1226 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



inquiry, and this surely nowhere more vividly than in dealing with 

 the sufferings and dangers of life. Aristotle's interest, observation, 

 and insight in biology owed much to his medical parentage: and 

 the botanical classic of his disciple Theophrastus too; whfie from 

 later times to comparatively recent ones, as from Dioscorides to 

 wellnigh all before Linnaeus, and sometimes since, medical influence 

 has not been lacking. Thus for eminent botanists and zoologists in 

 our own country, enough to recall the names of Robert Brown, 

 Hooker, and Huxley, to see them as doctors out on exploration, 

 and even Darwin's Edinburgh beginnings of research as in fruitful 

 truancy from its School of Medicine. 



Again, take our modern biological insistence on Life as funda- 

 mentally the interaction of Organism with Environment, as out- 

 lined further in another chapter, and with each thus needing not only 

 analysis, but correlation in detail. Both attempts are at least as old 

 as Hippocrates; witness his conception of our organismal life as 

 presenting various temperaments — sanguine, nervous, lymphatic, 

 and bilious or melancholic types of constitution; and on the other 

 hand his insistence on the importance of environment both in 

 general and particular, in his Air, Water, and Places. And with- 

 out going too far into medical history, it is here well to recall that 

 his teaching is no mere old story, as presented in most schools of 

 medicine : it has been the very life of that of Montpellier, as at once 

 the earliest schooL after Salerno, and as keeping Hippocrates at his 

 best as leader of its method, doctrine, and unbroken central teach- 

 ing — ^whence for England even Sydenham himself — that doctrine 

 of Vitalism, which — despite its inevitably too general and abstract 

 expression, pending the modern research it has so largely initiated 

 and aided — is being vividly recalled and re-stated at the current 

 meeting of the French Medical Association in that very School of 

 Medicine as these pages are being written ; as well as in the growing 

 movement of the neo- Vitalism now arising in all countries. This 

 does not, of course, imder- value, much less reject the often invaluable 

 contributions of the biomechanist, biophysicist and biochemist — • 

 each a welcome part of the legitimate materialism of physical 

 science as underlying the biological; but none the less correcting 

 the error too easy from such approach and perspective, that of the 

 "illegitimate materialism" of imagining that we have thereby 

 reached the essential secret of biology itself. The neo-Vitalist has 

 thus but to supplement these labours (yet utilise their examxple of 

 thoroughness and accuracy) by making the essential Biodrama 

 more clear, i.e. the view of living beings in their self -maintaining 

 and species-continuing activities. And these as essentially directive 

 and co-ordinative of functioning and forming; and furthermore, as 

 increasingly associated and interactive, throughout organic evolu- 

 tion, from its incipience to its completeness, with biopsychosis and 



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