The question before us is: "What conclusions are to be drawn from the findings of science on what is called organic nature as commonly distinguished from inorganic? In other words, science point towards the validity of the common distinction or does it indicate life to be merely a certain state of complex matter and ultimately reducible to physico chemical terms?" We need not accept science as the final arbiter, but it would be illuminating to see whether a branch of inquiry which has great influence on philosophic thought today and which at one time was almost unanimously taken to "debunk" all non-materialism does actually offer any evidence worth considering against a non-materialistic view 3 nature of life.
Here we shall restrict the word "science" to biology proper and not draw upon either physics or else psychology under test conditions. We shall put on one side both the revolution in physics and the recent statistically measured :evidence for telepathy and precognition. Taking biology as our sole domain, we shall deal exclusively with the living organism and examine the deliverances of science concerning it Such a procedure of independent examination, by set- up more stringent conditions, will not definitively demonstrate materialism in the biological field if the other domains of science contradict whatever materialistic probabilities may be found here but it will enormously strengthen the general case of non-materialism if the balance is tilted in its favour in this domain no less than in those two. At the same time, since there will be no leaning on the latter and not materialism will be affirmed on purely biological grounds, we shall be in a position even to extend it towards the interpretation of physics and experimental psychology wherever the issue may hang undecided in them.
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There is no doubt that an enormous amount of elucidation of the living organism's functions has been made in physico-chemical terms during this century. of course many processes are still without physico-chemical interpretation- yet it will not do just to build on mere gaps in knowledge. Gap after gap has gone on being filled since Wohler and Liebig in 1828 first created in the laboratory what were called "organic compounds" - substances like urea, sugar, etc., which had been produced up to that time in the organism alone. And this is but as it should be; for, even if life transcends the material formula it must be expected to make abundant use of material "mechanisms" since it is operating with a close material companion and its appearance on earth was a late event in the history of matter, an intervention in the midst of considerably advanced physico-chemical complexity. The point is whether all gaps are of the kind that have been filled. If possible, we must try to get beyond what the organism does, to what the organism is: we must catch hold of something central to the vital phenomenon and ask if that too is reducible to physico-chemical activity. That and nothing else would be the crucial test science would have to pass before it could be called upon to declare that the materialistic working-method which is legitimate to it for the extension of analytic and descriptive knowledge has come across a "Thus far and no further".
Could we say that science's failure to synthetise life in the laboratory must give pause to that working-method? Let us cast a glance at the existing situation here. A huge hurdle the way of artificial synthesis of living matter was indicated in 1938 by Professor Horatio Hackett Newman of the United States. He wrote that not even the first step had been taken the step of synthetising the protein molecule which is chemical differentia of living matter. Within a decade Robert B. Woodward and Dr. C.R. Schramm made a rough protein molecule which had all the qualities of hair or fur.
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How far this brings us to the production of living stuff in the laboratory is to be gauged from three discoveries.
All organic development is founded on the living cell which consists of an outer skin with a fluid mass inside and a central section of nucleus: it is the cell that has to be finally synthetised. Now, the possibility of its synthesis has been greatly encouraged by the discovery of a form of matter midway between the organised cell and a protein molecule: the deadly filter-passing viruses which have been examined under the electron microscope. Chemically the virus is an overgrown protein molecule and it can exist in an utterly inanimate condition in a crystalline form resembling salt. But as soon as it is put in living tissue it ceases to be a crystal and begins to eat, grow and multiply. Even when as a crystal it has been cut up by Dr. W.N. Stanley of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, its progeny during its stay in living tissue has been like the original parent, not like the physically mutilated one. Exactly like a normal living cell it acts to perpetuate its original structure. A report from Copenhagen has it that scientists have succeeded in marking also in it the one factor that had distinguished the cell from it, namely, organic behaviour in even a test-tube and not only in a living host. So, with its capacity to be completely crystalline as well as completely organic, it is a definite link between the undeniably living and the apparently non-living. Even with- out the Copenhagen report, it would be a recognisable bridge.
Further, in what precise relation it stands to the cell is shown by the fact revealed by the electron microscope that the part of the cell known as the gene - the physical basis of inheritance - is very similar to the virus and may be described in Professor Newman's words, as a tamed or domesticated virus-like particle incorporated in the cell's complex economy. The cell itself is thus likely to have been in remote times a development of virus-like matter and is as good as demonstrated to be evolutionarily connected with the world of inorganic crystals.
That it is some sort of development has been presumed
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too along another line of research. A Russian woman scientist. Dr. O.B. Lepeshinskaya, whose experiments are said t have been confirmed by scientists in Norway, England and the United States, took materials from the cells, pieces that did not even include the important nucleus which used to be considered the repository of life's secret, and she claimed to find that they not only were composed in the main of protein molecules but could develop by themselves, act to preserve themselves when disturbed and in several other ways also pass" tests which proved them to be alive. Her conclusion was that while the cell is the basic unit of organised life it has come about from an assortment of organic chemicals which are themselves alive: it is a patterned development following somehow upon their combination. This conclusion is suggestively in tune with Dr. Woodward's observation during his synthesis of the protein molecule. The protein molecule is a specific structure of four elements - carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen - which already exist together in smaller units found in a full state, called the amino-acids, and building in combination this molecule. To quote a report on Dr. Woodward by Maurice Hecht: "He merely took some amino-acids, previously made from ordinary chemicals in the laboratory, and put two or more of them together after certain modifications and left them alone. The mixture was allowed to stand for two weeks. The amino-adds carried on the rest of the work on their own." From this it seems most probable that for creating life in the laboratory "we may not have to create a complete cell at all. When we succeed in creating the right chemical combination, we may not need to do any more - the cell may grow out of that on its own." The synthesis of life is thus immeasurably facilitated.
We should not be surprised if in the near future it 1s actually accomplished. And its significance primarily would just be that conditions obtaining at some point in the far pa5 have got duplicated experimentally with the same results a then. The original evolution of the living cell from wa1 would be proved before our very eyes and the chemical
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mode of it broadly exemplified. But that would not prove life to be nothing else than a new form of matter: it would only prove that material conditions came to be such that life could appear in them - unless we were also able to prove that nothing inexplicable in purely physico-chemical terms had appeared. So, once more we return to the problem whether in the phenomenon of life science has struck upon something centrally irreducible to these terms.
To sum up the situation: science's materialistic working- method need not feel stuck against a barrier impossible to cross because life has not been artificially synthetised yet - and the reason is that far from the chances being against such synthesis it is most likely that pretty soon we shall have protein combinations coming alive in our test-tubes - but, on the other hand, even this wonderful success cannot fundamentally dispose of non-materialism from the scientific viewpoint, for everything will hinge on the reducibleness or non-reducibleness of what may be regarded as the central characteristic of organic nature to physics and chemistry.
Our task then is to address ourselves to the scientific isolation of this characteristic and to measure against it the physico-chemical.
POSTSCRIPT (1958)
D.R. Newth, -writing on "Soviet Embryology" in Science News 40 (1956), remarks on Lepeshinskaya's work: "Her claims, if substantiated, would be of enormous consequences for biology, but they have been received with scepticism. Attempts in the USSR to repeat some of her most critical experiments have yielded negative results, and her observations are on material that presents the greatest difficulties for decision. Most of the embryologists with whom I discussed this matter were content to treat her case as unproven and still open, though Prof. Polezhaiev believes that he has found similar processes occurring in regenerating tissues of amphibia."
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About the experiments on the amino-acids, a reviewer of Albert Ducroqc's The Origin of Life in the Times Literary Supplement of January 17, 1958, writes: "It is clear that the ammo-adds play a fundamental part in living processes, and it is relevant that at an early stage in its history our earth had an envelope of water, ammonia, methane and carbon dioxide, each composed of two of the four master elements... It would seem a useful working hypothesis that the first manifestations of life arose on the earth from the interplay of solar radiation on the earth's fluid envelope, and in trying to create life artificially it would be equally reasonable to try to energize, by means of ultra-violet radiation, a mixture of gases in a closed chamber simulating the primitive atmosphere of the earth. This is what the American scientist Miller has done, and in a notable series of experiments he has synthesized a certain amount of organic products, among which amino-acids play an important part. This is still far from the cell, the basic unity of living matter, but it is exciting enough. Furthermore, one of the characteristics of living matter is its ability to reproduce itself, and the physical basis of this ability is now known to be deoxyribonucleic acid, commonly called DNA."
2
The question we have considered crucial in our inquiry 1 whether the central characteristic of organic nature - or, common parlance, life - has yielded to physics and chemistry and whether it is such as they can hope to explain.
Let us begin with the opinion of that master physiologist, Sir Charles Sherrington. Sherrington does not forget the many mysteries of even the simplest protoplasmic cell: he admits "the still unexplained residue of the cell's behaviour. But he goes by the great deal of accounting that chemistry and physics have done for that behaviour and by the explanation they have given of so much to which years ago they could offer no clue: he feels it is logical to suppose that
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the remaining mysteries will prove resoluble by them. In his famous Gifford Lectures, published in book-form in 1941, Man On His Nature, he declares: "Today the very distinction between the living and the non-living is a convention. That deletes 'life' as a scientific category; or, if you will, carries it down to embrace the atom.... An energy-system which we call 'alive' does not radically depart from energy-systems which we do not call 'alive'. Both are chemical... Instead of a specific principle which is life, life is an example of the way in which an energy-system in its give and take with the energy- system around it can continue to maintain itself for a period as a self-centred, so to say, self-balanced unity."
To appreciate Sherrington's position correctly we should state that he is not an out-and-out materialist. He stands helpless before what he differentiates as "mind" from what he defines as "life". Mind, according to him, does not yield to explanation in terms of "energy". But if we understand by "life" broadly whatever carries on and holds together processes like growth, metabolism, adaptation, tissue-regeneration and propagation, then, in Sherrington's view, science, though still far from the goal of explaining every vital process, is entitled by past successes to be materialistic about the living organism.
We may feel philosophically that by conceding the non material nature of mind Sherrington has exposed his case to a subtle attack. But we have strictly limited our discussion to the biological field and we have to meet his materialism on that particular ground: thus, apart from any other advantage, the biological materialism of those that do not concur with him about mind will at the same time be met. Here, adhering to the question we have posed as crucial in our inquiry, we must disengage the central characteristic of life from Sherrington's description and test it by his materialistic canons- Evidently, in his eyes, processes like growth, metabolism, adaptation, tissue-regeneration and propagation are ultimately the give and take of an energy-system with the energy-system around it and are purely physico-
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chemical for all their complexity. But we must not overlook the phrases in which he calls the organic energy-system one that "can continue to maintain itself for a period as a self-centred, so to say, self-balanced unity." In these words we seem to have life's central characteristic. And we do not have to wait long before Sherrington himself, in developing his materialistic thesis, confirms our perception.
This is how his materialistic thesis is developed by him:
"Perhaps the most striking feature of life is that it acts as though it 'desired' to maintain itself. But we do not say of the spinning of a heavy top which resists being upset that it 'desires' to go on spinning. The very constitution of the living-system may compel it to increase; thus a self-fermenting protein-system, granted its conditions, must increase. Broadly taken, however, there is in 'living' nothing fundamentally other than is going forward in all the various grades of energy-systems which we know, though in some less rapidly and less balancedly than in others. Whether atom, molecule, colloidal complex or what not, whether virus or cell or plant or animal compounded of cells, each is a system of motion in commerce with its surround, and there is dynamic reaction between it and the surround.... There is between them all no essential difference. The difference is one not of ultimate nature but of scheme and degree of complexity, nothing more. The elemental parts and elemental patterns are not novel. The atoms and sub atoms are among Earth's commonest."
Is this argument satisfactory? It does not provide any reason for the fact that about life's activity the scientist is led to say that it is as though life "desired" to maintain itself while about the spinning of a heavy top he is led to say nothing of the sort. Surely there is something which makes the difference? Why do we designate one energy-system as life and another as non-life? Sherrington, after saying that the atoms and sub atoms in the living system are among Earth's commonest, observes: " 'Living' becomes a name for certain complexes of them, arrangements of which it may be
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said that they are organized integratively - i.e. to form a solidarity, an individual. Hence we do not speak of 'life' in association with absolute simplicity of organization; never with mere homogeneity of structure. It requires a heterogeneity which permits integration of its complex even if the latter be but a single cell." A little earlier he writes: "The cell is not a polyphasic chemico-physical system merely. Many a mere drop of complex jelly could be that. The cell is a polyphasic chemico-physical system which is integratively organised. Hence there comes about that it can answer to what is described as 'life'." Again: "The processes going forward in it are co-operatively harmonized. The total system is organized.... Many considerations force on us the conception of the cell as 'organization'." Elucidating the nature of life at all stages and levels, Sherrington says: "Each of us at the outset of his or her individual life story is microscopic and one sole cell. By that cell's multiplication, and by its descendents' coherence, each of us attains his or her final form and size. Each at every stage of that astonishing 'becoming' is never any less than a self-centred individual.... The embryo, even when its cells are but two or three, is a self-centred co- operative society which is familial and a unity - an organized family of cells, with corporate individuality. This character of being an individual seems, as we look upon Nature, a feature peculiarly stressed in what is living."
The key-words about life, therefore, are organization, co- operation, integration, unity, individuality. Of course, the term "individuality" is to be understood in each case within its special context. We must not import into it everywhere all the refinements and subtleties it acquires in a discussion of human psychology. But it is valid inasmuch as there is the mark of a dominant and insistent wholeness suggestive of an overall purpose. The solitary cell has this mark and, when many cells combine, the unit-life retains it and yet the collective life at each moment both of development and of maintenance of developed existence is not a bare aggregate any more than the single cell is a bare aggregate: it has itself
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the same mark. An identical quality, characteristic of life, is manifested throughout, and this ubiquitous invariable quality is that life is, to quote Sherrington once more, "not simply additive, but additive by co-organization of an integrative kind. There the harmony of the whole is not merely built out of its parts but is impressed on the parts by the whole. An individuality whose whole, as luminously said by Coleridge, is presupposed by all its parts."
Here we have the heart of the matter. And all serious biologists point towards it. It means in the first place that what distinguishes living things is not some substance or substances of which they are composed. As Edmund W. Sinnott, one of the acutest American biologists, states in Cell and Psyche: "It is not the character of the constituents of a living thing but the relations between them which are most significant. An organism is an organized system." E.B. Wilson, a famous worker in the same field, declares in The Cell in Development and Inheritance: "We cannot hope to comprehend the activities of the living cell by analysis merely of its chemical composition.... Modern investigation has brought ever-increasing recognition of the fact that the cell is an organic system and one in which we must recognize some kind of ordered structure or organization." Herbert Muller, again a distinguished name, writes in Science and Criticism:
"The fundamental fact in biology, the necessary point of departure, is the organism. The cell is a chemical compound but more significantly a type of biological organization; the whole organism is not a mere aggregate but an architecture, the vital function of growth, adaptation, reproduction - the final function of death - are not merely cellular but organic phenomena." Ludwig von Bertalanffy, perhaps the greatest Austrian biologist of our day, avers: "The fact that the processes in an organism are regulated according to the needs of the whole is the most striking characteristic of the phenomena of life." J.B.S. Haldane no less than his father J.S. Haldane - eminent names both - sees in co-ordinated self-preservation the essential of life. Joseph Needham too
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has often expressed his opinion that the central problem in biology is "organizing relation." Julian Huxley is aware of this no less. But when we have put aside the notion of character of constituents and concentrated on organization we have not yet emphasised the entire differentia of the living.
In a general sense organization is to be found in the non- living. Sherrington makes much of this and lumps life and non-life together as "fundamentally balances of give and take of motion with their surround." He speaks of a grey rock and a darting dragon-fly: "We may consider the dragon-fly the more delicately balanced system with the more intensive give and take. Directly and indirectly through the collateral system of the green plant, it has the more acute commerce with the energy-system of the sun. We may judge it a more organized and integrated system than the rock... but these are details when we view energy-systems generally. Then, as pure energy-systems, rock and dragon-fly come together within one category." Sherrington reduces the fact of life's organisation to just a "more" of what already obtains in non- life, to a coming to a head as it were of the organization universally prevalent. Is he right?
At the turn of the century the German philosopher- biologist Hans Driesch conducted a series of experiments in embryology which showed that in many eggs all kinds of interferences could be made without affecting at all the embryo resulting. To explain the eggs' astounding behaviour he posited a non-material agency which he called, reviving a term of Aristotle's, "entelechy" - i.e. a factor which "carries the goal within itself." About these experiments Needham writes: "Large pieces could be removed from the egg, several blastomeres could be taken away, or the blastomeres could be shuffled at will, and yet a normal, though small-sized embryo would result. Any one monad in the original egg-embryo then, was capable of forming any part of the finished embryo. Driesch was quite right in proclaiming that this was "beyond the powers of any machine such as man has ever Instructed, but he soon left the straight and narrow path by
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insinuating his non-material entelechy into the works as the inevitable transcendent mechanic or driver." The straight and narrow path from which Driesch's "vitalism" was deemed a deviation is supposed to be the belief that the surprising organizing relations as demonstrated by him and by many workers after him in many departments of biology do not fall outside physics and chemistry and have to be attacked in the laboratory instead of being left an extra-laboratorial mystery. The resolution thus to attack them is indeed in consonance with the genius of science. But is it scientific to assert that physics and chemistry can be competent to explain organizing relations in toto?
Let us first glance at the actual upshot of the attempt to discover the physics and chemistry of organizing relations. The most thrilling chapter of the attempt was the study of certain chemicals which were christened "organizers". They were found markedly to affect development. The most outstanding name here is the German embryologist H. Spemann. Looking at Spemann's work as well as at that of others, Julian Huxley predicted in 1933 that in a short time the organizing powers of a living thing would be reduced to a chemical formula and stored in a bottle. It seems, however, that the short time has not yet elapsed. Spemann himself has admitted that his "organizer" was only a stimulus, an evocator, and that the real problem of organization lies in the responding system itself, and not in the trigger which sets this off. Analogous chemical substances have also been found to be no more than agents and messengers by which development is affected. Sinnott cites the case of "auxin" whose role in plant-growth is important. "The beautifully co-ordinated results," says he, "must come from the presence of just the right amount of auxin, at just the right place, and at just the right time. Something must control the auxin, must act as the headquarters from which the chemical messengers are dispatched.... Moreover, the secret of the action of such a substance lies not primarily in itself but in the specific organization of the cells upon which it acts. Auxin no more
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makes roots than a nickel makes a tune in a juke box. Not the nickel or the auxin holds the secret, but the structure of the system itself."
What exactly makes the structure such and such and controls the evocators? The simple answer from the point of view of current physics and chemistry is: We have not much of an idea. As Michael Abercrombie remarks in Experimental Embryology Today in Science News 13 (published in 1949), "Though some of the finest experimentalists in embryology, such as Waddington and Needham in this country, were hard on its track, the solution of the problem escaped. The exhilaration of that concerted pursuit is over, and the reaction has been one of some disappointment." About the present state of the science, Abercrombie says: "Embryolegists have at the moment no main objective which can focus the activities of a notable proportion of their effort. They give rather the impression of casting about for new hypotheses to pursue. There is a great deal of apparently sporadic thinking around and trying out." As a result, some interesting ideas are mooted, such as the stickiness of cells: each cell has a stickiness of a most particular kind, so that it will stick firmly only to some types of cells, and will fail to stick to others. But neither this phenomenon of specific adhesion as demonstrated by Holtfreter nor the work of Weiss and Twitty, Medawar and Billingham, plausible though it is with regard to several processes, cuts down to the basic problems - and about one of the most basic, that of regulation, to which Driesch opened our eyes, Abercrombie notes: "We have at the moment only very tentative suggestions, and the problem urgently needs a point of attack." Von Bertalanffy, in his Problems of Life (1952), confesses: In spite of an enormous amount of experimental data, we do not have, at present, a really satisfactory theory of development." George Gaylord Simpson, one of the most able expositors of materialism in his Meaning of Evolution (1951), tabulating the much that still remains in biology to be 'earned, ends with the statement: "How is a genetic system
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translated into completed organic form? Unless this ignorance is personal, even the path to the answer is not yet really evident, as recent experimental embryology seems rather to skirt than to follow such a path."
Concrete results at bedrock level are nearly nil. Biological organization is still an enigma: the central and most characteristic feature of life has not yielded to current physics and chemistry. Will it ever do so? The answer hangs on the question: Does the integrated unity exhibited by life at all stages and levels resemble whatever unity non-life presents? Sherrington, as we saw, compares a grey rock and a dragon- fly because both are energy-systems in commerce with their surround. But clearly the grey rock as such is not a unity: it is a mere aggregate. The various bits of grey rock-stuff adhere to one another, without in any sense cohering in a sustained pattern. They compose no such organization as is the dragon-fly's. It is when we consider the molecules and atoms of its stuff that we reach a describable unity. The molecule is a unity of different atoms, the atom a unity of protons, neutrons and electrons. Can they be compared to the unity of the cell composed of colloidal particles? If we say that the cell-organization is something unique, it may be pointed out that the molecule-organization is not like the atom-organization and that either is unique. But even among uniquenesses there can be a similarity and a difference. Let us clarify to ourselves why we call a particular organization living and the rest non-living.
First, each part of a growing organism carries in itself up to a certain early state of the organism's development the presence or pattern of the whole, so that, if separated from the other parts with which it was co-operating through a particular function, it can produce a complete organism of the same type. Secondly, each part, up to a certain stage, can change its function if its place in the organism is changed an" do what the new place which it occupies needs it to do, as it each part had the sense of each point of the pattern and as u the pattern were independent of the material from which if
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seems to be made and could use any material to serve the function assigned to each point. Thirdly, each part joins with the others to form a separate distinct complete single organism, an organic individual, in which there is to a consider- able extent not only a functional dependence of the parts on the whole so that the parts, if isolated, would be disorganized but also an existential dependence such that the parts in isolation would cease even to be recognisable. Each of the three features and a fortiori their ensemble appear to prove that the whole has a primacy and that the parts are brought together essentially for its sake, for the purpose of expressing it.
The expression of the whole, over and above the general and fundamental features we have formulated, has some particular features in which the type or species of organism is thrown into relief as being the whole. Often the experiments of Driesch are turned to stress these features most. Sinnott succinctly illustrates them in two statements: "Each part or quality (is) so related to all the rest that in its growth the individual marches on through a series of specific steps to a specific end or culmination, maintaining throughout its course a delicately balanced state of form and function which tends to restore itself if it is altered.... A remarkable fact about organic regulation, both developmental and physiological, is that, if the organism is prevented from reaching its norm or 'goal' in the ordinary way, it is resourceful and will attain this by a different method. The end rather than the deans seems to be the important thing."
Nothing in the uniquenesses of non-life's organizations really parallels all this. Of course, in an organism the unity we have pictured may not be always manifest in full: it may "Manifest even in full within limits and it may be seriously hindered in several respects, but inasmuch as the essence of it in some way or other is never absent and all the more since it is often in full play, we can assert that here is a uniqueness incomparable, sui generis. The fact is that all non-life's I Organization, every inorganic whole, for all its pattern and
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structure and coherence, is still only additive, even when it is not a mere aggregate: it is not what Sherrington terms "additive by co-organization of an integrative kind", its harmony is not "impressed on the parts by the whole", it is not "an individuality whose whole, as luminously said by Coleridge, is presupposed by all its parts."
Let us get such a whole into proper focus by further distinguishing "co-organization of an integrative kind" from a system of interrelated parts interrelated into a system instead of massed together from non-living wholes as distinct from aggregates. These wholes are of two kinds. One kind is exemplified by molecules and atoms, the other by man-made machines. The former, as we can see from our summary of life's organization, have no recognisable sign of "purposefulness", of teleology. The latter are teleological, they serve a purpose, but still have nothing in common with organic unity. Although their parts may be interrelated differently from those of atoms and molecules, they are the same type of system inasmuch as organic unity is wanting to them. And it is wanting because a machine is merely put together from the outside and its unity is imposed ab extra: it does not have an internal unity and an internal development, whereas an organism bears within itself an active sustaining principle of its own unity as if in some way it had a sense of its own wholeness. And the evident symbol of such a sense is in the very pattern of an organism as contrasted to that of a machine. A machine's coherent wholeness differs intrinsically from an organism's. A machine is a number of units that simply fit together and work by action and reaction, while in an organism the parts co-operate to perform different functions and are determined by the functions they perform and are functional differentiations of a unity which pervades them concretely and directly. Hence an organism in its wholeness is pre-eminently non-mechanistic in the literal sense.
This is not tantamount to saying there are no mechanistic elements in it. Bertrand Russell, in a chapter of his Human
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knowledge: Its Scope and Limits, seems to think that if a frog's heart can be kept beating, as it can under special conditions, after being extracted from the frog, the concept of organic unity is disproved. What is disproved is only the fantastic notion that a living creature is entirely an organic unity and has in it no processes comparable to those going on in the inorganic world known to physics and chemistry. Life's history being what it is, an evolutionary one, mechanism must take a considerable hand in every living creature. And, because there are mechanistic traits and the parts have a certain independence, an organ or other elements may pursue courses different from or actually antagonistic to those of the complete organism: a man's epithelial cells may start any moment to proliferate independently and cause fatal cancer. But this does not equate a living creature to a machine any more than to an aggregate. While it is not beyond a physico-chemical character in its parts or even to some extent in its totality when that totality is viewed only as a collection of parts, it is much more in its real wholeness. Its real whole- ness is not simply additive either by being massed together or by being a system of interrelated parts, whether that system be a man-made machine or a natural composite like a molecule, like an atom. It is integratively additive so that its totality is more than the sum of the parts serving it and is in a large measure their very raison d'etre and seems in a genuine though not easily analysable sense to be prior to them.
And it is because life's organization is not simply additive that life acts as if with "desire" and "purpose": "desire" and Purpose" become possible only when the whole can be said in some sense to pre-exist: "desire" and "purpose" are indeed inevitable assumptions in view of such pre-existence. No wonder that every biologist gets the impression as of ends in view and of a wanting to attain them. Sherrington, illustrating this fact, quotes R.C. Punnett as saying: "We can only understand an organism if we regard it as though produced under the guidance of thought for an end." Referring to the suggestion of purposive behaviour received by a
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"competent observer", E.G. Dru Drury, he admits: "That impression of concerted endeavour comes it is no exaggeration to say with the force of a self-evident truth." And yet he writes a propos the growth of organisms: "Because atoms combine on the basis of the arrangement of their sub-atomic parts we do not speak of those constituent parts as there for producing molecules. We do not speak of electrons as for producing atoms. Yet molecule-producing - and atom-producing - would seem as purposive as limb-producing. Our concept of an atom treats an atom as a deterministic necessity. To describe atomic behaviour science makes no appeal to purpose. In physics science would gain nothing by that appeal. Does it in biology?" Sherrington's broad mind and experimental temper do not allow him to be a crude dogmatist, but he feels that the balance tilts in favour of a negative answer and that physics and chemistry more than hint that they can out of themselves explain how a pin's-head ball of cells in the course of certain weeks becomes a child. He fails to fathom to its depths his own phrase: "co-organization of an integrative kind." He is misled by lack of appreciation of the genuine difference between the organic whole and the inorganic - a difference which, if we look at it from the side of physics and chemistry, is clearly not of degree but of kind.
The central characteristic of life falls outside all materialism a la Sherrington.
3
In biology mechanistic or mechanical materialism is» strictly speaking, the view that the organism is a sum of the processes of the units composing it and that this sum is just an ordered aggregate such as a machine illustrates, but with- out any mechanic creating the order. Sherrington passes beyond so crude a view by saying that the organism is "additive by integrative co-organization" and, despite the machin6' features in it, is more than a sum of unit processes in action and reaction; its wholeness exceeds such a sum. However?
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he finds this wholeness merely a highly complex version of v/hat science by its growth in subtlety has come to recognise more and more in inorganic nature: namely, balanced systems. It is therefore simply a phenomenon, not yet fully analysed, belonging to the domain of physics and chemistry of the type already known to us in our laboratories. And, if one sees life thus, one's biological theory is still a mechanical materialism, though more refined than the old variety.
We have shown Sherrington's materialism to be untenable because of its being based on a misunderstanding of the true nature of the central characteristic mentioned by himself of life - organic unity, the individual whole that an organism constitutes by integrative co-organization. A similar misunderstanding - curious in one with a greater philosophical acumen - leads also the most prominent name in non- mechanistic biology, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, not only to criticise defects in prevalent vitalistic theories but to repudiate the very essence of vitalism which posits a purposive more-than-material life-force utilising physico-chemical processes within certain limits imposed by them: he adheres to another type of materialistic thought which has come to be known as "organicism". We must now examine his thesis as propounded in his famous book. Problems of Life.
At about the same time as J.H. Woodger in England (1926), von Bertalanffy brought to light a theoretical position purporting to avoid both mechanism and vitalism. The "organismic conception", as he called it, agreed with Driesch that the results of his experiments could never be accounted for by crudely considering the organism as the sum of its Parts in action and reaction. It went further and found even refined mechanism wanting. And yet vitalism was given no quarter. In consequence, biology was seen as irreducible to the current type of physics and chemistry, yet not as exceeding all chemistry and physics. A physics and chemistry specific to biology was sought for. The theme was: what new Physics and chemistry would explain organic unity, the distinct biological whole?
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The difference between this theme and that which k Sherrington appears to pursue can be shown by indicating how each proposes to join the physico-chemical with the biological. As already hinted, minds like Sherrington are disposed to incorporate biology into physics and chemistry by a mere extrapolation of the laws of the latter: the same laws are supposed to operate in a more complicated medium in biology, and biological laws are taken to be nothing except special extensions of them. Minds like von Bertalanffy believe that biology must have an autonomous development which, while not entirely refusing extrapolation from physics and chemistry, has its own postulates, its own set of laws and when the synthesis with physics and chemistry finally takes place an enlargement of the conceptual scheme of these two sciences will be necessary on account of biological study, without, however, the introduction of any factor which is not physico-chemical.
Surely the organismic attitude is more sane than the mechanistic. It is also more in tune with the actual procedure within physics and chemistry themselves. Von Bertalanffy gives a few examples, of which we may cite one. "Classical chemistry attributed to every atom a definite number of valencies, saturated when the atom enters into chemical combination with another. These valencies are sufficient so far as chemical compounds in the classical sense are concerned. They are not sufficient, however, to explain, for example, crystallization, macromolecular compounds, cohesion and so on; rather does the atom display further forces termed secondary valencies, lattice or van der Waals forces. In turn, they are explained by modern electron and quantum theory. In all such cases the inclusion of new phenomena into physical theory necessitates a modification and refinement of the original picture."
This is sound observation. But the bed of Procrustes is suggested if one assumes that biology must be incorporated into the physico-chemical at all costs. The chopper is evidently in the hands of the fear lest the admission of a supra-
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material agent should end the attempt at objective description, precise calculation and unequivocal correlation. This fear is to a considerable degree a mistake. If there is a life- force, it does not act without physico-chemical modes nor is its action unrestricted: an intricate web of process within process would be present in the organism in connection with the acts of such an agent. It can be investigated and a host of specific laws formulated without necessarily involving the denial of a supra-material entity as the ultimate source and presiding genius of the organism's "wholeness" and of organic control and regulation. The physico-chemical ceases only to be the final ground and determinant. And for a scientist to neglect physico-chemical investigation in the name of the supra-material would be an obscurantist vital- ism. But likewise would it be for a scientist an obscurantist materialism to go about with the preconception that nothing should be admitted except matter. A balance between the material and the supra-material should be possible in science - provided one condition is satisfied in the very last and culminating statement, a condition which vitalistic theories mostly ignore. Although a present difficulty in satisfying it should not restrain one from vitalism if the evidence is strong against the materialistic theory, no vitalism can be finally adequate unless matter and life are proved to be not essentially dissimilar. Essential dissimilarity would preclude interaction and make any balance between the two unintelligible. However, there can be a lower synthesis and a higher synthesis. In the one, life is reduced to matter, whether matter be conceived according to current physics and chemistry or according to an expanded version suggested by biological processes. In the other, matter is reduced to life and taken as a special limited case of vitality which is thus seen as fundamental.' So long as an ultimate reduction in
' Of course the term "fundamental" is relative. We are using it only as between two categories, matter and life. More fundamental than life would be mind and even beyond mind there could be spirit. But these are not our concern here.
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some form is the goal, there should be scientifically no less than philosophically as little a priori objection to vitalism as to materialism. To insist either that the reduction should be only in one direction, the materialistic, or that if there is to be a reduction in the opposite direction it should be immediate is to harbour prejudice and to lack in proper humility before Truth.
Von Bertalanffy professes to keep an open mind as to the metaphysical truth or illusiveness of vitalism but says that in science vitalism is illegitimate. Hence organic unity is bound to be chopped up by him to be something never sui generis: biological wholeness can never escape being so defined as to drop out all significant uniqueness. How completely this uniqueness is dropped out is clear when he tells us the rule that "holds for every 'whole'". He writes: "The question arises as to what the supposed 'non-summativity' of higher levels with respect to the lower ones really means, and in how far the former are explicable in terms of the latter. The answer is simple. The properties and modes of higher levels are not explicable by the summation of the properties and modes of action of their components taken in isolation. If, however, we know the ensemble of the components and the relations existing between them, then the higher levels are derivable from the components." This kind of whole is certainly not the organic unity we have spoken of and distinguished from a system of interrelated parts, whether the system be a molecule or a man-made machine. Von Bertalanffy, although he is not crude enough to deny all distinction, sees no such difference. And immediately after the above passage he exemplifies his definition. "Naturally, a mere summation of, say, a number of C,H,0, and N atoms gives no adequate knowledge of the compound molecule. This is readily seen, for example, in isomerism, when compounds consisting of the same atoms, but in different arrangement, have different properties. If, on the contrary, the structural formula is known, then the properties of the molecule are intelligible in terms of its parts, the component atoms..
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Adding up the charges in the parts of an electrical conductor, we cannot find the distribution of charge in the conductor as a whole, because it depends on the configuration of the whole system. If the parameters of the parts and the boundary conditions of the whole system are known, the distribution of charge in the latter can be derived 'from the parts'."
We have thus a complete dilution of the concept of the whole. And, for von Bertalanffy, the peculiarity of the organic whole lies not in its incomparable uniqueness but in whatever relations of a biological as distinct from a non- biological kind exist between the parts - relations which, despite this distinction, are still akin in essence to those obtaining in inorganic wholes. Exactly as it might be in physics and chemistry, says von Bertalanffy, "the lack of a rigid theory in fields like developmental physiology is connected with the fact that they have not yet found the necessary abstractions and symbolisms." The absence of a special "biological mathematics", so to speak, concerned not so much with the notion of quantity as with those of "pat- tern", "position" and "shape", is all the gap in these fields: organic unity, though restricted in its particulars to the biological level and to that extent unique, is in its generalities just another form of inorganic unity.
Apart from the prejudice that vitalism is illegitimate in science, von Bertalanffy is influenced by a defect in the vitalist Driesch's conception of the structure of an organism. Driesch conceives the wholeness of an organism as due to a factor different from and added to the material system rather than immanent in that system's constellation. If it is different from and added to the material system, von Bertalanffy argues, the system is looked upon as just a sum of its parts modified towards non-summativity by a life-force which stands apart from it. Driesch's vitalism, therefore, takes a "mechanical" view of the organism. Surely, in this respect von Bertalanffy is right as against Driesch. The entirely mechanical view of the body is mistaken, whether taken by a mechanist or a vitalist; but does that alter the character of
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organic unity? We may look upon a material system as not a sum of its parts but a unity, and yet stick to vitalism if organic unity exceeds the type which von Bertalanffy has in mind and which, despite specificities as between level and level, takes in both the atom and the cell by its too broad definition. His criticism of the vitalistic theory may very well be criticised as applying to a non-essential, of this theory. Vitalism would not be rendered superfluous by our being told that before positing a life-force we have to deal not with a mechanical organism but with an organism which acts as a whole. All depends on what sort of whole a non-vitalistic idea of the organism would provide.
Let us recall the general fundamental features underlined by us of organic unity when we were dealing with Sherrington's confusion. "First, each part of a growing organism carries in itself up to a certain early stage of the organism's development the presence or pattern of the whole, so that, if separated from the other parts with which it was co-operating through a particular function, it can pro- duce a complete organism of the same type. Secondly, each part, up to a certain stage, can change its function if its place in the organism is changed and do what the new place which it occupies needs it to do, as if each part had the sense of each point of the pattern and as if the pattern were independent of the material from which it seems to be made and could use any material to serve the function assigned to each point. Thirdly, each part joins with the others to form a separate distinct single organism, an organic individual, in which there is to a considerable extent not only a functional dependence of the parts on the whole so that the parts, if isolated, would be disorganized but also an existential dependence such that the parts in isolation would cease even to be recognisable. Each of the three features and a fortiori their ensemble appears to prove that the whole has a primacy and that the parts are brought together essentially for its sake, for the purpose of expressing it."
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The immanent whole as postulated by von Bertalanffy is inadequate to organic unity as we find it - basically as inadequate as the mechanical structure postulated by the summationists, to which Driesch felt obliged to add a transcendent factor. The call for vitalism remains even after we discard the old mechanical theory of the organism. The whole as a factor genuinely transcendent in some manner can alone give us organic unity.
Another argument of von Bertalanffy's against a transcendent factor rests on certain experimental observations. Among the several signs of such a factor in embryonic processes Driesch had mentioned "equifinality" - the reaching of the same end-results from different initial conditions - and the movement towards the most nearly typical result in the future despite interference, provided sufficient material is available during the process. Casting doubt on Driesch's notion of "entelechy", of a director of embryonic events in anticipation of the goal, von Bertalanffy writes: "Experience shows that the 'whole' on which determination depends is not the typical result to be reached in the future, but the actual state of the developing system at a given time which can be indicated in any particular case. To be sure, inasmuch as determination has not yet taken place, there is equifinality. However, development does not proceed 'purposively' in the sense that the best and most typical result possible is achieved, as should be the case with an entelechy directing events in foresight of the goal. What really happens, whether, when, and how regulation occurs, is unequivocally determined by the conditions present. For example, ½ -- blastomeres of the sea-urchin yield complete larvas, and so do ¼ blastomeres; from parts of the eight-celled and later stages complete or defective formations develop, depending on the cell material present or experimentally combined, and it can be indicated in every case which results will be obtained in a given cell combination. It has been said that the course of development proceeds with 'the senseless industry
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of necessity' irrespective of whether the result is good or bad, teleological, dysteleological, or ateleological. Also, it cannot be maintained that entelechy would try to achieve the most typical result possible, and is prevented from attaining this goal by the inadequacy of the material available. For example, in super-regeneration up to six hind legs can be developed in toads if suitable incisions art made. Obviously the work of entelechy is not limited here by the lack of material at its disposal; rather the process is necessarily determined by the material conditions present. The force of this argument is enhanced by remembering that, according to Driesch, one of the fundamental actions of entelechy is 'suspension' of potential processes, meaning that it stops certain processes in normal as well as regulative development, in such a way that the most nearly typical whole is formed. Super- regenerates 'and other monsters clearly demonstrate the impotence of entelechy.... Therefore, we can exclude the assumption of a principle which joins the material system of the embryo and governs its action in dependence on the typical result to be reached in the future. The 'wholeness' manifest in the processes of development is immanent in, not transcendent to, the embryo."
The precise bearing of this argument on our thesis can be measured if we hark back to our qualification of organic unity when we spoke of mechanistic elements present in the living creature. We said that such elements are bound to be there and can at times work so as to go against organic unity. In von Bertalanffy's passage we see another example of mechanistic action - or rather, since he repudiates mechanism in the ordinary sense, non-vitalistic action - yet it is as little subversive as the rest are of the fact that organic unity does exist. If a heart taken out of a frog and kept beating, if the growth of epithelial cells in a chaotic way to destroy the organism cannot cover up the fact of organic unity, neither can "super-regenerates and other monsters". The issue is really not whether Driesch's conception of vitalism is correct in all details, or whether the future rather than the actual
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state of the developing system at a given time is the determinant, or whether there are conditions under which even with ample material the most nearly typical whole is not formed. The issue is whether, no matter what happens, there is or there is not in a radical sense "a whole presupposed by the parts".
At every moment the embryo is, in Sherrington's phrase, "never any less than a self-centred individual... a self- centred co-operative society which is familial and a unity - an organization of family cells, with corporate individuality." This individuality may find itself limited by external circumstances, it may go in several respects wrong with regard to the form expected; but under all conditions it still remains evident. It acts as a "co-organisation of an integrative kind" which means that the organism behaves in general as if every component were itself the whole in a particular aspect - that the components do not merely get organized to act in a system of interrelations while themselves remaining foreign to the idea of the system, but are imbued with the idea, as it were, and spontaneously co-operate from within themselves and serve the whole as if that whole were their own being, on a larger more fully manifested scale. It is because the components act, to a greater or lesser degree, like self- differentiations of a unity that the biological whole varies from a whole purely physico-chemical. A power seems there, pre-existent to the components and securing their organization. The term "entelechy" does not describe all the phenomena of this power: it stresses the goal more than the whole:
this power's main characteristic is perhaps hit off by saying that an integratively co-organized whole of some kind or other is the principal goal. As long as some such whole is achieved by it, be it the most nearly typical or no, a unity which differs radically from any physico-chemical one possible is in action. Super-regenerates and similar monsters wake no odds to the essence of vitalism, for they are still wholes physico-chemically impossible.
In face of this impossibility we cannot stop at the immanent
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"wholeness" insisted on by von Bertalanffy. But, inasmuch as the organism is proved to be not a mechanical structure and inasmuch as the transcendent factor works under limitations imposed by the material system, we must grant that side by side with the transcendent factor and to a degree subduing it is an immanent whole which is just a sum of the relations among the parts at each moment, the parts themselves by entering into relation with one another undergoing in their processes a change from what they do in isolation yet never behaving as though each were in a less or more measure the very whole in a particular aspect. It was this immanent whole that was forgotten by Driesch who took the organism per se to be mechanistic. But just as he was mechanistic in regard to the parts, von Bertalanffy is mechanistic in regard to their relations: both are in their different ways additive and summative and the mistake of the one leads him to a transcendent factor while ignoring the immanent "wholeness" and the mistake of the other leads him to an immanent "wholeness" to the exclusion of the transcendent factor.
The strongest argument of all that von Bertalanffy musters, against mechanism on one side and vitalism on the other, and in support of his affirmation at the same time that biological relations are distinct from non-biological and that both the types are finally one - his strongest argument comes from his brilliant formulation of a physics and chemistry peculiar to the biological whole. The formulation is designated by him as "an open system in a steady state" and he has constructed a theoretical model - that is, a mathematical model on paper and not in the laboratory - of a material system of this kind, which is proved by him and other organicists to be suggesting the causes of certain special biological features apparently without needing a factor apart from the system. An example of such features is the dynamic equilibrium of an organism undergoing metabolic processes. Another is the constancy of the entropy content: Prigogine has calculated that in an open system, in contrast to a closed
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system such as we find in inanimate nature, the entropy content is constant but not maximal as in the equilibrium of a closed system. Under certain conditions it can even decrease, proving very pointedly the limitations of the second law of thermodynamics, and conduce to an increase in complexity and order. Again, the open system can achieve the same steady state whatever the starting conditions and return to a steady state after deviation: here we have an "equifinality" giving the appearance of purposefulness as if the system were directed towards the attainment of a given state in the future - quite the opposite of what happens in a closed inanimate system where the state at any moment depends on the state in the past. An extremely interesting account of the open system and its various physico-chemical capacities is provided in von Bertalanffy's Problems of Life and a fine summary of the mathematical findings of von Bertalanffy as well as others in the same field may be perused in New Biology 16 in the article The Organism as a Physico-chemical Machine. No doubt, it is a system with many serious gaps, as von Bertalanffy himself admits in the words which, in the second installment of our series, we have quoted in connection with the present posture of affairs in embryology. But it is developed enough to mark a momentous step in the physics and chemistry of the organism. It fully justifies von Bertalanffy in saying that biological relations are distinct from non-biological. On the strength of it he can substantiate his statement that not even in principle can organic unity be reduced to the laws of physical gestalten - that is, of physical systems that attain a state of equilibrium and represent wholes. He declares with perfect right that here are "problems that are beyond a mere application of gestalt principles known in inanimate nature. Rather a specific gestalt principle immanent in the organism is to be supposed."
But is he justified in repudiating vitalism? His new physics and chemistry is surely an eye-opener for the vitalist when the latter tends to regard vitalism as immediately resulting on the rejection of mechanistic materialism in
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biology. All the same, do they support von Bertalanffy's claim that they lead to a non-vitalistic theory of life? The answer is: No. His work demonstrates in some detail how the specific biological gestalt functions. But organic unity, as already pointed out, exceeds a whole such as understood by the gestalttheorie which gives us merely the physico-chemical configuration, whether the configuration be in the domain of the physico-chemical of the current type or in that of the Bertalanffian type. The biological gestalt remains a configuration whole, whatever its specificity. By the vitalistic features it exhibits it does not bring life under the rubric of the physico-chemical. When, for instance, we are told that the same end-results can be reached by it from different initial conditions, we have only to ask: Are the end-results organic unity? If not, the equifinality exhibited falls short of life's manifestation. What the biological gestalt constitutes is nothing more than the right physico-chemical basis for the unity that is organic.
But, of course, if it is nothing more, it is also nothing less. For, without it life cannot build itself in matter and the theory of vitalism will be somewhat freakish. So, while we must refrain from believing with von Bertalanffy that an expansion of the accepted physico-chemical scheme by the concept of the open system in a steady state is sufficient for the arrival of life and that the functioning of inorganic components in an unknown physico-chemical manner can give us the full biological phenomenon, we cannot deny the necessity of such expansion and such functioning. How else is the biological gestalt to take shape and serve as life's indispensable medium of manifestation? Even if we posit a life-force we can but regard it as using matter not only according to its own vital character but also according to what matter itself is capable of. Unless matter is found to have properties un- known to us today, we cannot conceive of the emergence of the biological gestalt under even the stress of a life-force. For, the life-force would be dealing with matter and if matter did not prove capable of a new physics and chemistry it could
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not be vitalised. But the question is whether in accounting for the new physics and chemistry of the biological whole we would not need to go ultimately beyond all physics and chemistry.
There is no doubt that we would. Still, two alternatives face us. Is life something utterly different from matter or is the inorganic merely a condition of involved vitality - matter being then nothing save vitality in a particular state of self- concealment which at a certain point of physico-chemical change releases the concealed nature? The release would mean the formation of the new gestalt by that nature as the basis of the latter's manifestation. On principles of science as well as of philosophy we must look on matter as involved vitality if we cannot be satisfied with looking on life as merely evolved materiality.
Such a view, fully worked out, would imply the existence of a life-force in itself, unconcealed and uninvolved, on a "plane" of its own and the concealment and involution as a partial phase of its being, an adventure of losing itself and finding itself under circumstances that start with seemingly its very opposite. In that case, the release or evolution of vitality from the apparently inorganic would be due at the same time to an urge from within the concealed and involved condition and to a pressure upon that condition by the life- force from its status as a free and undiminished agent. Then we should expect in the phenomenon of life four things together - an amount of the physico-chemical directly extrapolated from the inorganic: an amount of the physico-chemical specifically biological, irreducible to the former, joining it only in an expanded scheme of physics and chemistry:
tentative touches of something that transcends all physico- chemical formulas: direct activity of the transcendent factor at crucial decisive points. We suggest that an unbiased gaze on the organic phenomenon reveals just these four things simultaneously, and the transcendent touches of both kinds come in not as purely inexplicable intrusions but as creators of unsuspected and unique physico-chemical processes,
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perhaps some functioning of matter even beyond the open system in a steady state, and the main wonder of these touches lies precisely in their role as such creators. They can play that role because the life-force is not alien to matter:
only, it is not matter that is the explanation of life but life that explains matter by being the original power whose involved condition in various degrees is the physico-chemical. The problem of interaction is thus solved and intelligibility given in principle to a balance between the material and the supramaterial. Also, the sway of the physico-chemical over so much of the biological is rendered clear since the involution must make the former the widely determinant matrix of the latter. But the almost unlimited potentialities of development of the physico-chemical is no less given a rationale, for matter is no longer confined to a single cadre or a few sets of cadres and the life-force is no longer an agent acting quite ab extra: it acts as matter's inmost hidden nature and even the most transcendent touches have an underlying continuity with the immanent whole.
Everything considered, a position of this kind appears the most logical, if not the solely logical. Von Bertalanffy's work does not at all justify any doubt about the essence of vitalism. And we may state some inferences from this conclusion as follows. To begin with, the expanded scheme of the physico- chemical which he hopes for will go a long way towards providing rationally for the possibility of a transition from the inorganic to the organic, but by itself it will not make the transition completely explicable. Apropos the problem which we mentioned in our opening article - that of synthetising life in the laboratory - and which we declared on the way to being solved, we may remark that indeed the solution will take place soon, but, when we succeed in synthetising a colloid of a certain complexity and structure, something will suddenly animate it and the logical connection will never be entirely struck upon in physico-chemical terms. Only by the operation of a life-force the inorganic interrelated closed system can become in full the biological interrelated open
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system in a steady state and supply the required physico-chemical basis for organic unity. Further, if in physico-chemical terms there is no totally intelligible transition between the inorganic and the organic, what brought about this crucial becoming must also sustain it, for otherwise the new condition will lapse into the old. Also, what effected the transition by acting from beyond the physico-chemical may be thought of as subtly influencing in various directions the physics and chemistry of the new condition throughout an individual organism's career as well as throughout the history of organic evolution.
The last inference is the most important, but we shall not undertake here to give it an elaborate illustrative content. A separate article would be needed for that. What we shall do, before closing, is to face in brief a certain philosophical question posed by the formula that has been used so much by us - organic unity. We have also employed the word "individuality" as a synonym for the formula. Well, if organic unity implies an effective whole prior in some sense to the parts as well as to the relations between them, if it is a unity from which interrelated multiplicity originally proceeds as though to serve an overall purpose, a unity not built out of multiplicity and then reacting as a system of relations upon the relata, does it imply a sort of individual "soul" for each organism? Our answer can only be: "From the philosophical standpoint, organic unity implies primarily that under material conditions tending to obstruct and obscure all surface manifestation a supra-material power works out in each of its expressions an 'idea' in its secret being: this power carries on a purposive activity, much as a poet inspired by a situation may purpose to create a poem, each part of which would serve and express its general motive, and move towards the creation of this form through conditions of varying difficulty. We should also say that behind each organism thus fashioned, there must be not only a general life-force but some individualising character in the force, as if there were 'souls' trying to effect forms for themselves and
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tending through the long history of evolution to emerge more and more from their subliminal stations, as it were, into the surface awareness - 'souls' which we may regard ultimately as themselves numerically multiple and diversified expressions of an essentially single universal being that is the life of all lives."
These philosophical significances inevitably arise from the scientific fact ascertained by us that, if we approach from the side of the physico-chemical rather than from the side of a life-force whose partial phase is a concealing self-materialisation and an involution in physico-chemical process, we shall always strike against a difference of kind rather than of degree between matter and life - a difference which cuts the ground from under every species of biological materialism.
4
(i)
Materialism, either with a mechanistic theory or with an "organismic conception", has been found by us incapable of accounting for the integratively co-organized self-differentiated unity that is the organic whole, a whole that has to be considered as in some genuine sense pre-existent to the parts each of which acts in varying degrees as if it were the whole itself in a particular aspect and function. A fundamental principle of life - or life-force, to use a popular expression - is required by biological phenomena: life can never be rendered completely explicable in physico-chemical terms.
Further, whatever physico-chemical terms are present - necessarily present since biology studies embodied life - are not merely extrapolated into a more complex medium from the physics and chemistry we have developed in our laboratories. The organization of a new physico-chemical process called by von Bertalanffy "an open system in a steady state and so far elucidated in the main by only a theoretical model is the bodily basis of vitality. This organization whose
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mathematics cannot, under the present physical postulates, be derived from the mathematics of matter experimentally known to us but calls for a broadening of those postulates constitutes the "immanent" whole supporting the action of the "transcendent" whole that vitality really is.
But matter and life are not to be regarded as two opposed or entirely distinct principles. Life is indeed more fundamental and has a characteristic action of its own, yet it cannot be something quite other than matter: if it is something quite other no ground is provided for the interaction which undeniably takes place between the two and for the close- knit system which they form in the phenomena studied by the biologist. Consequently, when matter with its typical characteristics cannot be looked upon as fundamental and as sufficiently explicative of life, it must be viewed as life itself in a concealed shape, in an "immanent" condition admitting of diverse levels, life's self-involution in a mode apparently the very opposite of its own nature and serving as a starting- point for that nature's slow difficult evolution to the surface and graded developing disclosure of typical supra-material characteristics.
Finally, if the organisms constructed by life are each a self-differentiated unity, an organic whole that is everywhere individual in different shades and measures, the one life manifesting in space and time through such unities and wholes is likely to be itself a unity that is self-differentiated, a whole whose individuality does not preclude a manifoldness of subordinate individualities or individual "souls", as it were, numerously expressive within it of a single universal essence and emerging more and more to the surface of embodied life in the course of evolutionary history.
This, scientifically and philosophically, is the general picture to which we have arrived by our scrutiny of the phenomena pertaining to the organism. What we propose to do now is to cast a brief glance at the phenomena of organic solution and see whether the scientific facts of evolutionary history bear out our central notion of life.
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Evolution has been considered by scientists from one of two standpoints: naturalism and finalism. Naturalism holds that the course of evolution has run blindly, as a chapter of accidents, a movement without any aim, producing by sheer operation of unconscious physical and chemical agents through a long series of changing animals the self-aware and goal-seeking creature named man. Finalism implies a supra- material reality operating with an aim, a reality equated in most cases with a life-force governing matter under certain limitations. Even if a clear aim is not implied, at least some sort of direction is. A directional life-force may not render evolution strictly finalistic and Bergson who believes in just an élan vital, a vital impetus without a clear aim, disclaims the title of finalist; but inasmuch as his élan vital is not quite indiscriminately creative but pushes towards an ever greater efficiency and ever keener consciousness it has a vague kind of goalful striving, an undefined aim of higher and higher and is therefore still finalistic though in a broad and unspecific sense.
Some finalists take up the peculiar position that there are no élan vital, no mind-force, no individual "souls" apart from the body, nothing except matter, but God, while not canceling the brute "say" of matter in particulars, makes it evolve according to His own plan and manifest vital and mental modes dominating its usual physico-chemical ones. Lecomte du Nouy calls himself a "telefinalist", meaning that the ultimate aim of evolution - namely, man striving to be a perfect spiritual being - has been fixed by God and certain crucial transitions depend on Him but what he works upon is a movement of matter whose details develop by purely natural means and are ruled by "chance". He offers the simile of a number of streams issuing from a mountain lake and set going by the distant force of gravitation and executing various turns and twists, delays and rushes, stoppages and breakthroughs determined by the brute lay-out and contour of the land down which they flow, until the far-off valley, which is the goal, is reached by what is uniquely
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destined to overcome somehow all the intervening conditions. In the course of the telefinalistic evolution, however, several phenomena of "anti-chance" (to quote a term of Eddington's) occur because God has willed them: these cannot be explained by the natural trend of things according to the laws of probability and elude scientific analysis. The two most outstanding among them are the properties of life which cannot be linked to those of inanimate matter and the properties of mind which cannot be linked to those of matter animate. But even prior to life's arrival there are, in the scheme of du Nouy, puzzles like the chemical characteristics of molecules in relation to the qualities possessed by atoms. Du Noiiy, in Human Destiny, has many penetrating observations on biological problems and some intuitions of great cultural and spiritual value, yet both philosophically and scientifically his supernaturalism paired with materialism is torn by an immense hiatus between two extremes and it resorts to a kind of miracle-mongering and affords no abiding significance to the individualisation that is the constant factor in biological history and is of the widest import in human destiny. Also, it is exposed in part to the same objections that apply to the theory, at once materialistic and theistic, advocated by Lloyd Morgan: Emergent Evolution.
In Lloyd Morgan's theory of emergence material components are credited with forming by their interrelation a series of wholes whose properties are novel and, from a consideration of the parts, unpredictable: these properties are described as emergent rather than resultant. Emergents are said to arise widely in the domain of matter; on the level of the atom, the level of the molecule, the level of a collection of molecules. Lloyd Morgan claims, for instance, that the liquid or solid condition of a substance cannot be predicted from a complete knowledge of the molecules of that substance in a vaporous condition. C.D. Broad, an enthusiast for emergence, asserts that experiment alone and never any calculation from the components can teach us the chemical behaviour of any elementary substance. According to him,
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nothing that we know about hydrogen itself or in its combination with anything but oxygen would give us the least reason to expect that it would combine with oxygen at all, much less that two atoms of it would combine with one of oxygen. On the analogy of such physical "emergents", life is deemed an emergent from physico-chemical events related among themselves in a particular Way and mind an emergent from vital events in a particular interrelation.
But Lloyd Morgan adds that he is no stark materialist. He realises that Emergents has to avoid two errors: on the one hand, the higher must not be read down into the lower without any difference and, on the other, the lower must not be supposed to explain the higher without possessing in it something akin to what emerges. Lloyd Morgan, while refusing to accept a distinct life or mind, tries to comply with these conditions by postulating that all physico-chemical events have vital-mental correlates of their own which are imperceptible except when these events join together in a special manner as in organisms. He also seems to suggest that in perceptibly emergent life no less than in perceptibly emergent mind there is released an impulse which becomes free in some measure to control and direct what has hitherto bound it. Lastly, to explain what makes emergents emerge in a progressive direction, as they seem to do, in the total computation of evolutionary history, he posits the Activity of Divine Power, an Activity omnipresent throughout emergent evolution and expressive of Divine Purpose.
Like Lecomte du Noiiy, Lloyd Morgan strains at the gnat of a distinct life or mind governing matter under certain limitations and swallows the camel of Divine Activity a"0 Purpose. There need be no quarrel with this camel: in fact it has to be brought in sooner or later, but to go straight to 1 without taking first the gnat in one's stride is not very convincing, scientifically or philosophically. Even apart fro this, the theory of emergent evolution as presented by Lloyd Morgan is internally unsound. The suggestion of an imp1115 which becomes free in some measure to control and dire
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what has hitherto bound it is flagrantly contradictory of the idea of correlation between the material and the vital-mental. Life correlated to a system of physico-chemical events may be manifested as a property not to be found directly in the parts of the system but it cannot be anything else than a version in perceptibly vital terms of what exists in physico-chemical terms: there can be no turning of life upon matter to regulate and adjust. Similarly, mind cannot turn upon what has hitherto bound it to exercise a new power of orientation and selection, design and valuation. A new controlling and directing impulse can be released only if life or mind is no mere correlate of matter, no mere vital or mental aspect of it, helplessly attendant on physico-chemical interrelatedness, but an existent in its own right, however concealed and suppressed it may be before the emergence and, moreover, only if matter is not intrinsically different from life or mind and prohibitive of interaction with it but just an involved form of it from which the vital or mental evolves its own characteristic action.
In the second place, Lloyd Morgan's claim, as also Broad's and that of every other adherent of Lloyd Morgan's theory, about unpredictable physical Emergents is faulty. It is made with the intention of "naturalising" the emergence of life and mind and doing away with distinct vital and mental entities. To thinkers who do not feel bound, as Lloyd Morgan does, to acknowledge a progressive direction in evolution and to explain it by Divine Activity and Purpose, this naturalising of all emergence has been a prop to materialism. But, as McDougall acutely reminded us long ago in Modern Materialism and Emergent Evolution and as Reginald A. Kapp brilliantly drives home in Science versus Materialism, the emergence of life or mind is not on a par with that of physical properties. The simple reason for the disparity is: the latter are not really unpredictable at all. Physical chemists have successfully predicted the properties of atoms and molecules and collections of molecules, which they have never observed. No limits can be set to the physical chemist's power
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of prediction, for all the properties can be related either to the shape and arrangements of the molecules or to the numb and position and movement of the electrons associated with atomic nuclei. Even if the fallibility of the physical chemist prevents prediction at times, the emergent properties, after they have come, grow intelligible and explicable in terms of their antecedents and are therefore predictable in at least principle.
A capital example of the prediction of all the chemical properties of an atom from a knowledge of the atomic nucleus is given by Kapp. "Substances had been discovered," he writes, "of which the atomic nuclei carried nearly all the numbers of positive unit charge from 1 to 92. These corresponded to all the known chemical elements. But there were a few gaps. For instance, no nucleus had been found with 72 charges. Physicists knew that such nuclei must exist and that they would represent an undiscovered element. Though no one had ever met it, its properties were predicted. Eventually nuclei carrying 72 charges were found. They belonged to the atoms of a new element which has received the name Hafnium. This exhibits the predicted properties."
Apropos Lloyd Morgan's claim that a complete knowledge of the molecules of a substance in a vaporous condition would not enable the liquid or solid condition of that substance to be predicted, Kapp writes: "The physical properties of liquids and solids depend on the way in which the molecules are packed when they shake down, and this is known if the shape of the molecules is known. The molecules of oil, for instance, are long and cling firmly to each other, side by side, so that a collection of them tends to be grouped in layers like the stalks in a cornfield. But the ends cling les5 firmly and easily lose their hold. Consequently one laye1' slides easily over another. This explains why oil spreads over the surface of water and why it is a good lubricant, A physicist who discovered a vapour consisting of long molecules with the appropriate distribution of clinging power
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the sides and ends could predict the lubricating properties of that substance in the liquid state."
Broad's assertion that the power of hydrogen to combine with oxygen and much more its power to combine in the proportion of two atoms to one could not be predicted is also false. To quote Kapp again: "Electrons are kept in the vicinity of the atomic nucleus by electrostatic attraction. They are not prevented from falling into it by centrifugal force only. Their mutual electrostatic repulsion keeps them at a distance from each other and, therefore, also from any single spot such as the nucleus. A compromise is reached between the pulls towards the nucleus and the pushes between the electrons when the system settles down to a condition in which the electrons are not very crowded. In the oxygen atom stability exists when two of the eight electrons describe orbits comparatively near the nucleus in what is called an inner shell, or K-ring, and the remaining six describe orbits in an outer shell, or L-ring. These six are not very crowded. The electrons are said to shield the nucleus. This means that at a little distance from the atom the negative charges on the electrons completely cancel the positive charges on the nucleus. The atom behaves as if it carried no charges. It is electrically neutral and can neither attract nor repel other particles. But the wide spacing of the electrons in the oxygen atom causes the shielding to be imperfect at very short distance. Some of the electrical field of the nucleus gets through the mesh as it were, so that there are regions where a positive electrostatic field occurs. There are other regions very close to the atoms where the negative field of the electrons preponderates. Consequently the atom can both attract and repel particles which come sufficiently close. It has some electrostatic activity. The hydrogen atom consists of a nucleus carrying a single unit positive charge called a proton and one negatively charged electron. Each sometimes comes into a region where 11 is attracted. The hydrogen atom is then captured. The Proton allies itself with the oxygen nucleus and the electron which was associated with this proton in the hydrogen atom
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enters the outer shell. As I said already, the six electrons in the outer shell of the oxygen atom are not very crowded. As many as eight can be accommodated in this shell before their mutual electrostatic repulsions become pronounced. But more than eight are not possible. If a ninth tried to enter, it would be too strongly repelled, even though the requisite attractive force existed at the nucleus. The ninth would have to stay outside in a third shell. Hence we say that the second shell is complete when it contains eight electrons. This number is provided when one atom of oxygen has combined with two of hydrogen."
A physical emergent is actually no genuine emergent since it has no genuine novelty so far as any property is concerned which scientists count as objectively connected with it or even as having an objective basis in it of stimulus to our subjectivity. Thus, all the properties that science studies of the molecule produced by the combination of two atoms of hydrogen with one of oxygen are actually non-Emergents, but a property unpredictable either in practice or in principle is, for instance, the name by which we know the combination: "water"! Scientifically, this property depends entirely on the observer and not on the observed. A genuine novelty, traceable in the observed itself and yet not only unpredictable but also inexplicable after its arrival, can never arise unless the emergent is the manifestation of a principle exceeding matter and having matter as its involved condition instead of itself being a condition of matter evolved.
The immediate desideratum in biology is a vital principle of this sort. That principle may - indeed, must - be an index to others of the same sort with, at the top. Divinity. But to jump straight to them would be illogical. Much more illogical would it be to jump straight to the God of Lloyd Morgan and du Noiiy who supply no ground for interaction between Him and matter. Lloyd Morgan, however, appears to feel 1" general an inadmissible hiatus between matter and God: else he would not see the necessity to talk of psychological correlates or aspects of matter from the very bottom up to
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man. What he fails to see is the utter inadequacy of such correlates or aspects to account for the partially free domination which he acknowledges of the vital and mental over the physical and which we have established in biological terms by our study of organic unity.
So, finalism without vitalism of the type we have outlined is defective when dealing with evolutionary history no less than when treating an individual organism's career. What, in the biological sphere, we have to pit against the materialistic hypothesis is a vitalistic finalism. But, in the above considerations, we have pitted it against that hypothesis with regard only to the two crucial turning points in evolutionary history, the development of life in matter and that of mind in life. What about the particular course and the specific process? Do they support our vitalistic finalism or do they allow a materialistic picture?
Let us look at the picture painted by materialism. The old Darwinian version is well-known: minute variations some- how occurring as between individuals and gradually piling up to radical changes, a struggle for existence among the bearers of these changes as well as of those variations, the survival of the fittest and the continuation of their characteristics by heredity. The phrase "natural selection" covered the process by which the unfit were eliminated in the actual struggle and through environmental conditions. Today the Darwinian theme of "Nature red in tooth and claw" has given place to a more subtle and complex understanding of natural selection: indeed, according to Julian Huxley, sanguinary competition is now held to be mostly an anti- evolutionary force, the main part assigned to natural selection being an effect on what is designated as "differential fertility" among populations geographically distributed in several ways - a peaceful process sifting and reinforcing and accumulating, through the unequal reproductive capacities °f differently distributed groups, a series of mutations (both small variations and radical changes) which are known to be due to a shuffling in the pattern of chromosomes and genes
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in the germplasm. This peaceful working has been elucidated with a manifold mathematical analysis in a number of studies by a host of researchers, especially R.A. Fisher T R c8 Haldane and Sewall Wright. But, whatever the new understanding of natural selection, the blind nature of evolution affirmed by Darwinism is "confirmed" by Neo-Darwinism
In fact it has been further emphasised, since characters and adaptations desired and acquired by individual organ- isms are no longer considered inheritable and as the mutational pattern-shuffling in the chromosomes and genes seems to be following no purposive factor and even to be observing no formulable law. Both spontaneous mutations and those induced by artificial agents like heat are seen to be "accidental" with respect to external conditions: they show no adaptive character to the conditions under which they arise. For instance, the mutations that arise at increased temperature do not represent adaptations to that higher temperature: there is only an increase in the rate at which mutations appear. Even if, with von Bertalanffy, we hold that the uncontrolled character of mutations and their lack of adaptiveness and direction with respect to external influences do not necessarily mean that nothing in the nature of the organism itself determines them systematically on the whole, the Bertalanffian view does not do away with the essentially naturalistic and non-finalistic standpoint, since this view is not at all tantamount to vitalism.
The most purposive-looking feature of evolution - the manner in which organisms are marvellously suited for efficient functioning within their environment as if a life- force had made a calculated adjustment of organ and form to the demands of the surround - materialism explains, on the strength of observations, by saying that the general absence of anything except what is closely adapted to the calls of life s milieu is the result of nature's eliminating all that was n01 best adapted out of a vast number of accidental differences of detail among individual organisms. Moreover, the old ides that an intricate structure is useful only after it is complete
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and that therefore the production of it must have taken place a purposive miracle of all-at-once or else that the slow production of it was not affected by the non-purposive and blind play °^ natural selection but was a Ideological preparation in advance of actual use, is discredited by materialism: at all stages of development most structures are, according to it, useful in their own ways. Not that non-adaptive (of no particular advantage or disadvantage) or in adaptive (disadvantageous) or even pre-adaptive (non-adaptive or in- adaptive for the ancestral way of life but adaptive for some other way which happens to be available) features escaping the pressure of natural selection are denied, but their rarity is pointed out and they are regarded as simultaneous with adaptive ones and not over-balancing the advantage of the latter or as secondary results of these. Even if they persist for a longer or shorter time without connection with adaptive ones they are shown to be exceptions rather than the rule. And though the extremely rare pre-adaptive features are admitted to be of great importance as mechanisms for the rise of radically new types of organisms, they are not taken to be the usual modes of transition from type to type. If they were the usual modes, some sort of teleology would be suggested. The usual modes are seen to be those not incompatible with a play of blind forces.
A minor concession is, however, granted to the part played by the individual organism's acquired changes: such changes are not hereditary and therefore are unrelated to evolution directly but, as G.G. Simpson puts it, "any individual change not itself hereditary may nevertheless strongly influence the individual's ability or opportunity to reproduce and in this indirect way will affect the course of evolution of the group as a whole". Far more important than these Ganges acquired consciously or unconsciously are others that have little to do with the individual organism's initiative or its newly developed response to environment. The adaptations that really count, according to the materialistic hypothesis, are fortuitous mutations favoured by natural
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selection and getting integrated into the genetic system and leading from type to type by a long-range extension of the synthetic process sketched by Fisher, Haldane and Wright
The picture painted by materialism of "blind forces" cannot be arbitrarily shoved aside. Of course it is not an absolutely verified picture. Although plausible, it contains bold extrapolations. Thus, during nearly fifty years of genetical research on some dozens of animals and plants, a lot of mutations have been observed but except for some cases occurring in polyploid plants no transgression of the limits of the species has been accomplished by chance mutations, let alone "macro-evolutionary" changes needed for differences between fundamental groups (phyla). From this we cannot assert that nothing else could have occurred in a billion years of evolution; yet to say that something else has occurred is to extend universally a principle we have experimentally demonstrated to a rather limited extent. When we turn to the record of fossils, we do find a multitude of transitional types between species, many between genera, a few between classes, but none at all between phyla - and these last would be the most important and convincing. Probably early geological conditions are responsible for the lack. As to adaptive mutations, there seems some contradiction between the fact observed in the laboratory that mutations occur without reference to advantage within the environment acting upon the organism and the fact that in nature we find mutational features integrated with extraordinary adaptiveness into the environment. Even if minute advantageous mutations occur, the highly complex precision of adapted structures appears a far cry from them and not all the processes elucidated in the Fisher-Haldane-Wright synthesis strike one as quite convincingly explaining the almost expert skill of these structures and the countless convergence of mutational features that go to render them coherent co-operative wholes. Again, to take the "accidental usefulness" is of a character as the supreme deciding force m evolutions too sweeping a generalisation. In order to survive
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organ or trait has to be somehow useful or related to useful features, but, as Goebel, the celebrated botanist, has emphasised, the manifoldness of organic forms is much greater than the manifoldness of environmental conditions. For instance, as von Bertalanffy notes, in a uniform marine environment, forminifera or radiolaria develop hundreds of species, whose fantastic diversities of shape are "natural art- forms" far removed from the need to be merely useful. Also, how is it that life not only expands horizontally but climbs vertically as if there were a nisus to create a qualitative hierarchy? Within the usefulness (supposedly accidental) of organic things a lot of other motifs richer or deeper or at least more dramatic and in any case not easily to be explained away as accidental seem to be at work. Lastly, as von Bertalanffy reminds us, we have no more than one or two dozen experiments in which the "accidental usefulness" of a character is demonstrated, as when, for example, those individuals of a species of insect which have a colour identical with the background are less eaten by birds than those with contrasting colours. But there is no way to verify or falsify experimentally the extrapolation that evolution was controlled by "accidental usefulness".
Yes, the materialistic picture is not an absolutely verified one. Huxley and Simpson, two of its best exhibitors, are also aware of this, but they feel that, while here an extended hypothetical application of causes concretely tested in a limited field is made, causes like inherent tendencies, vital urges or cosmic goals are vague and not equally demonstrable by experimental technique. So they deem the materialise picture well-founded and plausible and not illegitimately
generalised. Though we may not quite agree we must concede a certain cogency to it. Only, we have to ask ether it is the sole truth and whether it is a truth which we should not expect on our vitalistic and finalistic theory. Our theory makes matter a state of concealed vitality, in which at the start vitality is, to all seeming, completely contradicted: the elements of dispersion, accident, undirectedness and
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waste are at their maximum. Evolutionary life's matrix therefore, is such as to sustain in many passages of life' history and in many phases of its activity the forces of blindness - at least a strong surface appearance of them in many details, just as in the details of an individual organism numerous non-vitalistic and non-finalistic features meet a superficial survey. Anything else than this would run counter to our theory. So the argument for a materialistic interpretation of evolution is itself an important point in favour of our vitalistic finalism!
But, of course, if our theory is correct, the materialistic picture would not be the sole truth. An opposite suggestion would offer itself - and more and more in the onward course of evolutionary history. This is exactly what we find. Let us mark what materialism is obliged to admit of an overall impression of, in the first place, insurgent abundant all- spreading creativity and, in the second, directed and purposive process. Of course it attempts to explain away that impression by stressing as basic the play of apparently blind forces already mentioned and exhibiting prominently the fumblings, the dead-ends, the deteriorations, the extinctions and the maze as of a vast randomness and opportunism. But life as creative artist cannot be gainsaid. "For naive and unbiased contemplation," writes von Bertalanffy, "nature does not look like a calculating merchant; rather she looks like a whimsical artist, creative out of an exuberant fantasy and destroying her own work in romantic irony. The principles of 'economy' and of 'fitness' are true only 1" a Pickwickian sense. On the one hand, nature is a niggards" when she insists on abolishing, say, an already minute rudimentary organ; this little economy having, as main a by the theory of selection, enough advantage to be decisive in the struggle for existence. On the other hand, she produces a wealth of colour, form, and other creations, which, as far as we can see, is completely useless. completely useless example, the exquisite artistry of butterflies' wings/ has nothing to do with function, and cannot even be appreciated
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by their bearers with their imperfect eyes. This productivity of creation seems to be expressed in the 'horizontal' multiplicity of forms on the same level of organization ,g well as in the 'vertical' progress of organization, which can, but need not necessarily, be considered as 'useful'.... go, evolution appears to be more than the mere product of chance governed by profit. It seems a cornucopia of evolution creatrice, a drama full of suspense, of dynamics and tragic complications. Life spirals laboriously upwards to higher and ever higher levels, paying for every step. It develops from the unicellular to the multicellular, and puts death into the world at the same time. It passes into levels of higher differentiation and centralization, and pays for this by the loss of regulability after disturbances. It invents a highly developed nervous system, a brain which allows consciousness that by means of a world of symbols grants foresight and control of the future; at the same time it is compelled to add anxiety about the future unknown to brutes; finally, it will perhaps have to pay for this development with self- destruction. The meaning of this play is unknown, unless it is what the mystics have called God's attaining to awareness
of Himself."
Profoundly suggestive eloquence, this. But the materialist that von Bertalanffy believes he has to be in the interests of science makes him conclude that though the theory of natural selection of the advantageous among the products of random gene-distribution of indifferent mutations is not satisfactory, "this does not imply mysterious controlling forces that in an anthropomorphic way strive towards Progressive adaptation, fitness, or perfection." Rather, he searches, according to his "organismic" approach, for materialistic laws inherent in the organism's activity as a specific biological whole instead of accepting unreservedly the formulas of Neo-Darwinism.
such denouement to the "crisis" suggested by him is indeed disappointing and ultimately as inadequate as the Neo-Darwinian formulas. A life-force with a godhead hidden
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in its depths, exploding through the obscurative and obstructive covering put on its energy by itself, displaying c' numberless roles its imaginative zest, its will of self-figuration and self-diversification and self-transformation, weaving a tense symphony out of its own motifs of unity and wholeness and "excelsior" and matter's motifs of division and break-up and degringolade, shooting up yet through this tangle of notes towards the grand finale of a conscious- ness which not only rises to the surface from subliminal depths and gets more and more intense but also visions and works out through all dangers and conflicts and setbacks some ideal perfection in both the inner and the outer being - this reading alone of the multi-coloured prolificity and productiveness revealed by evolutionary history can do justice to the facts.
(ii)
To buttress our vitalistic and finalistic reading of evolutionary facts and to give another facet to von Bertalanffy's dramatic presentation of life the creative artist's horizontal . richness and vertical novelty, we may quote a passage from 'l: me the Refreshing River by another materialist in biology, now a dialectical one rather than a mechanical or an organismic: Joseph Needham. "Modem biology," says Needham, 'is nothing if not evolutionary. There are now no reasonable grounds for doubt that during successive ages after the first appearance of life upon the earth it took up a succession of new forms, each more highly organized than the last. This is not gainsaid in any way by the existence of highly adaptive parasitism and retrogression in certain types of plants and animals, nor by the fact that a hundred disadvantageous mutants may have to be produced for every one w is of evolutionary value. As we rise in the evolutionary s from the viruses and protozoa to the social primates, there is
(1) a rise in the number of parts and envelopes of the
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organism and the complexity of their morphological forms and geometrical relations;
(2) a rise in the effectiveness of the control of their functions by the organism as a whole;
(3) a rise in the degree of independence of the organism from its environment, involving diversification and extension of range of the organism's activities;
(4) a rise in the effectiveness with which the individual organism carries out its purpose of survival and reproduction, including the power of moulding its environment."
The key-note of Needham's passage is "evolutionary progress". How in terms of materialism one can explain so definite a rise in living values is a standing puzzle. Material- ism would be expected to say that the rise, if any, is purely accidental and without significance. Matter, as conceived by materialism, can only show greater and greater complexity. But mere complexity is not progress. To be progress, increase in complexity must be coupled with increase in efficiency and there can be no efficiency without an aimed function to be performed; this means that matter which is not credited with any aimed function by the materialists cannot be efficient in any sense, leave aside its rising in efficiency. It is doubtful whether matter, qua matter, can be said even to keep increasing in complexity. No doubt, electrons get arranged into an atom, atoms build up a molecule, molecules combine into a colloid; but it is equally the case that a colloid breaks up into molecules, a molecule separates into atoms, an atom disintegrates into electrons. We cannot affirm that it is typical of matter to become more and more complex. As Kapp re- marks, "Material particles tend as much to fly apart as to come together. The only general way in which we can describe their behaviour is to say that they fly about." They get associated when the conditions are favourable for dissociation; and they get dissociated when the conditions are favourable for dissociation; they sometimes adopt intricate- looking configurations and sometimes simple-looking ones. "there is," to quote Kapp again, "exactly the same justification
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for propounding a law of simplicity as for propounding law of complexity." There is nothing in the nature of matter qua matter, to conduce to more and more complex formaltions. On naturalistic grounds the contention popular in many quarters that matter tends to fall into ever more complex wholes is unadulterated nonsense.
Even if we consider matter in the phase dubbed by von Bertalanffy "an open system in a steady state" and deduce mathematically that under certain conditions its entropy content can decrease unlike in a closed system and that complexity and order can increase in it, we cannot declare that it is in the nature of matter to fall more and more into such a system. Besides, no such system exhibits these progressive qualities except in an organism. Nor can the fact that matter of a certain degree of complexity grew organic at a particular time in the remote past be used by a materialist to prove that it reached this degree as a result of its nature to increase in complexity. When this degree was reached in one or more places, other places were as surely losing complexity, for, at any given time, it is, according to physicists, the nature of matter to move towards a maximum of entropy and realise further and further what they call disorganization - that is, conversion of energy into a form unutilisable for
work.
Does materialism alter its essence if it is entitled dialectical? Dialectical materialism holds that any state of matter sets up by its own nature an opposite state and that the two opposites - thesis and antithesis - join in a new whole o synthesis. It also avers that quantitative increase in change creates at a certain point a qualitative difference and that therefore new levels are organized. The majority of materialistic scientists - in other words, all non-Marxists who are inclined to be materialists in science - dispute the doctrines of dialectical materialism. But even if we grant truth to these doctrines, what we have is nothing more than new levels novelty of synthesis and a novelty of qualities. But there 1& intrinsic implication of progress in such production. Through
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perhaps an increase in complexity would be implied, such increase, as we have already noted, cannot constitute progress in any valid connotation unless it is coupled with increase in efficiency - that is to say, with an ever better performance of aimed functions such as no materialist, dialectical or organismic or mechanical, ascribes to matter. Further, an increase in efficiency leading on to a creature like man who embodies mind par excellence in relation to the rest of the organic world and who is regarded as at least the initial stage if not the actual realisation of evolutionary fulfillment - an increase in efficiency of this sort which makes mind the most important and valuable fact in the universe goes ill with the assertion central to all materialism that matter and not mind or even life is basic.
We may be told at this point: "Needham as well as von Bertalanffy deludes himself in getting an impression of evolutionary progress. Are they supported by other biological materialists?" We have made an admiring reference to Simpson, author of The Meaning of Evolution, and to Julian Huxley who wrote Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, as two of the ablest biologists with a materialistic penchant. Well, what do they have to tell us?
Huxley, summing up his attitude in an essay on evolution in his Man in the Modern World, says that most of the results of evolution are not progressive, much is mere change, much else, though advance, is one-sided advance, doomed to come eventually to a cul-de-sac, but a narrow thread of true progress does run through the whole web of change. And he goes on to argue that by progress he does not mean progress merely from a human standpoint. "Progress can be denned biologically in a perfectly objective way as denoting increased harmony of construction, increased capacity for knowledge and for feeling, and increased control over nature, increased independence of outer change." And he adds: "Man hap- pens to be at the top of the trend towards progress." In further elucidation of this statement we may quote the following words of his: "There has been only one progressive
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line in the whole of evolution - that which has led in 't stages through fish, amphibian, reptile and mammal to man for it appears established that all other lines have come t an; evolutionary dead-end well before the later part of n" tertiary period. Thus, in the broad view, evolution process consists of one line of unlimited progress among thousands of long-range trends towards specialisation each of these latter in turn beset with a frill, so to speak of thousands of short-range diversifications producing separate species."
On man, Huxley writes: "To assert that man is the highest product of evolution to date is a statement of simple biological fact. There are, however, some other points concerning man's position relative to evolutionary progress that are less obvious. First is the curious fact that the human species is now, in all probability, the sole repository of any possible future progress for life.... Second, with the evolution of man the character of progress becomes altered. With human consciousness, values and ideals appeared on earth for the first time. The criterion of further progress must include the degree by which those ideal values are satisfied."
What are we to make of all these statements? If, surveying a mass of proliferating and changing life over millennia, biology can demonstrate with objective and non-anthropomorphic criteria that there is such a thing as progress and that this progress has driven in the direction of man s appearance and that man is the highest product of evolution and is the sole trustee of further advance of life and that life s advance culminates in the quest for satisfaction on ideal values, are we not justified in considering as capitally sensible the hypothesis of a supra-material reality essentially purposive in character and with a drive towards ideal values acting through physico-chemical and "accidental" factors and winning somehow over their colossal obscurity obstruction and being able to do both these things because is itself those factors in one aspect of its existence, an aspect. self-willed but genuinely accepted afterwards in all its grim
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possibilities of challenging the original power whose para-paradoxical phase it is? Is not such a hypothesis more truly explanatory than the "blind forces" that Huxley, misguided by a falsely scientific scruple, posits as sufficient?
In passing, "we may remark on the scruple on Huxley's which he considers scientific. It is exemplified in his statement approvingly cited by Simpson that the vitalists' ascribing evolution to an élan vital no more explains the history of life than would ascribing its motion to an élan locomotif explain-i the operation of a steam engine. No doubt, the utmost effort must be made to discover the physico- chemical terms of a scientific problem, but the analogy Huxley draws is superlatively jejune. With all the physico- chemical terms available for a steam-engine, its operation cannot be explained without an élan locomotif in the form of the engine-maker's idea and aim as well as the engine- driver's control and direction. The history of life is concerned with organisms which are systems not ever inferior to a steam-engine but immeasurably superior and more versatile, systems including the best of a mechanism and at the same time far exceeding it in efficient unity no less than in multiplicity of function.
Let us now turn to Simpson. He is more cautious than Huxley at the outset, yet he cannot help ending on as positive a note. We may summarise his position by linking together several passages: "...General and objective criteria of progress are available and corresponding sorts of progress exist in the history of life. These fail to designate man's ancestry as a central line, and indeed fail to reveal any one such line.... There is no criterion of progress by which Progress can be considered a universal phenomenon of evolution.... All-over progress, and particularly progress toward any goal or fixed point, can no longer be considered as characteristic of evolution or even as inherent in life. Progress does exist in the history of life, but it is of many different sorts and each sort occurs separately in many different lines. One sort of progress in structure and function
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that stands out as particularly widespread and important is increasing awareness of the life situation of the individual organism and increasing variety and sureness of appropriate reactions to this. Among the many different lines that show progress in this respect, the line leading to man reaches much the highest level yet developed. By most other criteria of progress, also, man is at least among the higher animals and a balance of considerations fully warrant considering him definitely the highest of all.... It is a fact that man is an animal, but it is not a fact that he is nothing but an animal.... Man has certain basic diagnostic features which set him off most sharply from any other animal and which have involved other developments not only increasing this sharp distinction but also making it what amounts to a difference in kind and not only a relative difference of degree.... Even when viewed within the framework of the animal kingdom and judged by criteria of progress applicable to that kingdom as a whole and not peculiar to man, man is the highest animal.... It is still false to conclude that man is nothing but the highest animal, or the most progressive product of organic evolution. He is also a fundamentally new sort of animal and one in which, although organic evolution continues on its way, a fundamentally new sort of evolution has also appeared. The basis of this new sort of evolution is a new sort of heredity, the inheritance of learning. This sort of heredity appears modestly in other animals and even lower in the animal kingdom, but in man it has incomparably fuller development and it combines with man's other characteristics unique in degree with a result that cannot be considered unique only in degree but must also be considered unique kind.... Man's knowledge that he exists is, at the least, more conscious and particular than that of any other animal. alone knows that he has evolved and is still doing so. alone places himself in a conceptual framework of space time. Man possesses purpose and exercises deliberate c to a unique degree, even if, indeed, these capacities c said to be the same in kind in any other animals. It is most
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improbable that any other animal has more than an inchoate or largely instinctual sense of values, while in man this is normally conscious, orderly and controlled."
In face of these cumulatively wide and far-reaching admissions of evolutionary progress uniquely culminating in man in spite of a doubt whether man's ancestry can be said to be a central line and indeed whether there is any such line, Simpson, whose outlook here is in essentials practically the same as Huxley's, strikes one also as arriving at a huge reductio ad absurdum in his materialism. He keeps railing at vitalistic and finalistic theories as being obscurantist, evasive, remote from causalism, and apropos of man he writes: "Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned.... Purpose and plan are not characteristic of organic evolution and are not a key to any of its operations. But purpose and plan are characteristic of the new evolution, because man has purpose and he makes plans. Here purpose and plan do definitely enter into evolution, as a result and not as a cause of the processes seen in the long history of life. The purposes and plans are ours, not those of the universe, which displays convincing evidence of their absence." Simpson's intellect, acute though it is in many respects in the field of purely biological discussion, seems to work queerly in this general semi-philosophical argument. To say that purpose and plan are the cause of the evolutionary process is considered irrational, non-causalistic, ignorance-covering finalism or vitalism which is regarded as an unscientific theory because purpose and plan are held to be not "evident" in or "characteristic" of organic evolution before man's appearance. But to say that lack of purpose and plan is the cause of the appearance of man who purposes and plans and after whose appearance purpose and plan are found to be "evident" in and "characteristic" of further organic evolution is considered quite rational, causalistic and knowledge-revealing materialism which is regarded as a scientific theory. Surely this is logic standing on its head. If the most important
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product of evolution - the most important from even a standpoint of biological objectivity - and the one through whom the main, if not the sole, evolutionary progress in future will be made is distinguished by purposing and planning, is it not more logical, more in harmony with factual evidence, to take this product as the key to the secret of evolution and read in the long historical organic process a hidden purposive and planning power which at last emerges, through obstacles and envelopments, with some of its wonderful potencies to the surface? A finalism of this kind does not deny the existence of randomness and hence the randomness which is indeed there is accounted for. Simpson's theory does not at all account for the purpose and plan which are actual in man and which seem on a sweeping general vision of evolution to be a subtle potent current in what precedes him.
Simpson may be excused for having a grouse against certain forms of finalism as well as vitalism: no defence, however, can be made of his being so shortsighted as to miss the imperative need of some form or other of both vitalism and finalism. Whatever appears purposeless and planless can be conceived of as purpose and plan suppressed or in abeyance, especially if out of it undeniable purposing and planning evolve; but to posit as purposeless and planless the origin of a being who undeniably purposes and plans and, in addition, pursues ideals and values is not merely to want something out of nothing but everything out of nothing.
We have now come to a non-materialistic conclusion after weighing all the evidence supplied by materialists: it is actually by their own evidence that we have decided against them. And the broad decision has been reached according to an eminently logical procedure charted by Simpson himself in a moment when he is not ridden by what we have criticised in Huxley as a falsely scientific scruple which a priori would rule out as non-explanatory whatever is "° physico-chemically describable. Simpson says: "Although the metaphysical cannot be directly investigated by
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methods of science, its results may be . It is, indeed, one of the greatest values of our present that it can serve as a means of testing the fundamental philosophies of materialism, vitalism, and finalism. Vitalism and finalism involve elements postulated as beyond the reach of purely material scientific investigation. Yet the truth of these philosophies would involve material con e in the history of life. The investigation of these possible consequences is within the scope of scientific method, which therefore can provide evidence on which to base a dice among materialism, vitalism, and finalism, as wells among the variety of particular theories that have to elaborated within the framework of each of these philosophies. Conviction as to the essential truth of materials! need not, then, be the result of bias or of the limitations of the scientific method, but may be the result of careful evaluation of evidence. A scientific bias cheerfully confessed the belief that the results of such evaluation are likely to be nearer the truth than are the inclinations of personal preference or the traditions of a less knowledgeable and less critical past."
Quite so. But, while Simpson chooses with a keen mind several such phenomena of evolution as should provide particular crucial evidence of this short and sets forth a fairly impressive case for materialism as against certain kinds of vitalism and finalism, he fails to plumb the significance of life's horizontal exuberance and vertical inventiveness and of man's place in the evolutionary scheme and to formulate any argument likely to meet in antiqiion the vitalistic finalism which we have sponsored and which can assimilate to its own advantage Simpson's own case for materialism.
We may, then, regard as completely justified the verdict for a supra-material reality on the evidence of biological science. Since biology is, properly speaking, the study of life- Phenomena we have called this reality life-force, but in view of the mind-phenomena increasingly come into our purview with the rise of life in the evolutionary scale we should be more correct if we tat mind rather than life as
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basic. Some might urge that mind is just a development of life, but, inasmuch as man the mental being is acknowledged by biologists to be a unique evolute with whom the character of evolutionary progress becomes altered, mind must be distinguished from life. The distinctive traits of life are things like growth, metabolism, propagation, regulation, tissue- regeneration, adaptation, response to stimuli, insurgent idiosyncrasy and, central to them all, organic unity. In organic unity we have mind most vividly translated into life- terms, for here are both harmonising purpose and integrating individuality. Mind-terms themselves are recognisable in their own right when in an organism's behaviour these two ingredients of organic unity manifest as things like instinctive planning, "perceptual logic", reconditioned reflex, experimental adjustment of means to an end, individual leadership, concerted action. In whatever form they may be found, they are the mental strain in organic evolution, the spearhead, as it were, of that which ultimately emerges in a unique shape as technical and artistic creativeness, conceptual systematisation, conscience, social communion, intuition, sense of the Holy and, central to all of them, self- awareness with its possibilities of "soul"-experience. Thus there is more than one "depth-phenomenon" behind the "surface-phenomenon" of matter. A plane of mind no less than a plane of life must be declared to exist together with the material plane.
However, to render interaction possible, we should say that just as matter is an involved form of life so also life is an involved form of mind. That would explain the steps of the evolution - the advent of explicit vital processes from the material and of explicit mental processes from the vital, both advents helped, of course, by pressure from the planes where life and mind are each a separate uninvolved force and from where originally the precipitation of something of life and mind into matter-form took place and also the reverse push bringing about life's and mind's emergence was originally planted.
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One mistake must be avoided. To give mind the basic status and to make life its involved condition and, through life's involution in matter, matter too the same at a further remove is not subjectivism in the ordinary philosophical sense, for it does not reduce matter to the individual's sensation and perception and idea. Although it opens up the possibility of the individual consciousness's partaking in a consciousness which is cosmic and by which matter is not experienced as an extraneous foreign substance, it asserts merely the relation between the different grades of universal being.
Here we must halt if we are to remain within the biological sphere. A further step in one direction would carry us into psychology and the field of the extra-sensory if not of the mystical as well. A further step in the opposite direction would bear us into physics and the field of relativity theory and quantum theory. In an earlier series of scientific essays we have already tackled the problem of consciousness and the brain, explored the implications of extrasensory perception, touched on the individual and cosmic subliminal and stopped at the threshold of the mystical. To round off our scientific survey we should glance at modern physics and examine what it has to reveal in the question of the material and the supra-material. We have spoken of interaction between the former and the latter and designated the one as an involution of the other. Would the findings of modem physics elucidate our idea and show matter to be such as would not contradict, even though it may not directly prove, our conception of it as diminished life and mind? An affirmative answer would be eminently in order after demonstrating biologically, as we have already done, that, if matter is held to be basic, life and a fortiori mind cannot be conceived of as mere developments and intensifications of batter.
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