The Organisvi and its Chemistr?/ 115 



isms as has inorganic matter. "Living substance," unin- 

 dividuated in a strict sense, has no better standing in the 

 world of objective reahty than have the ghosts and other 

 apparitions with which the imagination of primitive men 

 populates the world. 



All the living substance that has existed on this earth 

 or anywhere else has existed through and in and because of 

 individual living beings. That this is a truism is no reason 

 for treating it as though it were not true. 



(b) Indications That Variation and Individuation are 

 Primarily Chemical, While Constancy and Uni- 

 formity are Primarily Physical 



Fixing attention, now, on organic matter as the matter 

 of individual organisms, which individuals are subject to 

 the laws of variation and heredity, and remembering that 

 according to these laws no two individuals are exactly alike, 

 and that every individual is derived from other individuals 

 which it resembles because of being thus derived, see how 

 in their very nature physics and chemistry are adapted to 

 the needs of the natural historian in his efforts to interpret 

 the "matter" of the organisms with which he is occupied. 

 From being par excellence the science of transformation, 

 of the production of what is absolutely different and abso- 

 lutely new relative to that from which the products come, 

 chemistrv seems to the naturalist to be above all others 

 the science which ought to illuminate the variational, the 

 transformational, the productional side of "organic sub- 

 stance." On the other hand, from being par excellence the 

 science of the general, the persistent, the non- and quasi- 

 transformational side of natural objects, physics appeals 

 to the naturalist as the science which ought to bring light 

 into the darkness that envelops the repetitional, the like- 

 begets-like, the heredity side of the same substance, 



