time: the refreshing river 



London, in 193 1, were received with bewilderment.^ "The true task 

 of scientific research," said Zavadovsky,^ "is not the violent identifica- 

 tion of the biological and the physical, but the discovery of the 

 qualitatively specific controlling principles which characterise the 

 main features of every phenomenon, and the finding of methods of 

 research appropriate to the phenomena studied. ... It is necessary to 

 renounce both the simplified reduction of some sciences to others, 

 and also the sharp demarcations between the physical, biological, and 

 socio-historical sciences." Again, in a passage which indicates a 

 point of view closely similar to that already outlined, he writes, 

 "Biological phenomena, historically connected with physical pheno- 

 mena in inorganic nature, are none the less not only not reducible 

 to physico-chemical or mechanical laws, but within their own limits 

 as biological processes display different^ and qualitatively distinct 

 laws. But biological laws do not in the least lose thereby their material 

 quality and cognisability, requiring only in each case methods of 

 research appropriate to the phenomena studied." Or, in other words, 

 biological order is both comprehensible and different from inorganic 

 order. In France, similar views have been put forward, as, for instance, 

 by Marcel Prenant,* also in accordance with the indications of 

 materialist dialectics. This philosophy has been called the profoundest 

 theory of natural evolution,^ the theory of the nature of transformations 

 and the origin of the qualitatively new,^ indeed the natural method- 

 ology of science itself. It was striking to find that its conclusions 

 upon a point of the most fundamental interest to the biochemist, the 

 meaning of the transition from the dead to the living, should coincide 

 with those which he had worked out independently by sincerely 

 following the dictates of scientific common sense. 



^ English scholars owe a debt to Lancelot Hogben, who was one of the first about 

 this time to try to translate dialectical materialism (more or less successfully) into English 

 idiom; cf. his article in Psyche, 1931, 12, 2. Certain mistakes afterwards pointed out 

 (P. A. Sloan, Psyche, 1933, 13, 178) do not diminish this debt. In the Aristotelian 

 Society's Symposium on Materialism for 1928 there had been no mention of dialectical 

 materialism, and a similar silence had reigned in the French symposium Le Matirialisme 

 Actual (Paris, 1920) to which H. Bergson, H. Poincare, Ch. Gide, and others had 

 contributed. 



^ Art. "The Physical and the Biological in the Process of Organic Evolution" in 

 Science at the Cross Roads (Kniga, London, 193 1). 



^ In the belief that the sense of the original is better conveyed, the word "different" 

 is substitiited for "varied" which actually appears in the text. 



* M. Prenant, Bull. Soc. Philomath., Paris, 1933, 116, 84. 



^ V. I. Lenin, "The Teachings of Karl Marx," in Marx, Engels and Marxism 

 (London, 1931). 



^ J. D. Bernal, in Aspects of Dialectical Materialism (London, 1934), pp. 90 and 102. 



244 



