SOME SPECULATIONS CONCEENING REGULATIONS 467 



nervous system, now it is a master gland, tomorrow it will again 

 be an entelechy. A nerve or gland may be a pathway or mediator 

 of physiological events, but is not known to initiate them. Perhaps 

 all regulators are, so far as organisms are concerned, equally meta- 

 physical. 



The resort to such metaphysical agencies has been shown to be worse than useless 

 in our dealings with the inorganic world and it is difficult to see how they can be of any 

 greater service in understanding the organic. The tenderminded may still delight in 

 assuming their intervention in the development and maintenance of unicellular and multi- 

 cellular organisms, whose integration is so exceedingly complicated and opaque that we 

 are probably still centuries removed from any adequate understanding of their functional 

 composition (Wheeler, '28a, p. 40). 



Anyone who begins to comprehend the magnitude of the organ- 

 ism's "task" of simultaneously ''caring for" all components is 

 likely to use anthropomorphic language. Very many imagined 

 schemes are built on the supposition : how could I manage all those 

 adjustments if I were the engineer? And endless are the specula- 

 tions that can be achieved therefrom. 



Spencer (1866, p. 61) and Haldane ('17, p. 26) recognized that 

 ''coordination is inherent in physiological activity." Some think 

 such a statement avoids the issue because it does not specify a 

 "mechanism." As far as I can see, it states what is known, and 

 recognizes the existence of integration without beclouding the phe- 

 nomena with fancies. There is hardly any further issue to be faced 

 unless it is shown that integration can be separated from function- 

 ing, that the whole is different from the combination of its parts 

 and relations among them. For, "integration itself is a process 

 of equilibration " (Henderson). 



§ 172. List of theories 



A host of extrapolations and possible extensions of notions pre- 

 viously mentioned are suggested by the material of earlier chap- 

 ters. They cannot be derived by pure induction; indeed some 

 probably never can be so "proven." A few are: (1) Theory of 

 necessary regulations. All living units regulate (maintain) some 

 components (properties) ; none survive without phenomena that 

 can be described as equilibrations. 



(2) Theory of interdependencies of regulations. No compo- 

 nent is regulated (equilibrated) independently of all others. 



(3) Theory of requirements. Rates of turnover of any one 



