Place of Definition, etc., in Philosophical Biology 



taking shape with a few biologists, notably with J. S. 

 Haldane, "to raise the term organism to the level of a 

 category," as Henderson has characterized Haldane's 

 undertaking. As a matter of fact, the effort is to re- 

 store, not originally to elevate the term, for a study 

 of the history of biological theory clearly discloses that 

 the term organism was long ago accepted as a category 

 in the very best writings. For example, whenever the 

 cell is interpreted as an "elementary organism," as it 

 usually has been since Briicke first conceived it thus, 

 organism is acknowledged to be a "category" a real 

 entity of biology. 



From the extreme devotion to description and classi- 

 fication which characterized the older biology, the new 

 has gone, in several of its most important aspects, to 

 the opposite extreme of scarcely any accurate descrip- 

 tion and classification at all. Very few biologists ap- 

 pear to have considered how this attitude toward sys- 

 tematization has affected philosophical biology, and 

 especially the biology of man, and so the general theo- 

 ries of human life, and influence upon human conduct. 



We approach here a matter of vast scope, one alto- 

 gether too vast to be more than touched in an essay like 

 this. But there is one segment of it which, though lying 

 close to the field of biology proper and of great impor- 

 tance, appears to have attracted the attention of pro- 

 fessional biologists but little. 



I refer to that melange ( the thing will not allow itself 

 to be called a system) of utterances and more or less 



