THE UNIQUENESS OF LIFE 163 



organismal enregistration of past experiences, individual and 

 racial. We must bear in mind that organismal reactions are 

 often very precise — the Xorth Sea will not suit the eel, it 

 must move on ; that they are often extraordinarily insistent, 

 as we may infer from Maitland's experiments on Smolts 

 which were always jumping out of the pond at the time when 

 they should naturally have been leavins; fresh water : that 

 the internal adjustments are so delicate that they begin to 

 operate long before the situation is at all critical ; and that, 

 after all, what we see is an active searching out of regions or 

 conditions of optimum stimulation. 



§ 7. Speculative. 



Such, then, is the position which may be called descriptive 

 or methodological vitalism. If we are pressed to go beyond 

 Science in the endeavour to form some connected reconstruc- 

 tion, we should say that those constellations of ' matter ' 

 and ^ energy ' which we call organisms aiford opportunity 

 for the expression of aspects of reality which are undetect- 

 able in the inorganic doman. ' Matter ' and ^ energy ' are 

 scientific concepts defined for the description of the so- 

 called physical universe; they are defined by certain meth- 

 ods — the intellectual instruments of physics and chemistry; 

 they are admittedly reached by processes of abstraction. In 

 dealing with the outer world apart from life, these formula? 

 work well, but we find no warrant for assertine; that they 

 exhaust the reality of ISTature. They correspond to reality, 

 for we risk our lives on this correspondence, but it does not 

 follow that they are exhaustive. Reality is richer than they. 

 For just as a physician may on occasions treat his patient 

 successfully without recos^iising him as a rational bring at 

 all, yet will on other occasions fail grievously through not 



