BIONOMICS 251 



It includes all organic changes, alike of the viscera, the limbs and 

 the brain. It excludes the great mass of inorganic changes which 

 display little or no co-ordination. . . By making co-ordination the 

 specific characteristic of vitality, it involves the truths, that an arrest 

 of co-ordination is death and that imperfect co-ordination is disease. 

 Moreover, it harmonises with our ordinary ideas of life in its different 

 gradations : seeing that the organisms which we rank as low in their 

 degree of life are those which display but little co-ordination of actions, 

 and seeing that from these up to man the recognised increase in degree 

 of life corresponds with an increase in the extent and complexity of 

 co-ordination. 



But " co-ordination," however congruous with Spencer's 

 First Principles, and however convenient in purely physico- 

 chemical biology, does not quite answer. 



But, like the others, this definition includes too much; for it may 

 be said of the Solar System, wth its regularly recurring movements 

 and its self-balancing perturbations, that it also exhibits co-ordination 

 of actions. And however plausibly it may be argued that, in the abstract, 

 the motions of the planets and satellites are as properly comprehended 

 in the idea of life, as the changes going on in a motionless, unsensitive 

 seed ; yet, it must be admitted, that they are foreign to that idea as 

 commonly received, and as here to be formulated. 



Obviously " co-ordination " should be replaced by 

 " co-operation," a word which is far more inclusive, though 

 still in a sense applicable also to the Solar System. 



That symbiotic activity tends towards increased individua- 

 tion, we have seen, and Schelling's definition w r ould thus not be 

 invalidated. "Co-ordination," however, is neither flesh nor 

 spirit, though it is a convenient term. 



We have previously seen that Spencer is elsewhere driven 

 to postulate " co-operation " and to admit that biological facts 

 must be interpreted "in some such way," although, this being 

 admitted, he stated we can only " dimly discern a harmony 

 with first principles." Indeed, in the very chapter on the 

 " Proximate definition of life," he says that : " It needs but to 

 contrast the many organs co-operating in a mammal, with the 

 few in a polype, to see that the actions which are progressing 

 together in the body of the first, as much exceed in number 

 the actions progressing together in the body of the last, as 



