X 



THE VITAL ORDER 



THE mechanistic theory of life — the theory 

 that all living things can be explained and 

 fully accounted for on purely physico-chemical 

 principles — has many defenders in our day. The 

 main aim of the foregoing chapters is to point out 

 the inadequacy of this view. At the risk of wearying 

 my reader I am going to collect under the above 

 heading a few more considerations bearing on this 

 point. 



A thing that grows, that develops, cannot, except 

 by very free use of language, be called a machine. 

 We speak of the body as a machine, but we have to 

 qualify it by prefixing the adjective living — the 

 living machine, which takes it out of the mechanical 

 order of things fabricated, contrived, built up from 

 without, and puts it in the order we call vital, the 

 order of things self -developed from within, the order 

 of things autonomous, as contrasted with things 

 automatic. All the mechanical principles are opera- 

 tive in the life processes, but they have been vital- 

 ized, not changed in any way but in the service of a 

 new order of reality. The heart with its chambers 



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