92 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
organismal method is to be applied in the practical study of behaviour. 
It is sufficiently clear, I think, that behaviour is an activity of the organism 
as an intact and unitary whole. Once we begin to tamper with the 
organism we get something less than behaviour. ‘The ‘ spinal ’ dog still 
retains the power to carry out many and complex reflex activities—and 
it is quite unimportant whether these activities are unconscious or not— 
but it does not and cannot manifest the full range of activity which 
characterises the intact dog. Pursuing the work of analysis further, we 
can get down to the study of an isolated muscle-nerve preparation, or to 
the study of the conduction of the nervous impulse and the mechanism 
of muscular contraction. Here we shall find little or no behaviour in the 
sense of directive and adaptable activity, and we may reasonably hope to 
arrive at an adequate physico-chemical account of what goes on. ‘There 
seems no reason to doubt that a physiological treatment of the isolated 
parts of the organism may in principle be adequate. But by taking the 
parts in isolation, we abstract from their relations to the whole, parti- 
cularly their temporal relations, and we leave out of account just 
what is fundamentally important—the working together of all the parts 
in the directive activities of self-maintenance, development and 
reproduction. 
When we analyse a total organic event or process we break up the 
spatio-temporal unity of the action into little unconnected bits which 
are unreal in the sense that they are abstract, being deprived of their 
constitutive relations to the whole process. If for the sake of enlarging 
and deepening our knowledge we analyse organic activities in detail, we 
must correct the abstract picture so obtained by re-integrating the part 
in the whole—we cannot reconstitute the whole action by simple summa- 
tion of the actions of the parts separated out by analysis. 
While then analysis is a justifiable and useful procedure, we cannot 
hope to build up from the parts thus isolated the directive activity of the 
whole, which shows characteristics belonging to none of the parts. Accord- 
ingly, the study of behaviour is not reducible to physiology or the causal- 
analytical investigation of the parts. Physiology may profitably consider 
what are the conditions necessary for the manifestation of whole-properties, 
and we have an excellent example of this in Lashley’s work * on the relation 
between learning and retentiveness on the one hand and the amount of 
brain substance on the other. But we must work down from the whole 
to the parts, and the study of the whole, as in behaviour, cannot be ade- 
quately replaced by the study of the parts in isolation. 
It is possible of course to abstract from the directiveness and continuity 
of organic events, and to consider the organism over a short period of 
time as being a mechanism or configuration. It is then susceptible of 
study and interpretation in physico-chemical terms, just as is an in- 
organic object, but what we get is physics and chemistry, not biology. A 
good deal of what ranks nowadays as experimental biology is not biology 
at all, but physico-chemical research carried out on organic systems 
5 K.S. Lashley, Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence, Chicago, 1929. 
