THE BIOLOGY OF THE CELL SURFACE 



failed for biology. And it is to be doubted that any such 

 "visualization" can ever succeed. We do not know that 

 there is no discontinuity between the non-living and the 

 living world and we certainly possess no evidence for the 

 postulate that living phenomena can be expressed In 

 "terms of groupings and displacements of ultimate 

 particles." 



Nowadays, even for the physicist, Loeb's statement is 

 too extreme. The evidence of physics does not yet permit 

 such a view as to the finality of its concepts. In addition, 

 before physical principles can be utilized profitably In 

 biology, they must be sharply defined and accepted by 

 physicists themselves.^ Moreover, even before the advent 

 of the relativity- and the quantum-theory, physicists 

 were not agreed that mechanics constitutes all of physics. 

 Here a statement written forty years ago by the biologist 

 Whitman- is apt: 



While biology is certainly indebted to physics for some of 

 its metaphysics, it is to the credit of physics to have made it 

 clear that mechanism, indispensable as are its methods, 

 affords no fundamental explanation of anything. As Karl 

 Pearson has so well said, the mystery of life is "no less or no 

 greater because a dance of organic corpuscles is at bottom a 

 dance of inorganic atoms." What dances and why it 

 dances is not explained by reducing size to the lowest limit of 

 divisibility, and just as little by the assumption of ultra- 

 physical causes. This is no criticism — no disparagement; 

 it is only a confession of ignorance. The ultimate mystery 

 is beyond reach of both mechanism and vitalism; let preten- 

 sion be dropped, and approximation to truth be closer on 

 both sides. 



Further, as we have seen in the preceding chapter, our 

 Investigations of the living thing as such end with its dis- 

 integration. The moment that any such far-going physlco- 



1 Watson, 1 93 1. 

 - M'' hitman, 189^. 



12 



