1020 ON FORM AND MECHANICAL EFFICIENCY [ch. 



whereby the body is a colony, a mosaic, of single individual and 

 separable characters*." I cannot think that there is more than 

 a very small element of truth in this doctrine. As Kant said, "die 

 Ursache der Art der Existenz bei jedem Theile eines lebenden 

 Korpers ist im Ganzen enthalten.'" And, according to the 'trend or 

 aspect of our thought, we may look upon the coordinated parts,, 

 now as related and fitted to the end or function o/the whole, and now 

 as related to or resulting from the physical causes inherent in the 

 entire system of forces to which the whole has been exposed, and 

 under whose influence it has come into being f. 



In John Hunter's day the anatomist studied every bone of the 

 skeleton in its own place, in order to discover its useful purpose and 

 understand its mechanical perfection. The morphologist of a hun- 

 dred years later preferred to study an isolated bone from many 

 animals, collar-bones or shoulder-blades by themselves, apart from 

 the field of force in which their work was done, in the search for 

 signs of blood-relationship and common ancestry. Truth lies both 

 ways; immediate use and old inheritance are blended in Nature's 

 handiwork as in our own. In the marble columns and architraves 

 of a Greek temple we still trace the timbers of its wooden prototype, 

 and see beyond these the tree-trunks of a primeval sacred grove; 

 roof and eaves of a pagoda recall the sagging mats which roofed an 



* Amer. Naturalist, April, 1915, p. 198, etc. Cf. infra, p. 1036. 



t Drie.sch saw in "Entelechy" that something which differentiates the whole 

 from the sum of its parts in the case of the organism: "The organism, we know, 

 is a system the single constituents of which are inorganic in themselves; only the 

 whole constituted by them in their typical order or arrangement owes its specificity 

 to 'Entelechy'" {Gijford Lectures, 1908, p. 229): and I think it could be shewn 

 that many other philosophers have said precisely the same thing. So far as the 

 argument goes, I fail to see how this Entelechy is shewn to be peculiarly or 

 specifically related to the living organism. The conception (at the bottom of 

 General Smuts's 'Holism'') that the whole is always something very different from 

 its parts is a very ancient doctrine. The reader will perhaps remember how, 

 in another vein, the theme is treated by Martinus Scriblerus (Huxley quoted it 

 once, for his own ends): "In every Jack there is a meat-roasting Quality, which 

 neither resides in the fly, nor in the weight, nor in any particular wheel of the Jack, 

 but is the result of the whole composition; etc., etc." Indeed it was at that very 

 time, in the early eighteenth century, that the terms organism and organisation were 

 coming into use, to connote that harmonious combination of parts "qui conspirent 

 toutes ensembles a produire cet efFet general que nous nommons la vie" (Buffon). 

 Cf. Ch. Robin, Recherches sur Torigine et le sens des termes organisme et organisation, 

 Jl. de VAnat. lx, pp. l-.'i.^, 1880. 



