V GENERAL CONCEPT OF HOLISM 115 



has endured of that past, and what is vaguely anticipated 

 of the future. The organism and its field is one continuous ^ 

 structure which, beginning with an articulated sensible cen- 

 tral area, gradually shades off into indefiniteness. In this 

 continuum is contained all of the past which has been con- 

 served and still operates to influence the present and the 

 future of the organism; in it also is contained all that the 

 organism is and does in the present; and finally, in it is 

 contained all that the organism vaguely points to in its own 

 future development and that of its offspring. In other 

 words, the organism and its field, or the organism as a 

 ''whole'' — the holistic organism — contains its past and much 

 of its future in its present. These elements are in it as active 

 factors, the future and the past interacting with the present. 

 The whole is there, carrying all its time with it, but clear 

 and definite only for a small central area, and beyond that 

 more and more fading away in respect of the dim past and 

 the dimmer future. And this time is not the abstract time 

 of mechanics, but real creative passage or duration in the 

 Bergsonian sense. The biological whole is fully explained 

 not merely in the light of its past and its present but also of 

 its future. The force which it exerts in its field is the ex- 

 pression of its total time factor. It is impossible to over- 

 estimate the importance of this time factor in the develop- 

 ment and consequently in the explanation of organism. An 

 organism is a continuous autogenesis: behind it is its phy- 

 logeny, which it partially repeats in its individual history, 

 and which in any case is a powerful factor in its individual 

 development; before it, again, is the future to which it 

 points, not only as general orientation of coming develop- 

 ment, but more specially as the realisation of the potentiali- 

 ties which it holds as the seeds of the future. The pull of 

 the future is almost as much upon it as the push of the past, . 

 and both are essential to the character, functions and activi- .^ 

 ties which it displays in the present. But without the con- 

 cept and the imagery of the field, which contains both the 

 future and the past in the whole, it would be difficult to 

 render the presence and the operation of the future as a 



