The Science and Philosophy of the Organism

" \Ve have no doubt as to the importance of this great contribution to the thought of the day. It really defines the issues, it sets forth with great power the arguments and principles which men of science and thinkers will have to regard, and theologians will do well to study the argument of this great work."— Aberdeen Free Press. THE second — and final — volume of this work consists of two portions. I first bring to a conclusion the discussion on which I embarked in Volume I., regarding the subject from the point of view of " Science," and then in the longer and more important portion I proceed to the " Philosophy " of the Organism.

The third part of the scientific section, with which this volume opens, is, so to say, an enlarged and improved second edition of my work, Die " Seele " als elementarer Naturfaktor (1903). In the course of the argument it will become apparent why the word Seele was put in inverted commas in the German title. Of the philosophical section only Part I. B 1 and 2 (pp. 162-188) contains matter that I have already published elsewhere — in Part I. of my Naturbegriffe und Natururteile (1904) — and even this part is here presented to the reader in a form very different from what it was. All the rest is new and hitherto unpublished.

vi SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM (pp. 189-226), and the whole of Part II. (pp. 266-339) of the philosophical section as the most important final results of my analysis, and therefore especially invite criticism of them. The last named part is, so to speak, the keystone of the whole building, and is written from an unusual point of view. I possess German manuscripts of the theoretical contents of this part dated as early as 1895 and 1897; but I always delayed publishing as the subject is extremely subtle.

The philosophical terminology employed in this work is that in general use. Nobody can feel more strongly than myself how greatly we need a new and immediate de nomination of philosophical concepts — a " characteristica universalis" in the sense of Leibniz. But this work was not the right place to introduce it, and there was nothing to adopt from others, for modern " symbolic logic " so far relates only to formalities. I must therefore ask the reader to understand by the terms u substance," "causality," " objective," etc. etc., nothing but what he is instructed by my definitions, and not to confuse what I have said with what I might have said but did not. I ask the reader to understand my words as they are written, and to conceive the problems only as they are stated, and not as the

philosophy of the Organism and not a general philosophy. For that reason problems of general philosophy — and even of the general philosophy of Nature — are only shortly alluded to. The general standpoint of this work is subjectiveidealistic ; but idealism is here nothing more than a method, and I no longer regard subjective idealism as final ; there does exist the possibility of metaphysics, i.e. of at least a certain knowledge about absolute reality.

Once more I thank my friends in Aberdeen for their great kindness. Once more I am indebted to my anonymous English friend at Heidelberg for his very reliable linguistic assistance, and to my publishers for their The Single Motor Acts. The "Movement at Random " . 20 The Modifiability of Single Motor Acts . . 21 The Origin of the Acts of Volition The Different Types of Historical Bases "Association" . No Supra-personal Factor known in History Proper . 118 Morality as a Supra-personal Factor . . .119

The Order of Entelechies. Eutelechy and Machine-Work . 150 Conclusions and New Problems . . . .151 The Relation of Entelechy to the Intensities of Energies 178 The Action of Entelechy in "Suspending" Possible Becoming . 179 The Role of Entelechy in the Continuity of Life . 181 Entelechy and Chemism .... 181 Mere Movement and the Causation of Movement . 215 The Forms of Mechanical Causation . . . 216 Entelechy in its Relation to the two Forms of Mechanical Energy . . . . .219

The Suspending and the Transporting Action of En telechy Discussed Together .... 223 The Problem of "Entelechy and Causality " only partly Solved 235 No Chemical Substance Possible as the Basis of Entelechy . 250 No Constellation of Chemical Substances Possible as the The Concept of Divisibility not Applicable to Entelechy . 257 The Concept of Localisation or Seat not Applicable to Entelechy . . . . . . .258 An Irreducible Kind of "Experience" the Foundation of Categories ....... 300

A Few Remarks on Categories and Ordinary Experience . 301 The Problem of the System of Categories . . . 302 Introspective Psychology and the Categories of Substance and Causality ...... 306 An Analogy to a Mere Functional Conception of Causality . 314 No " Causa Finalis ". ..... 315 The Concept of Contingency ..... 352 The Concept of a Limited Teleology . . . 353 Morality as a Standard of Measurement of Universal Teleology 355 Morality as a Category . . . . .356

OUR study of morphogenesis has led us to a very important result. We have become convinced of the autonomy of life, as far as the origin of the individual living form is concerned. The short surveys that we devoted to the physiology of metabolism and to biological problems of the systematic and historical kind have not proved so successful. Physiology afforded us but few indicia of a future vitalism, and in the large fields of systematics and history we found that there was very little to be learnt at all.

We now begin the second half of our lectures, and shall first conclude the factual or analytical or purely scientific section : the analysis of the physiology of organic movement has still to be attempted. The study of animal movement will be as instructive as the study of morphogenesis has been ; it will bring us into close contact with philosophical questions again. And when we have finished it we shall have completed our purely scientific work, and may then enter the sacred halls of pure philosophy.

The physiology of organic movement may raise the following questions, and, indeed, every text-book of physiology shows us that it actually has raised all of them. All movements, in some way, are reactions to external stimuli, i.e. are changes of the organic body in question with regard to its external surroundings. In other words, there is a line of processes, the first of which leads from without to within, whilst the last one leads from within to without ; and besides these there are intermediate processes. We now may ask : What happens in the organism when it receives the external stimuli, what is the final effect of these stimuli, and what is there between the stimulus and the final effect ?

The physiology of the so-called sense organs would give us the answer to our first question ; it would teach us to what sorts of stimuli the organisms are responsive and by what means of their organisation and function they are so. The physiology of locomotory organs takes account of the question about the final acts in the process of movement : the contraction of the muscle is studied, but so is also the ciliary movement in infusoria, or the strange process of secretion and absorption of gases by which the movements of Siphonophora or of Radiolaria are carried out.1 And all intermediate processes concerned in organic movements would come under the physiology of the nerves and nervecentres. Not very much is actually known about this subject. Scarcely anything has been ascertained with regard to the so-called " centres " ; and as to the nerves themselves we know little except that nervous conduction

1 Rhumbler shares the merit of having studied very extensively the means of movement in the lowest Protista. Even if he is wrong in many points of his interpretation (Jennings, Heidenhain) he has done good work in clearing the problems. But I beg to lay stress upon the fact that he only has studied means of movement — nothing more. takes time, that it is accompanied by electric changes, and that it is probably of a chemical nature. Now we should hardly gain very much for our philo sophical purposes, if in our analysis of movement we were to follow the lines of ordinary physiology, which we have shortly sketched here. Moreover, there is wanting some thing very important in our sketch, and when looking back to it we may be reminded of the words of Goethe : " Dann hat er die Teile in seiner Hand, fehlt leider nur das geistige Band." Ordinary physiology indeed does not offer us much more than " die Teile." But is there^ anything besides them ; is a specific motor act of an organism as such any thing in itself, is it not merely a sum or aggregate ? It seems to me that this is the central problem of motor physiology ; in other words, it seems to me that the question about the " wholeness " of the act of moving must come up at the beginning of the analysis. It certainly is impossible to neglect this question from the very beginning.

We therefore shall not follow the lines of ordinary physiology in our analytical studies, but shall turn the questions into a somewhat different shape. And, indeed, we know already from our previous researches how we may turn them in order to be successful : let the concept of " regulation " again be made the centre of our discussion, though in a slightly different and more complicated sense than when we were speaking of the physiology of morpho genesis and metabolism. There is indeed no properly " normal " state of organisation or function that could be said to be restored or regulated by organic movements. But in spite of that, there is something in these movements that bears the character of a correspondence to a change or

variation of the medium or the organism, just as in the case of regulation proper. An actual instance will give you perhaps a better idea of what I am thinking of, than mere abstraction can do. Take a dog and ask what characters resembling regulations, if not regulations themselves, may occur in his movements. The dog is running towards a certain place along the direct line that leads to it, a carriage is crossing this line just when the dog has to pass : the dog will run a little more quickly and will make a curve in order to avoid the carriage. Another dog has undergone an operation involving the loss of a part of one hemisphere of the brain : at first his move ments are very defective, but after a certain time, as the experiments of Goltz and others have shown, they become much less so than they were immediately after the operation. And a third dog is injured in one of his legs so that he is forced to run on three legs only : yet he manages to reach the place he wants to get to, by using his three legs in a manner somewhat different from the normal.

Here we have instances of all possible kinds of regulation, or, if you prefer to say so, of the correspondence between the sum of conditions and the sum of single effects con cerned in movement, which may occur in the field of motor physiology, no matter by what means or organs movement is carried out, be it by cilia, muscles, or threads of protoplasm. In the first instance the dog's goal was reached, in spite of a change in the outer conditions, by means of a change in certain single acts of movement : the dog ran round the carriage instead of following the straight line. In the second instance we do not know very much about the change of function that follows the change effected in the

dog's brain, but we may assume hypothetically, that other lines of nerves have been used for carrying out what there was to be done. In the third instance the change from without affected the organs which perform the movement itself, and this change was followed by a change in the use of these organs : for it is clear that the work done in walking by every single leg when there are four legs at the disposal of the organism does not remain the same when there are only three.

Keviewing our three instances, we may say that in the first case there was a variation in the totality of the ) external stimuli, followed by a corresponding variation in the effect, whilst such a corresponding variation followed a ^ change of the intermediate organs in the second case, and a change in the general condition of the proper effectuating organs in the third. We observe, then, a co-ordination of our three instances to the three fundamental branches of ordinary motor physiology already mentioned. It is not this co-ordination, however, but the existence of something like regulation in organic movement that interests us chiefly, and here we have the starting-point of our future researches.

All changes, whether in the external conditions, or in the intermediate organs, or in the effectuating organs, may be described as changes of motor stimulation in general, and we may therefore say that the relation between motor stimuli ami movement as such is in fact our general problem. Are there sums or aggregates on both sides or not ? If not, what is there ? These are the questions we have to answer. Let us now review the great variety of actual organic movements, with the object of discovering the kinds of relation between cause and effect in every class.

When I first tried, six years ago,1 to classify organic movements according to their degree of complication, it seemed inevitable that the classification must start from two types, which in different respects are the most simple ones : the so-called simple reflex, and the simple free directive motion called " taxis. " Modern investigations have proved that these two groups of movements, though the most simple in concept, are far from being the most fundamental in fact, and therefore a classification of organic movements at the present day will have to follow other lines of analysis. But in spite of that, for historical interest, a short survey of the theory of the simple reflex and of the simple directive movement may introduce the present chapter.

The simple reflex occurs in plants, in the Mimosa for instance, as well as in animals, and in the latter both when they possess a well localised brain and nervous system and when they do not. Coughing and sneezing are among the most universally known phenomena of this class. A stimulus applied to a specified point of the body is followed here by a specified movement of another specified part. And the same holds for some, though not very many, movements of Invertebrates.

It is the invariability, the absolute fixation of the relation between a simple cause and a simple motor effect or reaction, with regard to quality as well as to localisation, that characterises this type of the simple reflex ; 1 indeed, a simple reflex occurs with the precision of machinery. Nothing in fact speaks against the real existence of such machinery : we therefore may assume hypothetically that true simple reflexes are machine-like in every respect, and with this assumption we may now leave this type of organic movement, which affords us no theoretical problems of a complicated kind.

In the simple free directive movement or " taxis " it is the typical relation between the direction of the stimulus and the direction of the effect, with regard to the main axis or the plane of symmetry of the organism, which separates this type of motion from others. The significance of this will best be illustrated by certain phenomena which do not properly belong to the class of free movements we are dealing with here, but which more correctly belong to the physiology of growth : the so-called " tropisms"

Let us first devote a few words to the chief characteristics of these " tropisms." We did not discuss them whilst 1 Of course the general type of a simple reflex is not changed, if the locality of the cause and of the effect is the same. analysing morphogenesis and growth in particular, since their most prominent feature is not growth but typical motion. All of you know that the stem of a tree turns away from the ground, whilst the root enters it. We speak of negative and of positive geotropism in this case, for it has been proved that it is gravity which determines the direction of stem and of root here, in a manner that has been very much elucidated by modern authors.1 And in the same style we call it positive and negative heliotropism, if a stem of a plant turns toward the sun or any other source of light, and if a root turns away from such sources. Thermo tropism, rheotropism, and chemotropism are similar pheno mena ; their names show most decidedly in what they consist. There are a few similar phenomena in the so-called stolons of hydroids. As we have said, it is only on growing parts of fixed organisms that tropisms of all sorts are to be observed. A marked correspondence of the directions of the cause and of its immediate effect is exhibited in all of them.

Let us first state in a few words in what cases we may speak of a real " direction " peculiar to an agent of the medium. That a specific direction is given in the effect of gravity and the rays of light going out from a radiant body is clear without much explanation ; but there may be direction in natural agents even when they cannot properly 1 I refer to the work done by Noll, Nemec, Haberlandt, and many others during the last ten years. Of more than usual importance seems to be the discovery of Fitting (Jahrb. iviss. Bot. 44, 1907) that phototropic stimula tion may be transferred along broken (zigzag) lines, and that this stimula tion itself probably consists in a real induction of polarity in each cell established from without. There is no machine-like apparatus simply set going.

be spoken of as rays. Take the distribution of heat, not by radiation but by conduction, take the diffusion of chemical substances in solutions, and, last not least, take the electric current; in all these cases we may speak of the existence of " potentials," in the t broadest meaning of the word, and similarly we may speak of the existence of " lines of force." These lines of force, existing in all those processes, not only in galvanism but in diffusion and also in thermic conduc tion, allow us to speak of directed agents in every case where these lines exist, and in this way the realm of directed agents of the medium becomes very large. In fact, the directed movements we shall speak about, have been found to exist in correspondence with almost all of the directed agents of the medium in this broadest sense.

A " tropism," then, is a directed movement of a growing part of a plant or hydroid determined by the direction of a directed agent. The theory of tropisms l would be a very simple thing if there were nothing but typical cases say of geotropism or of heliotropism, e.g. such cases as the bending of a branch to any source of light, and the invariable bending of roots towards the ground. But there are two classes of complications, each of them consisting of two parts.

There are many cases where the " sense " of a tropism, that is to say, its being positive or negative, is changed by the intensity say of the light or of the chemical stimulus. An organ that is positive under ordinary conditions begins to bend away from the source of stimu- 1 In Pfeffer's Pflanzenphysiologie (vol. vii. p. 546) an excellent account of the theory of tropisms will be found. lation if the stimulus reaches a certain intensity, and conversely. This is a rather simple complication, but an additional phenomenon appears if the increased intensity of the stimulus has lasted for some time. Then the organism becomes adapted, or rather acclimatised, to this intensity, and resumes the positive irritability it had before.

Let us remember on this occasion what was said on irritability and its restoration after irritation in the first part of this work : all tropistic irritability follows the socalled law of Weber, that is to say, an increase of the intensity of the stimulus always acts only in proportion to the intensity already present. This law resembles the socalled " action of masses " in chemistry, and tends to prove that something chemical is connected with tropisms. Also the reversion of tropisms might be explained in the same simple manner. But the change of the point of rever sion is another thing — a real " acclimatisation," unknown to us in its details, a real " secondary regulation," which, though not proving vitalism in itself, is in any case very remarkable.