246 Science Religion and Reality 



and all material ties alone, lives on. From such a ghost science has 

 nothing to fear." Parallel also to the gradual retirement of vitalism 

 there has gone a continual tendency to set up ne plus ultra distinc- 

 tions. Pillars of Hercules differentiating living matter off from 

 non-living. One by one these crumble away and fresh ones are 

 substituted, each one a little further back. The conception of 

 unity in time has played a great part here. Von Uexkiill suggested 

 that organisms differed from dead matter by resembling a musical 

 melody rather than a single note. Apart from the possibility 

 brought up by the General Relativity theory, that all events are like 

 that, the suggestion has some plausibility about it, and was after- 

 wards extended by Bergson, who made the famous remark, " Con- 

 tinuity of change, preservation of the past in the present, real 

 duration — the organism seems to share these attributes with con- 

 sciousness." It was left for Bayliss to point out that inorganic 

 systems, especially in the colloidal state, can show similar pheno- 

 mena. A silicic-acid gel behaves quite differently according to 

 whether it has b^en previously exposed to a high or low concentra- 

 tion of water vapour. An earlier ne plus ultra distinction was the 

 simple one of primitive man into things which moved and things 

 which did not, and most recently there is Haldane's tendency 

 towards optimum conditions. All these have gone the same way. 



Neo-vitalism as well as vitalism, then, is unsatisfactory, and we 

 are left with the conclusion to which we were brought from the 

 historical evidence — namely, that at the present day the triumph of 

 mechanistic biology is undoubted and it has no serious rivals. But 

 is it capable of criticism from other directions ? 



4. A Critique of Mechanism 



We have seen so far that throughout the history of science 

 there has been mechanistic biology, and that it has always been 

 allied to materialism in philosophy and censured by theology and 

 the mystics. We have observed that in the last century and a half 

 the theory which before had had little to support it beyond the 

 opinions of certain philosophers has rested upon a sure basis of 

 experimental evidence. We have also concluded that its triumph 

 at the present day as a discipline and a method is complete, since 

 the neo-vitalist position is thoroughly unsatisfactory. Before pro- 

 ceeding to the question of whether the theological aversion to 

 mechanistic biology has been justified, however, we must see 



