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THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. XL VII 



the so-called vitalistic doctrines set forth by Love joy. 

 This doctrine Lovejoy characterizes as follows: 



of organic autonomy, and declares that (in part) the action of living 

 bodies is not strict!,, a function of the number and spatial configuration 

 of the particles composing then, at any given instant. In other words, 

 organisms not only have unique laws of their own, but these laws can 

 not even be stated in terms of the number and arrangement of the organ- 

 It is the doctrine that certain vital phenomena are not dependent upon 



cell at the moments at which the phenomena take place "— /. c, that the 

 same phenomena occur in a given organism in spite of profound modi- 

 fications of the composition and configuration of the parts, through a 

 sort of redivision of labor and redistribution of functions among the 



22. Tn a former paper 14 I interpreted the proposition 

 quoted above, that the laws of organisms "can not even 

 be stated in terms of the number and arrangement of the 

 organism's physical components," as a statement of 

 Driesch's view, that the organism's physical components 

 fail to include the factors necessary for the determina- 

 tion of the diversities that occur, so that the same set of 

 perceptual components may act in different ways at dif- 

 ferent times (as determined, according to Driesch, by a 

 non-perceptual factor), thus giving experimental inde- 

 terminism. It appears, however, from the discussion in 

 Lovejoy 's later papers 15 that he meant merely the fact 

 "that the same phenomena occur in a given organism in 

 spite of profound modifications of the composition and 

 configuration of the parts." But this can be asserted 

 equally as a positive fact for both living and non-living. 

 With this interpretation we could in the first of the two 

 statements quoted above substitute "bodies" for "liv- 

 ing bodies," and have a proposition that holds for 

 things in general. An iron body of a certain form moves 

 toward the earth. We may change the form in most 



