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Let us continue the quotation: "Since certain forms of adaptation which were formerly mysterious can now be explained without the assumption of an entelechy we are encouraged to hope that all forms may be thus explained." The author does not tell us what the mysterious adaptations are, nor does he offer us the explanations which, in his opinion, explain them.
This difference in rank is so strongly marked, that these two correlations are likewise conceived in a different form that of the potential and the actual. Matter is the potential, imperfect, roughly outlined element which is not yet actual, and may perhaps never become so. Form is the actual, the energy, the entelechy which actualises the potential and determines the final compound.
And having provisioned her well with store of meat and good drink, they set sail for the kingdom of Entelechy, where, having landed, they were kindly entreated; and there abide to this day; drinking of the sweet and eating of the fat, under the protection of that intellectual sphere which hath in all places its centre and nowhere its circumference.
For Aristotle it was the substantial form of the body the entelechy, but not a substance. And more than one modern has called it an epiphenomenon an absurd term. The appellation phenomenon suffices. Rationalism and by rationalism I mean the doctrine that abides solely by reason, by objective truth is necessarily materialist. And let not idealists be scandalized thereby.
Thus each and all, in so far as they realise their own well-being by the perfect development of the virtuous habit in their lives, contribute ipso facto to the supreme end of the state, which is the perfect realisation of the whole possibilities of the total organism, and consequently of every member of it. The State therefore is also an entelechy. For man is not made to dwell alone.
When in contact with the human body it partakes of the nature of other sublunar forms exhibiting its activity through matter and being inseparable from it. But it is not destroyed with the death of the body. It continues as a separate form after death. The soul, Aristotle defines as the first entelechy of the body.
We pass on to the next elimination: "Although its visible results are in a high degree purposeful, we may also exclude as unscientific the vitalistic theory of an entelechy or any other form of internal perfecting agency distinct from known or unknown physio-chemical energies."
In particular, he picked out the Aristotelian "entelechy" to stop a gap in the philosophy of his own age. What this form of statement ignores is that Leibniz was a scholastic: a scholastic endeavouring, like Descartes before him, to revolutionize scholasticism.
Its ultimate source is God himself, who is the ultimate perfection and the Good, and it emanates from him indirectly through the mediation of the separate Powers standing above it in the scale of emanation. The soul constitutes the first entelechy of a natural body." The above definition is interesting.
Thus life in an organism is at once the end and the middle and the beginning; it is the cause final, the cause formal, the cause efficient. Life then is an Entelechy, as Aristotle calls it, by which he means the realisation in unity of the total activities exhibited in the members of the living organism.
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