120 FUNCTIONAL INERTIA 



which we have learned to call protoplasmic affect- 

 ability always expressible as a transformation of 

 energy, has had its genesis aeons ago in the very 

 primitive affectability of the non-living ; and similarly, 

 that that other property which we know to exist in 

 non-living molecules, their inertia, is the causal 

 antecedent of that inertia which we must henceforth 

 learn to attribute as a property to the molecules of 

 living matter. 



As Maudsley has boldly said, " Life is not a con- 

 trast to non-living nature, but a further development 

 of it." * He reports Coleridge as having asserted 

 " that the division of substances into living and dead, 

 though psychologically necessary, was of doubtful 

 philosophical validity.' ' We seem j ustified in drawing 

 up the scheme shown on the opposite page. 



I would like to allude to a notion, which figures 

 a good deal in biological literature, viz., that of 

 " internal stimuli." When some observer or another 

 finds some reaction clearly not related to environ- 

 mental conditions (external stimuli), he writes it 

 down as due to " internal stimuli." Some writers 

 mean by internal stimuli such things as blood, lymph 

 CO 2 or O. 2 these I put on one side in this criticism : 

 they are as external to the living cell-structure as is 

 any environmental condition. It seems to me that 

 the continued use of this expression is not conducive 

 to clearer thinking. 



We have seen that in Biology we have to deal 

 with living molecules related to stimuli (" external 



* H. Maudsley, " Body and Mind/' p. 163. 



