378 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLII. No. 1081 



Until this is forthcoming from those travelers 

 and explorers who are now working in this 

 especial field the Basin Range hypothesis shall 

 have to be considered as holding a place 

 among those hypotheses yet unproven, and as 

 an assumption of very doubtful utility. 



Charles Keyes 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 

 Mechanism, Life and Personality. By J. S. 



Haldane. New York, Button. 1914. Pp. 



viii + 139. Price, $1.00. 

 I 



Dr. J. S. Haldane has long been known as a 

 philosophical physiologist. Indeed it is now 

 for more than three decades that he has occa- 

 sionally relieved the labors of an orthodox and 

 eminent scientific investigator with the pleas- 

 ures of idealistic metaphysics. At length he 

 has constructed his philosophy of biology into 

 a little book, " Mechanism, Life and Personal- 

 ity," which he offers as a contribution towards 

 " bringing the great biological movement of 

 the nineteenth century into definite relation 

 with the main stream of human thought." 



The first half of this book is devoted to an 

 examination of " the hypothesis that living 

 organisms may be regarded as conscious or un- 

 conscious physical and chemical mechanisms, 

 and can be satisfactorily investigated from 

 this standpoint." Such is Haldane's state- 

 ment of the mechanistic theory of life. Many 

 considerations favor such a theory. Chemical 

 analysis reveals no mysterious substances or 

 reactions within the body, general physiology 

 and the study of metabolism reveal no mysteri- 

 ous forms or manifestations of energy, and to 

 all appearances the laws of the conservation of 

 matter and the conservation of energy there 

 hold. Consciousness, to be sure, is a difiiculty, 

 but, at any rate, consciousness seems not to 

 interfere with the operation of any law of 

 physics or of chemistry. Moreover, when once 

 we have commenced the analysis of organisms, 

 whether physically or chemically, we find no 

 structure but physical and chemical structure, 

 no activity but physical and chemical activity. 



Historically too there is much to justify the 

 mechanistic view, for " the history of physiol- 



ogy displays uninterrupted progress in the suc- 

 cessful application of physical and chemical 

 methods to physiological problems." 



In the manifold and inconceivably intricate 

 phenomena of organic regulations the mechan- 

 ist has found serious difficulties. But in the 

 course of time, as the mechanistic nature of 

 nervous control, of the action of hormones, and 

 of similar phenomena were discovered, this 

 difficulty has grown less. Again the very exist- 

 ence of such marvellous physical and chemical 

 structures as living things once seemed 

 mechanistically quite inexplicable. But when 

 Darwin conceived the principle of natural 

 selection this difficulty was removed. 



In his zeal to do full justice to the mechan- 

 istic theory Haldane even goes so far as to 

 declare that it is possible to imagine how life 

 may have originated. This is perhaps too 

 much, for I suspect that some chemists would 

 still prefer the first chapter of Genesis to the 

 mechanist's guesses upon the subject. 



As for the traditional opponents of the 

 mechanistic view, the vitalists and the ani- 

 mists, their theories have ever been sterile. 

 Occasionally encouraged by the collapse of one 

 or another mechanistic theory, their own 

 efforts have nevertheless ended in mere words, 

 for " the apparent autonomous selective action 

 of the organism turns out to be causally de- 

 pendent in every detail on physical and chem- 

 ical conditions." Therefore the action of any 

 possible vital principle must be determined by 

 these conditions. 



Further the vitalistic theory implies " a defi- 

 nite breach in the fundamental law of the con- 

 servation of energy" (according to Driesch 

 not in the first but in the second law of thermo- 

 dynamics). Moreover the vitalistic agency is 

 itself " entirely unintelligible." 



On the other hand, even if the position of the 

 vitalists and animists is entirely unsatisfac- 

 tory, that does not establish the justice of the 

 mechanistic theory. We must not forget that 

 a living thing never does seem to be a mechan- 

 ism, especially to those who know it well and 

 study it as a whole, that is as a real organism. 

 In particular to identify stimulus and response 

 with physical and chemical causation, a belief 



