8o 



THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY 



of interlacing organisms of all sizes. 

 Organisms explode into nothing when 

 taken to pieces, systems remain in the 

 form of parts the relations of which can 

 be understood. In this way the incur- 

 ably analytic character of science con- 

 tributes its force to the conclusion that 

 anything may be subjected to scientific 

 study but nothing sucked entirely dry 

 of significance by so doing. 



Thus if J. S. Haldane's prophecy has 

 been fulfilled, it is not without a certain 

 irony. Physics has not swallowed up 

 physiology nor on the other hand has 

 physiology swallowed up physics; they 

 have devoured each other and of the old 

 antithesis nothing is left. 



To what extent the relegation of the 

 concept of the organism to philosophy is 

 absolute must still, however, be consid- 

 ered a little uncertain. In spite of its 

 history as measured in years, the concept 

 is still so young that we are not yet sure 

 whether there is a sense in which the 

 term would be applicable to a scientific 

 hypothesis pure and simple. It is just 

 conceivable that organicism might stand 

 in the peculiar position of being a scien- 

 tific hypothesis as well as a philosophical 

 theory. The most important factor in 

 this situation is the work of C. D. Murray 

 (40, 41). In several recent papers this 

 physiologist has applied the principle of 

 minimum work to physiological organ- 

 isms, and his success has already been 

 very considerable. In Murray's view, 

 the concept of organization is definitely 

 not an "affair of the reflective judgment" 

 but a very legitimate field for scientific 

 experiment and calculation. Murray con- 

 siders that at least two statistical laws 

 may be obtained from the study of living 

 organisms, both of which afford a quanti- 

 tative expression of the complex systems 

 in question. The first of these he terms 

 the "principle of maintenance of steady 



states" — this would correspond to the 

 maintenance of constancy of external and 

 internal environment — and the second, 

 the "principle of minimum work." This 

 second principle states that the cost of 

 operation of physiological systems tends 

 always to be a minimum, and thus is an 

 extension of the well-known principle 

 of Lagrange. Murray works out this 

 conception in its relations to the physiol- 

 ogy of the circulation and gives a prelim- 

 inary answer, at any rate, to the question, 

 "In any extra effort by the organism as a 

 whole, how is the tax or effort distributed 

 among the various organs of the body (the 

 parts of the whole) and what does each 

 contribute to the extra effort of the 

 whole?" This is certainly a most impor- 

 tant section of the problem of organization. 

 The principle of minimum work has the 

 great value of defining mathematically 

 the distribution of function among the 

 parts of the organism. But the undecided 

 question is, whether the word organism 

 means here the same thing as it does in 

 Whitehead and Lloyd Morgan. It is very 

 doubtful whether it does, for an organism 

 in their language means a whole that does 

 not exist dismembered in the constituent 

 parts, and can only be understood as a 

 whole. There would appear to be three 

 ways at least of thinking about a bicycle, 

 (a) to regard it as an object capable of 

 movement and only truly seen in its whole- 

 ness (Whitehead and Lloyd Morgan), (b) 

 to analyze it in the confidence that the 

 relation between the parts can be under- 

 stood in isolation and systematically 1. 

 without actually taking it to pieces 

 (Murray) and z. with actual analysis 

 (the majority of biophysicists and bio- 

 chemists). In any case, the slight resid- 

 uum of organicism left behind in science 

 by the transplantation of the concept of 

 the organism into a general philosophical 

 theory of nature will no doubt be readily 



