106 ORGANISM AND ENVIRONMENT 
one step nearer to a physico-chemical conception of the 
characteristic phenomena of life, though they have 
been indispensable in elucidating these phenomena— 
in enabling us to formulate with increasing sharpness 
and detail the preponderant and omnipresent réle of 
organisation in connection with biological phenomena. 
The more clearly we consider the matter the more 
clearly does it appear that this failure is not merely 
due to lack of ordinary physical and chemical data of 
the kind already familiar to us. No such data that 
we can remotely conceive would help us: no advance, 
for instance, in our knowledge of the chemical consti- 
tution and physical properties of protein compounds. 
We can reach no other conclusion than that it is the 
very conceptions of matter and energy, of physical 
and chemical structure and its changes, that are at 
fault, and that we are in the presence of phenomena 
where these conceptions, so successfully applied in our 
interpretation of the organic world, fail us. 
What reasons have we for assuming, as we are apt 
to assume, that our physical and chemical conceptions 
or mental pictures of the surrounding universe corre- 
spond with reality? The reason is that they do actually 
enable us to predict much of our experience of the 
inorganic world, and up to a certain point have proved 
eminently reliable. Nevertheless they leave an enor- 
mous blank in our knowledge: for they assume a world 
of various kinds of matter and various forms of 
energy, variously distributed ; but as to why this vari- 
ety and distribution exist they leave us in ignorance. 
From the very nature of the ordinary conceptions of 
