Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 19, 2025
For I maintain that all the Souls, Entelechies or primitive forces, substantial forms, simple substances, or Monads, whatever name one may apply to them, can neither spring up naturally nor perish. And the qualities or derivative forces, or what are called accidental forms, I take to be modifications of the primitive Entelechy, even as shapes are modifications of matter.
I have shown elsewhere that the notion of Entelechy is not altogether to be scorned, and that, being permanent, it carries with it not only a mere faculty for action, but also that which is called 'force', 'effort', 'conatus', from which action itself must follow if nothing prevents it.
Since the requirements of a new science would not allow a return to sheer scholasticism, it was necessary to find a fresh philosophy, in which entelechy and mechanism might be accommodated side by side.
Such forms of being would all be unpalatable to him, even if conventionally called higher, because their body was larger, and their soul more complex. Nor would divine perfection itself be in any sense perfection unless it gave expression to some definite nature, the entelechy either of the celestial spheres, or of scientific thought, or of some other actual existence.
For the mechanists are undoubtedly right in this, that “entelechy,” “the idea of the whole,” “co-operation,” “guidance,” “psychical factors,” and the like, are only names for riddles, and do not in themselves constitute knowledge.
At each moment it has its fixed and determinate entelechy, the ideal of that being's life, based on his instincts, summed up in his character, brought to a focus in his reflection, and shared by all who have attained or may inherit his organisation.
Thought is an entelechy, an organic whole, in which every process conditions and is conditioned by every other. If we begin with sensation, the sensation, blank as regards predication, has relations to that which is infinitely real, the object, the real thing before us, which relations science will never exhaust.
Human nature, in the sense in which it is the transcendental foundation of all science and morals, is a functional unity in each man; it is no general or abstract essence, the average of all men's characters, nor even the complex of the qualities common to all men. It is the entelechy of the living individual, be he typical or singular.
This first entelechy is what we should call life, since it is possessed by a man asleep. The French I know but do not use is in its first entelechy; the French I am actually speaking is in its second.
What the author would seem to mean by his statement is this: "I am convinced myself that we can do without a 'supernatural' explanation, and I regard as 'unscientific' any explanation which cannot be put to the test of chemistry and physics; hence I must shut the door on anything like an entelechy, and, that being so, it behoves me to look for some other explanation."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking