THE PROGRAMME 19 



thinking of what might be called the ultimate or the typical 

 facts in science. It is with such typical or ultimate facts, 

 of course, that we must become acquainted if our future 

 philosophy is to be of profit to us. 



Certainly, there would be nothing to prevent us from 

 arranging our materials in a manner exactly the reverse of 

 that which we shall adopt ; we could begin with a general 

 principle about the organic, and could try to deduce all its 

 special features from that principle, and such a way perhaps 

 would seem to be the more fascinating method of argument. 

 But though logical it would not be psychological, and 

 therefore would be rather unnatural. And thus our 

 most general principle about the organic will not come on 

 the scene before the eighteenth of these twenty lectures, 

 although it is not a mere inference or deduction from the 

 former lectures : it will be a culmination of the whole, and 

 we shall appreciate its value the better the more we know 

 what that whole really is. 



GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE ORGANIC FORM 



Our programme of this year, it was said, is to be 

 devoted wholly to organic forms, though one of its appendixes, 

 dealing with some characteristics of the physiology of 

 metabolism, will lead us on to a few other phenomena. 

 What then are the essentials of a living form, as commonly 

 understood even without a special study of biology ? 



Living bodies are not simple geometrical forms, not, 

 like crystals, merely a typical arrangement of surfaces in 

 space, to be reduced theoretically, perhaps, to an arrange- 

 ment of molecules. Living bodies are typically combined 



