LIFE: OUTLINES OF GENERAL 

 BIOLOGY 



CHAPTER I 



THE CHARACTERISTICS OF ORGANISMS 



From a common-sense point of view the apartness of living creatures 

 from non-living things seems conspicuous. It appears almost self- 

 evident that an organism is something more than a mechanism. 

 But when we inquire into the basis of this common conviction, we 

 usually find that the plain man is thinking of the highest animals, 

 such as horses and dogs, in which he recognises incipient person- 

 alities, in a world quite different, he says, from that of machines, 

 or from that of the stars or stones. His conviction rests on his 

 recognition of them as kindred in spirit; but he hesitates when we 

 ask him to consider the lower animals, down to corals and sponges, 

 and still more when we ask what he thinks about plants. In such 

 relatively simple organisms as corals and seaweeds, he detects no 

 mental aspect; and apart from this, they show him but little of 

 that bustling activity which is part of his picture of what "being 

 alive" means. Thus, while he was sure that dog and wheelbarrow 

 were separated by a great gulf, he is not so convinced about the 

 difference between a coral and a stone. It is, therefore, for the 

 biologist to explain as clearly as he can the fundamental charac- 

 teristics of all living creatures. And there is another reason for this. 



One of the earliest imaginative ventures of primitive man was 

 to project intention into outside forces and non-living things. 

 Having little understanding of the physical world, and almost as 

 little mastery of it, he projected himself into forces and things. 

 In the absence of more than the beginnings of scientific description, 

 primitive man had somehow or other to make sense of things; so 

 he pictured them as agents like himself — a view that expanded 

 later on into a general theory of animism, peopling the world 

 with spirits: in fact a volitional view, derived from his own con- 

 scious will. 



Now the question which we must frankly face, in seeking to 

 distinguish the characteristics of living organisms, is whether we 

 biologists, in our turn, doubtless a higher one, are not in danger 

 of repeating the mistakes of our ancestors. Our scientific knowledge 

 of the organism is very incomplete; we do not know all that living 

 may essentially mean ; we feel sure that we do not exhaust it even 



