[130] constellations which, according to the law of probability, has happened perhaps only once in five billion years; it couldn’t have happened more often. Now I would call such a theory absurd. LESS absurd is another theory which says: there was once upon a time a readiness of the inorganic matter to go over into organic forms by slow transitions, and perhaps such realities as viruses, which we have lately discovered, may have been transitory forms of this kind. Now this certainly is much more adequate to the law of scientific research which tries to avoid as many absurdities or improbabilities as possible. But now the method itself of dealing with living bodies in biology, of which the human body^a is only one example: the answer is that from a philosophical point of view, one simply must say that the Gestalt^b, the living structure (which is my translation of the German word Gestalt), or the living entity which we call living being, precedes the mechanisms which occur within it. For this reason, I would say no amount of mechanical, and especially chemical, research of qualitative character, in the biological method, can deny that all these processes occur in a being which has a definite structure--or, as Aristotle^c called it, an inner telos, entelecheia, so that, however the chemical processes may be, if there is a seed of an apple tree, an apple tree will always come out. However distorted by climate and winds, it is an apple tree and nothing else. Now this is the strong point in the organicistic [sic.] consideration. On the other hand, the strong point in the mechanistic consideration is that you can calculate in all living bodies the chemical exchange processes in quantitative terms. That is the situation. Now I cannot go into this. I am convinced