No. 552] AUTONOMY OF BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 723 



teleology would never have entered the biologist's head 

 were he not himself a living thing. Since this is the case, 

 however, his interest in life exceeds all others, and he 

 attends to the processes that make life possible only be- 

 cause of their resultant. Inasmuch as the latter occu- 

 pies the focus of his mind, he wrongfully reasons back- 

 ward from results to processes, and finding in these none 

 that might have rendered the cherished product im- 

 possible, concludes that the processes were all along 

 aiming at what, from his standpoint, is the end. Clearly 

 the conclusion has only an anthropocentric basis. 



Postulate IV 

 The cause of this finality, in so far as the vitalists are 

 not agnostic, is (a) a psychical factor; (b) a metaphys- 

 ical factor. 



Since biological finality is an anthropomorphism, a 

 discussion of the supposed teleological factors is futile. 

 Inasmuch, however, as psycho-vitalism has its counter- 

 part in psycho-mechanism, the fallacy common to both 

 may be pointed out. 



(a) To reflect mind into the cell, and so reflected to 

 use it as an explanation of what the cell does, is the 

 method of primitive animism. Quite apart from the fact 

 that the existence of mind, so far, at least, has been dem- 

 onstrated only in the case of certain higher animals, but 

 not at all for the lower, or the developmental stages of 

 the higher, as an explanation it can have no title to 

 serious consideration since it is itself one of the elements 

 of the automatic self-preservation which it is the aim of 

 biology to analyze. To interpret something we do not 

 understand in terms of something else which at present 

 we understand even less, may give temporary comfort to 

 some minds, but the ideals of scientific explanation call 

 for the reverse process. 



(b) The difficulties of Driesch's style are such that 

 many biologists refuse to read his books. For this rea- 



