Goethe once said, that even in so-called facts there is more “theory” than is usually granted; he apparently was thinking of what might be called the ultimate or the typical facts in science. It is with such typical or ultimate facts, of course, that we must become acquainted if our future philosophy is to be of profit to us. Certainly, there would be nothing to prevent us from arranging our materials in a manner exactly the reverse of that which we shall adopt; we could begin with a general principle about the organic, and could try to deduce all its special features from that principle, and such a way perhaps would seem to be the more fascinating method of argument. But though logical it would not be psychological, and therefore would be rather unnatural. And thus our *most* general principle about the organic will not come on the scene before the eighteenth of these twenty lectures, although it is not a mere inference or deduction from the former lectures: it will be a culmination of the whole, and we shall appreciate its value the better the more we know what that whole really is. GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE ORGANIC FORM Our programme of this year, it was said, is to be devoted wholly to organic forms, though one of its appendixes, dealing with some characteristics of the physiology of metabolism, will lead us on to a few other phenomena. What then are the essentials of a living form, as commonly understood even without a special study of biology? Living bodies are not simple geometrical forms, not, like crystals, merely a typical arrangement of surfaces in space, to be reduced theoretically, perhaps, to an arrangement of molecules. Living bodies are typically combined forms; that is to say, they consist of simpler parts of different characters, which have a special arrangement with regard to one another; these parts have a typical form of their own and may again be combinations of more simple different parts. But besides that, living bodies have not always the same typically combined form during the whole of their life: they become more complicated as they grow older; they all begin from one starting point, which has little form at all, viz., the egg. So the living form may be called a “genetic form,” or a form considered as a process, and therefore *morphogenesis* is the proper and adequate term for the science which deals with the laws of organic forms in general; or, if you prefer not to use the same word both for a science and for the subjects of that science, the *physiology of morphogenesis*.