ON THE VITAL1STIC VIEW OF NATURE. 



463 



side, the union or co-operation of many essentially similar 

 units in a complicated organism brings out more and 

 more, as we ascend in the scale of living things, a new 

 phenomenon, a new kind of unity, that which we term 

 " individuality," the wealth of an inner self-conscious life, 

 to which the older school of biologists attached primary 

 importance. Life accordingly has now for us two sides 

 first, the life of the smallest, the most primitive unit 

 of living matter, say the cell, the amoaba, or, if you will, 

 the idioblast, the gemmule, the germ-plasma, the physio- 

 logical unit. Secondly, the life of the complex society of 

 cells, the higher organism in which the inner world with 

 all its mental phenomena has become manifest. How 

 is the unity of this higher complex possible ? In what 

 does it consist ? What can we know of it ? Neither 

 the physiological nor the psychological unity is in-- 

 telligible to us. An eminent biologist, to whom we 

 owe the creation of an entire new science, the late 

 Professor Virchow, the founder of Cellular Pathology, 

 has told us recently l that only since biologists have 

 ceased to try to understand the unity of life in the 

 higher organisms, the psychological unity, and have 

 realised the fact that the unity of life is in the 

 autonomous cell, has biology in theory and practice 

 made much progress. Be it so. It seems likely that 

 the progress of biology depends entirely on the culti- 

 vation of the mechanical view ; but from another and 



to the following tracts which deal 

 specially with the problems of 

 mechanism and vitalism. Hans 

 Driesch,'Die mathematisch-mechan- 

 ieche Betrachtung morphologischer 

 Probleine der Biologie ' (Jena, 1891) ; 



0. Biitschli, ' Mechanismus und 

 Vitalismus' (Leipzig, 1901); Eugen 

 Albrecht, ' Vorfragen der Biologie ' 

 (Wiesbaden, 1899). 



1 In the Huxley Lecture of 1898. 



