time: the refreshing river 



"inorganic" chemistry, or from nuclear physics. But at that level it 

 blends without distinction into order as such, and hence we should 

 do well to give up all the old arguments about Form and Matter, 

 replacing these factors with two others more in accordance with 

 modem knowledge of the universe : Organisation and Energy. From 

 this point of view there can no longer be any barrier between mor- 

 phology and chemistry. We may hope that the future will show us, 

 not only what laws the form of living organisms exhibits at its own 

 level, but also how these laws are integrated with those which appear 

 at lower levels of organisation. This formulation is surely in line 

 with Whitehead's philosophy of organism, and no less so with that 

 of the dialectical materialists and the emergent evolutionists.^ 



Let us say once more then that in Whitehead's philosophy biologists 

 find a view of the world which they are particularly well fitted to 

 appreciate. Though dialectical materialism and emergent evolutionism 

 have also much to teach us, they see in him the greatest and subtlest 

 exponent of organic mechanism. These words are written in the 

 College of Francis Glisson and William Harvey, of W. B. Hardy and 

 Charles Sherrington. Isaac Newton's rooms, in that College of the 

 Holy and Undivided Trinity, to which A. N. Whitehead himself 

 belongs, lie only a stone's-throw away. From the neighbouring bio- 

 logical stronghold a word of deep respect and salutation goes out to 

 the repairer of the onesideness of that Newtonian system which in its 

 time was so profoundly progressive, the instaurator of the organic 

 conception of the many-levelled world. 



1 Cf. the opinion expressed by Engels on form and matter: 



"The whole of organic nature proves without exception that form and matter 

 are identical or inseparable. Morphological and physical, form and function, are 

 mutually determined. The differentiation of form (in the cell) conditions the 

 differentiation of substance in muscle, skin, bone, epithelium, etc., and the differ- 

 entiation of substance reacts back again and conditions new form" {Dialectics of 

 Nature, Gesamtaugsabe edn., Moscow, 1935, p. 623). 



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