; thus, if those rela- 

 tions are sensibly altered, the whole will no 

 longer function in its original manner. If 

 this were true of organisms, their action 

 would, in Driesch's sense, be " mechanical," 

 even though the law of the action of the 

 parts were not deducible from any law of 

 inorganic mechanics.' But since some or all 

 organisms are, at least to some extent, har- 

 monious equipotential systems, their action is 

 not mechanical in either sense — such is the 

 essence of the argument. " It must be 

 granted that a machine, as we understand the 

 word, might very well be the motive force of 

 organogenesis in general, if only normal, that 

 is to say, only undisturbed development took 

 place, and a taking away of parts of our 

 system led to f ragmental development." * 



In all this argument for the non-mechanical 

 nature of organic phenomena there is nothing 

 whatever that necessarily " exempts from ex- 

 perimental determinism . . . that immense 

 field of developmental processes which lies be- 

 tween the egg and the adult," or that neces- 

 sarily nullifies the experimentalist's postulate 

 that " when two cases differ in any respect 

 there will always be found a preceding differ- 

 ence to which the present difference is (experi- 

 mentally) due." The argument (whatever its 

 worth) does not imply that different effects 

 have the same antecedents; it implies only 

 that, in an individual organism, the same type 

 of effect (namely, the typical form of the 

 species) may follow from different antecedents 

 — the relation between the two sets of antece- 

 dents being such as to reveal the non-mechan- 

 ical character of the action of both. It is 

 surprising that this, of itself, should be re- 

 garded as violating the rule of causal uni- 

 formity, since that rule notoriously does not 



' Drieseh himself does not seem to note the dis- 

 tinction here indicated, and accordingly frequently 

 speaks as if he were arguing merely for organic 

 autonomy in the ordinary sense. 



* ' ' Science and Philosophy of the Organism, ' ' 

 1908, I., 139. 



work both ways; the same effect (in the ordi- 

 nary sense) need not always have the same 

 cause. Even if entelechies are to be dragged 

 into the situation, indeterminism need not 

 follow, if only it be assumed (what nothing in 

 the hypothesis precludes) that an entelechy 

 always comes into action whenever a specific 

 material complex has been formed; and that 

 the occasions upon which, and the manner in 

 which, the entelechy determines the subse- 

 quent action of that complex are uniform." 

 I do not say that Drieseh himself clearly and 

 consistently adheres to this assumption; but 

 in so far as he departs from it, and gives 

 color to the charge of indeterminism, he in- 

 troduces a foreign element into his concep- 

 tion of a " harmonious equipotential system," 

 and confounds the second sort of vitalism 

 with yet a third essentially distinct one. And 

 this is one of the confusions which it is need- 

 ful to guard against in the discussion. 



4. Let me briefly revert in conclusion to 

 the original question concerning the meaning 

 to be assigned to the term vitalism. Professor 

 Jennings would apparently reserve that word 

 for indeterminist theories, on the ground that 

 these alone are likely to have much interest — 

 the interest of the repulsive — for " the man 

 of science at work with his two hands." It 

 does not seem quite clear that the limitations 

 of interest of even bimanous experimentalists 

 ought to be erected into a canon of lexicog- 

 raphy; yet one should welcome any canon 

 which will impose upon the terms used in the 

 discussion of vitalism single and definite and 

 constant meanings. It is of no importance 

 whether a given trisyllable denote one or an- 

 other doctrine; it is of some real importance 

 that it be not used indiscriminately to dis- 

 guise the real nature of several distinct doc- 

 trines, and that these doctrines themselves, 

 the distinctions between them, and their bear- 

 ings both theoretical and practical, be clearly 

 formulated and understood. So far as the 

 tendency of present technical usage is con- 



' This uniformity would not imply (as the hasty 

 reader may incline to suppose) that entelechy- 

 determined action and mechanical action would 

 be the same. 



