circumstances, it can develope into a living being; and so a seed, while alive, is capable of becoming a perfect living plant, as the egg or the caterpillar or the chrysalis is, in potentiality, the future perfect insect or butterfly. The terms comprehend, in fact, all the metamorphic conditions of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and have a range of application wide enough to include life under all degrees and forms. This was the first great idea in their adoption, and although Aristotle made them to signify an analogous transition in moral or mental faculties, (as when he speaks of a boy as a general, in potentiality,) yet their real purport is to distinguish those two universal conditions of living and sentient beings. Cicero[1] has alluded to these terms or rather to the entelechy, (as was noted in the preface,) but, from not having contrasted it with the potentiality, he seems to have mistaken its general import; and he may thus have been led to suppose that Aristotle's intention, in this novel term, was to designate a special fifth nature, to be the source of motion and the originating cause of mental faculties and natural emotions. Montaigne[2], also, in modern times, following Cicero, speaks of the entelechy only, which he regards, erroneously, as the motor power of the body — "ce qui naturellement fait mouvoir le corps." A hot dispute prevailed among scholars, it may be added, before and during the age of Rabelais[3],(and which he has alluded to
