BIOPSYCHOLOGICAL 651 



drawn-out mechanistic versus vitalistic controversy, we must not 

 allow ourselves to be influenced in our thinking by any thought of 

 consequences. The only scientific questions are: Is the mechanistic 

 description of the realm of organisms adequate or inadequate? Is a 

 vitalistic description legitimate and really needed, and, if so, in 

 what terms? 



When studying living creatures we must try to steer between 

 an abstractional Scylla and a materialistic Charybdis. Scylla has 

 still her many heads, of which "vital force", "entelechy", and even 

 "elan vital" are three. Charybdis is still voracious, violently reducing 

 to a lowest common denominator everything that she can suck into 

 her vortex. No doubt she can reduce the living organism — say the 

 dog — to electrons and protons, but this does not help us to under- 

 stand our dog as dog. And that is what we aim at as biologists. 



Is there or is there not in the dog anything besides matter, and 

 energy, and mind? But this way of pressing the question forgets or 

 ignores the fact that matter and energy and mind are abstracted 

 aspects of reality. By the methods that reveal matter and energy — 

 or electrons, protons, and radiations — nothing else at present can 

 be disclosed. Even if we are convinced of the reality of a quite specific 

 "vital force", we cannot demonstrate it by chemico-physical 

 methods. If we could it would not be specific. This does not seem to 

 be a way out. 



Between the abstractional Scylla and the materiahstic Charybdis, 

 both metaphysical, is the passage called "methodological vitalism". 

 This does not postulate any "vital force", "biotic energy", or 

 "entelechy", yet it reacts from the attempt to coerce the organism 

 into the framework of mechanism — grand as that framework may 

 be, as the stars on high declare. What a methodological vitalism says 

 is simply this: There is a chemistry and physics, a mechanics and 

 dynamics, of the living organism ; but, when they have finished their 

 ledger, the description is biologically inadequate. 



An Aberdeenshire swallow banded when full grown with a marked 

 aluminium ring of no great weight, came back after its winter 

 sojourn in Africa to its native land, county, parish, farmstead. 

 Suppose we were biochemists and biophysicists knowing enough 

 to make a ledger of all the metabolisms — chemical and physical 

 changes — between the date of the swallow's liberation and the 

 date of its recapture, would this make sense of the fact estabhshed? 

 It would not, and nothing will, except a biopsychological theory of 

 the bird as a "historical being", meaning by that a creature that 

 carries its past engrained within it, lasting and working. But does 

 not a comet return on its majestic curve with predictable punctu- 

 ahty? It does, and we feel sure that Halley's comet, last seen in 

 1910, will be back again in 1985 ; but the swallow differs from the 

 comet in being individually adjustable, in having a measure of 



