Significance of the Internal Secretory System 149 



to produce organisms, then it would be impossible for biol- 

 ogy to do much better in its reasoning and general attitude 

 than Loeb and other elementalists do when they undertake 

 to construct a philosophy of organisms. I agree whole- 

 heartedly that all supernaturalism, no matter what nomen- 

 clatorial garb it takes on, must be repudiated by the sciences 

 of organic beings. Ideas, or psychoids, or entelechies, or 

 "principles" of an} 7 kind conceived as independent of, or 

 even separable from, sensible objects are quite as repugnant 

 to me, an organismalist, as they are to any element alist. The 

 essence of my contention is that the natural substitute for 



+/ 



these imponderable things are the living, individual organ- 

 isms themselves, and not the particles of which they are com- 

 posed. Each and every individual organism is a natural 

 reality by exactly the same criteria that the atoms, mole- 

 cules, cells and tissues of which it is composed are natural 

 realities. And since each individual is to some extent differ- 

 ent from every other, and maintains its individuality in full 

 possession of these differences, by its power of transforming 

 foreign substance into its own substance, it is ultimate both 

 as to structure and as to causal power in as deep and literal 

 a sense as the material particles of which it is composed are 

 ultimate. 



Loeb's considerable attention to the views of Claude Ber- 

 nard is fortunate for us, since it affords a chance to show 

 from still another angle the inevitable breakdown of ele- 

 mentalist reasoning when it is brought face to face with or- 

 ganic phenomena as actual nature presents them to the 

 modern student. Loeb calls attention, properly, to the fact 

 that one of the things on which Bernard placed special em- 

 phasis, as Bichat before him had done, is the organizing syn- 

 theses which go on in the living being. The real advance, it 

 seems to me, which Bernard made over any of his predeces- 

 sors, was the positiveness of his rejection of a vital force 

 as something supernatural as something, using his own 



