THE UNIQUENESS OF LIFE 167 



hypothesis as to the nature of the difference between stone 

 and tree, between boomerang and homing bird, in being 

 content with holding to the fact that new aspects of reality 

 have somehow risen to the surface and demand other than 

 mechanical formulation. Learning, choosing, struggling, and 

 the like appear to transcend mechanism. 



The third theory asserts that something not really belong- 

 ing to the natural order, something not material, is present 

 in living creatures, informing them, underpinning them, 

 inspiring them. The ' biological ' view differs from this in 

 keeping to the idea of continuity, in supposing that aspects 

 of reality which in azoic days were only implicit became 

 explicit in the first living creatures, and have become more 

 and more patent as evolution has gone on. 



We are here in the difficult position of agreeing on the 

 one hand with the positive vitalists in their emphasis on 

 the uniqueness of organisms as compared with not-living 

 things, and yet of disagreeing with them (or many of 

 them) in their emphasis on. discontinuity. It is plain from 

 our argument that our understanding of the facts of the 

 case leads us to a high appreciation of the apartness of 

 organisms and to a conviction that living transcends all 

 mechanical description, but we are not compelled by this 

 to a rejection of the central idea of Evolution, which is 

 continuity. 



To ignore distinctions yields false simplicity; to exag- 

 gerate them yields false complexity. There is very little 

 individuality in the inorganic domain, but it must be re- 

 membered that gold and iron, phosphorus and sulphur, 

 oxygen and nitrogen remain quite distinct things with prop- 

 erties and ways of their own, specific like organisms, " each 

 something of a law unto itself ". There are, indeed, logical 



