time: the refreshing river 



About 1928 their position could fairly justly be summed up 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 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 

 which govern the processes of 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, and are, as it were, extrapolations 

 from the inorganic." ^ 



But the nature of this extrapolation was still obscure. The question 

 entered a new phase, however, some ten years ago, with the publication 

 of J. H. Woodger's remarkable book Biological Principles.^ There 

 it was laid down that the term "vitalism" should thenceforward be 

 restricted to all propositions of the type "the living being consists of 

 an X in addition to carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, etc. plus 

 organising relations'' Recognition of the objectivity and importance 

 of organising relations had always been an empirical necessity, forced 

 upon biologists by the very subject-matter of their science, but the 

 issue was always confused by their inability to distinguish between 

 the organisation of the living system and its supposed anima. With 

 the abolition of souls and vital forces the genuine organising relations 

 in the organism could become the object of scientific study. Before 

 the contribution of Woodger, "organicism," as it had been called, 

 had necessarily been of an obscurantist character,^ since it was sup- 

 posed as, for example, by J. S. Haldane, that the organising relations 

 were themselves the anima, and as such inscrutable to scientific 

 analysis.* To-day we are perfectly clear (though a few biologists may 

 still fail to appreciate this point) that the organisation of living systems 

 is the problem, not the axiomatic starting-point, of biological research. 

 Organising relations exist, but they are not immune from scientific 

 grasp and understanding. On the other hand, their laws are not 



^ SB, p. 247. ^ (London, 1929). 



^ "Obscurantist" organicism was well castigated by N. I. Bukharin in the Marx 

 Memorial Volume of the Moscow Academy of Science, 1933 (Eng. tr. Marxism and 

 Modern Thought, p. 26). 



* C. D. Broad in his The Mind and its Place in Nature (London, 1925), had argued 

 along lines similar to Woodger's when he rejected both "substantial vitalism" and 

 "biological mechanism" in favour of "emergent vitalism," but his treatment was for 

 various reasons imsatisfactory and did not have much influence among biologists. 



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