VI FUNCTIONS AND CATEGORIES 127 



causality of the parts in their intimate synthesis in the 

 whole. In mechanical composites each element in opera- 

 tion or action has its own effect and is a separate cause; 

 and the final result is the resultant blending of all these 

 separate effects. In the whole, as we have seen, there is 

 not this individual separate action of the parts; there is a 

 synthesis which makes the elements or parts act as one or 

 holistically; and the action or function is an inseparable 

 holistic unity just in proportion as the S5nithesis is a whole 

 or realises the character of wholeness. It is in this sense, 

 and in this sense only, that the whole is a cause; it is a 

 cause not apart from its parts, but solely through their 

 synthesis in action. The whole fuses the action of its ele- 

 ments into a real synthesis, into a unity which makes the 

 result quite different from what it would have been as the 

 separate activities of the parts. The structural synthesis 

 of the whole results in a similar synthesis of activity or 

 function. Just as the whole as a structural unity, and only 

 as such, is something different, something new compared 

 with its parts in their separateness or isolation, so too its 

 action is radically different from the blending of their sepa- 

 rate actions. 



Thus the causality of the whole is explained, and from 

 this explanation one can appreciate how immensely com- 

 plicated the action or functioning of an organism must be. 

 When a stimulus is applied to an organism a whole is set 

 in motion, and the response which results is not merely 

 an affair of the original stimulus, but of the entire whole 

 in all its unique complication of parts and functions which 

 has been set in motion. The comparatively simple, isolable 

 phenomenon of causation as observed in the interaction of 

 material bodies undergoes a complete and radical trans- 

 formation when observed in the case of an organism; and 

 the difference is not a mystery, but is deducible from the 

 nature of the whole as exemplified by an organism. I shall 

 return to this matter and just now pass on to another 

 important result of the nature of a whole. 



In the preceding chapters I have more than once used 



