142 The Unity of the Organism 



quoted. If there are "only two classes of things" in the 

 universe, "Matter and Energy," it would follow that the 

 myriads of individual organisms which according to our 

 senses certainly seem to exist, are after all phantasms of 

 some sort, and those departments of science which deal with 

 the phantasmal individuals would have to concern them- 

 selves chiefly with "getting behind" the apparitions to the 

 two real things, the Matter and the Energy. 



But even those physiologists and biologists who adopt the 

 physical-chemistry standpoint most unreservedly speak of 

 the matter of which organisms are composed as "living" 

 and so do not quite accept the restrictions upon them of 

 such a conception of the "province of physics" as that 

 formulated by physics itself in the quotation above given. 

 They seem to insist by implication that "living matter" is 

 a real thing, no less than are Matter and Energy. This is 

 very significant from our standpoint and will be exceedingly 

 important if finally physics, too, shall fully accept it. It 

 will be thus important because if biology is driven, as this 

 treatise holds it will be, to recognize that the individual or- 

 ganism, each and every one that exists or ever has existed, 

 is as real a thing as are any of its parts or substances, by 

 whatever criterion of reality science or philosophy can ap- 

 ply; and if physics goes with biology in this, then will ob- 

 jective science as a whole be committed to a doctrine of the 

 universe vastly different from that which now dominates the 

 physico-mathematical sciences. Put into the briefest, most 

 concrete form possible, such a consummation would establish 

 the so-called natural history, or descriptive, or "inexact" 

 (sic?) sciences in a place at least as secure and exalted as 

 that held through the centuries in western civilization by 

 the mathematico-physical, the so-called exact sciences. 



And we must not forget the important fact that physics 

 itself as conceived by some of its eminent devotees, occupies 

 no such all-inclusive, all-dominating and domineering place 



