362 Problems of Organic Adaptation 



minate or capricious. He points to the very significant fact 

 that there is no evidence of life apart from protoplasm, and 

 that such phenomena as development, adaptation, reason, 

 and purpose are not annulled if they are found to be bound 

 up with matter, for it is no more extraordinary that they 

 should be associated with matter than that they should be 

 separate from it. 



In living as in lifeless things, mechanistic factors are not 

 merely additive as Driesch maintains, but they are fre- 

 quently creative. In chemical compounds new qualities ap- 

 pear which were not present in any of the elements entering 

 the compounds. No one could predict beforehand the quali- 

 ties of water from the properties of hydrogen and oxygen, 

 and in general one cannot predict the results of combinations 

 before they have been learned by experience. The fact that 

 one could not predict consciousness from a knowledge of 

 the organic or inorganic constituents of the body is not 

 fundamentally different from these other cases in which new 

 things are formed by new combinations. The "creative evo- 

 lution" of Bergson is not different in principle from "crea- 

 tive synthesis," which is found everywhere in the living 

 and the lifeless worlds; it is therefore no proof of vitalism. 



The new vitalism no less than the old has failed at every 

 point to establish its main proposition, namely, that the 

 reactions of organisms are not causal, and that they require, 

 in order to explain them, a special principle which is lacking 

 in the inorganic world and which is non-mechanistic in action 

 and wholly unrelated to the principle of cause and effect. 

 This is not to deny that there may be a teleological principle 

 in all nature, but rather to affirm that there is no sufficient 

 reason for supposing that in this regard the living world 

 differs fundamentally from the lifeless. 



