BIOPSYCHOLOGICAL 647 



Huxley said, though it was only a half-truth, the organism is a 

 whirlpool in the rushing stream of matter and energy. There are 

 surface-tensions and oxidations, and so forth, in the living body 

 just as in the non-living world. 



Similarly, the biosphere envelops and interpenetrates the human 

 sphere, for man depends on plants and animals and is himself made 

 of protoplasm. Apart and unique as man is. he is zoologically a 

 mammal. He inherits, develops and grows, he feeds and breathes, 

 he multiplies and dies as a mammal, though he is much more. He 

 may allow himself to become more of a mammal than he should 

 be, and slave to his passions. He may allow himself to be less of a 

 mammal than he should be, if he becomes selfishly non-parental. 

 The poet spoke of himself quaintly as being "stuccoed all over with 

 quadrupeds", even including some reptiles; man is solidary with 

 the rest of creation. "Yet what a piece of work is a man — in reason 

 how like a God." It is an obviously gross exaggeration that "Mann 

 ist was er isst" (Man is what he eats); yet food is a sociological 

 factor. A rice-societv is different from a wheat-society. The biosphere 

 embraces the sociosphere. 



INTERACTIONS OF THE THREE SPHERES.— This idea of 



three spheres is elementary, but it has its usefulness ; so let us linger 

 for a moment to notice that each sphere may cut into the one 

 outside it. When coral polyps build a breakwater a thousand miles 

 long, when beavers make a dam or cut a canal, when the grass 

 covers the earth with a protecting garment, when the debris of the 

 carboniferous forests turns into coal, the biosphere is influencing 

 the cosmosphere. The hand of life upon the earth is a familiar theme. 

 Perhaps there is exaggeration in the poet's daring hyperbole: 

 "Thou canst not stir a flower without troubling of a star"; yet the 

 green plants have made the atmosphere breathable. 



Similarly man acts on the cosmosphere with all his geotechnics, 

 whether it be a canal at Panama or a dam in Holland. He often 

 takes part of the biosphere into his kingdom, sometimes for great 

 good, as when he domesticates the dog and cultivates the wild 

 wheat, sometimes for evil, as when he alters the balance of Nature 

 ruthlessly or shortsightedly. 



We have dwelt on the swaying inter-osculating boundaries 

 between the three spheres because we wish to emphasise the validity 

 of these boundaries. It is of great importance to our outlook to be 

 clear that a living creature is more than a whirlpool, greater in a 

 way than a star; and that a human society is more than a hive, 

 not to speak of a herd. 



ORGANISM MORE THAN MECHANISM.— What reasons are 

 there, then, for regarding a living creature as more than a whirlpool? 



