PROVOCATIVE BIOLOGICAL THEORIES 75 



try to live up to their dictum about expressing their 

 knowledge concerning wholes 'in the terms of the ele- 

 ments of the wholes, they have either to leave out entirely 

 any reference to the attributes of the wholes, or else gra- 

 tuitously to carry back the attributes of the wholes to 

 the constituent elements. Water, for instance, expressed 

 as the 'oxide of hydrogen' expresses nothing whatever of 

 the attributes of water, and if we try to attach water 

 attributes to the elements, merely for the sake of recog- 

 nizing in them their ability to make water, not only do 

 we do a purely gratuitous thing, but we involve ourselves 

 in a fog of uncertainty from not knowing anything about 

 how to distribute the water attributes between two con- 

 stituent gases. This aspect of the problem of wholes and 

 elements has been worked out so thoroughly in so many 

 ways, epistemological, logical, chemical, physico-chemical, 

 biochemical, and statistical, culminating finally in 'emer- 

 gent evolution' (G. H. Lewes, C. L. Morgan, etc.) on the 

 biological side, and 'organic mechanism' (A. N. White- 

 head) on the nonbiological side, that there seems no alter- 

 native to our accepting it as basic for all existence to 

 which our knowledge processes have any access. 



"For myself, relying as I do on the natural-history 

 mode of philosophizing as a methodological concomitant 

 of the organismal conception, I find it quite satisfactory 

 to define the conception illustratively by calling attention 

 to the fact that all bodies, both living and not living, 

 about which we know anything, furnish evidence that the 

 elements of which they are composed have latent powers. 



