But this presumption can never be proved; it can only be postulated. It therefore is only with this postulate that our first proof of vitalism holds; but this restriction applies to every law of nature.
I cannot force you to agree with this postulate: but if you decline you are practically saying that there exists a sort of pre-established harmony between the scientific object and the scientist, the scientist always getting into his hands such objects only as have been predestinated from the very beginning to develop two larvae instead of one, and so on.
Of course, if that is so, no proof of natural laws is possible at all; but nature under such views would seem to be really dæmonic.
And so, I hope, you will grant me the postulate of the universality of scientific concepts—the only “hypothesis” which we need for our argument.
4. On Certain other Features of Morphogenesis Advocating its Autonomy
Our next studies on the physiology of form will be devoted in the first place to some additional remarks about our harmonious-equipotential systems themselves, and about some other kinds of morphogenetic “systems” which show a certain sort of relationship with them. For it is of the greatest importance that we should become as familiar as possible with all those facts in the physiology of form upon the analysis of which are to be based almost all of the future theories that we shall have to develop in biology proper and philosophical. Our discussions, so far as they relate to questions of actual fact, will contain only one other topic of the same importance.
But though it is designed to complete and to deepen our analysis, the present considerations may yet be said to mark a point of rest in the whole of our discussions: we have followed one single line of argumentation from the beginning until now; this line or this stream of thought, as you might call it, is now to break into different branches for a while, as if it had entered from a rocky defile into a plain. It seems to me that such a short rest will be not unconducive to a right understanding of all we have made out; and such a full and real conceiving again, such a realising of our problems of morphogenesis and their solutions, will be the best preparation for the philosophical part of these lectures.
HARMONIOUS-EQUIPOTENTIAL SYSTEMS FORMED BY WANDERING CELLS