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allow of my developing this position here ; but I may perhaps 

 refer to my address as President of the Physiological Section 

 of this Association in 1908. I will only venture to remark that 

 the position indicated involves a far more thorough departure 

 from mechanical explanations than that of the old vitalists or 

 their more recent representatives, although I am in agreement 

 with the position of the vitalists in their main criticisms of 

 what may be called, for the sake of shortness, " mechanistic " 

 biology. The vitalists cut the ground from under their feet by 

 accepting the physical conception of both the environment and 

 the body substance ; they cannot consistently escape from the 

 consequences of this acceptance. The conception of organic 

 unity implies a biological, as distinct from a physical, interpreta- 

 tion of environment as well as organism ; and the biological 

 interpretation is natural and necessary where biological facts 

 are concerned. The physical and the biological interpretations 

 are each theoretically applicable to the whole of Nature ; but 

 neither can be actually applied completely, as only part of the 

 known facts correspond in either case. I feel no personal 

 doubts that the mechanistic biology, in spite of the great names 

 associated with it, including that of the distinguished President 

 of this Association, will soon be a thing of the past. 



The conception of organic unity applies to the whole of what 

 may be called the " vegetative " aspect of life but takes us no 



resembling this phenomenon is at present known to us in the inorganic world ; 

 and if, as we may confidently hope, similar phenomena are ultimately found in 

 what we at present call the inorganic world, our present conception of that world 

 as a mere world of matter will be completely altered. Prof. Schafer points to 

 the numerous physical and chemical processes which we can distinguish by 

 abstract thought within the living body ; he completely ignores the actual fact 

 of their maintenance in organic unity. The more detailed and exact our know- 

 ledge has become of the marvellous intricacies of structure and function within 

 the living body, the more difficult or rather the more completely impossible has 

 any physico-chemical theory of nutrition and reproduction become. The difficulty 

 stands out in its fullest prominence in connexion with the phenomena of repro- 

 duction and heredity. I can find in Prof. Schafer's address no serious attempt 

 to deal with this difficulty. He has much to say of the physics and chemistry 

 of colloid nitrogenous material and he makes play with the obsoleteness of the 

 distinction formerly drawn by chemists between " organic " and " inorganic " 

 chemistry ; but he ignores the evident differences between living organisms and 

 non-living material whether " organic " or " inorganic," colloid or crystalloid. 

 He also fails to see what constantly strikes me in my work as a physiologist, that 

 the advance of biology is everywhere hampered and confused by the physico- 

 chemical theory of life. 



