GREEK BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE 



are easily overthrown; and such, generically, 

 may be doomed. Yet life remains, very form- 

 ative, apparently still purposeful, still tending 

 toward self-fulfillment. The vital principle is 

 utterly wonderful and elusive, a will-o'-the- 

 wisp, and yet assuredly there. Anatomists, 

 physiologists, biologists, even physicists, are 

 not quite without it. Some among them crave 

 such an explanatory principle " to save the 

 phenomena! " Though it lead into swamps 

 of mysticism, people will not give it up and be 

 satisfied with mechanics and chemistry. The 

 fact of life is the prime organic reality: it is 

 still utterly wonderful and elusive, and yet 

 assuredly there. While biology today works 

 largely with mechanical and chemical data, 

 and uses mechanistic and chemical hypotheses, 

 the majority of biologists recognize that such 

 data and such principles do not afford a suffi- 

 cient explanation or description of living 

 organisms. 



Seeing that chemical and mechanistic for- 

 mulae give no real picture of the organism, 

 many biologists still think that no real picture 

 of it can be reached through such channels 

 exclusively. There is still much Aristote- 

 lianism in modern physiology. As Aristotle 



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