Hans Driesch

From THE PROBLEM OF KNOWLEDGE, 1940 by Ernst Cassirer

Driesch began . . . with a comprehensive study of the phenomena of regeneration and regulation¹⁶ but soon drew some conclusions that led him far more deeply into metaphysics than ever had been the case before, within the confines of empirical research, during the nineteenth century. His experiments on the eggs of the sea urchin constituted the point of departure, but he ventured at once upon a very bold explanation. The results of experiment had shown that perfectly normal organisms could develop from embryos which had suffered from very severe injury produced by the experiment : thus when the embryo was bisected an entirely normal larva of half size developed, and when embryos were crushed between glass plates so as to disarrange their cells completely, the wholly abnormal positional relationships did not necessarily exclude the formation of a normal, whole organism. No confusion resulted in the system. The embryo with misplaced cells remained an autonomous whole, and followed the usual course of development undisturbed.¹⁷ The conclusion drawn was that since the formative power at work is not interfered with by division, separation, or displacement, it must be a �something� without spatial character and to which no definite position in space can be assigned, but Driesch hesitated to characterize this �something.� In earlier writings he had not scrupled to call it frankly a �soul,� and to explain that the soul accordingly is an �elemental factor in nature.�¹⁸ Later he modified the expression, in order to avoid introducing the idea of a consciously purposeful activity and spoke not of a soul but of a something-like-a-soul, a �psychoid.� It was, of course, not a psyche but it could be spoken of only in such psychological terms. He found the most suitable expression finally in the Aristotelian concept of "entelechy," which now became for him the innermost key to the whole biological system of things. The entelechy is the formative power of the organism, different from the physicochemical forces and not to be set on the same level with them. All merely physical or chemical factors are but means employed by the organism ; they do not make life, though they are used by life and enlisted in its service. No machine of any kind and no sort of causality which depends upon spatial configurations can explain what is done daily and hourly by the organism. "Is it possible to imagine that a complex machine, unsymmetrical in the three planes of space, could be divided hundreds and hundreds of times and still remain intact?"¹⁹   (pp. 197-98)

16. Driesch. Die organischen Regulationen (Leipzig, W. Engelmann, 1901)
17. Driesch, "The Experiments on the Egg of the Sea-Urchin," The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, I, 59 ff.; trans. from the German, Die Philosophy des Organischen (1909).
18. Driesch, Die Seele als elementarer Naturfaktor (Leipzig, W. Engelmann, 1903).
19. Driesch. The Science . . . , II, 78 (German original, II, 78) ; see Der Vitalismus als Geschichte und als Lehre, S. 221.

 

. . . The "entelechy" is abstracted from the realm of spatial existence ; it is something not sensible but supersensible. As such it is, as Driesch himself often makes plain, first describable only in negative terms, and analysis leads to nothing but negative results. It is no "force, it is not an intensity, it is not a constant, it is just—'entelechy,'"²⁷ There is just as little hope of finding anything analogous to it in the realm of consciousness.
.  .  .  neither "entelechy" nor a "psychoid" can be represented in idea, for whatever is thus capable of representations really is spatial.²⁸

But this mere "system of negations" which Driesch, as a logical analyst, sought to display, changed for him as metaphysician into a positive system, and, even more, it became the ens realissimum, the most real of all being.   .   .   we must see in it the actual well-spring of nature, that in which "the power and seed of all activity" discloses itself.²⁹   (pp. 198-99)

27. Driesch. Philosophie des Organischen, II, S. 206 ff., 252, Eng. trans., pp. 204 ff., 250.
28. Ibid. S. 331, Eng. trans., p. 328 ; cf. Der Vitalismus . . . , S. 243.
29. Driesch, Philosophie des Organischen, II, 263 ff., Eng. trans., pp. 260 ff. ; Der Vitalismus . . . , S. 228 ff.

New Haven : Yale University Press,
London : Oxford University Press, 1950.