238 Science Religion and Reality 



nucleus must carry within its substance a mechanism which by 

 reaction with the environment not only produces the millions 

 of complex and delicately balanced mechanisms which constitute 

 the adult organism, but provides for their orderly arrangement 

 into tissues and organs, and for their orderly development in a 

 certain perfectly specific manner. The mind recoils from such a 

 stupendous conception ! " 



Haldane also, like Driesch, is not content with arguments of 

 this nature drawn from the supposed insufficiency of mechanism as 

 a working hypothesis, but he also makes use of more metaphysical 

 modes of approach. He points out that Kant created no special 

 category for life, and so in Kantian language the only way of con- 

 ceiving living beings was in terms of physics and chemistry. On 

 the other hand, Hegel did make a special category for living sub- 

 Stance, and Haldane maintains that the biologist should avail him- 

 self of this and insist that life cannot be reduced to physico-chemical 

 conceptions. Haldane would say that to take animals to pieces 

 and study separate functions by biochemical or biophysical methods 

 is inadmissible because the essence of life consists of its co-ordina- 

 tion as a whole. He will not allow that we can ever understand 

 the organism by studying one part like a carburettor apart from the 

 rest and then by turning to the cylinders and examining them. The 

 organism is a unit. Again and again he says that since so far no com- 

 plete mechanistic explanation has been advanced of any one organ, 

 we cannot trust physico-chemical methods to explain the whole. 



Another important argument of Haldane's is akin to the 

 criticisms of the scientific method in general which have been so 

 much more common of recent years. He uses the views of LeRoy 

 and Duhem, which logically criticise the whole validity of the 

 scientific method, to support the neo-vitalist position. In scientific 

 thought, he says, we take much of the juice out of reality, we are 

 bound to deal with exsuccous abstractions because in generalising 

 we let the individual escape. We analyse and take to pieces ; we 

 do not look at the object as a whole, but only in bits. We select 

 facts, and abstract from reality itself by focussing our attention upon 

 certain aspects of it. These subjective contingency arguments 

 contain much truth, but they are strange enthusiasms for a scientific 

 worker. Haldane proceeds to apply such conceptions to the 

 biological problem, and says that when we consider a man as a 

 physico-chemical machine we abstract from reality by setting aside 



