The Living Organism: an Introduction to the Problems of Biology

Abstract

THE observer of the more recent phases of biological thought will not need to be told that during the last few years a reaction has been setting in, both in England and abroad, against any so-called mechanical theories of the origin and development of living things, and against any hypothesis which seeks in the facts of chemistry and physics for an ultimate explanation of the phenomena of life; and those who have had the opportunity of a more intimate acquaintance with this new philosophical development will know that the “neovitalist” adopts, as the basis of his scientific beliefs, an ontology which states that it is not true that the hierarchy of the natural sciences presents us with a material universe of which the separate parts studied by the several sciences can all be ultimately expressed in terms of one of them, biology in fact being a special case of chemistry, this of physics and so on; but that on the contrary every science deals, not with a part, but with the whole of the material universe, all the facts of which come under its survey, and as a particular manner of looking at which it is to be regarded. On this view, therefore, it is as useless ever to expect a physical explanation of the chemical atom as it is futile to hope that organic metabolism may after all turn out to be merely a specially complex chemical reaction: each science has what is, for itself, an ultimate fact, in terms of which it seeks to express the whole of nature, but which has nothing in common with the ultimate fact of any other science whatever. This ultimate fact is, for the vitalistic biologist, the living organism, and when pressed for an account of how the inanimate world is included in his science, he replies by a reference to the environment, which, we are told, is to be regarded as being made by and for the organism itself.