30 THE THEORY OF [pt. 



Organicism and Emergence 



We may now pass by another small transition, from organicism 

 to theories of emergence. Neo- vitalism in this form practically ceases 

 to have any claim to the name, and approaches extremely closely 

 to neo-mechanism. The principle of emergence in its simplest form 

 is the statement that there are levels of existence in the universe, at 

 each of which some more complicated form of being comes into 

 existence, containing some essence absolutely new, and which could 

 not have been predicted, even if all the properties of the constituents 

 of the lower order had been known. This is evidently a conception 

 very close to that of the organism, for just as the living or non-living 

 system, looked at from one point of view, ceases to be itself as soon 

 as it is dismembered, so the new level of complexity, looked at from 

 one point of view, consists of lower levels of complexity joined together 

 in a way that could not have been foreseen, because its properties 

 and peculiarities are not the sum of the properties and peculiarities 

 of its constituents. But it is important to note that there are here two 

 parentheses, namely, "looked at from one point of view", implying 

 that there is another point of view, and though the discussion is 

 complicated here by the doubt as to whether Whitehead intends his 

 organisms to be taken as a metaphysical theory, or as a scientific 

 theory, yet in Lloyd Morgan the statement is clear that the emergent 

 point of view has always a complementary one, the resultant point 

 of view, "the emergent web and the resultant woof" as he calls it. 

 This is really a new and more accurate way of putting the ancient 

 antithesis of mechanism and teleology, for the scientific method in- 

 volves the concept of resultance, since it continually seeks for the 

 predetermining causes which must be in some way uniform with 

 their effects, while the advent of something absolutely new at each 

 level, i.e. atom to molecule, colloidal aggregate to living cell, etc., 

 is a speculation hardly germane to science and resembling the final 

 cause. 



We find ourselves back again, then, at the distinction between 

 metaphysics and science, which was first seriously studied by Kant. 

 Most of the confusion has arisen in the past through an insufficiently 

 clear decision as to the nature of biology. Biology cannot be philo- 

 sophical and scientific, emergent and resultant, indeterminate and 

 determinate, teleological and mechanical at one and the same time. 



