150 The Unity of the Organism 



words, "under the government of a special principle, a pecu- 

 liar power what name soever be given it, whether soul, or 

 archeon, or psyche, or plastic intermediary, or guiding 

 spirit, or vital force, or vital properties" ; and his rejec- 

 tion of these conceptions because of his recognizing that the 

 unitariness of the organism removes the necessity for as- 

 suming any such extraneous principle. "When we say," 

 Bernard writes, "that life is a guiding idea, or the evolu- 

 tive force of the being, we merely express the thought of a 

 unity in the succession of all the morphological and chemical 

 changes effected by the germ, from the beginning to the 

 end of life. Our mind grasps that unity as a conception it 

 cannot escape. . . ." 10 



Up to this point the position held by Bernard is entirely 

 satisfactory for the organismal conception as I am trying 

 to develop it, and is, according to my view, unassailable. 

 But the unquoted part of the last sentence contains a state- 

 ment which reveals Bernard on a by-road leading away from 

 the promised land toward which he was headed as long as he 

 was speaking in terms of biology proper. The rest of the 

 sentence follows : "and explains it as 'a force' ; but the mis- 

 take is in supposing that this metaphysical force acts after 

 the manner of a physiological force." Stated in a nut- 

 shell, the by-road which Bernard is entering here is that of a 

 kind of separatedness, but inevitable concomitance, or paral- 

 lelism between the phenomenal and neumonal worlds which, 

 according to the views upheld in this volume, does not exist. 

 "We need here," Bernard says, "to draw a distinction be- 

 tween the metaphysical world and the phenomenal physical 

 world, which serves as its basis, but which can borrow noth- 

 ing from it." This Leibnitzian theory, according to which 

 "everything takes place in the soul as though there were no 

 body, and in the body everything takes place as though 

 there were no soul," Bernard says science "recognizes and 

 adopts in our day." But in our day, this year nineteen 



