18 president's address. 



of organisation in the same manner in which it is admitted to 

 explain certain non-elementary " processes occurring in the living 

 body," and his demand at that point for the operation of another 

 principle of explanation is, to my mind, tantamount to such an 

 intrusion. 



It may, however, be useful to endeavour to ascertain from 

 other statements what precisely it is that Dr. Haldane thinks the 

 new vitalism may do for biology. In the letter from which I 

 have already quoted, the writer says : " It seems to me that we 

 do want new working hypotheses for co-ordinating observa- 

 tions as to these elementary phenomena, and that just as the 

 conceptions of mass and energy differentiated physics from 

 mathematics, so the new biological conceptions will differen- 

 tiate biology from the physical sciences. When this time comes 

 we shall have got out of the present rather barren controversies 

 between vitalists and anti-vitalists. These controversies will 

 die of inanition, just like the old controversies about the 

 possibility of an absolute vacuum, which used to perplex the 

 physicists and mathematicians. There will then be a distinctively 

 biological way of looking at organisms and their environment, 

 just as there is a distinctively physical and a distinctively 

 mathematical way of looking at the world." 



What the precise character of these new and distinctively 

 biological conceptions is to be, be^^ond the fact that they must be 

 vitalistic, purposive, or teleological, I find it rather ditJicult to 

 determine, although the latter and major portion of the Nineteenth 

 Century article is devoted to the vindication and defence of 

 vitalism as a positive working hypothesis. 



In the attempt to demonstrate the positive content of this 

 hypothesis and its alleged contribution to the advancement of 

 physiological science, the writer summarises the change in the 

 modern point of view, in relation to three typical series of 

 functional facts, viz., those of cell-growth and maintenance; of 

 glandular secretion and absorption; and of respiration. 



As regards the first of these, it is pointed out that " the deposit 

 of new material during growth only occurs in immediate 



