in degree of complication and subtlety of contrivance? And if an animal's
body, say my own, is simply an agglomerate of minute interacting material
units, and its wholeness is merely accidental and apparent, how is my
conscious mind to be adjusted to it? For my consciousness appears to
identify itself with that whole vital pattern which used to be called the
substantial form. We are now told that the pattern is nothing real or
active, but the mere accidental resultant of distinct interacting forces:
it does no work, it exercises no influence or control, it _is_ nothing. How
then can it be the vehicle and instrument of my conscious soul? It cannot.
Then is my soul homeless? Or is it to be identified with the activity and
fortunes of a single atomic constituent of my body, a single cog in the
animal clockwork? If so, how irrational! For the soul does not experience
itself as the soul of one minute part, but as the soul of the body.

Such questions rose thick and fast in the minds of the seventeenth-century
philosophers. It will cause us no great surprise that Leibniz should have
quickly felt that the Formal Principle of Aristotle and of the Scholastic
philosophy must be by hook or by crook reintroduced--not as the detested
_substantial form_, but under a name by which it might hope to smell more
sweet, _entelechy_.

Nothing so tellingly revealed the difficulties of the new philosophy in[19]
dealing with living bodies as the insufficiency of the solutions Descartes
had proposed. He had boldly declared the unity of animal life to be purely
mechanical, and denied that brutes had souls at all, or any sensation. He
had to admit soul in man, but he still denied the substantial unity of the
human body. It was put together like a watch, it was many things, not one:
if Descartes had lived in our time, he would have been delighted to compare
it with a telephone system, the nerves taking the place of the wires, and
being so arranged that all currents of 'animal spirit' flowing in them