Entelechy
Entelechy is a philosophical concept stemming from Aristotle's metaphysics.
The term traces to the Ancient Greek word entelecheia, from the combination of the Greek words enteles (complete), telos (end, purpose, completion) and echein (to have). Aristotle himself appears to have originally coined the word. In Metaphysics Theta, Aristotle uses 'entelechia' (and 'energia') in contrast with 'dunamis' in discussing the distinction between actuality and potentiality. One example used by Aristotle to illustrate the distinction concerns knowledge. A given person might have the potential to know something, and so can be described as a potential knower. Once he learns the relevant fact or skill, he is an actual knower.
Aristotle's most historically influential application of 'entelecheia' outside of his metaphysics is his claim in the second book of On the Soul that the soul is the form or actuality of an organic body that makes it alive. The idea is that the various organs that make up a living body only add up to an actually living creature when they are organized in a certain way (as a rather vivid example, one might imagine the assembly of the monster in Shelley's Frankenstein). At the same time, Aristotle asserts that the entelecheia of the body (the soul) is also, in a sense, the purpose of living things, and part of the explanation for their movement. The actions of animals are directed at preserving their particular arrangement of organs and the production of new animals with the same form. This naturalist picture is complicated, however, by Aristotle's suggestion in book three of On the Soul that some aspect of the soul is not a part of the body.
It is this latter suggestion that determined the usage of 'entelechy' in later philosophers.
In some philosophical systems, it may denote a force propelling one to self-fulfillment. This concept occupies a central position in the metaphysics of Leibniz, and is closely related to his monadology. Each sentient entity contains its own entire universe within it, in a sense. Each sentient entity is a monad, an absolutely independent thing that has no contact with any other sentient entity except through the mediating agency of God.
In the biological beliefs known as vitalism living things are animated by an entelechy according to Hans Driesch.
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