636 THE WONDER OF LIFE 



and biology is an independent science '....' There is 

 something in the organism's behaviour — in the widest 

 sense of the word — which is opposed to an inorganic resolu- 

 tion of the same, and which shows that the living organism 

 is more than a sum or an aggregate of its parts. . . . This 

 something we call " Entelechy ".' 



Driesch conceives of ' Entelechy ' as ' an agent at work 

 in nature ', ' of a non-spatial nature ', without a seat or 

 locahzation ; it is unmaterial, and it is not energy ; it is 

 not inconsistent in its agency with the laws of energetics ; 

 its function is to suspend and set free, in a regulatory man- 

 ner, pre-existing potentials, i.e. pre-existing faculties of 

 inorganic interaction. 



Argument from Organic Evolution. — It is con- 

 venient to speak of ' cosmic evolution ', ' inorganic evolu- 

 tion ', ' the evolution of the solar system ', ' the evolution 

 of the earth ', ' the evolution of scenery ', and so on ; but 

 there is a risk of identifying processes which are really 

 very different. 



In biology it is usual to draw a distinction between the 

 two terms — development and evolution. Development 

 (Haeckel's ontogeny) is the becoming of the individual ; 

 Evolution (Haeckel's phylogeny) is the becoming of the 

 race. How do these agree and differ ? In both there is 

 a succession of stages, and the scientific assumption is that 

 each stage is conditioned by the preceding stages. In 

 development the continuity between successive stages is 

 one of personal identity ; it is the same organism from 

 start to finish, though, as we have seen in the chapter on 

 ' The Cycle of Life ', there are some apparent contradic- 

 tions. In racial evolution, however, the stages are physic- 

 ally discontinuous. Although we speak of the continuity 



