December 11^ 1914] 



SCIENCE 



841 



As the author himself explains, the point of 

 view and methods of treatment are largely 

 those suggested by Driesch and Bergson. The 

 book is not long; there are eight chapters en- 

 titled, respectively, the Conceptual World, the 

 Organism as a Mechanism, the Activities of 

 the Organism, the Vital Impetus, the Indi- 

 vidual and the Species, Transformism, the 

 Meaning of Evolution, the Organic and the 

 Inorganic; there is also an appendix vrith a 

 brief account of the chief principles of ener- 

 getics. In the table of contents is given a 

 concise yet complete and connected summary 

 of each chapter. This makes it unnecessary 

 for the reviewer to summarize the whole book, 

 and this review will be confined chiefly to a 

 criticism of the author's main contentions and 

 especially of the arguments by which he seeks 

 to support his vitalistic thesis. 



The first chapter discusses the relation of 

 conceptual reasoning to reality. The author 

 agrees with Bergson in regarding intellect as 

 essentially a biological function, which reacts 

 in a characteristic manner on the flux of real- 

 ity and dissociates this more or less arbitrarily 

 into detached elements; the aim of this dis- 

 sociation is practical — namely, to facilitate 

 definite or effective action on the part of the 

 organism. Scientific method follows an essen- 

 tially similar plan; our scientific descriptions 

 and formulations of natural processes are con- 

 ceptual schemata; their correspondence with 

 real nature is inevitably inexact; they neces- 

 sarily simplify and diagrammatize. In reality, 

 however, nature can not be regarded as a com- 

 posite of separate processes, individually sus- 

 ceptible of exact description in intellectual 

 terms, and interconnected in ways which are 

 similarly definite and quantitatively deter- 

 minable ; it is rather a continuous or flux-like 

 unitary activity, exhibiting a progressive and 

 irreversible trend; hence actual duration is 

 distinct from the conceptual time of physicists. 

 Now the intellect, in making its characteristic 

 conceptual transformation, neglects or ignores 

 or even falsifies much of the essential char- 

 acter of reality. This is how it becomes pos- 

 sible to view the living organism as a mechan- 

 ism: the physiologist substitutes for the real 



living organism the conception of a system of 

 physico-chemical processes, conceived as inter- 

 connected in a definite way; by doing so he is 

 enabled to view the organism as essentially a 

 physico-chemical mechanism; but we must 

 note that the conceptual elements out of which 

 he builds up his scientific view of the organism 

 inevitably determine the nature of this end- 

 conception, which is physico-chemical or 

 mechanistic only because his method does not 

 permit him to regard the organism as any- 

 thing but a summation or integration of the 

 physico-chemical processes that form the ele- 

 ments of his synthesis. As a result, however, 

 he really misses what is most distinctive of 

 living beings, and reaches a point of view 

 which is not only inadequate for scientific 

 purposes — as shown by the failure of physico- 

 chemical analysis in the case of many vital 

 processes — but in its very nature far removed 

 from the actuality itself. 



This is the fundamental criticism which the 

 author makes of the accepted scientific meth- 

 ods of investigating life-phenomena. In the 

 remainder of his book he interprets the char- 

 acteristics of the organism and of the evolu- 

 tionary process from this general or Berg- 

 sonian point of view. He sees operative in 

 life a distinctive agency, corresponding to the 

 " elan vital " of Bergson or the entelechy of 

 Driesch, which acts typically in a direction 

 contrary to that characteristic of inorganic 

 processes ; these latter tend toward homogeneity 

 and dissipation of energy; in living organisms, 

 on the contrary, evolution tends toward the pro- 

 duction of diversity, and the tendency of en- 

 tropy to strive toward a maximum may be 

 compensated or even reversed by vital activity. 

 " Life, when we regard it from the point of 

 view of energetics, appears as a tendency 

 which is opposed to that which we see to be 

 characteristic of inorganic processes. . . . The 

 effect of the movement which we call inorganic 

 is toward the abolition of diversities, while that 

 which we call life is toward the maintenance 

 of diversities. They are movements which are 

 opposite in their direction" (page 314). It is 

 here that the author's views become most seri- 

 ously open to scientific attack; the evidence 



