phénomènes de la Vie[1], and abides in much of modern physiology[2]. Inherited from Hegel, it dominated Oken's Naturphilosophie and lingered among his later disciples, who were wont to liken the course of organic evolution not to the straggling branches of a tree, but to the building of a temple, divinely planned, and the crowning of it with its polished minarets[3].
It is retained, somewhat crudely, in modern embryology, by those who see in the early processes of growth a significance "rather prospective than retrospective," such that the embryonic phenomena must be "referred directly to their usefulness in building the body of the future animal[4]":—which is no more, and no less, than to say, with Aristotle, that the organism is the τέλος, or final cause, of its own processes of generation and development. It is writ large in that Entelechy[5] which Driesch rediscovered, and which he made known to many who had neither learned of it from Aristotle, nor studied it with Leibniz, nor laughed at it with Voltaire. And, though it is in a very curious way, we are told that teleology was "refounded, reformed or rehabilitated[6]" by Darwin's theory of natural selection, whereby "every variety of form and colour was urgently and absolutely called upon to produce its title to existence either as an active useful agent, or as a survival" of such active usefulness in the past. But in this last, and very important case, we have reached a "teleology" without a τέλος,
- ↑ Cf. p. 162. "La force vitale dirige des phénomènes qu'elle ne produit pas: les agents physiques produisent des phénomènes qu'ils ne dirigent pas."
- ↑ It is now and then conceded with reluctance. Thus Enriques, a learned and philosophic naturalist, writing "della economia di sostanza nelle osse cave" (Arch. f. Entw. Mech. XX, 1906), says "una certa impronta di teleologismo quà e là è rimasta, mio malgrado, in questo scritto."
- ↑ Cf. Cleland, On Terminal Forms of Life, J. Anat. and Phys. XVIII, 1884.
- ↑ Conklin, Embryology of Crepidula, Journ. of Morphol. XIII, p. 203, 1897; Lillie, F. R., Adaptation in Cleavage, Woods Holl Biol. Lectures, pp. 43–67, 1899.
- ↑ I am inclined to trace back Driesch's teaching of Entelechy to no less a person than Melanchthon. When Bacon (de Augm. IV, 3) states with disapproval that the soul "has been regarded rather as a function than as a substance," R. L. Ellis points out that he is referring to Melanchthon's exposition of the Aristotelian doctrine. For Melanchthon, whose view of the peripatetic philosophy had long great influence in the Protestant Universities, affirmed that, according to the true view of Aristotle's opinion, the soul is not a substance, but an ἑντελέχεια, or function. He defined it as δύναμις quaedam ciens actiones—a description all but identical with that of Claude Bernard's "force vitale."
- ↑ Ray Lankester, Encycl. Brit. (9th ed.), art. "Zoology," p. 806, 1888.
