32 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



functioning of the organism to such infinitesimal 

 analysis. The structure decomposes to organs, tissues, 

 cells, nucleoplasm, cytoplasm, biophors, micellae, etc ; 

 and the functioning decomposes to colloidal reactions and 

 all the rest of it ; but in this is there anything different 

 from the building up of the curve from infinitesimally 

 short straight lines, or the moving picture of the 

 cinematograph from motionless pictures? When we say 

 that the processes of the organism are only those of 

 matter and energy, we forget that physics has already 

 traversed the path which biology still treads, and that 

 after its infinitesimal analysis of the universe it has 

 recomposed its energy, corpuscles, atoms, molecules and 

 particles in a homogeneous ether which eludes description 

 and which retains nothing of the description of matter 

 and energy except motion. And motion is just that 

 aspect of experience which mathematics had failed to 

 conceptualise. Physics has returned, in a way, to an 

 intuitive understanding of the universe, to a metaphysics, 

 if we like, and it expresses this only by the construction 

 of intellectual "models." Is it not clear that biology 

 must yet attempt this integration of its analytical 

 results? And should we not emulate the modesty of the 

 physicist and think of our physico-chemical descriptions 

 of the organism only as intellectual models ? 



It is strange that those who adhere to the view of 

 life as a mechanism should usually avoid its definition. 

 They manage somehow or other to conceive of conscious- 

 ness as a product of energy transformations, a process in 

 which nevertheless all the energy remains, as well as 

 the consciousness, a truly remarkable result ! But having 

 achieved this miracle the rest should be easy. The 

 functioning of the organism involves fundamentally the 

 accumulation of energy, the establishment of phases of 

 false equilibria, and the release of the energy in 



