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THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. XLYII 



ferent principles for explaining what occurs in them from 

 those employed in the inorganic ; maintaining that in ex- 

 plaining movements consciousness must be substituted 

 on the same footing of effectiveness for physical deter- 

 mining factors. Finalistic vitalism makes a similar 

 claim for the employment of the end or purpose of a 

 process, in explaining what happens. 



In regard to both these doctrines, it appears that we 

 are confronted with the same dilemma that we meet in 

 other cases. Either for all diversities in physical action 

 we can find antecedent physical diversities which are 

 uniformly connected with the succeeding ones, so as to 

 furnish a causal explanation for the latter, or we can not. 

 In the former case a complete account or explanation of 

 the processes can be given on the same principles as in 

 all experimental science, so that there is no ground for 

 separating off these processes in a special division of 

 science. In the latter case we fall again into physical 

 and experimental indeterminism ; from the same phys- 

 ical conditions diverse physical results may follow, de- 

 pending upon diversities in some factor not physical. 

 This I should admit to be valid vitalism; it illustrates 

 the way a vitalistic argument appears to wind up almost 

 i ncvit;il>ly ,-it experimental indeterminism. 



F. Vitalism Based on the Doctrine that a Non-per- 

 ceptual Agent Takes an Active Part in the 

 Processes in Living Things, Altering 

 what the Perceptual Conditions 

 Alone would Produce 



35. The doctrine that a non-perceptual vital agent (as 

 consciousness, purpose, entelechy) actively intervenes 

 in the processes of organisms is at once the archetype 

 and culmination of vitalistic doctrine; the one fully 

 worked out exemplar of this type is the system of Driesch. 



36. My analysis leads me to agree fully with Driesch 

 that only by such active or dynamic vitalism is a real dif- 

 ference in principle made between the science of the oc- 



