alien substances of the inorganic world, eliminates their mineral entelechies and utilizes their components and energies for its own purposes. The soul or vital entelechy, therefore, is more powerful than the entelechies of inorganic units which it supplants. It turns the forces of living matter _inward_, so that the living organism becomes capable of _self-regulation_ and of striving for the attainment of self-perfection. It is this _reflexive orientation_ of all energies towards self-perfection that is the unique characteristic of the living being, and not the nature of the energies themselves. The energies by which vital functions are executed are the ordinary physicochemical energies, but it is the vital entelechy or soul which elevates them to a higher plane of efficiency and renders them capable of reflexive or vital action. There is, in short, no such thing as a special vital force. The radical difference between living and non-living units does not consist in the possession or non-possession of an entelechy, nor yet in the peculiar nature of the forces displayed in the execution of vital functions, but solely in the orientation of these forces towards an inner finality. § 7. The Definition of Life Life, then, may be defined as the capacity of reflexive or self-perfective action. In any action, we may distinguish four things: (1) the agent, or source of the action; (2) the activity or internal determination differentiating the agent in the active state from the selfsame agent in the inactive state; (3) the patient or receptive subject; (4) the effect or change produced in the patient by the agent. Let us suppose that a boy named Tom kicks a door. Here Tom is the agent, the muscular contraction in his leg is the activity, the door is the patient or recipient, while the dent produced in the door is the effect or change of which the action is a production. In this action, the effect is produced not in the cause or agent, but in a patient outside of, and distinct from, the agent, and the otherness of cause and effect is consequently complete. Such an action is termed transitive, which is the characteristic type of physicochemical action. In another class of actions, however, (those, namely, that are peculiar to living beings) the otherness of cause and effect is only partial and relative. When the agent becomes ultimately the recipient of the effect or modification wrought by its own activity, that is, when the positive change produced by the action remains within the agent itself, the action is called immanent or reflexive action. Since, however, action and passion are opposites, they can coëxist in the same subject only upon condition that said subject is differentiated into partial otherness, that is, organized into a plurality of distinct and dissimilar parts or components, one of which may act upon another. Hence only the organized unit or organism, which combines unity or