DEVELOPMENTS IN PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY 



79 



tant for the theory of biology. It means — 

 if recent "organicism" is justified and 

 maintains the positions it has gained — 

 that another middle line of partition 

 between living matter and dead matter is 

 to be abandoned. There have been many 

 of them, but none have withstood the 

 advance of exact biology. If this proc- 

 ess is followed historically it can be 

 seen how the two most obstinate and 

 irreducible characteristics of life were 

 its finalistic or teleological aspects and 

 its special arrangement in organisms, 

 entities with a high degree of internal 

 r elatedness and dependence. The former 

 of these has vanished with the realiza- 

 tion of the teleology of the inorganic 

 world, an event that will always be 

 associated with the name of Lawrence 

 Henderson, and now the latter would 

 appear also to be universally present 

 throughout nature. "Some biologists" 

 says Lloyd Morgan (39) "interpret all or- 

 ganic action in the modal terms appropriate 

 to physics and chemistry, others there are 

 whose interpretation is couched in the 

 modal terms appropriate to psychology. 

 It is difficult to see on what logical 

 grounds biologists of the first school — 

 the so-called mechanists — can resent the 

 downward extension of the connotation 

 of the word 'organism' to natural entities 

 which as they claim differ only in their 

 lack of superadded complexity and no 

 wise essentially in type of action or 

 behavior. It is, however, easy to see on 

 what logical grounds biologists of the 

 other school — the so-called vitalists — 

 can resent, and will no doubt reject, a 

 concept of the organism which implies 

 that it can adequately be discussed in 

 terms of an organic theory of nature 

 without introducing any further concept 

 such as entelechy or elan. ' ' I suggest that 

 the discovery of the value of the concept 

 of the organism in the philosophical 



aspection of physico-chemical phenomena, 

 is of great importance for the theory of 

 biology. Workers in exact biology would 

 in any case have had to go on using mech- 

 anism as a working principle in research, 

 because as is well known it is the only one 

 that will work; but it will relieve them 

 to learn that the concept of the organism 

 is no longer purely biological. The field 

 of physics and chemistry, which was for- 

 merly covered by the mechanistic schema, 

 continues to be so covered, only now the 

 concept of the organism covers it also. 

 Whereas until recent times, mechanism 

 was held to be the only way of interpret- 

 ing physico-chemical phenomena, while 

 there was great doubt as to whether 

 mechanism or organicism was the only 

 way of interpreting life phenomena, now 

 both mechanism and organicism come into 

 force over both domains of experience. 

 In other words we have to deal not with 

 two opposing and incompatible modes 

 of explanation struggling between them- 

 selves for fragments of our experience, 

 but rather with two complementary and 

 different modes of explanation covering 

 the entire expanse of living and non- 

 living things. If we reserve the name of 

 science for the mechanistic mode of in- 

 terpretation we shall only be obeying 

 a necessary outcome of the quantitative 

 and metrical character of the scientific 

 method, and organicism, covering both 

 realms as it now claims to do, we shall 

 term a philosophical theory. Thus to the 

 scientific mind the living and the non- 

 living form one continuous series of sys- 

 tems of differing degrees of complexity, 

 all of which consist of parts that can be 

 understood as parts when separated from 

 their wholes and are therefore interpret- 

 able in terms of "metrical macroscopic 

 mechanism;" while to the philosophic 

 mind the whole universe, itself perhaps 

 an organism, is composed of a vast number 



