I] CHEMICAL EMBRYOLOGY 25 



is derived, etc.", and at the same time he lays stress on the identifica- 

 tion of the physico-chemical aspect with the scientific aspect, going 

 on, indeed, to say that "physiologists can only act indirectly through 

 animal physico-chemistry, i.e. physics and chemistry worked out in 

 the field of life, where the necessary conditions of all living organisms 

 develop, create, and support each other according to a definite idea 

 and obedient to rigorous determinism". It is true that elsewhere he 

 identifies this "force that goes to arrange the letters of the alphabet" 

 with the "mediating nature" of Hippocrates and the archaeus 

 faber of van Helmont. Had he read more in Lucretius than in 

 Aristotle, he might rather have spoken of it as a necessary outcome 

 of the constitution of nature, a suggestion more profoundly in 

 harmony, perhaps, with the natural bent of the scientific conscious- 

 ness (cf Bacon's remarks on Democritus in De Augmentis Scientiarum) . 

 But, even so, he evidently regards it as the subject-matter of meta- 

 physics and not of science, for he says in the next paragraph, "The 

 term 'vital properties' is only provisional because we call properties 

 ' vital ' which we have not yet been able to reduce to physico-chemical 

 terms, though doubtless we shall succeed in that some day". 



Organicism as an Occasion of Falling 



By making use of the thought of Bernard, we pass by an imper- 

 ceptible transition from finalism and dynamic teleology to or- 

 ganicism, another of the principal forms which the opposition to 

 mechanistic biology has taken. This, like some of the other doctrines 

 I have mentioned, has a long history behind it. The notion, "We 

 murder to dissect", finds clear expression as early as a.d. 200, when 

 Q^. Septimius Tertullianus, of Carthage, one of the Western Fathers, 

 spoke thus of Herophilus, the Alexandrian anatomist, "Herophilus, 

 the physician, or rather butcher, dissected 600 persons that he might 

 scrutinise nature; he hated man that he might gain knowledge. 

 I know not whether he explored clearly all the internal parts of man 

 for death itself changes them from their state when alive, and death 

 in his hands was not simply death, but led to error from the very process 

 of cutting up". No more excellent statement of the organicistic view- 

 point could be devised. Sir Kenelm Digby in 1644 gave a still 

 clearer summary of this point of view, and even in the rationalistic 

 eighteenth century there were scientific men who objected to the 

 use of the term machine-like as applied to animals, and insisted that 



