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It starts with mere criticism and with objections, which go no further than saying that “in the meantime” we are still far from having reached a physico-chemical solution of the riddle of life; it may ascend through all stages up to an absolute rejection of the theory as an idiosyncrasy of the time which impedes the progress of investigation, and as an uncritical prejudice of the schools.
And just as an infinity of functions have the same differential, these functions differing from each other by a constant, so perhaps the integration of the physico-chemical elements of properly vital action might determine that action only in part a part would be left to indetermination.
In the first place it is said and I take this point first, because the imputation is too frequently admitted by Physiologists themselves that Biology differs from the Physico-chemical and Mathematical sciences in being "inexact." Now, this phrase "inexact" must refer either to the methods or to the results of Physiological science.
He reaches the conclusion that all our inner subjective life is amenable to physico-chemical analysis, because many cases of simple animal instinct and will can be explained on this basis the basis of animal tropism. Certain animals creep or fly to the light, others to the dark, because they cannot help it. This is tropism.
It would be hard to find a worse example of confused thinking than that of the following passage: "The idea that the organism as a whole cannot be explained from a physico-chemical viewpoint rests most strongly on the existence of animal instincts and will. Many of the instinctive actions are 'purposeful, i.e. assisting to preserve the individual and the race.
The mechanistic theory of life the theory that all living things can be explained and fully accounted for on purely physico-chemical principles has many defenders in our day. The main aim of the foregoing chapters is to point out the inadequacy of this view. At the risk of wearying my reader I am going to collect under the above heading a few more considerations bearing on this point.
The percentage dissociation is determined by studying the electrical conductivity of the solutions and by other physico-chemical methods, and the following general statements summarize the results: !Salts!, as a class, are largely dissociated in aqueous solution. The organic acids, on the other hand, belong generally to the group of "weak acids."
It is a far cry from man to the dumb brutes, and from the brutes to the vegetable world, and from the vegetable to inert matter; but the germ and start of each is in the series below it. The living came out of the not-living. If life is of physico-chemical origin, it is so by transformations and translations that physics cannot explain.
This type of mind is bound to have trouble in accepting the physico-chemical theory of the nature and origin of life. It visualizes life, sees it as a distinct force or principle working in and through matter but not of it, super-physical in its origin and psychological in its nature. This is the view Henri Bergson exploits in his "Creative Evolution."
When we have resolved the biological aspect of phenomena into physico-chemical factors, we will leap, if necessary, over physics and chemistry themselves; we will go from masses to molecules, from molecules to atoms, from atoms to corpuscles: we must indeed at last come to something that can be treated as a kind of solar system, astronomically.
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