ORGANIC REGULATION 99 



the external environment. An organism and its en- 

 vironment are one, just as the parts and activities of 

 the organism are one, in the sense that though we can 

 distinguish them we cannot separate them unaltered, 

 and consequently cannot understand or investigate one 

 apart from the rest. It is literally true of life, and no 

 mere metaphor, that the whole is in each of the parts, 

 and each moment of the past in each moment of the 

 present. Organic wholeness covers both space and 

 time, and in the light of biological fact absolute space 

 and time, and self-existent matter and energy, are but 

 abstractions from, or partial aspects of, reality. 



We are thus brought face to face with a conclusion 

 which to the biologist is just as significant and funda- 

 mental, and just as true to the facts observed, as the 

 conclusion that mass persists is to the physicist. 



We saw previously that the structure of a living 

 organism has no real resemblance in its behaviour to 

 that of a machine, since the parts of a machine can be 

 separated without alteration of their properties. All 

 of these properties are also independent of whether the 

 machine is in action or at rest. In the living organism, 

 on the other hand, no such separation can be made, and 

 the "structure" is only the appearance given by what 

 seems at first to be a constant flow of specific material, 

 beginning and ending in the environment. We have 

 now seen that the apparent flow has a persistence and 

 power of development of its own, which we cannot 

 account for by mere constancy in the physical and 

 chemical environment. What persists is not mere 

 matter or energy: for the matter and energy which 



