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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIII. No. 851 



that from the law anything more specific shall 

 be predicted or deduced, it is necessary that 

 there be given empirically certain information 

 concerning at least one of the variables. 

 Without some empirical knowledge concern- 

 ing the motions or masses of some bodies, 

 nothing could be inferred about bodies from 

 the law of gravitation. For this additional 

 empirical knowledge about the actual values 

 of the variables the laws themselves, if prop- 

 erly formulated, expressly call. But the un- 

 deducibility of biological from other laws, 

 which the vitalist asserts, is not simply the 

 undedueibility due to a lack of the specific 

 empirical information called for by those 

 other laws. What the vitalist maintains is 

 that, even given a complete knowledge hoth of 

 all the laws of motion of inorganic particles 

 and of the actual configuration of the particles 

 composing a living body at a given cross- 

 section of time, you could not from such 

 knowledge deduce what the motion of the 

 particles, and the consequent action of the 

 living body, would be. What he asserts pri- 

 marily, in short, is the doctrine of the logical 

 discontinuity, at certain points, of scientific 

 laws. This discontinuity does not necessarily 

 imply any breach of the principle of causal 

 uniformity. Whenever a number of particles 

 acting in accordance with one set of laws 

 (e. g., of mechanics) are brought into a cer- 

 tain configuration, they may conceivably 

 thereafter take to moving in ways not cor- 

 rectly described by the aforesaid laws; if so, 

 the conditions under which the shift from one 

 mode of action {i. e., action of which a correct 

 generalized description is given by the one 

 set of laws) to the other mode takes place are 

 uniform, and a new law may be formulated 

 setting forth that very uniformity of discon- 

 tinuity. Again, such a view would not, in 

 itself, deny that the behavior of organisms is 

 a function of the number and configuration 

 of the material particles composing them. 



Such a doctrine of the autonomy of a given 

 science might conceivably be applied to other 

 sciences besides biology. It might be held, 

 for example, that chemistry is similarly au- 

 tonomous with respect to physics, or psychol- 



ogy with respect to biology. It might, again, 

 be maintained that the real point of discon- 

 tinuity comes, not where chemistry connects 

 with biology, but rather where physics con- 

 nects with chemistry — biological phenomena 

 being in themselves theoretically inferrible 

 from chemical laws, when chemical laws are 

 more adequately known. I do not now in- 

 quire whether any such views are plausible or 

 not; I merely point out that vitalism is first 

 of all a special case of what might be called 

 scientific autonomism, or logical pluralism. 

 Mechanism, meanwhile, asserts the possibility 

 of an eventual unification of scientific laws. 

 Between the two is possible an agnostic posi- 

 tion, based upon the observation that both 

 sides agree that no such unification is yet 

 achieved, and that both have some difficulty 

 in proving either that it must be or that it 

 can not be achieved in the future. 



In so much of vitalism, however, there ap- 

 pears to be nothing that can properly be called 

 " mystical " or "transcendental," nor anything 

 that can especially profitably be regarded as a 

 survival of primitive animism. 



2. There is, however, a doctrine which goes 

 beyond this mere assertion of organic auton- 

 omy, and declares that (in part) the action of 

 living bodies is not strictly a function of the 

 nurnher and spatial configuration of the par- 

 ticles composing them at any given instant. 

 In other words, organisms not only have 

 unique laws of their own, but these laws can 

 not even be stated in terms of the number 

 and arrangement of the organism's physical 

 components. Not all who call themselves, or 

 have been called, vitalists assert so much as 

 this; but the neo-vitalism of Driesch main- 

 tains precisely this view, and endeavors to 

 support it by definite empirical evidence. 

 Driesch seeks in the phenomena of regulation, 

 regeneration and conscious behavior, evidence 

 for the assertion that the composition (phys- 

 ical and chemical) of an organism, on the 

 one hand, and its morphogenesis and activity, 

 on the other, are (to some extent) independent 

 variables. With a radical variation in com- 

 position — e. g., after the elimination of half 

 the blastomeres at a certain stage of develop- 



