| Similarly, rational activity is
what makes a man to be a man and distinguishes him from a brute animal.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a 17th-century German
philosopher and mathematician,
called his monads (the ultimate reality of material beings)
entelechies in virtue of their inner self-determined activity. The term was revived around the
turn of the 20th
century by Hans Driesch, a German biologist and philosopher, in
connection with his vitalistic biology to denote an internal perfecting principle
which, he supposed, exists in all living organisms. ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA
|