26 THE THEORY OF [pt. 



the living being was an organism. Cuvier took a very definite stand 

 on this question when he said, "All the parts of a body are inter- 

 related, they can act only in so far as they all act together; trying 

 to separate one from the whole means transferring it to the realm 

 of dead substance and entirely changing its essence". But the name 

 most familiarly associated with biological organicism in this country 

 is that of J. S. Haldane, who has frequently set forth his views upon 

 this subject. His attitude is so well known that it need not be de- 

 scribed here at any length, but, in brief, he points out that the living 

 animal is an entity with a far higher degree of internal relatedness 

 than any non-living system, and holds that the organic cannot 

 be understood by a study of its parts though the inorganic very 

 possibly can. In other words, an organism is an entity whose parts 

 lose all their characteristic properties when they are studied away 

 from the organism itself; they fall, as it were, into meaninglessness 

 as soon as they are abstracted from the whole of which they are 

 parts. Consequently that kind of physiology, and a fortiori biophysics 

 and biochemistry, which analyses living organisms, is insufficient 

 as an apparatus for understanding living things and should give 

 place to studies in which organisms are regarded intact. Moreover, 

 it is only in the untouched organism that those wonderfully well- 

 balanced actions are seen by which the animal or plant holds to its 

 own niche in the economy of nature, resisting every attempt to dis- 

 lodge it, provided the attempt be not so successful as to disorganise the 

 living thing. This power of maintaining a constancy in its external and 

 internal environment is what Haldane regards as the deus ex machina, the 

 property of living things essentially inexplicable by physico-chemical 

 hypotheses and requiring special biological language for its formula- 

 tion. (For a discussion of the "inconceivability argument" in bio- 

 logy, see Mackenzie and Needham.) "All attempts", he says, "to 

 trace the ultimate mechanism of life must be given up as meaningless. 

 The aim of biology becomes a very different one — to trace in 

 increasing detail, and with increasing clearness, the organic deter- 

 mination which the organic conception formulates." It is to be 

 noted, however, that Haldane vigorously criticised Drieschian neo- 

 vitalism, adducing against it the argument of impossibility of inter- 

 ference with the second law of thermo-dynamics, and the dubiousness 

 of the theory of guidance without work done, a discussion of which 

 on much better foundations was subsequently given by Lotka. 



