No kind of causality based upon the constellations of single physical and chemical acts can account for organic individual development; this development is not to be explained by any hypothesis about configuration of physical and chemical agents. Therefore there must be something else which is to be regarded as the sufficient reason of individual form-production. We now have got the answer to our question, what our constant E consists in. It is not the resulting action of a constellation. It is not only a short expression for a more complicated state of affairs, it expresses a true element of nature. Life, at least morphogenesis, is not a specialised arrangement of inorganic events; biology, therefore, is not applied physics and chemistry: life is something apart, and biology is an independent science.
All our results at present, indeed, are negative in their form; our evidence was throughout what is called per exclusionem, or indirect or apagogic. There were excluded from a certain number of possibilities all except one; a disjunctive proposition was stated in the form: E is either this, or that, or the other, and it was shown that it could not be any of all these except one, therefore it was proved to be that one. Indeed, I do not see how natural science could argue otherwise; no science dealing with inorganic phenomena does; something new and elemental must always be introduced whenever what is known of other elemental facts is proved to be unable to explain the facts in a new field of investigation.
We shall not hesitate to call by its proper name what we believe we have proved about morphogenetic phenomena. What we have proved to be true has always been called vitalism, and so it may be called in our days again. But if you think a new and less ambitious term to be better for it, let us style it the doctrine of the autonomy of life, as proved at least in the field of morphogenesis. I know very well that the word “autonomy” usually means the faculty of giving laws to oneself, and that in this sense it is applied with regard to a community of men; but in our phrase autonomy is to signify the being subjected to laws peculiar to the phenomena in question. This meaning is etymologically defensible, and besides that I perhaps may remind you of a certain chapter of Professor Ward’s Gifford Lectures, in which he holds the view that, psychologically and epistemologically, there is more than a mere verbal relation between the civil and the natural “law.”
Vitalism then, or the autonomy of life, has been proved by us indirectly, and cannot be proved otherwise so long as we follow the lines of ordinary scientific reasoning. There can indeed be a sort of direct proof of vitalism, but now is not the time to develop this proof, for it is not of the purely scientific character, not so naïve as our present arguments are, if you choose to say so. An important part of our lectures next summer will be devoted to this direct proof.
“Entelechy”
But shall we not give a name to our vitalistic or autonomous factor E, concerned in morphogenesis? Indeed we will, and it was not without design that we chose the letter E to represent it provisionally. The great father of systematic philosophy, Aristotle, as many of you will know, is also to be regarded as the founder of theoretical biology. Moreover, he is the first vitalist in history, for his theoretical biology is throughout vitalism; and a very conscious vitalism indeed, for it grew up in permanent opposition to the dogmatic mechanism maintained by the school of Democritus.
Let us then borrow our terminology from Aristotle, and let that factor in life phenomena which we have shown to be a factor of true autonomy be called Entelechy, though without identifying our doctrine with what Aristotle meant by the word έντελέχεια. We shall use this word only as a sign of our admiration for his great genius; his word is to be a mould which we have filled and shall fill with new contents. The etymology of the word ἐντελέχεια allows us such liberties, for indeed we have shown that there is at work a something in life phenomena “which bears the end in itself,” ὃ ἔχει ἐν ἑαυτᾣ τὸ τέλος.
Our concept of entelechy marks the end of our analysis of individual morphogenesis. Morphogenesis, we have learned, is “epigenesis” not only in the descriptive but also in the theoretical sense: manifoldness in space is produced where no manifoldness was, real “evolutio” is limited to rather insignificant topics. But was there nothing “manifold” previous to morphogenesis? Nothing certainly of an extensive character, but there was something else: there was entelechy, and thus we may provisionally call entelechy an “intensive manifoldness.” That then is our result: not evolutio, but epigenesis—“epigenesis vitalistica.”
Some General Remarks on Vitalism
We now shall leave entelechy where it stands: next summer we shall turn back to it and shall make its full logical and ontological analysis our chief study. At present we are satisfied with having proved its existence in nature, with having laid some of the foundations of a doctrine to be based upon it. I hope that these foundations will evince themselves strong: that is all-important.[65] It indeed has been the fault of all vitalism in the past that it rested on weak foundations. Therefore the discussion of the basis underlying our doctrine of the autonomy of life is to occupy us still a considerable time. We shall devote to it two more of this year’s lectures and three of the next; we shall examine all sorts of phenomena of life in order to find out if there are any further proofs of vitalism, independent perhaps, of what we way call our first proof, which is based upon the analysis of the differentiation of harmonious-equipotential systems. We shall find some more independent proofs; and besides that we shall find many kinds of phenomena upon which future times perhaps may erect more of such independent proofs.