648 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



In other words, how does organism transcend mechanism? The 

 reason for making a comparison with a whirlpool, or a star, or a 

 volcano, or a crystal, and not with a machine, is obvious — namely, 

 that a machine is a material system put together by man's device. 

 A machine cannot be regarded as a sample of the cosmosphere; it 

 is an embodied human idea. 



(a) The oyster is more than the eddy, because it has not yet been 

 possible to give in chemical and physical terms a complete account 

 of any vital phenomenon, far less of behaviour, development, and 

 evolution. One may isolate a good part of a physiological event, 

 and say: Here is a physical or chemical process in a line with what 

 occurs in the inorganic world. At a certain stage in the contraction 

 of muscle there is a combustion of lactic acid; at a stage in a reflex 

 action there is a very slight rise of temperature due to a thrill passing 

 along a nerve ; at a stage after a meal, a peptic enzyme breaks up a 

 protein into amino-acids by a process of fermentation, and so on. 

 But we cannot make a satisfactory chemico-physical ledger of a 

 dog's or an Amoeba's vital processes for an hour — there is such 

 baffling relatedness and regulatedness. A fortiori, how far off is 

 a chemico-physical account of heredity, development, variation, 

 struggle. 



{b) In the second place, hving creatures have distinctive qualities 

 which are at present irreducible, such as purposiveness — a wider 

 word than purposefulness — and the capacity for enregistering 

 experience. A volcano does work, but not in the self-preservative 

 way characteristic of organisms. A star commands our admiration, 

 increasing with our knowledge; but the whirligig beetle in the pond 

 is greater than a star in commanding its course. A river carves its 

 bed effectively and beautifully, but who can credit a river with 

 what we must grant to a mouse — a "present foretaste" of the plea- 

 sure or pain which a certain course of behaviour will entail? A bar of 

 iron is never quite the same after it has once been severely jarred, 

 but this is only a distant hint of the power that living creatures 

 have of enregistering experience within themselves. The carnivorous 

 plant called Venus s Flytrap, that shuts quickly on an insect, will 

 allow itself to be duped three or four times with faked food; but 

 after that, it is fooled no more, until it has, so to speak, forgotten. 

 A brainless starfish, with not a single nerve-ganghon in its body, 

 learns to right itself more and more quickly when it is laid on its 

 back day after day for a week ; and a young crayfish, which has a 

 well-formed brain, learns with astonishing celerity to avoid a path- 

 way that includes a mild electric shock. Organisms are not isolated 

 from the inorganic; they subsume its laws and qualities; yet they 

 are new systems with laws of their own. 



Let us explain for a moment what is meant by calling the organism 

 a "historic being". It has a capacity for enregistering the past. W. K. 



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