448 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



cover the whole field of life. When Dr. J. S. Haldane punctures a 

 would-be entirely mechanical description of the work of the kidneys 

 or the lungs ; or when Smuts points out that many of the reactions 

 of organisms differ from those of non-living systems in being the 

 unified responses of co-ordinated wholes of a higher order than, say, 

 atoms or chemical com]x>unds; or when Driesch shows how mechan- 

 istic formuhe fail to grip the facts of development, and so on, the 

 mechanists point to what the future may have in store in the way 

 of complete mechanistic description. This is unanswerable, though 

 it may seem optimistic. It remains, however, for the vitalist to 

 }K)int out that in the higher reaches of life the mental aspect is 

 undeniable, and that mentality cannot be juggled out of mechanism. 

 Moreover, to put a long argument briefly, a machine cannot have a 

 theory that it is a machine. Our fifth proposition is that mechanistic 

 methods are indispensable and invaluable, but have their dangers 

 just like facile ^^talistic ones, and do not lead to adequate descrip- 

 tions of living. 



(6) At the opposite pole is positive vitalism, ably represented, 

 for instance, by Prof. Wildon Carr, who maintains with emphasis 

 that mechanism is not to be supplemented, but is to be rejected as 

 a wrong way of approaching the problem. Like Driesch, he stands 

 for the postulate of an "entelechy", a positive principle in virtue of 

 which an organism is an individual whole and acts as such. The 

 essence of life is individual and purposive activity, and this is 

 original and of the essence of reality. \Miat we know of matter 

 does not help us to understand life and mind. 



But a radical objection to this view is the apparent continuity 

 of evolution. For it looks as if living organisms had emerged (at 

 present one of the "blessed" words) from non-li\nng materials; 

 it looks as if undeniable "minds" or mental aspects had arisen as 

 new syntheses in animals the ancestors of which were not more 

 than latently mental, just as the clever chikl arises in individual 

 development from an egg-cell, the "mind" of which is hard to seek. 

 But Wildon Carr and many who think with him would definitely 

 reject the evolutionary precedence of matter to life, and of fife to 

 mind. 



.According to General Smuts, who is regarded by Carr as an 

 entelechist without knowing it, evolution has Ix^en a progressive 

 emergence of higher and higher "wholes", such as the atom, the 

 cell, the vegetative organism, the animal with an embodied mind, 

 and the human ix-rsonality. Anew "whole" is a fresh synthesis, the 

 intrinsic nature of which admits of new agency, creativeness, and 

 freedom. The ])rogr(Ssive emergence of "wholes" in Nature allows of 

 the expression of fresh aspects of reality; and if it be asked why 

 there should be this tendency to whole-making, Smuts replies, if we 

 understand him aright, that such is the nature of things. Man lives 



