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SCIENCE 



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



hypothetical and imperceptible forces or enti- 

 ties to account for the perceptible facts, is 

 essentially a question of scientific convenience. 

 The presumption, surely, is in favor of the 

 positivistic method, which is content to cor- 

 relate the observable data without going be- 

 hind them. Yet it must be confessed that it 

 is not by such avoidance of hypotheses con- 

 cerning imperceptible causes or substances 

 that physics and chemistry have achieved their 

 best results. And the precedent of those sci- 

 ences might be plausibly (though, I think, 

 unwisely) made, by one convinced of the truth 

 of the vitalistic answer to one or the other of 

 the first two questions, an excuse for not 

 taking his vitalism positivistically or prag- 

 matically. In any case, these hypothetical 

 " forces " or causes would constitute elabora- 

 tions or embellishments of his doctrine; they 

 would not constitute the basis or the irre- 

 ducible minimum of it. 



A word in conclusion about the position of 

 Bergson, of which Professor Eitter speaks 

 with cordial approval. Bergson holds the doc- 

 trine of organic autonomy in a special and a 

 somewhat extreme form. Inorganic and or- 

 ganic processes manifest, in his opinion, rad- 

 ically dissimilar modes of causality. " The 

 present state of an inanimate body depends 

 exclusively upon what took place at the pre- 

 ceding instant. The position of the material 

 points of a system is determined by the posi- 

 tion of the same points at the immediately 

 antecedent moment. In other words, the laws 

 which control unorganized matter can be ex- 

 pressed in differential equations in which time 

 (in the mathematician's sense) plays the part 

 of an independent variable." This, Bergson 

 insists, is not true of living bodies; their 

 present state does not " find its complete ex- 

 planation in the immediately anterior state." 

 We must absolutely give up " the idea that the 

 living body could be subjected by some super- 

 human calculator to the same mathematical 

 treatment as that which is applied to our solar 

 system." The " creative " efficacy of organic 

 evolution is shown, for Bergson, precisely in 

 the impossibility of deriving from even the 

 most complete knowledge of the configuration 



of the components of an organism at a given 

 moment, and of all the " laws " which have 

 been disclosed up to that moment, any abso- 

 lutely complete and certain knowledge of the 

 future condition and action of that organism. 

 Bergson, moreover, does not stop with this 

 anti-mechanistic view of the actual behavior 

 of organisms; he suggests an explanation for 

 what he conceives to be the facts. And his 

 explanation, though rather elusive, approxi- 

 mates that given by the psycho-vitalists. The 

 neo-Lamarckians, he declares, are right in 

 referring organic evolution to " a cause of the 

 psychological order," though they apprehend 

 this too narrowly. The conception of " effort 

 should be taken in a sense more profound, a 

 sense even more psychological, than any neo- 

 Lamarckian has supposed." It is true that 

 Bergson does not seem to call his doctrine 

 vitalism, and that he speaks in criticism of 

 the vitalism of certain other writers. But it 

 seems to me that any dogmatic (i. e., not 

 merely provisional or agnostic) anti-mechan- 

 ism in biology should be called vitalism. In 

 other words, the doctrine which it appears to 

 me to be linguistically most convenient to 

 designate by that name is the doctrine of 

 organic autonomy in its biological application, 

 the assertion of an essential logical dis- 

 continuity between the " laws " or modes of 

 action of matter dealt with by biology and the 

 " laws " of all the sciences of the inorganic. 

 And in this sense, of course, Bergson is an 

 unmistakable and a radical vitalist. It would 

 certainly be paradoxical to withhold the name 

 from a writer who does not hesitate to say 

 that the " parts of an organized machine do 

 not correspond to parts of the work of organi- 

 zation, since the materiality of this m,achine 

 does not represent a sum. of means employed, 

 hut a sum of ohstacles avoided " by the elan 

 vital in its form-creating activity. 



Arthur O. Lovejoy 

 The Johns Hopkins University 



proddctivity of soils 

 The discussion of the " Secular Mainte- 

 nance of Soils " by Professor Chamberlin 



