It has been suggested that some reference, of an apologetic nature, to the title of this book may be desirable, so I wish to point out that it can really be justified. Science, says Driesch, is the attempt to describe Givenness, and Philosophy is the attempt to understand it. It is our task, as investigators of nature, to describe what seems to us to happen there, and the knowledge that we so attain—that is, our perceptions, thinned out, so to speak, modified by our mental organisation, related to each other, classified and remembered—constitutes our Givenness. This is only a description of what seems to us to be nature. But few of us remain content with it, and the impulse to go beyond our mere descriptions is at times an irresistible one. Fettered by our habits of thought, and by the limitations of sensation, we seem to look out into the dark and to see only the shadows of things. Then we attempt to turn round in order that we might discover what it is that casts the shadows, and what it is in ourselves that gives shape to them. We seek for the Reality that we feel is behind the shadows. That is Philosophy.

The Physics of a generation earlier than our own thought that it had discovered Reality in its conception of an Universe consisting of atoms and molecules in ceaseless motion. What it described were only motions and transformations, but it understood these motions and transformations as matter and energy. Yet more subtle minds than the great physicists of the beginning of the nineteenth century had already seen that sensation might mislead us. There was something in us that continually changed—that was our consciousness, and it was all that we knew. If external things did exist they existed only because we thought them. But we ourselves exist, for we are not only a stream of consciousness that continually changes, but there is in us a personality, or identity, which has remained the same throughout all the vicissitudes of our consciousness. If the things that exist for us exist only because we think them, and if we also exist, then we must exist in the thought of an Absolute Mind that thinks us. Physical Science, studying only motions and transformations, understood that there was something that moved and transformed—this was matter and energy. Mental Science, studying only thought, understood that nature was only the thought of an Universal Mind. Either conclusion was equally valid Philosophy (or metaphysics), and neither could be proved or disproved by the methods of Science. The speculative game is drawn, said Huxley, let us get to practical work!

Both Physics and Biology did get to work, with the results that we know. But Physics advanced far beyond the acquirement of the results that stimulated Biology to formulate our present hypotheses of evolution and heredity. As its knowledge accumulated, it began to doubt whether matter and energy, atoms and molecules, mass and inertia—all those things which it thought at first were so real—were anything else after all than ways in which our mental organisation dealt with crude sensations. They might, as Bergson said later on, be the moulds into which we pour our perceptions. Physics set up a test of Reality, the law of the conservation of matter and energy. There are existences which may or may not persist. Visions and phantasms and dreams are existences while they last. They are true for the mind in which they occur. But they seem to arise out of nothing, and to disappear into nothing, and physical Science cannot investigate them. They are existences which are not conserved. On the other hand those images which we call moving matter and transforming energy can be investigated by the methods of physics. Molecules change, but something in them, the atoms, remain constant. Energy becomes transformed, and it may even seem to cease to exist, but if it disappears, then something is changed so that the lost energy can be traced in the nature of the change. Matter and energy are conserved and therefore they are the only Realities. But the test is obviously one that has an a priori basis, and we may doubt whether it is a test of Reality.

Thus Physics constructed a dynamical Universe, that is, one which consisted of atoms which attracted or repelled each other with forces which were functions of the distances between them. Even now this conception of a dynamical, Newtonian Universe is a useful one, though we recognise that it is only symbolism. But it was not a conception with which Physics could long remain content. How could atoms separated from each other by empty space act on each other, that is, how could a thing act where it was not? There must be something between the atoms. The Universe could not be a discontinuous one, and so Physics invented an Universe that was full. It was an immaterial, homogeneous, imponderable, continuous Universe. That which existed behind the appearances of atoms and molecules and energy was the ether of space. It must be admitted that the conception appears to the layman to involve only contradictions: heterogeneous, discontinuous, ponderable atoms are only singularities in a homogeneous, continuous, imponderable medium, or ether. Yet it is easy to see that this contradiction arises in our mind only because we had previously thought of the Universe in terms of matter and energy, and in spite of ourselves we attempt to think of the new Reality in terms of the old one. In its attempt to understand all its later results Physics had therefore to invent a new Philosophy—that of the ether of space.

It is only in our own times that Biology has become sceptical and has begun to doubt whether its earlier Philosophy is a sound one. That which it describes—the object-matter of its Science—is not that which Physics describes. There are two domains of Givenness, the organic and the inorganic. Biology, leaning on Physics, studied motions and transformations, just as Physics did, though the motions which it studied were more complex and the transformations more mysterious. But borrowing the methods of investigation of Physics it borrowed also its Philosophy, and so it placed behind its Givenness the Reality that Physics at first postulated and then abandoned. The organism was therefore a material system actuated by energy. The notion, it should be noted, is not a deduction from the results of Biology, but only from its methods.

Did Physiology, that is, the Physiology of the Schools, ever really investigate the organism? A muscle-nerve preparation, an excised kidney through which blood is perfused, an exposed salivary gland which is stimulated, even a frog deprived of its cerebral hemispheres—these things are not organisms. They are not permanent centres of action, autonomous physico-chemical constellations capable of independent existence, and capable of indefinite growth by dissociation. They are parts of the organism, which, having received the impulse of life, an impulse which soon becomes exhausted, exhibit for a time some of the phenomena of the organism. What Physiology did attain in such investigations was an analytical description of some of the activities of the organism. It did not describe life, but rather the physico-chemical reactions in which life is manifested. The description, it should be noted, is all-important for the human race in its effort to acquire mastery over its environment; and there is no other way in which it may be carried further but by the methods of physical Science. Givenness is one, though we arbitrarily divide it into the domains of the organic and the inorganic, and there can be only one way of describing it. That is the mechanistic method.

Nevertheless all this is only a description, and our Philosophy must be the attempt to understand our description. The mechanistic biologist, in the attempt to identify his Philosophy with that of a former generation of physicists, says that he is describing a physico-chemical aggregate—an assemblage of molecules of a high degree of complexity—actuated by energy, and undergoing transformations. But our scepticism as to the validity of this conclusion is aroused by reflecting on its origin. If it was borrowed from the Philosophy of a past Physics, and if the more penetrating analysis of the Physics of our own time has made a new Philosophy desirable, should not Biology also revise its understanding of its descriptions? For Biology has not stood still any more than Physics, and the Physiology of our own day has become different from that of the times when the mechanistic Philosophy of life took origin. The embryologists and the naturalists of our own generation have studied the whole organism in its normal functioning and behaviour, and have obtained results which cannot easily be understood as physico-chemical mechanism. Life is not the activities of the organism, but the integration of the activities of the organism, just as Reality for Physics is not the atoms and molecules of gross matter, but the integration of these in the ether of space.

This, then, is all that we mean by the philosophy of Biology—the attempt to understand the descriptions of the Science in the light of its later investigations. Philosophy, in the academic sense, we have not considered in relation to the subject-matter of our science, though there is much in the classic systems that is of absorbing interest, even to the working investigator of the nineteenth century. The biological education is not, however, such as to predispose one towards these studies. The reader will recognise that the point of view, and the methods of treatment, adopted in this book are those suggested by Driesch and Bergson, even if no references are given. He may, perhaps, appreciate this limitation; for, influenced by the modern scientific training, he may be inclined to regard Philosophy as Mark Twain regarded his Egyptian mummy: if he is to have a corpse it might as well be a real fresh one.

J. J.

Liverpool
November 1913