78 



THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY 



living organism as a whole with all its 

 complicated phenomena of regulation 

 presented features that it was impossible 

 to imagine in any constellation of purely 

 physico-chemical processes. The tend- 

 ency of the organism to maintain its 

 external and internal environments abso- 

 lutely constant at its own optimum, the 

 vis medicatrix naturae, and the preservation 

 of individuality in living organisms, all 

 were adduced by him as examples of phe- 

 nomena so different from those of the 

 inanimate world that conceptions quite 

 foreign to physics and chemistry would 

 be necessary to account for them in a 

 reasonable manner. Moreover, he felt 

 strongly that these conceptions were in a 

 sense more profound than those of me- 

 chanics, and in 191 9 he thought it right to 

 maintain that far from physiology being 

 reducible to physics and chemistry, the 

 latter might be reducible to the former. 

 "That a meeting-place," he said (zo) "be- 

 tween biology and physical science may at 

 some time be found, there is no reason for 

 doubting. But we may confidently pre- 

 dict that if this meeting place be found, 

 and one of the two sciences is swallowed 

 up, it will not be biology. 



This theme, like so many others in these 

 regions was not quite new and had had 

 some interesting historical relationships. 

 Cagniard de Latour and others, for in- 

 stance, had difficulty in persuading bio- 

 chemists of the necessity of the yeast-cell 

 in fermentation, owing to their distaste 

 for attributing chemical processes to 

 "vital activity." As a prophecy it 

 has borne fruit very much more rapidly 

 than that famous one of Kant's about the 

 blade of grass, though as in that case we 

 still cannot be sure whether the true 

 messiah has arrived or no. Fulfilment 

 of Haldane's prophecy may perhaps be 

 seen in the fundamental work of A. N. 

 Whitehead, who in his book Science and 



the Modem World (56), sets out an organic 

 theory of nature. Still more recently a 

 most lucid commentary and amplification 

 of his suggestions has been given by C. 

 Lloyd Morgan (39). The concept of 

 the organism is now carried over into the 

 inorganic world, and the whole universe 

 is regarded as being made up of organisms, 

 some of greater complexity than others 

 but all possessing the properties of organ- 

 isms. The distinguishing feature of an 

 organism is that its parts are not entities 

 having a full existence by themselves, but 

 rather owe their being to the whole of 

 which they form parts — so that if the 

 whole is taken to pieces, the parts entirely 

 cease to be what they were. Each part is 

 what it is not in its own peculiar right, 

 but by virtue of its relatedness to all the 

 other parts in the whole. Already in Life, 

 Mind, and Spirit (38), Lloyd Morgan had 

 maintained that this kind of relatedness 

 of parts within wholes was not a criterion 

 of living things sufficient to distinguish 

 them from non-living things, and A. N. 

 Whitehead has worked out in great detail 

 the concept of the organism in the physico- 

 chemical world. To say that there is the 

 same kind of internal inter-relatedness 

 about physico-chemical organisms as 

 about living organisms or social organisms 

 is not to assert that there is no difference 

 between these sorts of organism. The 

 most extreme of the old-fashioned biologi- 

 cal materialists never denied that there 

 were differences between living animals 

 and inorganic systems, for that would 

 have been too obviously contrary to 

 common sense; he simply said that the 

 differences were of degree and not of kind, 

 that the former, in a word, were only 

 complicated special cases of the latter, 

 whereas his opponents definitely brought 

 in something new. 



It is this in the modern extension of the 

 concept of the organism that is so impor- 



