152 The Unity of the Organism 



as explanation of all phenomena, is exactly what I mean by 

 elementalist absolutism. 



Confusion of Theory of Organisms and Theory of the 

 Knowledge of Organisms 



Although the thoroughgoing metaphysical character of 

 these statements is evidenced by the finalism which crops 

 out at several points, this is not the aspect of the matter 

 which chiefly interests us here. Rather what we are con- 

 cerned with is the fact that affirmations about the "aim of 

 the physical sciences" and the "goal of biology" do not 

 belong, properly speaking, to the provinces of physical 

 science and biology at all, but to quite a different science, 

 namely that which deals with the nature of knowledge itself. 

 The "physical sciences" are the vast accumulation of man's 

 positive knowledge, theories, hypotheses, and so forth, about 

 physical nature; they certainly are not physical nature it- 

 self. Consequently a statement of the character and aims 

 of that knowledge is not a statement about the phenomena 

 to which the knowledge pertains. And the same reasoning 

 applies to the affirmation about the goal of biology. 



All this is only another way of saying what Loeb him- 

 self virtually tells us, namely that his entire discussion of 

 the organism as a whole is made from the standpoint of one 

 particular theory of the ultimate nature of living beings, 

 that theory being the mechanistic. Recall the complete title 

 of the book The Organism as a Whole From the Physico- 

 Chemical Viewpoint. To treat the subject from this view- 

 point is of course perfectly legitimate. When, however, the 

 assumption is made that such a treatment is the only really 

 legitimate one because it rests on ultimate truth, then sound 

 science is bound to protest, chiefly because of the obvious 

 biological inadequacy, and at some points, perversion and 

 contradiction displayed in the treatment. 



