28 THE THEORY OF [pt. 



always refer it to this whole and draw our final conclusions only in 

 relation to its effect on the whole. It is doubtless because he felt this 

 necessary interdependence among the parts of an organism that 

 Cuvier said that experimentation was not applicable to living beings 

 since it separated organised parts that should remain united. For 

 the same reason vitalists proscribe experiments in medicine. These 

 views, which have their correct side, are nevertheless false in their 

 general outcome and have greatly hampered the progress of science." 

 Bernard did not commit himself to an absolutely unambiguous state- 

 ment as to the correct and incorrect sides of organicism, and seems to 

 have regarded it as true only in the sense that imaginative synthesis 

 must follow radical experimental analysis. He was therefore quite 

 opposed to that true and keen-edged organicism represented by 

 Cuvier and other biologists, which denied the bare utility and 

 legitimacy of the experimental analysis, and which was not un- 

 justly satirised by Woolf in 1927: 



You cannot demonstrate the soul 



Except upon the animal as a whole; 



Spiritual autolytic changes begin 



As soon as you push a needle through the skin. 



Haldane's writings and those of his school, such as J. A. Thomson 

 and G. G. Douglas, had extremely little effect on the direction taken 

 by biological science in the first years of this century. As A. D. 

 Ritchie pointed out, it is extraordinarily difficult to find out anything 

 about living systems, unless their parts are treated in isolation, even 

 if that be recognised as but the preliminary for imaginative synthesis, 

 and, as many observers said, Haldane's own researches in the physio- 

 logy of breathing afforded an excellent example of the usual scientific 

 method. Biological research proceeded steadily on the usual lines, 

 for Haldane's practical counsels could only be followed by those who 

 were willing to abandon causal explanations in biology or to give 

 up the hope of biology becoming an exact science. 



An influence was at hand, however, which was to lessen very much, 

 if not to destroy altogether, the attraction of Haldane's opinions for 

 biologists. A. N. Whitehead had in his earlier works, The Concept 

 of Mature and The Principles of Natural Knowledge, elaborated his theory 

 of extensive abstraction, but it was not until the publication of his 

 Science and the Modern World that it began to exercise any wide- 



