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Updated: June 1, 2025
More comprehensively, but from a precisely similar standpoint, Driesch has followed up the discussion of this problem. He is, of all modern investigators, perhaps the one who has most persistently and thoroughly worked out the problem of causal and teleological interpretation, and he has also thrown much light on the scientific and epistemological aspects of the problem.
Oscar Hertwig, de Vries, Driesch and others attempt to reconcile the preformationist and the epigenetic standpoints, and “to extract what is good and usable out of both.” Hertwig and Driesch, however, can only be mentioned with reservations in this connection.
Dense gray clouds poured from the chimney and settled heavily upon the roof. And now she opened the door, the back door by the side of which was the brush pile; Widow Driesch came out, in one hand a box of matches and in the other an oil can.
When these two sets of cells, or some of them, exchange positions in the embryo, they exchange lines of development. The first set now form muscle, the second digestive tissue. The only change has been in their relative positions. Driesch maintains, therefore, that the goal of development in any embryonic cell is determined not by structure or nutriment but by position.
Wiping the profuse sweat from her brow and loosening a little the cotton kerchief about her lean and wrinkled throat, Katherine Driesch picked up another armful of brushwood from the chimney-corner, broke it in pieces over her knee, and stuffed all the pieces together into the jaws of the fireplace. It was almost ready to burst.
Some of the most distinguished of the German biologists of the present day, such men as Driesch and others, calmly tell us that the edifice erected by Darwin will have to come down because of newly discovered evidence, and indeed some of them go so far as to declare that Darwinism was a crude hypothesis very superficial in its philosophical aspects and therefore acceptable to a great many people who, because it was easy to understand and was very different from what our fathers had believed, hastened to accept it.
Associated with them is Reinke’s “Theory of Dominants.” Driesch started from their ranks, and is a most interesting example of consistent development from a recognition of the impossibilities of the mechanistic position to an individually thought-out vitalistic theory. Hertwig, too, takes a very definite position of his own in regard to these matters.
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 things. The teleological now seems to him itself a factor playing a part in the chain of causes, and thus making it teleological.
The vital processes compel us to admit that it seems “as if intelligence determined quality and order.” Driesch still tries to reconcile causes and purposes as different “modes of regarding things,” but this device he afterwards abandons. We cannot penetrate to the nature of things either by the causal or by the teleological method.
Only by recognising both can biology become a complete science. In the “Analytische Theorie der organischen Entwicklung” Driesch picks up the thread where he dropped it in the book before, and spins it farther, “traversing” his previous theoretical and experimental results.
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