

LECTURE V. 

 THE UNIQUENESS OF LIFE. 



1. The Inadequacy of a Mechanistic Description of Organisms Is 

 a Negative Conclusion. 2. The Problem : Vitalism or Me- 

 chanism, or Neither? 3. Are Organisms Unique in Virtue 

 of their Complexity? 4. Have Organisms a Monopoly of 

 Some Peculiar Energy or Energies? 5. Is there a Non-per- 

 ceptual Vital Agency resident in Organisms and Operative in 

 distinctively Vital Activities? 6. Descriptive or Methodolog- 

 ical Vitalism: the 'Biological' View. 7. Speculative. 8. 

 Retrospect. 9. Why Cannot the Controversy between Mech- 

 anistic and Vitalistic Theory be Ended? 



1. The Inadequacy of a Mechanistic Description of 

 Organisms Is a Negative Conclusion. 



WE have considered the chief characteristics of living 

 creatures such as persistence in spite of change, cyclical 

 development, and effective agency. We considered the or- 

 ganism under the category of a material system to see how 

 that fitted, and we reached the conclusion that, while this 

 is a legitimate and useful way of looking at a living creature, 

 the formulae of physics and chemistry are inadequate for 

 the re-description of the everyday bodily functions, or of 

 behaviour, or of development, or of evolution. We did not 

 reach any conclusion as to the depth of difference between 

 organisms and not-living things; our result was a negative 

 one, that the chemico-physical formulae do not suffice for 

 answering the distinctively biological questions. 



It is an unfortunate tendency of the human mind to re- 

 gard evidence against one theory as evidence in favour of 



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