time: the refreshing river 



description, he divided the biological factors into two, the "simple 

 components," whose connection with physico-chemical factors could 

 immediately be seen, and the "complex components," where the 

 relation with physico-chemical factors was much less obvious, but 

 might reasonably be expected to be revealed in due course.^ The 

 curling of a piece of ectoderm, for instance, if understood in relation 

 to protein fibres, surface forces, lipo-protein monolayers, etc. would 

 be a case of a simple component. The regularly reproducible self- 

 differentiation of an isolated eye-cup under certain conditions, for 

 instance, involving processes much too complicated at present for 

 physico-chemical explanations, would be a case of a complex com- 

 ponent. But the terminology of components (einfache and complexe 

 Komponenten) never came into general use. 



By 1928 the position of most working biologists could be summed 

 up not unfairly as follows: 



"Mechanists do not say that nothing is true or intelligible 

 unless expressed in physico-chemical terms, they do not say 

 that nothing takes place differently in living matter from what 

 takes place in the dead, they do not say that our present physics 

 and chemistry are fully competent to explain the behaviour of 

 living systems. What they do say is that the processes of living 

 matter are subject to the same laws that govern the processes 

 in dead matter, but that the laws operate in a more complicated 

 medium; thus living things differ from dead things in degree 

 and not in kind; they are, as it were, extrapolations from the 

 inorganic."^ 



The nature of this relationship, however, still remained obscure. 

 In the following year, however, the situation was greatly clarified by 

 the appearance of J. H. Woodger's book Biological Principles. This 

 important work set out to discuss the classical contradictions in 

 biological theory, vitalism and mechanism, structure and function, 

 organism and environment, preformation and epigenesis, teleology 

 and causation, mind and body. Contradictions once recognised, fruit- 

 ful synthesis followed. From his discussion it followed that the term 

 "vitalism" ought henceforward to be restricted to all propositions of 

 the type "the living being consists of an X in addition to carbon, 



^ See W. Roux, Gesammelte Abhandlungen u. Entwickhmgsmechanik der Organismen 

 (2 vols. Leipzig, 1895). 

 2 SB, p. 247. 



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