time: the refreshing river 



It is probable, indeed, that the organic view of the world has 

 considerable historical and social significance. The seventeenth 

 century, the age of Gassendi and Newton, of Boyle and Descartes, 

 was a time in which the capitalist system of economic individualism 

 won its first decisive victories in taking over state power. The sur- 

 render of the last royalist troops in the English civil war was the final 

 conclusion of centuries of feudalism, for though the monarchy was 

 restored in England, feudalism was not. All later monarchs ruled by 

 the grace of the City of London. Parallel with the breaking-up of 

 the old guilds, and the absolute freeing of commercial enterprise in 

 every kind of new exploitation, went the rediscovery of atomism by 

 Gassendi and its application to chemistry as the "corpuscularian or 

 mechanical hypothesis" by Boyle. The analogy between free mer- 

 chants, projectors, and industrialists, and the fortuitous concourse of 

 atoms, can even be found explicitly stated in seventeenth-century 

 books on economics. Is it not therefore of interest that in our time, 

 when capitalist economics has worked itself through to a new state 

 of society demanding everywhere more social control and organisation 

 of human affairs, that there should be a rediscovery of the organic 

 interpretation of the world, an interpretation in which the monads 

 **do not blindly run" in Whitehead's famous phrase,^ "but run in 

 accordance with the whole of which they form a part." Function 

 depends on position in the whole. Statistical regularity of fortuitous 

 random motions is not the whole story; there is a plan of organising 

 relations too. The world is not entirely like a perfect gas or an abso- 

 lutely homogeneous solid, it also contains viscous phases, crystals 

 rigid in one, two or three dimensions, plasticity and elastic deforma- 

 bility, living organisation. It may be that we are on the threshold of a 

 long period, lasting perhaps for several centuries, in which the organic 

 conception of the world will transform society, giving it a unity 

 more comradely and equal than feudalism, but less chaotic and self- 

 contradictory than the centuries of capitalist atomism.^ In Alfred 

 North Whitehead we surely have to recognise the greatest living 

 philosopher of the organic movement in philosophy and science. 



Historical origins of Organicism and Dialectical Materialism. 



About the historical origins of the organicistic viewpoint in biology 



a great deal could be said. There is space to refer only to one or two 



iS&MW, p. 113. 



^ Or, as a friend of mind acutely puts it, Contract is not returning to Status but going 

 forward to Function. 



186 



