iii6 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



a living creature answers back to a stimulus, the real cause of the 

 response is not the excitant but the whole. This transforms our 

 concept of causality, previously too much based on billiard balls, 

 i.e. on mechanics. Moreover, the idea of the whole leads us on to the 

 concept of creativeness, and to the recognition of an increasing 

 freedom as the series of wholes progresses. "We are out of the bonds 

 of the old crude mechanical ideas, and we enter an altogether new 

 zone of ideas and categories." 



The word Holism is sometimes used by Smuts to denote a world- 

 outlook, and sometimes to express a tendency deep in the nature 

 of things. In this second sense Holism is the ultimate synthetic, 

 ordering, organising, regulative tendency in the universe which 

 accounts for all the structural groupings and syntheses in it, from 

 the atom and the physico-chemical structures, through the cell and 

 organisms, through mind in animals, to personality in man. Our 

 author does not seek to explain this in terms of anything else in the 

 scientific universe of discourse. Yet he suggests that it may be 

 philosophically interpreted. For "the Holism in Nature is very close 

 to us, and a real support in all our striving towards betterment. 

 Our aspiration is its inspiration, and it is thus the inner guarantee 

 of eventual victory in spite of all setbacks and defeats". 



In all essentials, then, we cannot but welcome this synthetic 

 philosophy; and the more since it anticipates, in general terms, 

 many of the synthetic endeavours and interpretations we offer, 

 from our concrete starting-point, in this book ; those in bio-psycholo- 

 gical terms especially, but many others as well. Such undesigned 

 agreement is surely of encouraging augury towards the returning 

 harmony of science, philosophy, and even religion, in terms of that 

 Unity underlying the variety of Life in Evolution, which we are 

 here seeking to express, and at so many levels, from microbe to man, 

 and from simplest organic life-processes to their highest outcomes, 

 and even ideals. 



