Page:W. H. Chamberlin 1919, The Study of Philosophy.djvu/19

Rh mechanistically explained, as a preparation for the evolutionary process. By this I mean to say it resembles adaptation.”

When one who is learning to express himself by means of language has an interest sufficiently stable to maintain the effort to adjust until his elementary habits become organized to his satisfaction, he slowly becomes able to pronounce words and sentences. By practice he can make his newly won powers to utter those words or sentences become automatic or habitual, so that the use both of such powers of uttering words and, of course, of the included elementary sounds, becomes an unconscious accompaniment of his expression of his interests. This also applies to the correlation of words in forms that even involve temporal elements, as in a familiar song. And so in nature everywhere organic forms are being organized out of the elements, and the movement or arrangement of these elements and of their accompanying forces is controlled by the efforts put forth in the realization of interests. If the interests so achieved are often repeated so as to become automatized or habitual, the organic form becomes fixed, capable of description as a species, and henceforth arises automatically.

This control of the inorganic elements by automatized interests or ends may well be illustrated by the development of the embryos of animals. Take for an exceptional example the egg of a sea-urchin. The cells of the embryos of the sea—urchin, viewed abstractly, are equi-potential with respect to their power to develop into the adult form. A change in one part of the developing embryo takes place with reference to changes going on in other parts and involve such changes in the organism as a whole that a definite adult form is the outcome. It is as if this final form were a pattern which in some way controls the process of organization from the beginning. The zoologist Driesch calls these automatized interests or ends which he cannot fully describe in terms of sensory forms and changes, but which he must postulate in order to account for the sensory forms and changes which he does percieve, entelechies.

The same control and the same organization of inorganic elements by interests which have resulted in a stable organization of habits so that a definite set of organic changes and a specific organic form results automatically is everywhere illustrated in the development of plant forms. The Bryophyllum Calycinum is a unique example. If a leaf of this plant is cast upon a favorable soil any cell in its surface may, if stimulated to action, grow into the perfect adult form. Every case of developing organic forms illustrates the same subordination of the dynamic powers or habits supporting our experience of the inorganic elements to interests that develop automatically, like the words or tones of a