PHYSIOLOGICAL 447 



should be kept for genuine organisms, not blunted by application 

 to atoms on the one hand, or to human societies on the other. 



Thus our third proposition is that the domain of things, the 

 realm of organisms, and the kingdom of man (where mind plays a 

 dominant part) are three distinct orders of fact, each with its 

 characteristics — distinct though they overflow and interpenetrate, 

 distinct though their continuity is becoming increasingly clear. 



(4) It is a waste of time and wits to continue to pit against one 

 another the mechanistic and the vitalistic descriptions of living 

 creatures, as if one must choose between them. Every reasonable 

 vitalist, whatever school of vitalism he represents, wishes good 

 speed to chemicophysical analysis and description; but his protest 

 is that the sea of reality contains fishes which must escape the 

 physicochemical nets. The physicochemical meshes or methods are 

 not adapted or intended to capture them. There is no chemical 

 test for feeling; there is no balance that will weigh a purpose. Yet 

 the vitalist believes in the reality of feeling and purpose; and is 

 rather amazed that anyone can disagree with him. Every vitalist 

 wishes to see biochemical and biophysical analysis pushed as far 

 as they will go — they express, in Comtian phraseology, "legitimate 

 materialisms". But care must be taken not to pretend that the 

 biochemical and biophysical concepts must suflice, or do suffice, 

 for the description of the whole of life or living. It is also more than 

 a little naive to suppose that atoms and radiations and the Hke 

 form a sort of bedrock of reality, the fact being that they are only 

 certain aspects of reality which become clear when certain methods 

 are used in certain fields. And their mirroring, increasingly cleared 

 from blurs, is ours. 



Similarly, in the opposite direction, there are "legitimate tran- 

 scendentalisms", as when we insist on including feeling and the like 

 in our account of animals; or when we consider the possibihty that 

 something analogous to the mental aspect of an intelligent animal 

 may be at work in the implicit organism which we call the developing 

 ovum. General Smuts suggests (in his Holism) that mechanism and 

 vitalism should both be discarded as mischievous survivals, but 

 that is impossible. They represent two legitimate ways of looking 

 at living creatures. It is true, however, that they require to be 

 replaced by neomechanism, and neovitalism, for the mechanistic 

 formulations of to-day are not those of fifty years ago, and vitalism 

 has also been changed by a deepening knowledge of the non-living 

 and of the unconscious. Our fourth proposition is that mechanistic 

 and vitalistic descriptions are not only legitimate, but even necessary 

 for clearness. 



(5) The extreme mechanistic position is not that there is a 

 chemistry and a physics of the living organism, for that is admitted 

 by all; it is that the concepts of chemistry and physics suffice to 



