652 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



indeterminism, in being free to err, and in being able to hajid on its 

 way-finding capacity as a heritage to its offspring. 



It is not difficult to multiply cases where the chemico-physical 

 description of vital activity does not in itself make sense; and this is 

 just another way of saying that biology is autonomous. Yet this is 

 too negative a position. We must go further and seek to define the 

 characteristic qualities that give the organism its newness. It is not 

 enough to tie up the puzzles of life with a label called "x". At all 

 events we must first be ready to state what these puzzles are; and 

 we must welcome their reduction to simpler terms if that is 

 practicable. 



As we have explained in the first chapter of this book, organisms 

 have a characteristic self-preservative metabolism of proteins in a 

 colloidal state, always changing and yet remaining for variable 

 periods the same. Organisms are able to grow, multiply, and develop, 

 continuing their specific organisation or individuality from genera- 

 tion to generation. Organisms show a purposive behaviour, a power 

 of enregistering individual and racial experience, and a capacity for 

 varying and evolving. 



So far as we are aware, nothing happens in living creatures that 

 is inconsistent with the laws of chemistry and physics, but new 

 things happen — profiting by experience, the bent bow of endeavour, 

 processes of self-regulation, self-repair, self-multiplying. This is the 

 Autonomy of Life. So, if we speak of the Order of Nature, it must 

 be more than the Order of the Cosmosphere, it must include the 

 higher order of the Biosphere, in which new aspects of Reality have 

 emerged that require categories of their own. George Henry Lewes 

 used the word "emergent" as contrasted with resultant, when the 

 new product shows more than the sum of the old properties and 

 quaHties ; and this usage has been elaborated and refined by Lloyd 

 Morgan. 



An attempt must be made to avoid the fallacy of hard and fast 

 lines in speaking of autonomy. We emphasise the autonomy of life 

 because we wish to avoid the false simplicity of calling an animal 

 a mechanism, yet every new synthesis implies some degree of 

 autonomy, so we must use the term warily. 



One can fancifully picture a disembodied chemist studying a 

 world of gases; and some worlds arc gaseous indeed. A star may be 

 without solidity, we understand, and consist of electrons and 

 protons, maimed atoms or ions, and storms of ether-waves. One 

 can imagine the disembodied chemist coming to know much in 

 regard to the laws of gases, and attaining to a very vivid picture of 

 the dance of molecules and their interminable collisions. But after 

 many Jehovan days, in which a thousand years are as one day, 

 hydrogen and oxygen unite, in the chemist's cooling world, to form 

 water, the first known liquid, let us suppose, with novel and surprising 



