ABSTRACT
The problem of mechanism and vitalism may be regarded as single, but it is certainly far from simple. The principle of the autonomy of life, then, means the right to use in biology teleological concepts. The principle of the autonomy of life, as here interpreted, means, not vitalism, but teleology - and teleology as compatible with, but logically dominant over, mechanism in biology. Moreover, prediction owes its prominence in the discussion of mechanism and vitalism to the fact that the relation of biology to physics and chemistry, or of organic to inorganic processes. The biologist is interested in the study of living things, and hence finds it convenient to divide all things in nature into those which are living and those which are non-living. But a unified theory of nature does not require the reduction of all universals to one kind, or the restriction of all variables to one type of values.
