176 THE STUDY OF ANIMAL LIFE CHAP. 



tion whether the behaviour of organisms has any real 

 spontaneity, precluding or limiting the possibility of 

 prediction, or whether the suggestion of spontaneity is 

 fictitious, and due to the complexity of the conditions. 

 It was once true to say that the wind bloweth where it 

 listeth, but now the meteorologist tells us whence it 

 cometh and whither it goeth. Are we, in our ignorance 

 or obscurantism, postulating for the living creature a 

 spontaneity and unpredictability such as our forefathers 

 believed to be exhibited by the wind ? This is a very 

 difficult problem the problem of biological determinism, 

 analogous to the problem of psychological determinism 

 and free will. We venture to say just a little on this 

 difficult problem. 



As we ascend the scale of being there is a growing 

 amount of what may be called " experimental indeter- 

 minism." It is plain, for instance, that an organism is 

 free as compared with a not-living system. The living 

 creature has alternatives, the inanimate system none. 



When we begin experimenting with a starfish, we 

 cannot tell what it will do in the various circumstances 

 in which we place it. But after we have experimented 

 for a long time we can tell what the starfish, whose in- 

 timate acquaintance we have made, will do under certain 

 circumstances, provided always that we know its 

 " physiological condition at the time." The behaviour 

 of a hermit-crab and even its reflexes may be profoundly 

 altered if it be taken out of its borrowed shell. And just 

 as " a hungry man is an angry man," as every house- 

 hold knows, so a hungry starfish does not behave as a 

 full-fed one does. Now, if we are rash enough to make a 

 prediction in regard to the behaviour of a fresh starfish 

 of the same kind and weight and size, we are very likely 

 to be very far wrong. Why is this ? It is otherwise in 

 the inorganic world, where we can safely argue from one 

 thing to another thing of the same kind. 



The difference is not one of complexity, but of kind. 

 The starfish is not mechanically necessitated to act as 

 it does ; it checkmates mechanism because it is organism ; 

 it is ruled by its own brainless, ganglionless constitution 



