VI FUNCTIONS AND CATEGORIES 137 



pendence of the environment. This does not mean that 

 the environment does not influence it, but it means that 

 the environment influences it only indirectly and after a 

 more or less complete transformation and metabolism of 

 such influence. Vis-a-vis the environment the organism is 

 something new, something sui generis, which does not pas- 

 sively accept and reproduce the influence of the environ- 

 ment, but utilises and appropriates it for its own purposes 

 and in its own ways, as if it were some superior arbiter 

 and disposer of the whole situation. The concepts of 

 dominion, of mastery, of creation which the orthodox view 

 places at the beginning of things are now distributed and 

 assigned to all organisms, whose inmost nature it is only 

 possible to express through these concepts. In other words, 

 organism is not an effect of external causes; nor are its 

 states and characters effects of external causes; it is in a 

 large measure its own cause — causa sui — and the cause 

 of its own states and functions. External environmental 

 influences are merely the rough material with which it 

 works and builds up its own system. And in the act of 

 building the material is itself more or less completely 

 changed into the character of the structure built. I say 

 "more or less," because this character of creative mastery 

 and transformation which organism displays in respect of 

 external influences and materials is itself of a progressive 

 character. In the lower organisms there is much more of 

 passive acceptance and response than in the higher; and 

 the whole process of Evolution is largely a continuous growth 

 towards organic independence and self-regulation; in other 

 words, towards wholeness. The concept of wholeness 

 contains and explains all the distinguishing organic attributes 

 in their various grades throughout the wide range of organic 

 Evolution. 



Thus it is that the creative element in Evolution, the 

 emergent new, is associated with the nature and action of 

 wholes, and is confined to them. Not only is the activity 

 of wholes holistic and creative, as yet it is the only creative 

 activity of which we have knowledge. 



