106 ORGANISM AND ENVIRONMENT 



one step nearer to a physico-chemical conception of the 

 characteristic phenomena of life, though they have 

 been indispensable in elucidating these phenomena — 

 in enabling us to formulate with increasing sharpness 

 and detail the preponderant and omnipresent role of 

 organisation in connection with biological phenomena. 

 The more clearly we consider the matter the more 

 clearly does it appear that this failure is not merely 

 due to lack of ordinary physical and chemical data of 

 the kind already familiar to us. No such data that 

 we can remotely conceive would help us : no advance, 

 for instance, in our knowledge of the chemical consti- 

 tution and physical properties of protein compounds. 

 We can reach no other conclusion than that it is the 

 very conceptions of matter and energy, of physical 

 and chemical structure and its changes, that are at 

 fault, and that we are in the presence of phenomena 

 where these conceptions, so successfully applied in our 

 interpretation of the inorganic world, fail us. 



What reasons have we for assuming, as we are apt 

 to assume, that our physical and chemical conceptions 

 or mental pictures of the surrounding universe corre- 

 spond with reality ? The reason is that they do actually 

 enable us to predict much of our experience of the 

 inorganic world, and up to a certain point have proved 

 eminently reliable. Nevertheless they leave an enor- 

 mous blank in our knowledge : for they assume a world 

 of various kinds of matter and various forms of 

 energy, variously distributed ; but as to why this vari- 

 ety and distribution exist they leave us in ignorance. 

 From the very nature of the ordinary conceptions of 



