114; The Unitij of the Organism 



It is this : Arc a man and a dead man, a horse and a dead 

 horse, tlie same thing or are they different things? If the 

 materialistic biologist and the vitalistic biologist will answer 

 this question with an unfaltering "They are different 

 things," and will give due attention to both the objective 

 and the subjective grounds on which the answer is based, 

 they will find that the words materialism and vitalism, to 

 which they have clung so tenaciously, are emptied of any 

 im])ortant significance as applied to their doctrines. Both 

 vitalist and materialist will then become aware that the very 

 nature of biochemistry, its nature in virtue of which it has 

 a certain measure of independence, or self-sufficiency, is a 

 peculiar revealer of both the necessity and the method of 

 application of physical chemistry to biology. 



So I bnng this discussion of the organism and its chem- 

 ical substances to a close with a brief natural-history state- 

 ment of the probable role of physical chemistry in inter- 

 preting organic beings. First of all, we must insist that the 

 obvious, the never-refuted, the universal fact that all living 

 substance or protoplasm is individualized, shall not be ig- 

 nored or cavalierly tossed aside. Nor can we permit its 

 significance to be obscured by sophistical reasoning — by 

 such reasoning as, for example, may be indulged in from 

 the discovery that certain organs and cells may live for a 

 long time and carry on their activities more or less normally, 

 after being separated from the organism. What the/se 

 important observations prove is that many living organs, 

 tissues, and cells have wonderful tenacity of life, once they 

 have been brought into existence. From this viewpoint 

 the facts are of great interest, but they do not furnish a 

 scintilla of evidence that organic substance or cells or or- 

 gans are independent of individual organisms in the sense 

 of being able to come into existence independently of in- 

 dividual organisms. Some physiologists talk about "organic 

 matter" as though it had as little connection with organ- 



