THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY 



have the future in its own hands, has not 

 been able to live up to its promises. The 

 more its special entities immanent in 

 living beings have been considered, the 

 less necessary they have seemed to be in 

 relation to the facts and the less valuable 

 they have been found as inspirations to 

 research. The finalist school with its 

 insistence on teleology as the special sign- 

 manual of life has been unable to deny the 

 teleology of the inorganic world, so that 

 the Aristotelian conception modified by 

 Kant of the efficient cause and the final 

 cause as two complementary explanations 

 of all natural phenomena remains un- 

 superseded. The older organicism, which 

 saw in living organisms an interrelatedness 

 of parts present nowhere else in the uni- 

 verse, has been swallowed up in an organic 

 theory of nature which regards all things, 

 and even all events, as themselves organ- 

 isms. The classical biological mechanis- 

 ticism with its roots invisibly but surely 

 embedded in the naturalistic view of the 

 world has withered away altogether since 

 the general abandonment of the notion 

 that the application of the scientific 

 method exhausted the content of things. 

 And lastly, the psychobiologists, who 

 asserted that biology could only be made 

 intelligible by employing psychological 

 concepts at all points, have failed to 

 commend their views by producing a 

 serious body of experimental work. 



Out of the decay of these theories — 

 valuable as they certainly were in their 

 day — have arisen various standpoints one 

 of which has come to be called "Neo- 

 mechanism" (43). It is represented by a 

 variety of biologists and others (53, 37, 9, 

 z8, 33, 36, 35,46, 49, and 5 1) who all agree 

 in regarding the scientific method as 

 essentially mathematical, mechanical, de- 

 terministic, quantitative, abstract, and by 

 consequence inapt to include the entelechy 

 or any similar conception; and with all 



this, at the same time a partial, distorted, 

 and as it weie twisted approximation to 

 truth. The neo-mechanistic position, 

 therefore, at one and the same time 

 asserting the universal dominion of the 

 mechanical sort of explanation over all 

 nature, living and non-living, and ad- 

 mitting the inadequate nature of this sort 

 of explanation as a full account of the 

 world, resembles the old mechanisticism 

 in maintaining the heuristic need for the 

 machine, and differs from it in seeing 

 nothing solely ultimate about the ma- 

 chine. It thus recognizes itself to be the 

 way the scientific mind goes to work, 

 and not the manner of thinking in phi- 

 losophy, theology, or art. It differs of 

 course completely from neo-vitalism in 

 denying the bare value of any entelechy 

 or archaeus in living things; it can have 

 nothing to do with any elasticity in its 

 laws, and deprecates that TapkyKXiais 

 which Lucretius was weak enough to 

 introduce into his world. 



. . . . incerto tempore ferme 

 incertisque locis spatio depellere paulum, 

 tantum quod nomen mutatum dicere 

 possis." 



It also differs from biological finalism, for 

 it knows teleology to be an unquantitative 

 category, and banishes it from the labor- 

 atory to the domain of the philosophers, 

 who are quite capable of dealing with it. 

 It welcomes the organic theory of nature, 

 for to the exact biologist, nothing is an 

 organism any more than anything else; 

 to the philosopher, all things are organ- 

 isms, and just as the scientific mind sees 

 different degrees of complexity in its 

 systems, so the philosopher sees emergent 

 degrees of complexity in his organisms, up 

 to the world-soul itself. The neo- 

 mechanistic position stands in close re- 

 lationship with the views put forward by 

 R. G. Collingwood in his recent book 



