Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/99

Rh held that the material and moving causes yield no adequate conception of the organism, so biology today inclines to hold that no adequate description of the living organism can be framed in categories of "matter" and "energy."

Phrases change; and thinking takes a new direction from the new phrase and seems to flow in untried channels. The old phrase becomes an alien. Few of us today could bring ourselves to accept eo nomine the —the soul or, if one will, the organic life in its ascending scale,—as the entelechy, to wit, "the form or actuality of a natural body having in it the capacity of life." More specifically, the is the "first entelechy," or actuality, standing as knowledge stands to the exercise of knowledge in speculation. This "soul" is the formative principle of the body and the body's end or final cause, even as speculative activity is the soul's final end.

Such statements are not of our time. Yet perhaps they are not so far from our intellectual purposes. Do we not think that all the sciences, including those having to do with organisms, contribute to the soul which is life,