ed to us as isolated and uncoordinated
instances, is here definitely systematised according to their
characteristic peculiarities, and from the point of view of the increasing
distinctness of the "autonomy" of the processes. The system begins with
the active regulatory functions of living matter in the chemistry of
metabolism (see particularly the phenomena of immunisation), and ascends
through different stages up to the regulations of regeneration. There
could be no more impressive way of showing how little life and its
"regulations" can be compared to the "self-regulations" of machines, or to
the restoring of typical states of equilibrium and of form in the physical
and chemical domain, to which the mechanists are fond of referring.

The facts thus empirically brought together are then linked together in a
theory, and considered epistemologically. We may leave out of account all
that is included in the treatment of modern idealism,
immanence-philosophy, and solipsism. All this does not arise directly out
of the vitalistic ideas, though the latter are fitted into an idealistic
framework. Extremely vivid is the excursus on respiration and
assimilation. (All processes of building up and breaking down take place
within the organism under conditions notoriously different from those
obtaining in the laboratory. It is radically impossible to speak of a
living "substance" according to the formula CxHyOz, which assimilates and
disassimilates itself [sibi].) Excellent, too, are Driesch's remarks on
materialistic elucidations of inheritance and morphogenesis. It is quite
impossible to succeed with epigenetic speculations on a material basis
(_cf._ Haacke). Weismann is so far right, he admits, from his
materialistic premisses when he starts with preformations. But his theory,
and all others of the kind, can do nothing more than make an infinitely
small photograph of the difficulty. They "explain" the processes of
form-development and the regeneration of animals and plants, by
constructing infinitely small animals and plants, which develop their form
and regenerate lost parts. And Driesch holds it to be impossible to
distribute a complicated tectonic among the elements of an equipotential
system. In denying the materialistic theory of development, Driesch again
determinedly "traverses" his own earlier views. He does this, too, when he
now rejects the reconciliation between causality and teleology as
different modes of looking at th