160 THE UNIQUENESS OF LIFE 



ence between organisms and things in general, we hold to 

 what we believe to be a fact, that mechanical formulae do 

 not begin to answer the distinctively biological questions. 

 We do not doubt the value of bio-chemistry and bio-physics, 

 but when these are added up the summation is not biology. 

 We need new concepts — such as that of the organism as a 

 historic being which has traded with time, and has en- 

 registered within itself past experiences and experiments, 

 and which has ever its conative bow bent towards the future. 

 We need these new concepts because there are new facts 

 to describe, which we cannot analyse away into so-called 

 simpler processes. In the present state of knowledge we 

 cannot tell in what the newness essentially consists. This 

 appears to us to be a quite legitimate stopping-place, without 

 going on (except speculatively) to any positive vitalistic 

 theory which must be, from the nature of the case, meta- 

 physical. 



The best statement that we know of methodological vital- 

 ism is that given by Mr. E. S. Russell, and we take one of 

 his illustrations — the migration of the European eel to its 

 spawning ground in the deep, warm, and salt waters on the 

 verge of the abyssal Atlantic. Chemical and physical meth- 

 ods can tell us much — how the eel gets energy for its long 

 journey, and a score of other things ; they might conceivably 

 give us an account of every transformation of energy within 

 the eel from the time it left the pond to the time of its death 

 in the dark abysses, but they do not illumine the biological 

 fact of the eel's migration. As Mr. Russell says, '^ The 

 migration is, so to speak, a fact of a higher order than any 

 physical or chemical fact, although it is made up of an in- 

 definitely large number of physical and chemical facts. To 

 explain the fact one must accept it as a whole, not seek 



