Das Kausalitätsprinzip der Biologie

Abstract

VON BAER said that the chief end of biology was to refer the formative forces of organisms to the general forces and vital directions (Lebensrichtungen) ef the Kosmos. According to the mechanists this is rapidly being done; according to the neo-vitalists this is not being done at all, for the characteristic activities of living creatures cannot be described in the formulae of physicochemical happenings, and there is in the organism an autonomous regulative force or entelechy. Biologists oscillate between these two positions, or dogmatically entrench themselves in either of them, very much as philosophers did in regard to empiricism and rationalism before Kant's critique showed a better way. Dr. Strecker seeks to be a daysman between the two biological schools, laying his hands upon them both, pointing out that there is truth on both sides, but that there is a third outlook which dominates both. For the practical methods and analytic results of the “Entwicklungsmechaniker,” such as Roux, the author has an appreciative respect; his criticism is epistemological rather than biological; he does not think that there is any hope of rationally interpreting organisms in mechanistic formulae. For the neo-vitalists he has also much that is good to say, for they at least do not give a false simplicity to the faets of life; on the other hand, he does not hold with an “entelechy,” which seems to be an ingenuous way of bundling all the difficulties into one term, and saying “there's an end of it.” The fact is that the mechanists and the vitalists are tarred with the same stick, they are ekgenetic, they seek to interpret results which have come to be, instead of concentrating attention oh the process of becoming, which is the engenetic method. In the inorganic world we have to do with passive things, with an externally con ditioned series of sequences; in the world of organisms we have to do with creative agents, with an internal activity, like that of our own psychical life, with engenetic doings, not with ekgenetic occurrences. The only way to get at the gist of the organism, its in ternal creativeness, is as we get at our own internal life^engenetically. Man crowns the evolution series, his most distinctive feature is his psychical experience, and it is in the light of this that we must try to read the secret of the dominating, correlating, regulating principle in the life of organisms. This, at least, is what we understand this exceedingly abstract treatise to mean. Das Kausalitätsprinzip der Biologie. By Dr. Friedrich Strecker. Pp. viii + 153. (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1907.) Price 3 marks.