BOTANY AND MORPHOGENESIS 1 29 



regulates its activities. This may be thought of as a primitive purposiveness. 

 Such is not the sort of purposiveness, often wrongly invoked by the teacher 

 of elementary biology, which assumes that the organism naturally tries to do 

 what is best for itself, as a person would; it is rather the purposiveness 

 implicit in the very fact of the organism as a self-regulating system. In our 

 fear of being teleological we sometimes forget that the organism itself is in a 

 real sense teleological. 



These problems are far from those with which we are dealing in the 

 laboratory, and some biologists pride themselves on being entirely uncon- 

 cerned with such matters. Biology is everywhere now pressing so closely on 

 philosophical questions, however, that the student of life at its lowest levels 

 should take an intelligent interest in problems presented at its most complex 

 ones. The botanist is dealing with the very simplest manifestations of life, 

 uncomplicated by the intricacies of structure and function necessarily pres- 

 ent in animals. It may be that in the end what he discovers in plants about 

 the nature of life will prove to be important for an understanding of man 

 himself. 



