8 The Unity of the Organism 



As we glanced at the organismal and elemental theories 

 when they opposed each other in the infancy of biology, we 

 must look at them still opposing each other in this era of 

 what we may call the adolescence of the science. The or- 

 ganismal side we have already spoken of in our glance at 

 the work of the French biologists of the early nineteenth 

 century. As an elementalist of this period I choose Theodor 

 Schwann. In his Microscopical Researches into the Accord- 

 ance in the Structure and the Growth of Aiiimcds and 

 Plants, published in 1839, he said: "We may, then, form 

 the two following ideas of the cause of organic phenomena, 

 such as growth, etc. First, that the cause resides in the 

 totality of the organism. By the combination of the mole- 

 cules into a synthetic whole, such as the organism is in every 

 stage of its development, a power is engendered, which en- 

 ables such an organism to take up fresh material from 

 without, and appropriate it either to the formation of new 

 elementary parts, or to the growth of those already present. 

 Here therefore the cause of the growth of the elementary 

 parts resides in the totality of the organism. 



"The other mode of explanation is that growth does not 

 ensue from a power resident in the entire organism, but 

 that each separate elementary part is possessed of an inde- 

 pendent power, an independent life, so to speak: in other 

 words, the molecules in each separate elementary part are 

 so combined as to set free a power by which it is capable 

 of attracting new molecules and thus increasing, and the 

 whole organism subsists only by means of the reciprocal 

 action of the single elementary parts. So that here the sin- 

 worked during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Delage 

 (L'Heredite, p. 750) mentions C. E. Von Baer, Claude Bernard, M. 

 l?iohtit, W. His and K. Pfliiger as representative of this group. The 

 philoso])hic'al importance of the ideas held by these investigators has been 

 emphasized by I.. J. Henderson (The Order of Nature). But there is, 

 as I believe, a vein of subjeotivistic metaphysics implicit in their con- 

 ceptions which throws them somewhat out of the main organismal 

 current. 



