INTEGRATIVE LEVELS 



likely to be reducible^ to the laws governing the behaviour of molecules 

 at lower levels of complexity. It would be correct to say that the 

 living differs from the dead in degree and not in kind because it is 

 on a higher plane of complexity of organisation, but it would also 

 be correct to say that it differs in kind since the laws of this higher 

 organisation only operate there. 



It may be of use to follow a little further the difference between 

 the older dogmatic organicism and the new point of view. Organisa- 

 tion is inscrutable, it was urged, since any inorganic part instantly 

 loses its relational properties on removal from the whole, and no 

 means are available for rendering wholes transparent so that we can 

 observe them while intact. But unfortunately these statements are 

 not true. Woodger^ has distinguished three main possibilities in the 

 relation of organic part to organic whole: (a) independence, (h) func- 

 tional dependence, (c) existential dependence. A part of the first sort 

 would pursue its normal activities independently of whether it was in 

 connection with its normal whole or not. A part of the second sort 

 would be disorganised, if so isolated, and a part of the third sort 

 would cease even to be recognisable. Dogmatic organicists, ignoring 

 these distinctions, assumed that all parts are parts of the third sort. 

 Yet this is certainly not the case. Liver cells synthesise glycogen and 

 iris cells melanin in tissue culture as well as in the body. Isolated 

 enzyme systems carry out their multifarious reactions in extracts as 

 well as in the intact cells. Even existential dependence is a difficulty 

 which can be overcome if means exist for making wholes "trans- 

 parent," as by X-ray analysis of membrances or fibres, examination 

 of living cells in polarising microscopes or ultra-violet spectrometers, 

 or by "marking" in-going molecules by substituting isotope elements 

 in them, such as heavy hydrogen or phosphorus. 



It was a striking fact that in other countries other biologists had 

 been coming to similar conclusions. In Russia, under the guidance 

 of an elaborate philosophy at that time almost unknown here, a new 

 organicism had been growing up, but so little were English men of 

 science prepared for it that the very sensible and elaborate communi- 

 cations of the Russian delegation to the International Congress for 

 the History of Science at the Science Museum at South Kensington, 



^ "Every new form of moving matter thus has its own special laws. But this enriched 

 form and these new laws are not cut off by a Chinese wall from those historically pre- 

 ceding them. The latter still exist in 'sublated form' "; Bukharin, loc. cit., p. 31. 



^ Proc. Aristot. Soc, 1932,32, 117. 



243 



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