i] CHEMICAL EMBRYOLOGY 29 



spread effect upon scientific men other than mathematical physicists. 

 Whitehead boldly extended the concept of the organism to cover all 

 objects, i.e. all events, non-living as well as living. The word "in- 

 organic" would thus cease to apply to non-living nature and all 

 physical systems would be regarded as in a sense incomprehensible, 

 except when regarded as wholes composed of parts owing their very 

 existence to their share and arrangement in the whole in question. 

 Quoting Tennyson's, '"The stars', she whispers, 'blindly run'", he 

 says, "An electron within a living body is different from an electron 

 outside it, by reason of the plan of the body. The electron blindly runs 

 within or without the body, but it runs within the body in accordance 

 with the general plan of the body and this plan includes the mental 

 state. But this principle of modification is perfectly general throughout 

 nature, and represents no property peculiar to living bodies". 



Lloyd Morgan recognised in Whitehead's organisms his "systems 

 of relations going together in substantial unity", which he had con- 

 ceived of as stretching in degrees of ever vaster complexity from the 

 smallest physical event to the universe itself. It was Lloyd Morgan, 

 indeed, who pointed out first the significance of Whitehead's argu- 

 ments for biological thought. He showed that the extension of 

 organicism to cover the entire world of physics had no serious con- 

 sequences for biological mechanists (who would continue to employ 

 physico-chemical methods as before), provided that they had not 

 adopted some form of scientific naturalism. At the same time, it 

 could have little help for those who had insisted that the principal 

 characteristic of living things was their organismic character, and 

 had been led by this to propose far-reaching alterations in scientific 

 logic or to give up the hope of causal explanation in biology. If, 

 as it would seem, there are organisms everywhere, then the position 

 that there are organisms nowhere turns out to be better placed than 

 the position that living things are organisms and not other things ; 

 for, in the former case, peace can be at once secured by attention 

 to definitions, while in the latter case the irreducible characteristic 

 of life is not organicism, whatever else it may be. The difference 

 between the living and the non-living becomes a quantitative one, 

 expressible in degrees of organisation. As has been pointed out, 

 Haldane's prophetic observations concerning the eventual meeting- 

 place of physics and biology have perhaps at last been justified, but, 

 if so, with a barren benefit to neo- vitalism. 



