356 THEORETICAL BIOLOGY 



to the problem, as soon as we have found the right way of 

 putting the question. 



It is not a question of making something Hving out of 

 dead matter. That is doomed to failure. It is a question 

 of breaking up the protoplasm activated by the impulses into 

 separate genes, and then investigating their effect, singly 

 and together, on a second substance that is not necessarily 

 protoplasm itself. 



Since there can be no doubt that we have to do with real 

 natural factors, it must be possible to get on the track of 

 their mode of operation and their interlinkings. In so doing, 

 the more we employ the methods elaborated by physicists and 

 chemists, the sooner will biology win the recognition of these 

 two sciences, which hitherto have been her implacable enemies. 



If my statements as to the life-energy be compared with 

 those of Reinke, it will be seen that they agree almost com- 

 pletely with his theory of dominants. Only that I emphasise 

 more strongly than he that, when I refer to genes and impulses, 

 I am talking of actual natural factors. And I refuse to 

 obliterate the boundaries on the psychical side, since I reckon 

 the impulse-systems to an objective conformity with plan, 

 instead of to a universal world-intelligence. The world- 

 intelligence always remains a psychical factor, and no one 

 would dream of trying to inject single intelligences into 

 matter, however plastic. 



SELF-OBSERVATION 



For a biologist, observation of his own body does not 

 differ fundamentally from observation of other living organ- 

 isms. He shows that there is a surrounding- world in the case 

 of his own body also, divisible into world-as-sensed and world 

 of action, and set over against an inner world within the body 

 itself. And his functions, too, are made up of numerous 



