506 SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



Here is one absolutely certain and evident fact, of which 

 every biologist is bound to take account as being the most 

 certain of all biological facts. 



Since, then, we know this fundamental verity with 

 respect to the animal man, it is reasonable to suppose that 

 other organisms which resemble man in various degrees 

 each of them also consists of an extended material structure 

 and an individual immaterial energy, however different it 

 may be from that of man in its powers and faculties. 



It is now becoming more and more distinctly recognised 

 that each organism in the course of its development and 

 its subsequent life-history is dominated and governed by 

 some individuating agency. Professor Burdon Sanderson's 

 words at the penultimate meeting of the British Association, 

 though avoiding any direct consideration of the problem, 

 decidedly favoured such a view. As we have seen, Pro- 

 fessor Weismann recognises the existence of a, to him 

 inscrutable, force as acting in every biophor, and Professor 

 Whitman has declared "that organisation precedes cell- 

 formation and regulates it rather than the reverse, is a 

 conclusion that forces itself upon us from many sides ". 



That a living organism is a unity consisting of an im- 

 material individuating energy, immanent in a variously dif- 

 ferentiated mass of matter which it dominates and regulates, 

 is a conception which the imagination cannot picture. That 

 circumstance, however, is no bar to its satisfactory character 

 for the intellect, because it harmonises and accounts tor the 

 phenomena of organic life in a way which accords with the 

 most certain of all our knowledge about our own organism. 



Mr. Bourne speaks 1 of "unmeaning phrases, such as 

 formative forces, vital principles and the like ". I echo his 

 words in so far as no " vital force " or " principle," apart from 

 real individual organisms, is for me either a perception or 

 an inference. Nevertheless, the existence of our individuat- 

 ing, immaterial, psychical power is a matter of direct per- 

 ception and therefore as full of meaning as can well be, 

 while as to other organisms the existence of a parallel power 



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