CHAPTER XX 







THE CLASSICAL TRADITION IN MODERN MORPHOLOGY 



To write a history of contemporary movements from a 

 purely objective standpoint is well recognised to be an 

 impossible task. It is difficult for those in the stream to 

 see where the current is carrying them : the tendencies of 

 the present will only become clear some twenty years in 

 the future. 



I propose, therefore, in this concluding chapter to deal 

 only with certain characteristics of modern work on the 

 problems of form which seem to me to be derived directly 

 from the older classical tradition of Cuvier and von Baer. 



The present time is essentially one of transition. 

 Complete uncertainty reigns as to the main principles of 

 biology. Many of us think that the materialistic and 

 simplicist method has proved a complete failure, and that 

 the time has come to strike out on entirely different lines. 

 Just in what direction the new biology will grow out is hard 

 to see at present, so many divergent beginnings have been 

 made the materialistic vitalism of Driesch, the profound 

 intuitionalism of Bergson, the psychological biology of 

 Delpino, France, Pauly, A. Wagner and W. Mackenzie. 

 But if any of these are destined to give the future direction 

 to biology, they will in a measure only be bringing biology 

 back to its pre-materialistic tradition, the tradition of Aristotle, 

 Cuvier, von Baer and J. Miiller. It may well be that the 

 intransigent materialism of the ipth century is merely an 

 episode, an aberration rather, in the history of biology an 

 aberration brought about by the over-rapid development 

 of a materialistic and luxurious civilisation, in which man's 

 material means have outrun his mental and moral growth. 



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