196 The Unity of the Organism 



that no individual can be fully understood, fully interpreted, 

 without itself being made a subject of investigation. No 

 generalization about organism ])ropcr can be counted on 

 to apply fully to all organisms ! It is probable that an 

 ill-defined sense of this difficulty (that of the unreachable- 

 ness of the whole of living nature by any recognized uni- 

 versal principle or law) accounts for the turning back of so 

 many able biologists after they have gone far on the natural 

 history road. For example, E. B. Wilson's failure to accept 

 the consequences of his own conclusion, "the real unity is 

 that of the entire organism," is very likely explicable in 

 this way. To one who has been so indoctrinated with the 

 metaphysics which grows naturally out of modern mathe- 

 matical physics as to make him accept the pronoun'cement 

 that there are "only two real things in the universe. Matter 

 and Force," a course of discovery and reasoning which 

 makes every individual organism, no matter how small and 

 insignificant, a "real thing" seems preposterous even though 

 true. But the fact that the conception as modern biology 

 reaches it is largely due to physics itself through its influ- 

 ence upon chemistry and biochemistry, ought to contribute 

 much to the reconciliation of science generally to the con- 

 ception. 



The full meaning of such an exaltation — for exaltation 

 it undoubtedly amounts to — of the individual can be com- 

 passed only by a painstaking examination of very many 

 biological facts and hypotheses and dogmas, this examina- 

 tion ranging over the whole vast realm of living nature. 

 Indeed, the final and most convincing evidence for the essen- 

 tial truth of the conception will be reached only when man 

 himself and the highest provinces of his nature have been 

 brought into the examination. By the mode of treatment 

 adopted in this work we shall not have sounded the deepest 

 depth explored in it until the end of the last chapters shall 



