Organicism Biology

Royal Institute of Philosophy
Cambridge University Press
Organicism in Biology
Author(s): Joseph Needham
Source: Journal of Philosophical Studies, Vol. 3, No. 9 (Jan., 1928), pp. 29-40
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Institute of Philosophy
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ORGANICISM IN BIOLOGY
JOSEPH NEEDHAM, M.A.,

Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge
"
The word Organicism," although it may seem unfamiliar to the
younger generation of biologists, is not a new one, and has been
heard of already in that shadowy limbo where philosophical and
biologicalconceptions meet on common ground. The genius of its
original minting is not known, but it figured largely in the great
work of Yves Delage, the French zoologist, in which he attempted to
survey and criticize every important biological theory which had ever
been seriously produced. His VHerediti et les grands Problemes
de la Biologie appeared in 1903, and in it he classified all biological
theories, past, present, and future, under the four heads of
" " " "
Animism," Evolutionism," Micromerism," and Organicism,"
an arrangement which seems to us now more than a little illogical.
As Animism he classed the thoroughgoing vitalism of such men as
Blumenbach, Needham, and Bordeu, and by Evolutionism he meant
the pref ormation-theory, associated with the names of Swammerdam,
Haller, and Leuwenhoek. Neither of these classes numbered among
them any names from the twentieth century, and Delage disposed
of them in three pages each. Micromerism, however, took him no
less than 310 pages, for he defined it as the opinion that living
organisms were made up of particles, biological atoms, which by their
mutual relations accounted for life phenomena. Here occur the
names of Buffon, Herbert Spencer, His, Darwin, Weissmann, Nageli,
de Vries, and 0. Hertwig, together with many minor theorists who
have been long ago forgotten. Forgotten also are the names of
"
many of the theories, and probably it is just as well. Kineto-
" " " "
genesis," Katagenesis," Bathmism," and Microzymism sound
very strangely in our ears, though perhaps some day some historian
of biology will discover in one of them a claim to precursorship.
Lastly comes Organicism, and Delage uses the term to include the
opinions of Descartes, Bichat, von Baer, Claude Bernard, Roux, and
Driesch, certainly a miscellaneous collection and very doubtfully
at one.
That which was common to the organicists, said Delage, was that
"
they regarded life, the form of the body, the properties and
characters of its diverse parts, as resulting from the reciprocal play
or struggle of all its elements, cells, fibres, tissues, organs, which act
the one on the other, modify one the other, allot among themselves
29
JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES
each its place and part, and lead all together to the final result,
giving thus the appearance of a consensus, or a pre-established
harmony, where in reality there is nothing but the result of inde?
pendent phenomena." It will not here be necessary to examine
the grounds on which Delage classified his organicists together,
though it would indeed be fascinating to discuss the logic that made
Descartes and Driesch bedfellows. As Delage himself said, it was
"
Roux that was the veritable chief of modern organicism," and
this earlier use of the word stands in close relation to the founder of
" "
Entwickelungsmechanik." Roux, in making known to us the
struggle of parts in the organism, the morphogenetic action of
functional excitations, the autodifferentiation of iunctions, and
hence the structures of organs, their form and their development,
has introduced new factors of the utmost importance into the
question of evolution.'' But this original use of the word organicism,
in applying itself mainly to Roux, carried with it Roux's own atti?
tude to interim biological laws, an attitude which is fundamentally
mechanistic. In Roux's view, the function of experimental embry?
ology in particular and of biology in general was the interpretation
of living processes as special cases of physico-chemical laws operating
in an immensely complicated medium. But he considered that this
" "
reduction of biological processes to their simple components
was too diffieult a thing to be immediately attempted, and he advo?
"
cated the preliminary decomposition of the brute facts into complex
components," in other words, special biological laws valid for all
life and directly dependent upon the essential properties of living
"
matter. It is most important to note that in this kausale frage-
"
stellung Roux was concerned to regard special biological general?
izations as rest-houses on the way to biophysics, and not as ultimate
ends in themselves. Nor did he regard them as being in any way
more profound than those of physics; on the contrary, the conception
of a ladder of disciplines with biology near the top and mathematical
physics at the bottom was emphatically his notion of the classifica?
tion of the sciences.
This is as much as need be said concerning the earlier connotation
of the word organicism. Its second appearance took place in 1916,
when J. S. Haldane made use of the word in his Silliman Lectures
"
at Yale University: Organism and Environment as illustrated
by the Physiology of Breathing." The word organicism was indeed
admirably fitted to be the label for the opinions of that distinguished
physiologist, but in order to do so it had to suffer a complete change
of meaning, a change, moreover, which nobody noticed. According
to Haldane, of the two words " living organism " so commonly used,
it was the second one which contained infinite significance. To
" "
him, the organism as a whole was the great stamp and super-
30
scription of life; there was that about a living organism which

absolutely defied explanation of a mechanical kind. Once separated
into its component pieces, nothing of any value could be learnt
about it. But in its natural wholeness, it exhibited collections of
phenomena which were so unlike anything the physico-chemical
world could show, that entirely new conceptions were necessary if
physiology was to be worthy of its subject-matter. The intact
organism, for example, possessed the most incredibly delicate
powers of regulation of its conditions, and these it used, in a manner
which could only be described as profoundly purposive, for the
maintenance of normal states in its environment. These normal
states were common to all forms of life, although slight differences
between kinds of animals were to be observed, and disttirbing in?
fluences tending to move living organisms out of their accustomed
physico-chemical surroundings, both inside and outside themselves,
were countered by an insatiable force pulling them back again.
"
This nostalgia" Haldane identified with the natural healing
power of the body so familiar to physicians, and he regarded it as
"
fundamentally indescribable in physico-chemical language. The
"
structure of a living organism," said Haldane, has no real resem?
blance to that of a machine, since the parts of a machine can be
separated without alteration of their properties. All of these
properties are also independent of whether the machine is at motion
or at rest. In the living organism, on the other hand, no such
separation can be made, and the structure is only the appearance
given by what seems at first to be a constant flow of specific material,
beginning and ending in the environment. We have seen that the
apparent flow has a persistence and power of development of its
own, which we cannot account for by mere constancy in the physical
and chemical environment."
From all this it appears that Delage's organicism was a different
thing from Haldane's. In the quotation already given, Delage
referred to the parts of the living organism as each having a share
in the formation of the whole, and giving the appearance of a con-
sensus or pre-established harmony, where in reality there is nothing
but the result of independent phenomena. But in Haldane's view,
if one thing was certain about the parts of a living body, it was that
they were not independent, they went together in such a manner
that after separation they ceased entirely to be themselves. Delage's
organism, like Roux's, was the result of a blind play of constituent
cogs and levers ; Haldane's organism was a whole, composed of parts
so subtly interacting that once taken to pieces it was nothing at all.
In his books and addresses Haldane constantly argued against
both mechanistic and vitalistic biology, and although he very
"
rarely used the expression organicistic biology," that was what
3*
he wished to commend to notice. He objected to mechanism partly

because he did not distinguish it very carefully from scientific
naturalism and partly because it seemed to him quite inadequate
for the problems which it was required to answer in biology ; and
he objected to vitalism because it asserted the presence of gods,
demons (Maxwellian or otherwise), signalmen, locomotive drivers,
archaei, souls, entelechies, and all kinds of little beings hidden in
the stuff of life. His own view was always a little obscure, and
therefore innumerable biologists complained, and still complain, that
they could not understand whatever he meant. You will have
nothing to do, they said, with vital spirits in any form, and yet you
say there is something there which eludes physico-chemical exam?
ination. That something, Haldane would reply, is the organism, the
wholeness of a living animal, doing things that no atomic system,
no system uninformed by an organic plan, could ever do. Moreover,
this concept is a more profound one than those of physics and
"
chemistry, it touches reality more nearly on the raw. That a
meeting-place between biology and physical science may at some
"
time be found," said Haldane, there is no reason for doubting.
But we may confidently predict that if that meeting-place be
found, and one of the two sciences is swallowed up, that one will
not be biology." This remark made most biologists feel a little
embarrassed, as if someone had said something indiscreet, and they
failed to understand it. But as a matter of fact it was a prophecy
of the first importance.
If a short digression may at this point be permitted, it would be
well to indicate that this question of the primacy as between physi?
ology and physics is not so barren as it might at first sight appear.
It has an importance for the practice of science as well as in phil?
osophy. Very little study of the history of scientific thought is
required to show that the tacit background of a great experi-
mentalist's mental operations exercises a profound influence on
the line of progress which knowledge takes. The instance which
here specially concerns us is the difference of opinion between
Louis Pasteur and Justus von Liebig over the fermentation question.
The discovery of the yeast-cells by Cagniard de la Tour and others
had made it very diffieult to know whether the living cell played a
more important part than the cell-free liquid in fermentation, and
if so, what sort of part. Pasteur adopted a physiological view, and
insisted on looking on the metabolic activity of the yeast-cell as the
important factor; but Liebig made every effort to disregard it for
fear of a possible surrender to vitalism. To him, chemistry was
much more fundamental than physiology, and he felt that any
explanation which involved living organisms was a backward step.
The effects of this dichotomy of opinion on the history of biology
32
were very far-reaching, and even after the demonstration that the
yeast-cell was an essential element in fermentation there remained
two trends of thought, one considering the yeast-cell only as the
carrier of the essential enzyme, and the other thinking of it as a
physiological entity with a metabolism of its own. This example
is only introduced here in order to show that Haldane's prophecy
is not devoid of practical significance.
But a third appearance of the term organicism has now taken
place, and it is probably much the most important of the three.
I refer, of course, to A. N. Whitehead's organic theory of nature
expounded in his Science and the Modern World, and I suggest
that the importance of this in the philosophy of biology has not
so far been properly appreciated, though the lucid commentary of
C. Lloyd Morgan 1 has done a great deal towards this end. Lloyd
2 that he did not
Morgan had already said regard the concept of
the organism as one characteristic of living things, thus sharply
differentiating himself off from Haldane. He saw no reason why
"
the term organism should not be applied to all those natural
entities," as he called them, existing throughout the universe in
emergent degrees of complexity, but all having the characteristic
that if the parts were separated, the whole was not simply dissected
but completely annihilated. A. N. Whitehead, however, applies
the concept of the organism to all events and things in the world,
taking in thus in a wide sweep the whole domains of physics and
chemistry.
The event, as Whitehead says in his rather difficult language,
"
is the ultimate final unit of natural occurrence. An event has to
do with all that there is, and in particular with all other events.
This interfusion of events is effected by the aspects of those eternal
objects, such as colours, sounds, scents, and geometrical character?
istics, which are required for nature and are not emergent from
it. Such an eternal object will be an ingredient of one event under
the guise of or aspect of qualifying another event. There is a
reciprocity of aspects and there are patterns of aspects. Each
event corresponds to two such patterns, namely, the pattern of
aspects of other events which it grasps into its unity and the pattern
of its aspects which other events severally grasp into their unities.
A primary organism is identified as being the emergence of some
particular pattern as grasped in the unity of a real event. There
is thus an intrinsic and an extrinsic reality of an event, namely,
the event in its own prehension and the event as in the prehension
of other events. The concept of an organism includes, therefore,
1 C. Lloyd Morgan, " The Concept of the Organism as
Emergent and
Resultant," Proc. Aristot. Soc, 1927, p. 141.
? In Life, Mind, and Spirit, p. 66.
c 33
the concept of the interaction of organisms. The relationships of

events are constitutive of what the events are in themselves."
In the physico-chemical world, according to Whitehead, the concept
of the organism will turn out to be as a philosophy of science much
more satisfactory than that which underlay classical Newtonian
physics. It is as if a more inclusive
equation had been developed,
from which, as Lagrange might have done, one could obtain all
the results of Newtonian physics, with its Einsteinian modifications
as well.
Thus, on the organic theory of nature, all the universe is seen
to consist of wholes, or organisms, whose parts, as Lloyd Morgan
would say, go together in substantial unity, or in other words, are
only themselves so long as they remain in their natural places
within the whole to which they belong. For the constitutive
relationships or parts are not entities having an existence in their
own right, but only by virtue of their position and function in the
organism of which they form parts. This relatedness or going-
togetherness is the hallmark of an organism, and it may be noted
that it can interlace with other organisms, just as a living organism
and its environment is inextricably intertwined.1 The universe,
in this view, is a vast array of organisms, mounting up from the
simplest atomic wholes to the world-organism, that modern trans?
"
lation of anima mundi" itself. Biology, as Whitehead says, is
thus the study of the larger and more complicated organisms,
physics that of the smaller and simpler organisms.
At this point no one who has examined the history of biological
thought can fail to be impressed by the fact that here in a most
striking manner a wall of partition has gone down between, not the
organic and the inorganic, as might have been said ten years ago,
but between the living and the non-living. On the face of it, then,
the old-fashioned biological mechanist comes into his own, or at
any rate his attitude is much less open to objection than that of
the old-fashioned vitalist. The mechanist, after all, never asserted
as against common sense that there was no difference between a
stone dog and a real live dog; he only insisted that the processes
going on in the living dog were extremely complicated special cases
of the processes known to occur in the inorganic world.3 It was
always a point in his favour that nobody could teil at what moment,
either in phylogenesis, as for instance in protozoa or coelenterata,
or in ontogenesis, as in embryonic development, mind began to come
i Cf. F. B. Summer, ScientificMonthly, 1922,14,233, and A. Lotka, Physical

Biology, 1926, p. 374, on the overlapping of co-ordinate reference frames.
a This is the essence and kernel of that venerable controversy. Cf. the
basis of reference of the American symposium on it: Journ. Phil. Ps ch.
and Sci. Meth., 1918, 15, 458.
34
into play. Of the two alternatives of supposing that the cat and
the bacteriophage both had minds, or that neither had, it was more
satisfactory to assume the latter, since on the latter assumption
experiments could be made, while on the former a disturbing element
was introduced.
There have been many boundary commissions on the borderline
between life and non-life. They have sat interminably on the
question. Time after time they have said to the physico-chemical
biologists, Thus far and no farther, and always the force of experi?
mental facts has overthrown the artifieial distinction, so that the
commission has resumed its labours and invented another formula.
Thus living matter was supposed to differ from dead matter qualita-
tively because it moved in time as well as in space, because its actions
depended not only on its past history but also on its future history,
because it exhibited memory-phenomena, because it eluded the
second law of thermodynamics. No great difficulty was experienced
in overturning these signboards, but two were much more irreducible
and stubborn, namely, the finalistic flavour of life and the organistic
character of living animals. The former of these was disposed of in
biology by Lawrence Henderson and in philosophy by Bernard
Bosanquet, and now the latter has vanished in Whitehead's dialectic.
"
Lloyd Morgan has well expressed this. Some biologists," he says,
" in the modal terms to
interpret all organic action appropriate
and chemistry, others there are whose interpretation is
physics
couched in the modal terms appropriate to psychology. It is
difficult to see on what logical grounds biologists of the first school?
the so-called mechanists?can resent the downward extension of the
connotation of the word organism to natural entities, which as they
claim differ only in their lack of superadded complexity and no wise
essentially in type of action or behaviour. It is, however, easy to
see on what logical grounds biologists of the other school?the
so-called vitalists?will resent, and will no doubt reject, a concept
of the organism which implies that it can be adequately discussed
in terms of an organic theory of nature without introducing any
further concept such as entelechy or elan."
Has, then, Haldane's prophecy been fulfilled ? The answer is
that, if the organic theory survives the criticism which it will no
doubt receive, it has,and more abundantly than the prophet ex?
pected. Biology may in a sense be said to have swallowed up physics,
but physics has also swallowed up biology. In Whitehead's own
" a new aspect, which is neither
words, Science is taking on purely
physical nor purely biological."
Now if, from the point of view of a laboratory worker, actually
involved every day in the practice of the experimental method,
one inquires what effect these considerations are likely to have upon
35
research itself, the answer is none at all. This does not imply that
the subject we have been discussing has no importance; on the
contrary, it is of the highest significance that the effect should
be none at all. In the controversyx which took place sixteen
years ago between A. O. Lovejoy and H. S. Jennings in America
about the exact implications of Driesch's views if carried out in
practice, Jennings demonstrated that any radical experimental
determinism was incompatible with the neo-vitalism of the German
school, and it was this, unsuccessfully disputed by Lovejoy, which
had a preponderating influence on American biological thought.
What differentiates most completely the older from the newer
organicism is that the former interfered with experimental analysis
and the latter does not.
The fact that the scientific investigator works fifty per cent. of
his time by non-rational means is, it seems, quite insufficiently
recognized. There is without the least doubt an instinct for research,
and often the most successful investigators of nature are quite
unable to give an account of their reasons for doing such and such
an experiment or for placing side by side two apparently unrelated
facts. Again, one of the most salient traits in the character of the
successful scientific worker is the capacity for knowing that a
point is proved when it would not appear to be proved to an outside
intelligence functioning in a purely rational manner; thus the
investigator feels that some proposition is true, and proceeds at
once to the next set of experiments without waiting and wasting
time in the elaboration of the formal proof of the point which
heavier minds would need. Questionless such a scientific intuition
may and does sometimes lead investigators astray, but it is quite
certain that if they did not widely make use of it, they would not
get a quarter as far as they do. Experiments confirm each other,
and a false step is usually soon discovered. And not only by this
partial replacement of reason by intuition does the work of science
go on, but also to the born scientific worker?and emphatically they
cannot be made?the structure of the method of research is as it
were given, he cannot explain it to you, though he may be brought
to agree a postiori to a formal logical presentation of the way the
method works. He is no doctrinaire. A tendency is easily noticed
in him of preferring not to discuss the working of the method, out
of an unexpressed fear, perhaps, that if he knew exactly what he was
doing he might not be able to do it. Thus many artists detest the
discussion of the theory of art for fear that if they knew a great deal
about how painting is done, or how it is believed to be done, they
might not be able to paint. The type of Leonardo da Vinci is the
rarest of all, both in science and in art, and this is only one of many
1 See Science for 1911 and 1912, 33, 610,
927, 34, j$, 36, 434, 672,57, 104.
36
striking parallels between the two divisions of man's experience.

The scientific worker, then, operates to a high degree unconsciously,
as it were, like the builders of coral reefs. Francis Bacon, the
official herald and announcer of the scientific method, totally
misunderstood this quality in his charge. He imagined that the
scientific method was itself as mechanical a thing as the picture of
the universe which it produces by its efforts. You have but to read
"
cursorily in the New Atlantis about the Fellows or Brethren of
"
Solomon's House to observe the manner in which he thought the
scientific method would work in practice. Everything was arranged
" "
like a court of law, the three Merchants of Light were to travel
and bring back information of things and experiments abroad, the
" "
three Depredators were to collect experiments out of books
" "
('read the literature'), the three Pioneers were to try new
"
experiments themselves (' do laboratory work '), the three Com-
" "
pilers were to draw up the results of all this into titles and
" " "
tables (' do the calculations '), the three Lamps were to draw
conclusions from these works, and to suggest new and more profound
" "
experiments which the three Inoculators were to carry out and
" "
the three Interpreters of Nature were to interpret. This is not
fantastic because it happens to occur in a Utopia; it is only an
"
embroidered version of what is said in the Aphorisms concerning
" "
the interpretation of Nature in the Great Instauration." But
"
Time, which antiquates antiquities and hath an art to make a dust
of all things," has shown that science is quite a different matter;
out of impulses, which the investigator cannot understand and
does not bother to examine introspectively, new experiments are
born; facts which to all appearance have no connection at all
are set side by side, the investigator cannot tell why, and
illumination results ; the mazes of technique are threaded by a
sure instinct so that unisolatable substances are isolated and
insuperable difficulties are overcome. Bacon thought the scientific
mind was in a sense legal, but actually it has proved to be far more
truly artistic ; after all, his opportunities of studying the real thing
at work were meagre.
But so it has turned out, and surely the scientific view of the
world, with its three
hall-marks, mathematics, mechanics, and
materialism, gains somewrhat in significance when it is realized that
there is an element of intuition in it as well as of reason, and when
indeed it is not at all sure that the former element is not more
powerful than the latter. For the conviction is forced upon one
that the scientific view of the world, and the method of abstraction
by which it is arrived at, is an autonomous and authentic manner
of dealing with what is real in the world in which we live ; that it is
not an instrument of merely practical utility, nor on the other hand
37
a philosophy, much less the only true philosophy. It is not an art,

it is not a religion, it is not history, it is not a philosophy; it is
something different to all of these, it is a special department and
activity of the human spirit.
The organic theory of nature fits into this like a square peg into
a square hole, but the older use of the word organicism, the vitalistic
organicism of Haldane, does not. An organism, defined as we
have been defining it, is something which the scientific method cannot
deal with ; it is a hard, round, smooth nut, which experimental
analysis can neither crack nor lever open at any point. As soon as
a hole is made in it, it explodes like a Prince Rupert drop and vanishes
away. Hence the impotence of biologists confronted by Haldane's
organisms. Do not touch, he would say, unless you remember all
the time that the living animal is an organism; but the biologists
would murmur, We cannot do anything with it unless we forget
that it is an organism (in the strict sense). Thus there was a lock-out
"
in biology, except for a few blacklegs of natural historians," whose
work could only be called science by courtesy.
This perplexity was noted by A. D. Ritchie, who said in his book
"
on the scientific method; In any investigation it is a great
simplification and convenience to be able to treat the system dealt
with as atomic and not as organic, because the investigation of an
organic system is intolerably diffieult. . . . To say that the organism
must be treated as a whole is a very bad way of putting it, because
in those respects in which it has to be treated in this way it is
very diffieult to discover anything about it. Haldane's own re?
searches are a very valuable example of how much knowledge we
can obtainabout the whole organism by studying its parts in
isolation." Ritchie calls the scientific investigation of an organism
intolerably diffieult, but the truth is that it is impossible. It can
only be approached by trying to translate in some way the language
of organisms into the language of science. This has been attempted
to a certain extent by C. D. Murray * very recently, who has applied
Lagrange's principle of minimum work to the case of living animals.
It is as yet too early to say whether this touches the concept of the
organism as such at all, and probably it will not succeed any better
than R. S. Lillie's * brilliant attempt to resolve teleology into a special
case of the theorem of Le Chatelier, on the grounds that equilibrium
between species of animals would involve all the finite teleology of
the living world.
It is much more probable that the concept of the organism, like
? C. D. Murray, " The

Physiological Principle of Minimum Work," Proc,
Nat. Acad. Sci., Washington, 1926, 12, 207 and 299.
"
? R. S. Lillie, What is
Purposiveness from the Physiological Point of
View ? " Journ. Phil. Psych. and Sci. Meth., 1915,12, 589.
38
the concept of purposiveness, is quite foreign to the scientific mind.

The presence of organisms in the realm of biology, which everyone,
including Haldane himself, was trying to make an exact science,
was a real anomaly. Clearly you cannot meddle with the scientific
method, as so many reformers have tried to do ; it is the outward
and visible sign of one of the ways the mind works, and the fact that
it always issues out into mechanism may be deplored, but must be
accepted. Exactly which of the forms of mechanism which C. D.
Broad has charted out may still be a point on which dispute is
possible,1 but it must at least be that kind of mechanism called
metrical and macroscopic. It may indeed vary in stringency with
different sciences, and even with different branches of biology, but
there is an irreducible minimum, and that minimum is far above
the high-water mark of any of the non-mechanistic schools.
The concept of the organism, then, is best regarded as a philo?
sophical concept proper to the domain of the philosophy of science,
but in no sense a scientific hypothesis. This is the reason why
modern organicism, the organic theory of nature, seems so important
for modern biology. The mechanistic principles of practical research
would have continued in use whatever philosophers said, but now
there is no philosophical reason why they should not. The mechan?
istic schema formerly covered the non-living world not inadequately,
but now without hesitation is extended to cover the living world
as well; the organicistic schema formerly covered the living world,
and now covers also the world of the non-living. Both are co-
extensive with experience, but one is appropriate to science, the
other to philosophy; there is no further need for any fighting to
go on in biology between those to whom the concept of organism
is the more profound and those who feel the same about that of
mechanism, for all things are organisms and all things are atomic
systems also. You choose your standpoint, and you see what is
to be seen from that standpoint.
In this way biology is at last freed from an incubus which made
every advance in research diffieult and disheartening. It was no
fun administering the scientific method in a region where the oracles
said it was inapplicable, even though you knew within yourself that
the oracles were wrong. What the organic theory of nature has done
is to bring it about that the scientific worker has liberty to deal
with everything as if it were fundamentally an atomic system,
while the philosopher can at the same time deal with everything
as if it were fundamentally an organic system. That their several
accounts of the world will differ is obvious, but by now we ought
to be accustomed to that, for immanent teleology and universal
1 C. D. Broad, " Mechanical and its Alternatives," Proc.
Explanation
Aristot. Soc., 1919, ig, 86.
39
mechanism cannot be mixed either. Neo-mechanism would there?

fore seem to be the theory of biology best adapted for the future,
for it only advocated mechanism as essential methodologically, and
did not claim that it gave a truer account of the world than the
organicism of the philosopher or the other interpretations, perhaps
impossible to formulate, of the religious man and the poet or the
artist.
"
Weare onely that amphibious piece between a corporal and
spiritual essence, that middle form that links those two together,"
"
says Sir Thomas Browne ; and in another place, Thus is Man that
Great and True Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live, not
onely like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and
"
distinguished worlds." Obliquely and upon a sort of conse?
quence," this is still true. It is our property to live in several worlds
at once, and of these we know at least three : one, where everything
can be analysed and abstracted into the form of equations, and
where Man is a Machine; another where entities have an individuality
which evaporates when they are dissected, and Man is an Organism;
" "
and a third where the notion of the General Concourse can still
be taken seriously, and Man is a child of God and an Inheritor of
the City of Heaven.
40

Organicism Biology

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Organicism Biology

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Royal Institute of Philosophy

Cambridge University Press

JOSEPH NEEDHAM, M.A.,

scription of life; there was that about a living organism which

he wished to commend to notice. He objected to mechanism partly

the concept of the interaction of organisms. The relationships of

i Cf. F. B. Summer, ScientificMonthly, 1922,14,233, and A. Lotka, Physical

striking parallels between the two divisions of man's experience.

a philosophy, much less the only true philosophy. It is not an art,

? C. D. Murray, " The

the concept of purposiveness, is quite foreign to the scientific mind.

mechanism cannot be mixed either. Neo-mechanism would there?

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