Cell And Psyche The Biology Of Purpose

121 717

CELL AND PSYCHE
THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE

By
EDMUND W. SINNOTT

HARPER TORCHBOOKS / The Science Library
HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK

CELL AND PSYCHE

Copyright 1950 by The University of North Carolina Press
Printed in the United States of America

This book was first published in 1950 by The
University of North Carolina Press, and is re-
printed by arrangement.

First HARPER TORCHBOOK edition published 1961

PREFACE TO
THE TORCHBOOK EDITION

SINCE the publication of this little book in 1950, as the McNair
Lectures at the University of North Carolina, the author has
written two others, as well as a number of papers, on the same gen-
eral theme. Though these elaborate the argument a little further,
the essence of it is in Cell and Psyche. This is admittedly a specula-
tion, but one based solidly on biological fact. It has been regarded
as rather visionary and metaphysical by some people, but others
have been attracted to it by the suggestion it offers for a better
understanding of the ancient problem of how mind and body are
related to each other. This problem is of such paramount impor-
tance, not only for a knowledge of what man really is but for the
construction of a satisfying life philosophy, that any light thrown
on it should be welcome.

The suggestion that man's physical life grows out of the basic
goal-seeking and purposiveness found in all organic behavior and
that this, in turn, is an aspect of the more general self -regulating
and normative character evident in the development and activities
of living organisms, is at least worth serious consideration. If we
are to avoid a dualistic idea of man's nature and to construct a
true monism that does not require the sacrifice of the significance
of either mind or body, some such conception as this seems a rea-
sonable means of doing so. It is to be hoped that the wider distri-
bution now made possible for the present book may result in a more
general consideration of this particular relationship between biol-
ogy and philosophy*

E.W.S.

New Haven, Connecticut
April, 1961

CONTENTS

Introduction . i

I. Organization, the Distinctive Character

of All Life 15

II. Biological Organization and Psychological

Activity 43

IIL Some Implications for Philosophy 75

Suggested Readings . 112
Index . 117

INTRODUCTION

IN THE CLAMOR and confusion of our times one fact
grows ever clearer beliefs are important. One of the
major problems with which men now are faced per-
haps, indeed, the most important one is the wide dis-
agreement which still exists in their fundamental philos-
ophies. What course a man will follow, or a nation, is
set in no small measure by his basic creed, by what he
really thinks about the true nature of a human being
his personality, his freedom, his destiny, his relations to
others and to the rest of the universe; by the judgments
lie makes as to what qualities and courses of action are
admirable and should command his allegiance. These
are not academic questions merely. They arc ancient mys-
teries which long have troubled human hearts and seem
today almost as far as ever from solution. The answer a
ny*n gives to them is the most significant thing that one
can know about him. We may be tempted to under-
estimate the importance of these inner directives and
turn instead to outer influences, to economic and social
factors, as more decisive for our actions. But when we
look at what the philosophy of Marx has done to set one-
half the world against the other, at the basic divergence
between the thinking of East and West, and at so many
other differences in political and religious beliefs which

2 CELL AND PSYCHE

now divide mankind, we can hardly doubt the profound
practical import of men's philosophies. It is still true
today that "as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. 5 * In
the minds of men are the most fateful battles fought.
Against those ideologies we condemn, force in the end
will fail. If our opponents cannot be convinced, or their
ideas reconciled to ours, true peace will never come. And
so today men everywhere are trying to formulate a satis-
fying body of convictions, a sound philosophy of life, in
the hope that for a generation drifting on the ocean of
uncertainty some anchor may take hold upon the bottom
of eternal truth.

This is no new quest Since the beginning of history
men have pondered the deep questions of life and death,
of beauty and truth, of good and evil. What brings so
much confusion to their thinking now is the vast increase
of scientific knowledge which has made nature much
more difficult to understand and pulled down so many
ancient pillars of belief. The answers confidently given
a century ago and accepted then by almost everyone are
seriously challenged today. The universe is a vastly big-
ger place than our grandfathers thought it was. The
earth is far older than the 6,000 years allotted it by
Bishop Ussher. Milton's account of the creation of liv-
ing things in the seventh book of Paradise Lost is still
fine poetry but quite inadequate as a scientific description
of biological events. Man himself has a much longer
and more complicated history than that with which a
strict interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis would

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 3

provide him. Even matter, the physicists tell us, which
to the beginning of our own century retained its com-
forting solidity, should now be looked upon as largely
empty space. The atom itself is no longer a little mate-
rial pellet but has almost vanished into a series of electric
charges, waves, and probabilities, no longer understand-
able except by mathematics. The universe is exploding.
Space is curved. Light waves can be bent. Form and mass
depend on speed of motion. The physical world of the
nineteenth century with its reassuring certainties is gone
forever, and we have not yet learned how to find our
way about in the new one which has come to take its
place*

It is not surprising, therefore, that men of science have
become involved in an attempt to interpret their findings
in philosophical terms and to bring order into our knowl-
edge of the world. Eddington, Jeans, Schrodinger, Du
Noiiy, Shenington, Needham, J. S. Haldane, Hender-
son, Julian Huxley, and many others are familiar names
in this field today, as were those of T. H. Huxley,
Haeckel, Driesch, and Jaques Loeb a half century ago.
The conclusions of these earnest philosophic laymen are
often open to criticism at the hands of those more skillful
in the craft, and doubtless they have written much bad
philosophy. As Professor Joad puts it, "When the scien-
tist leaves his laboratory and speculates about the universe
as a whole, the resultant conclusions are apt to tell us
more about the scientist than about the universe." 1 But

X <X E. M. Joad, Philosophical Aspects of Modern Science, p. 339.

4 CELL AND PSYCHE

the wisest philosophers have failed to interpret the uni-
verse completely, and surely no aid in the accomplish-
ment of so great a task should be despised. The fresh
vision which the scientist can bring to these problems
is stimulating, and the contribution which he makes to
the philosophies of men may in the end prove more sig-
nificant than all his triumphs in technology. It is in this
belief that I shall here attempt to find some help toward
a solution of a few of the great problems with which life
confronts us by drawing upon the resources of biology,
the science of life itself.

Whatever I shall say can hardly have much novelty,
for biologists have long recognized the importance of
their science for philosophy and have discussed these
matters often and from many points of view. It is chiefly
during the past hundred years, however, when biology
has really come of age, that they have left the laboratory
and the field from time to time to engage in the thrust
and parry of philosophic argument.

Darwin's theory of Natural Selection and the subse-
quent wide acceptance of the fact of organic evolution
wrought a complete revolution in our understanding of
the origin of living things and of man himself and thus
in our whole attitude toward nature. Not only did a
literal interpretation of the traditional story of creation
become impossible for anyone who understood biology
and geology, but the new ideas challenged tradition on
even more fundamental grounds than that of Biblical in-
fallibility. Though Darwin himself showed little interest

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 5

in the implications of his theory, some of the early pro-
tagonists of his ideas drew from them strong support for
a philosophy of materialism and thus struck at the very
basis of religion. Ernst Haeckel, Darwin's first great sup-
porter on the continent, battled with enthusiastic vigor
against the ancient ideas of immortality, free will, and
the existence of a God. Life for him was simply a com-
plex chemical phenomenon associated with the com-
pounds of carbon and had originated by evolution from
inorganic nature. Mind was merely the result of chem-
ical changes in living stuff, the soul a fiction, and man
himself no more than part of a rigidly determined,
planless universe. All nature was one, and matter its
sole foundation* This extreme and uncompromising
materialism found less favor in England and America.
Darwin's biological theories led T. H. Huxley into
wide discussions of philosophy and religion in which he
adopted an essentially agnostic attitude, supporting the
concept of universal causation and the supremacy of the
scientific approach to truth. He broke sharply with
orthodox Christianity, but refused to call himself a
materialist.

But something more than evolutionary speculation was
needed. The question of what sort of system a living
thing is could readily be approached by experiment, and
in the latter years of the nineteenth century the science
of experimental embryology opened up a new and excit-
ing chapter in biology and biological philosophy. The
fertilized eggs and early developmental stages of many

6 CELL AND PSYCHE

animals, notably some of die echinoderms and amphibia,
can be studied under controlled conditions and manipu-
lated in various ways. The results of work on such mate-
rial were in many cases most surprising. When, for
example, one of the first two cells of a tiny salamander
embryo is destroyed, the remaining one grows into a
whole individual, not a half, as one might expect. Two
fertilized eggs induced to fuse by artificial means were
found to produce one animal instead of two. A mass of
evidence of this sort made it very difficult to interpret
development as due to the progressive parcelling out of
"determiners" from an egg to the cells which originate
from it, as Weismann and others had suggested. It soon
became evident that every cell of many embryos, at least
in the early stages, is able, if isolated, to produce a whole
animal. The implications of this remarkable fact were
not overlooked, and Driesch was quick to point out the
difficulties involved in imagining a machine capable of
being cut up into an indefinite number of pieces each of
which could restore the whole machine again. For this
and other reasons he concluded that a mechanistic ex-

t~}*~j.y A*-

planation of development was impossible, and postulated
the operation here of an entelechy, an extra-physical agent
which in some unknown manner guides the course of
development. Such vitalism has found little acceptance
among biologists, although there are a few thinkers to-
day who call themselves neo-vitalists. Man's mind, which
has knowledge of all nature as its goal, will not readily
accept defeat by admitting that there is something here

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 7

which must lie beyond its power to understand. The
grave problems which such studies in experimental em-
bryology raise, however, are still for from solution.

Meanwhile the geneticists had not been idle. Mendel's
laws were rediscovered, and by a brilliant series of induc-
tions the physical basis of inheritance was shown to con-
sist of a series of genes arranged in a constant pattern
in the chromosomes of the nucleus. Since all cells of the
body have the same number of chromosomes, they are
very probably identical in hereditary constitution, and the
question of how these similar cells cooperate to produce
a complete individual with its specific form and its
patterned differences is hard to understand. Develop-
mental genetics, which emphasizes the mechanics of gene
action, thus faces essentially the same problem as does
experimental embryology that of how the orderly con-
trol of development is accomplished. To understand the
means by which thousands of genespresumably protein
molecules in every cell can so guide the chemical activ-
ities of protoplasm that an organism is produced, is very
difficult. J. S. Haldane went so far as to say that "the
mechanistic theory of heredity is not merely unproven,
it is impossible. It involves such absurdities that no in-
telligent person who has thoroughly realized its meaning
and implications can continue to hold it." 2

But many were not so pessimistic as this about the
ability of science to explain an organism in terms of
mechanism. By the turn of the century physiologists had

*J. S. Haldane, Mechanism, JJff and Personality, p. 58*

8 CELL AND PSYCHE

made much progress in the physico-chemical analysis of
the activities of living things. Many vital processes could
by then be imitated outside the body, and Jaques Loeb,
a vigorous champion of the mechanistic interpretation of
life, was already hopefully predicting the artificial syn-
thesis of living protoplasm in the near future. Biochem-
istry, continuing to apply to the analysis of living things
the chemical knowledge already gained in the laboratory,
has now become one of the most active and promising
fields of scientific inquiry, and physiologists delve hope-
fully into the maze of proteins, nucleic acids, enzyme
systems, and hormones of which protoplasm is composed
to learn much about its complex structure and activities.
Facts which they find can be interpreted in chemical
terms, and there is no suggestion here of any mystical or
superphysical agenL The possibilities before this grow-
ing discipline are great, and its practitioners, undaunted
by the unsolved problems which they must still encounter,
believe that biochemistry holds the key which will unlock
all the secrets of life. Such a belief gives support to a
conception of the organism as a physico-chemical mecha-
nism and thus to a materialistic approach to life's problems.
This is the attitude of many biologists today and is ex-
pressed in its more extreme form by writers like Lancelot
>Hogben.

A number of biological philosophers, impressed by the
enormous complexity of life and the difficulties of ex-
plaining it in mechanistic terms, have endeavored in vari-
ous ways to avoid the extremes of both materialism and

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 9

vitalism by finding some middle position which can
accept the results of physiology and genetics "but still find
room for freedom, purpose, and value. Notable among
them are those who believe that the living organism in-
troduces a new concept quite different from that of a
physical mechanism or a mystical entdechy. Unless we
study living things as integrated systems with character-
istics and kws of their own, say these organkists, we
shall never understand what life really is. This important
idea, which would set up biology as an independent sci-
ence and not merely a complicated kind of physics or
chemistry, has found favor with many. Notable among
them are J. S. Haldane, Bertalanffy, Ritter, and Smuts,
who differ in the details of their theories but agree that
the organism is the heart of the problem. As to just how
this system is set up and persists, however, they have few
suggestions to offer.

A somewhat different philosophical approach is made
by those who advocate what is called emergent evolution.
They accept the truth of experimental determinism that
similar conditions will always be followed by similar con-
sequencessince without this science would lose meaning,
but they point out that as evolution progresses, and as
new conditions arise which have never been present be-
fore, these will invariably be followed by new conse-
quences. Such consequences, they believe, cannot be
predicted from a knowledge of the conditions alone.
This concept, first elaborated in detail by Lloyd Morgan,
does away with the necessity of believing in a rigidly

io CELL AND PSYCHE

mechanical universe. It allows opportunity for novelties,
for new phenomena and new principles; even for free-
dom, since antecedent conditions are never precisely the
same. Life can be regarded as such an "emergent/' Al-
though it follows laws, these are laws of its own and not
necessarily predictable from or determined by those of
physics and chemistry. This theory has found favor with
a number of biologists and has the obvious advantage of
providing autonomy for life without interfering with
physical determinism, as vitalism does, but it also pos-
sesses certain logical difficulties, and its final contributions
to biological philosophy are still uncertain.

But while the physiologists have been busily at work
applying the techniques and concepts of chemistry to an
analysis of life processes, the physicists have been revo-
lutionizing the whole conception of matter itself, and
with most surprising results. Relativity and quantum
mechanics have greatly altered our ideas of the physical
universe. In the world of Planck and Heisenberg and
Einstein the confident philosophical conclusions of the
mechanists, however certain their experimental results
may be, begin to sound a little naive. The matter on
which materialism is based has become so tenuous that
it seems hardly able to support the tough-minded philos-
ophy of a Haeckel or a Loeb, and the men who approach
philosophy from the physical sciences are much less dog-
matic today than the biologists, as those who read Ed-
dington and Jeans and Schrodinger well know.

A number of distinguished physicists have speculated

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 1 1

about the nature of life. Nils Bohr, for example, one of
the notable pioneers in atomic theory, proposes another
explanation for the gap between life and the non-living,
which to many still seems so unbridgeable. He is im-
pressed with the difficulty of reconciling classical mechan-
ics with the newer quantum theories and suggests that
they may be parallel and complementary ways of looking
at the universe. Each has its own laws, each provides an
orderly system of scientific facts, but neither can be de-
rived from the other. He sees a resemblance here to the
relation between physics and biology and postulates a
similar complementarity between living systems and life-
less ones. Each, he believes, is autonomous and has its
own specific rules and principles, but the attempt to de-
rive life from matter, to regard it simply as a complex
physioxhemical system, he is inclined to think is a diffi-
cult or even impossible quest. "The existence of life," he
says, "must be considered as an elementary fact that can-
not be explained, but must be taken as a starting point
in biology, in a similar way as the quantum of action,
which appears as an irrational element from the point of
view of classical mechanical physics, taken together with
the existence of elementary particles, forms the foundation
of atomic physics." 8 This idea has received a respectful
hearing, but it violates our deep desire to bring all nature
into a single system, to make the universe truly one. Per-
haps such a program is too ambitious, but scientists will
not abandon it until they are forced to do so.

* N. Bohr, "Light and Life," Nature, 131 (1933), 421-23, 457-59.

12 CELL AND PSYCHE

Another notable physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, looks
for the solution of this problem in still undiscovered laws
of physics. "We must not be discouraged," he says, "by
the difficulty of interpreting life by the ordinary laws of
physics. For that is just what is to be expected from the
knowledge we have gained of the structure of living
matter. We must be prepared to find a new type of
physical law prevailing in it." 4 Science is young, and
surely we have not yet discovered all the laws which gov-
ern the universe. A century from now our present diffi-
culties may well have been removed, though doubtless
others, equally serious, will by then have arisen.

So swing the tides of theory to and fro. From the vast
amount of study and thought which have been given to
the problem only one conclusion can be drawn with cer-
tainty today we still are a long way from understanding
what life really is. Man has not yet gone far enough
along the roads of scientific discovery and of philosoph-
ical insight to be able to answer the thronging questions
which life raises. All that each of us can do is to adopt
as a working hypothesis that one which seems most likely
to give opportunity for further progress. We may be-
come vitalists and undertake the almost hopeless task of
learning something about entelechies. Or, following the
now popular course, we may work as strict mechanists
and endeavor to interpret all life, from bottom to top, in
terms solely of matter and of energy. If neither extreme
satisfies, we may follow some middle way like emergent

4 E. Schrodinger, What If Life?, p. 80.

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 13

evolution or complementarity, studying life by and for
itself without trying to tie it to lifeless nature. Or finally,
admitting that on the basis of our present knowledge of
both facts and laws the problems of life seem insoluble, we
may push out on every front in search of fresh facts, of
adventurous hypotheses, of new principles as science ad-
vances through the years, which may give us a clue as to
the nature of living organisms.

In this slender volume I shall add nothing to our store
of scientific knowledge, nor can I hope to say anything
very new about biology or its theories of life. Whatever
novelty the present discussion achieves and whatever merit
it may possess will come from its attempt to bring some
of the concepts of biology in the narrower sense closer
to those of psychology and of philosophy to help end
what McDougall calls "the intolerably absurd state of
affairs hitherto obtaining; namely, two sciences of the
functioning of organisms, on the one hand mechanical
biology, on the other psychology; two sciences completely
out of touch with one another; the one ignoring the men-
tal life of men and animals, the other trying vainly to
relate it intelligibly to the bodily life." 5 From such a
synthesis there may emerge a few ideas useful in answer-
ing the difficult questions with which we began our dis-
cussion. It is not, of course, the problems of theoretical
biology as such which chiefly interest man or are signif-
icant for his welfare, but the higher aspects of man's life
which emerge from these. Such are problems of biology

5 William McDougall, The Kddlc of Life, p. 265.

14 CELL AND PSYCHE

in its broad sense but of biology at a much higher level
than that of the laboratory. If we can bring these loftier
matters down to their common protoplasmic denomina-
tors and find some problem which is basic to all of them,
we shall help to clarify the great objectives which we seek
and to bring unity into the search. If it is possible to
disentangle from the throng of biological and psycholog-
ical ideas, often seemingly so irrelevant and confusing,
one main issue the key log in the jam we shall then
be able to focus attention and investigation on this point,
undistracted by minor and irrelevant details, and thus
more hopefully approach our goal. I believe that such a
basic problem does exist, that it touches the life of the
mind and spirit as well as of the body, and that upon its
solution depends not only our understanding of life in
strictly biological terms but our ability to answer some
of the deep questions which men so long have asked. To
discover it and to explore its philosophical implications is
the purpose of the following pages.

CHAPTER I

ORGANIZATION,

THE DISTINCTIVE CHARACTER

OF ALL LIFE

THE UNIVERSE is turning out to be a far more surprising
place than our grandfathers ever dreamed. The more
we learn of it, the wider grows the realm of the unknown.
Science, like Hercules, is coping with a Hydra and finds
that for every problem which is solved, two new ones
rise at once to take its place. "An addition to knowl-
edge," says Eddington, "is won at the expense of an addi-
tion to ignorance. It is hard to empty the well of Truth
with a leaky bucket." 1

In the last generation physics and chemistry and astron-
omy have completely rebuilt our old ideas about the
world of nature. Ancient solidities and certainties have
disappeared. Matter and energy and space and time have
taken on quite other aspects and seem to be subject to
analysis at last only by mathematical subtleties. During
this same half century the sciences of life have also made
great progress, especially in the application of physical
and chemical knowledge and techniques to biological
problems; but there has been no such revolution here as
that which shook the physical sciences so profoundly.

1 A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, p. 229.

16 CELL AND PSYCHE

Biology is far more complex than they, and for it there
has not yet come a formulation of the new and radical
concepts which are necessary before life can truly be
understood. Protoplasm still confronts us as the most
formidable of enigmas.

But for all men life must nevertheless remain the ulti-
mate problem. Around it, since. we ourselves are living
things, center those great questions which have always
stirred mankind most deeply: on the lower level food,
sex, race, and other problems of our animal nature; on
the higher, those ultimate questions as to the place and
significance of man in the universe, as to his personality
and its destiny, his freedom, and the meaning for him of
love and beauty, of virtue and aspiration, of what he calls
his spirit and its communion with the universe outside of
him. The structure of the atom, the size of space, and
the theory of relativity interest a few, but rarely stir men
deeply. No one goes to the barricades in defense of
E = me 2 . But those more vital matters, which reach into
our hearts as much as into our minds, have set wars
ablaze and banners flying and poets singing and mystics
praying since the dawn of history. These are all prob-
lems of life, and life is the ultimate mystery.

Any satisfying philosophy must deal with these ques-
tions, and to do so it must be rooted in the science of life
itself, of life not only as we see it in man but as it is
expressed in those far simpler organisms up and down
the evolutionary scale. It is therefore biology in its
widest sense, as the interpreter of life at every level,

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 17

which will bring the richest offerings to philosophy.
Tennyson's flower in the crannied wall, if we could really
understand it, "root and all, and all in all," would in-
deed solve for us the final mysteries of God and man,
for these are the mysteries of life itself.

What, then, can the biologist tell us about the curious
phenomenon with which he deals? The nineteenth cen-
tury produced the magnificent conception of life as dy-
namic, changing, ever moving forward; of the history
of the world as the great stage on which the drama of
organic evolution is being enacted. But it also estab-
lished the equally important conception that life has its
physical basis in that remarkable material system which
is called protoplasm. Here in this aggregation of pro-
teinswatery, formless, and flowing, deceptive in its
visible simplicity but amazingly complex in its ulti-
mate organization are centered all the problems of
living things. It is not greatly different chemically and
physically in bacterium and orchid, in amoeba, arthropod,
and man. Life is protoplasmic activity, and this is essen-
tially the same from protozoan to primal Man is not
only cousin to all living things by blood-relationship, but
is built of the very same stuff as they. It is not of dust
or clay that we all are made, but of proteins and^of
nucleic acids.

The task of the biologist is therefore to understand
this remarkable living material. From it are built the
beautiful and intricate bodies of plants and animals; in
it centers the control which regulates the activities of

i8 CELL AND PSYCHE

these exquisite mechanisms; and out of it come the altera-
tions which make possible all evolutionary change. Early
biologists believed that there must be some sort of soul
or atrima in every living thing, which governs it. A few,
even in recent times, have been so much impressed with
the complexity of protoplasmic activity, especially in its
control of growth and development, that they adopt an
essentially similar explanation and assume the existence
of an entelechy or some other extra-physical agent which
directs the activity of living stuff. Such a philosophy of
vitalism, however, is now rarely asserted. Students of
plant and animal physiology more commonly seek to ex-
plain in physical and chemical terms alone everything
that goes on in protoplasm. The recent rapid growth of
biochemistry has made it possible to analyze into rela-
tively simple processes so many vital activities that this
mechanistic view of biology has been greatly stimulated.
It looks at life as simply a particularly complex series of
physical and chemical reactions, no different fundamen-
tally from those in any material system.

Protoplasm is a far more complicated affair, however,
than biologists of a generation ago imagined it to be. An
easy imitation, outside the organism, of some of the
changes evident in living cells led them to the optimistic
prediction that in a few years it would be possible even
to synthesize protoplasm and produce a living thing.
Such a triumph today seems farther away than ever.
Physiologists have underestimated their protoplasmic
opponent and have been obliged to withdraw, at least

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 19

temporarily, from many advanced theoretical positions.
Everything that we have learned about protoplasm in
recent years testifies to a complexity in physical structure,
chemical composition, and physiological activity within
it far beyond that which its visible simplicity would lead
us to expect; and when we realize that out of this re-
markable stuff has come not only the protean plant and
animal life of our globe but man himself, with the mag-
nificent accomplishments and the sublime possibilities
which are his, our respect for it should be profound.
Protoplasm is a bridge anchored at one end in the simple
stuff of chemistry and physics, but at the other reaching
far across into the mysterious dominions of the human
spirit.

A recognition of the magnitude of the problem which
confronts them has far from discouraged biologists. For
its solution they have enlisted the aid of their own clans
physiologists, morphologists, embryologists, geneticists,
cytologists, microbiologists, and the rest and have called
in powerful allies from chemistry, physics, and mathe-
matics. Their successes have been notable. Hie electron
microscope has delved so deeply into protoplasmic struc-
ture that the genes themselves at last are visible. Some
of the processes of metabolism, notably that of respiration,
once thought to be f airly simple chemical exchanges, have
been shown to involve many and complex steps and inter-
actions and the mediation of a long series of enzymes.
Growth and development in animals and plants are
known to be affected by many chemical and physical

20 CELL AND PSYCHE

factors hormones, growth substances, organizers, bio-
electric fields, light, temperature, and many others. Every
living thing, even the humblest, is evidently a mechanism
of the most remarkable and exquisite complexity.

What, we may ask, is the essential character of this
mechanism, the quality that best distinguishes it ? An ob-
vious answer would be that it contains some substance or
substances which make it what it is. This answer has
often been given; and the increase in our knowledge of
the chemical activities of living stuff and of the physiolog-
ical importance of specific substances like the hormones
has persuaded many biologists that the secret of life is
indeed to be found in a persistent analysis of its biochem-
ical behavior.

Others, however, who see the difficulty of this concept
if it is carried very far have come to realize that 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, each part or quality 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
4 delicately balanced state of form and function which
tends to restore itself if it is altered. This is the most
important thing about it. E. B. Wilson in a famous
passage said that "we cannot hope to comprehend the
activities of the living cell by analysis merely of its chem-
ical composition. . . . Modern investigation has, how-
ever, brought ever-increasing recognition of the fact that

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 21

the cell is an organic system, and one in which we must
recognize some kind o ordered structure or organiza-
tion." 2 Woodger remarks that "biologists in their haste
to become physicists, have been neglecting their business
and trying to treat the organism not as an organism but
as an aggregate. ... If the concept of organization is
of such importance as it appears to be it is something
of a scandal that we have no adequate conception of it.
The first duty of the biologist would seem to be to
try and make clear this important concept Some bio-
chemists and physiologists . . . express themselves as
though they really believed that if they concocted a mix-
ture with the same chemical composition as what they
call 'protoplasm' it would proceed to 'come to life.' This
is the kind of nonsense which results from forgetting or
being ignorant of organization." 8 Herbert Muller puts
it well thus; "For the fundamental feet 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 functions of
growth, adaptation, reproduction the final function of
death are not merely cellular but organic phenomena.
Although parts and processes may be isolated for ana-
lytical purposes, they cannot be understood without ref-
erence to the dynamic, unified whole that is more than
their sum. To say, for example, that a man is made up

*K B. Wilson, The Cell in Development and Inheritance* p. 760.
*J. H. Woodger, Biological Principles, pp. 281, 290.

32 CELL AND PSYCHE

of certain chemical elements is a satisfactory description
only for those who intend to use him as a fertilizer." 4

Through all the complexity which it is the task of the
biologist to analyze thus runs one fundamental fact com-
mon to every living thing: protoplasm builds organisms.
It does not grow into indeterminate, formless masses of
living stuff. The growth and activity shown by plants
and animals are not random processes but are so con-
trolled that they form integrated, coordinated, organized
systems. The word organism is one of the happiest in
biology, for it emphasizes what is now generally regarded
as the most characteristic trait of a living thing, its
organization. Here is the ultimate battleground of biol-
ogy, the citadel which must be stormed if the secrets of
life are to be understood. All else are outworks, easily
open to energetic attack. But this central stronghold, we
must ruefully admit, has thus far almost entirely resisted
our best efforts to break down its walls.

Organization is evident in diverse processes, at many
levels, and in varying degrees of activity. It is especially
conspicuous in the orderly growth which every organism
undergoes and which produces the specific forms so
characteristic of life. A coniferous tree, for example, such
as a spruce or pine, though a loosely integrated plant
individual in comparison to most animals, has a definite
form, and its parts show a close coordination with each
other. In each year's growth the central shoot is vertical
and continues the axis of the trunk. The several side

* Herbert J. Muller, Science and Criticism, p. 107.

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 23

shoots, not as long, spread out almost horizontally. A
definite pattern for the crown of the tree thus develops,
the apical shoot growing faster than the branches, but
the ratio between the two remaining essentially constant
so that a regular conical shape is produced. If the young
"leader" or terminal shoot is removed, one of the laterals
swings up to take its place. This and other evidence
indicates that the orientation and the relative growth of
these side shoots are in some way under the control of the
terminal bud. Other buds govern the growth of partic-
ular parts or branches. The angles which these make
with the trunk, the ratio of height to diameter in the
trunk itself, the proportion of above-ground parts to the
root system, and other measurable relationships tend to
be maintained. Thus the whole tree is an organized sys-
tem in which the character and amount of growth in one
part is related to that in all the others so that a precise
form is reached. Some of the agents involved in this
control, notably the plant hormones, are known; but how
they are distributed so precisely in space and time that
such a coordinated system is produced we do not under-
stand. The tree itself is the expression of this organizing
control.

A still more tightly organized system is evident in the
developing animal embryo. The fertilized egg of a
salamander is cleft into two cells by a vertical wall, then
into four as one would quarter an apple, then horizon-
tally into eight, and so on and on. If to our vision these
changes are speeded up by time-lapse photography we

24 CELL AND PSYCHE

can witness how the tiny group of cells, through con-
tinued cleavage, forms a partly hollow, spherical body;
how the upper portion grows down over the yolk mass;
how at one point the sphere is pushed in to make the
primitive mouth; how above this the puckered neural
folds mark out the position of the spinal axis; how they
grow over to meet and form the neural tube; how at the
sides the primitive gills appear; and how, step after step,
the embryo moves swiftly on to form the young larva from
which the mature salamander grows. Here is no random
process but a steady march, each event in step with the
rest as though to a definite and predetermined end. One
gets an impression of some unseen craftsman who knows
what he is about and who molds the mass of growing
cells according to a precise plan. The young salamander
seems to go through, before our eyes, an active progress
toward a destination in a way which suggests its later
movements of behavior, and not a merely passive unfold-
ing. Here seems to be the expression in development of
a constantly operating control which from the start and
through all its precise steps from egg to adult maintains
the embryo as an organized system.

This strict coordinated progression in organic growth
is everywhere manifest, though often in less dramatic
ways. The very fact that living things, in their bodies
and in the organs which constitute them, everywhere
show constant and specific forms, is proof of this control.
Form is simply the external and visible expression of the
organizing activity of protoplasm and is thus perhaps the

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 25

most distinctive characteristic of living things. As Need-
ham has well said, the central problem of biology is the
form problem. In a gourd fruit, for example, growth in
length and in width proceed at different rates so that
form, as indicated by the ratio of one dimension to an-
other, is continually changing. What remains constant is
the ratio of the growth rates. During the development o
the fruit any two rates keep evenly in step with each
other so that it is possible to predict the actual dimen-
sions and the changing dimensional ratios, and thus the
organic pattern, at any stage of growth.

In the light of these facts it is impressive to look under
the microscope at a thin slice of an early stage in such a
developing fruit. Here one sees hundreds o tiny cells
which by their constant division cause the organ to grow.
The planes of these divisions the angle of each new
partition wall which cuts a cell into two are in all direc-
tions. Chaos here seems to reign. This is no chaos,
however, but a cosmos, with events marching to a pre-
cise destination, for the growth in the various dimensions
of the organ which results from these divisions is beauti-
fully coordinated. Some integrating control must here
be operating. It is the nature of this control, of this
fundamental organizing activity, which still eludes us
and which constitutes the most formidable problem of
biology.

One could multiply indefinitely examples of this sort,
since all development normally shows such organized
behavior; but among the lowliest of fungi there is an

26 CELL AND PSYCHE

instance of this so remarkable that it illuminates the
whole problem. In one group of slime molds (the
Acrasiaceae} the individuals are single cells, each a very
tiny and quite independent bit of protoplasm resembling
a minute amoeba. These feed on certain types of bac-
teria found in decaying vegetable matter and can readily
be grown in the laboratory. They multiply by simple
fission and in great numbers. When this has gone on
for some time a curious change comes over the members
of this individualistic society. They cease to feed, divide,
and grow, but now begin to mobilize from all directions
toward a number of centers, streaming in to each, as one
observer describes it, like people running to a fire. Each
center exerts its attractive influence over a certain limited
region, and to it come some thousands of cells which form
a small elongated mass a millimeter or two in length.
These simple cells do not fuse, but each keeps its indi-
viduality and freedom of movement. The whole mass
now begins to creep over the surface with a kind of
undulating motion, almost like a chubby worm, until it
comes to a situation relatively dry and exposed and thus
favorable for spore formation, where it settles down and
pulls itself together into a roundish body. Now begins
a most curious bit of activity. Certain cells fasten them-
selves securely to the surface and there form collectively
a firm disc. Others in the central axis of the mass be-
come thick-walled and form the base of a vertical stalk.
Still others, clambering upward over their comrades,
dedicate themselves to the continued growth of the stalk.

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 27

Up this stalk swarms the main mass of cells until they
have risen several millimeters from the surface. These
cells, a majority of the ones which formed the original
aggregate, now mobilize themselves into a spherical mass
terminating the tenuous stalk, which itself remains an-
chored to the surface by the basal disc. In this terminal
mass every cell becomes converted into a rounded, thick-
walled spore which, drying out and blown away by the
wind, may start a new colony of separate amoeba-like
cells. In other species the structure is even more com-
plex, for the ascending mass of cells leaves behind it
groups of individuals which in turn form rosettes of
branches, each branch terminating in a spore mass. In
this process of aggregation, a group of originally iden-
tical individuals is organized into a system wherein each
has its particular function and undergoes a particular
modification, some cells to form the disc, others the stalk,
and others serving as reproductive bodies.

Such an aggregation of distinct cellular individuals
into an organized system may also be observed in cer-
tain sponges. The living part of the body of such ani-
mals, consisting of at least four different kinds of cells,
can be broken up artificially and even passed through
muslin, but the thoroughly disorganized mass of cells, if
they are not injured in the process, will regroup them-
selves in proper positions and produce a whole animal
again. In some respects even more remarkable is a
process which takes place among many insects, where the
tissues of the caterpillar are broken down during the

28 CELL AND PSYCHE

pupal or cocoon stage into what appears to be a disor-
ganized mass of "mush/' Out of this unpromising mate-
rial the entirely different tissues and organs of the adult
insect are gradually mobilized, a metamorphosis indeed,
and one of the enigmas of biology.

Such organizing behavior is somewhat different from
that in most plants and animals since here all growth
(increase in material) is finished before differentiation
and development begin, but we can hardly doubt that
the process which integrates this group of individuals or
a mass of homogeneous material and transforms it into
an organized biological society is the same as that which
operates in the more familiar cases of growth and devel-
opment by cell multiplication. In both there is the same
orderly progression, the same close coordination of one
part with the rest, the same march to a final goal. In
both, to use Driesch's famous dictum, "The fate of a cell
is a function of its position." In both, there is the same
evidence of unifying control. Surely if we could under-
stand what makes the tiny cells of a slime mold run
together and build such a beautifully fashioned cell-state,
where each is modified in a particular way which serves
the whole, we should know much about the ultimate
secret of life.

The evidence of biological organization from these ex-
amples of normal growth and development is greatly
extended through studies by which these processes are
experimentally modified, especially by removing certain
parts of the growing body. When this happens the or-

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 29

ganism shows a remarkable ability to regenerate its lost
parts and restore a normal whole. Thus a "cutting,"
removed from a plant, under proper conditions will pro-
duce a new root system and finally an entire individual
with the normal proportion of root to shoot. Internal
plant structures may also be restored. If a conducting
bundle in the growing stem or leaf is severed, the two
ends may be connected by the development, behind the
cut, of a new bundle through the conversion of ordinary
storage cells into specialized vascular ones.

Some of the most remarkable examples of regeneration
occur in animal embryology. Where the egg of a sea
urchin or a frog, for example, at the beginning of devel-
opment divides into two cells, these may be separata!
from each other, and each, instead of producing half an
individual, now grows into a whole one. The fete of
each cell is now quite different from what it would have
been if it had remained part of a two-celled embryo. By
the reorganization of its material each regenerates a single
whole animal. Such behavior, of which countless similar
examples might be cited, is so difficult to explain on
chemical or physical grounds that Driesch, less tough-
minded than most biologists, was driven to assume the
operation here of an entelechy or director.

Regeneration is common everywhere in young, grow-
ing organisms. The leg of a tadpole, snipped off, may be
restored, or the eye of a crustacean. Mature animals also
may regenerate, as in the familiar case of the angleworm
in which, when the body is cut in two, the head end will

30 CELL AND PSYCHE

orm a new tail. Regenerative ability is by no means uni-
versal, however, and is lost in most adult individuals or
structures. In less highly organized systems, like most
plants, it persists in certain more embryonic parts. Many
cases are known where a single cell, from the surface
layer of a leaf or elsewhere, may be induced to start inde-
pendent development and to form an entire new indi-
vidual. The general conclusion, with all its far-reaching
implications, seems justified that every cell, fundamentally
and under proper conditions, is totifotcnt^ or capable of
developing by regeneration into a whole organism.

In all these cases of regeneration the molding, coor-
dinating, organizing activity of living stuff is emphasized.
Here, as in normal cases, the ultimate result, the goal
toward which development seems to move, tends to be a
single complete organism, whatever may have been the
vicissitudes of its developmental history. The organizing
ability of protoplasm thus shown so dramatically in the
processes of growth and development has long excited the
interest of biologists. To answer the problems which it
poses is the task of the science of morphogenesis, which
endeavors to mobilize evidence and techniques for their
solution from most of the other biological disciplines and
from the physical sciences, as well.

This same organizing control is evident not only in
development but in the protoplasmic activities by which
the life of the individual is maintained. Around a living
creature is its unorganized material environment, a ran-
dom mixture of many things. Certain of these, its food,

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 31

arc continually being pulled into the organism, where at
once they lose their random character and are built into
the organized structure of a living system. Every plant
and animal thus acts as an incorporating center which
brings organic order out of environmental disorder.

Such a living organism, however, is extraordinarily un-
stable and sensitive to external conditions. It is an open
system, and matter is continuously passing into it and
out of it. It is the seat of innumerable chemical and
physical changes incident to vital activity. And yet the
very continuance of its life depends on the maintenance
of relatively constant conditions within it of water con-
tent, acidity, oxygen supply, a definite concentration of
certain specific substances, and many more. This is not
merely an equilibrium, a balance between forces. It is
what the physiologists call a "steady state," and to mainr
tain it the expenditure of energy is required. 3$Jjh
maintenance of such a constant set of conditions, and
death is the inevitable result of their dislocation. In such
a complex and open system, the first requisite is evidently
a means whereby the many activities are so regulated that
the necessary balance is constantly restored as external and
internal changes upset it, and the inevitable tendency to-
ward disorganization is continually resisted. Here again,
as in the processes of development, each part of the sys-
tem must be closely tied to all the rest so that changes in
one activity or in one region may be compensated by
those in another. It is therefore very hard for a physiol-
ogist to study any one activity by itself, a fact which

32 CELL AND PSYCHE

makes the practice of this science peculiarly difficult and
has led to many erroneous conclusions. The particular
level of physiological balance may change as development
progresses, or as the environment is altered, but for each
state or condition there is set up in the organism a norm
or standard toward the maintenance of which its activity
is constantly regulated.

The most conspicuous and best known of these physio-
logical regulations are those in the higher animals, par-
ticularly the mammals, which must maintain a very
constant internal environment. The precisely controlled
bodily temperature of man and the warm-blooded ani-
mals is a common example of this. Equally important^
though less familiar^ is the maintenance of uniform con-
centrations of sugar and oxygen in the blood, and similar
constancies. The control of these physiological processes
is well described by Cannon in a notable book. 5 He pro-
poses for this state of balance the term horneostasis. The
way in which this is maintained under changing condi-
tions, and the ability of the body to regulate its vital
processes so very delicately, is surely one of the most re-
markable phenomena displayed by living things.

Such regulations are familiar in man and the higher
animals, where the mechanisms involved are chiefly the
nervous system and glands of internal secretion. Living
cells which are far less specialized, however, are also
capable of such self-regulation. Among plants, for ex-
ample, the hydrogen-ion concentration (acidity) in the

* W. B. Cannon, The Wisdom of the Body.

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 33

sap of cells of a given tissue is often very closely main-
tained despite external change. The concentration of
various dissolved chemical substances in particular cells
may also be kept very near to a given level under widely
varying external concentrations. These are essentially the
same sorts of regulations as in homeostasis but involve no
nervous mechanism.

A remarkable fact about organic regulation, both de-
velopmental and physiological, is that, if the organism is
prevented from reaching its norm or "goaT in the ordi-
nary way, it is resourceful and will attain this by a dif-
ferent method. The end rather than the means seems to
be the important thing. The significance of such facts
for an interpretation of biological organization is obvious.

The maintenance of an organized self-regulating sys-
tem seems to be a general attribute of protoplasm, but
such manifestations of organization as have here been
discussed are not by any means a necessary accompani-
ment of all life. The beautifully coordinated living sys-
tem sometimes suffers a grievous loss of organization.
Tumors, cancers, malformations, and innumerable ab-
normalities of growth in plants and animals are evidence
that the organizing control is sometimes relaxed. Its
most radical modification is shown by certain types of
cells which may be cultured indefinitely in a nutrient
solution and there multiply and grow into shapeless
masses of tissue. Such cells remain alive and show cer-
tain physiological regulations, since a complete lack of
organization would bring death; but they are unable to

34 CELL AND PSYCHE

produce a formed organism where each cell has its par-
ticular structure and function, depending on its place in
the whole living system.

There are evidently various levels of organization, some
of which are subordinate to others in a kind of hierarchy.
A cell is one such level, and the processes which go on
within it maintain a certain independence; but cells are
organized into tissues, tissues are grouped into organs,
and organs into individual organisms. This organization
may be very loose, as in certain lowly plants where most
of the cells are alike and the individual can hardly be
distinguished from a colony; the mass may be more
closely tied together, as in a tree, where there is an in-
definite number of leaves and branches but a general pat-
tern for the whole; or it may be very tightly organized,
as in most individual animals.

Organization, however different in degree, is primarily
a matter of relations. Harrison well describes it thus:
*Tarticulate units at any level are not wholly independent
of one another. The relations of particles are part of
the system and it is their behavior in relation to one an-
other that constitutes 'organization/ . . . No particle or
unit can be clearly understood or its behavior predicted
unless its reactions with others are taken into con-
sideration." 6

An understanding of how this organization is set up
and maintained is the biological problem to which every

6 R. G. Harrison, Cellular Differentiation and Internal Environment, Publi-
cation 14, American Association for the Advancement of Science, p. 77.

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 35

other is subordinate and contributory. Whatever reper-
cussions it may have upon other fields of human inquiry,
it is thus primarily a task for the student of biology in
the broadest sense and must be undertaken on his terms.
These terms may have to be enlarged, and we may need
to learn the use of new methods of attack upon the prob-
lem, but it is life that we are seeking to understand, and
life is the province of biology. As Needham warns us,
"Organization is not something mystical and inaccessible
to scientific attack. ... It is for us to investigate the
nature of this biological organization, not to abandon it
to the metaphysicians because the rules of physics do not
seem to apply to it." 7

There have been many attempts to solve the problem
of organization. For some biologists this presents no diffi-
culty, and is simply the question of how such a regular
tory mechanism has arisen in evolution. During its long
course, only those variations which were useful in sur-
vival persisted, and through this age-long trial and error
the nice adjustments of part and process gradually were
developed, by chance favorable mutations, until the pres-
ent beautifully coordinated organic systems were pro-
duced. Surely, these men contend, organization must be
something which has thus evolved. That it is not in-
trinsic in protoplasm is proven by the fact that it is often
lost in cases of abnormal growth.

This evolutionary explanation is an obvious one, but
it has its difficulties. It can hardly make clear, for ex-

T Joseph Nccdham, Order and Life, pp. 7 *7-

36 CELL AND PSYCHE

ample, how the power of regeneration could have been
acquired. There seems little likelihood that all the great
variety of injuries and losses which a plant or animal can
now repair (including those produced experimentally
and which almost certainly would never be suffered in
nature) have occurred in its ancestry so frequently that
natural selection has had a chance to develop organisms
able to repair them. To account for correlative changes
such as would be required in the development of a regu-
latory mechanism has always been a major difficulty for
the theory of selection.

Organizing relations are easy to observe and measure
but are very difficult to explain physiologically. It is
much easier to deal with substances, and in attempting to
understand organization biologists have therefore thought
more often in chemical than in physical terms. They
have frequently postulated specific formative materials,
hopefully expecting that these in some way would trans-
late themselves into organizing relationships. Particularly
significant among such are the various growth substances,
regulators, and hormones which in recent years have been
so intensively studied in plant and animal physiology.
Among plants, for example, the effects of auxin have
been found to be very numerous and important. It is
concerned with cell enlargement, cambial activity, bud
inhibition, root formation, leaf fall, and other activities,
and thus markedly affects the development of the plant.
But it is evident that auxin cannot do all these things
by itself. It is the agent, the messenger, by which they

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 37

are accomplished; but the beautifully coordinated results
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. Here is the real problem. "When we
discover," says J. S. Haldane, "the existence of an intra-
protoplasmic enzyme or other substance on which life
depends, we are at the same time faced with the question
how this particular substance is present at the right time
and place, and reacts to the right amount to fulfill its
normal functions." 8 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 makes roots than a nickel makes a tune in
a juke box. It simply sets in motion the activity of an
organized system. Not the nickel or the auxin holds the
secret, but the structure of the system itself.

The amphibian "organizer" postulated by Spcmann is
an example of the same difficulty. A bit of the roof of
the primitive mouth of the young salamander embryo
grafted almost anywhere on the body of another embryo
will start a new embryonic axis and thus may make the
animal a double one, like a Siamese twin. This bit of
living tissue was thought to have in itself important or-
ganizing powers; but soon other agencies, simple chem-
ical or physical factors, were found which had essentially
the same effect, and Spemann himself finally admitted

* J. S. Haldane, The Philosophic Basis of Biology, p. 79.

38 CELL AND PSYCHE

that his "organizer" was but a stimulus, an evocator, and
that the real problem of organization lies in the respond-
ing system, in the living stuff itself, and not in the
trigger which sets this off. Such chemical explanations
of organization, despite the enthusiasm with which they
have been sought, have not thrown much light upon the
problem. Probably not many biologists today would agree
with Julian Huxley's optimistic prediction in 1933 that
we were then on the verge of reducing the organizing
powers of a living thing to a chemical formula and stor-
ing it in a bottle.

The beautiful structure of chemical molecules, espe-
cially in the proteins with their great size and complex-
ity, has suggested that the form and organization of a
living thing may in some way be determined by that of
the specific proteins it contains. It is hard, however, to
picture a mechanism which would bring this about.
Baitsell and others have gone even further and suggested
that the organism is itself a gigantic molecule and that
the forces which integrate it are the same as those which
hold together and organize atoms.

Biophysicists have also offered their explanations. Gur-
witsch, impressed by the fact that the fruiting bodies of
many fungi, constant and specific in their forms, are pro-
duced by a tangled mass of apparently similar fungus
threads, believes that a formative "field" exists around
the developing structure. Whence this arises and how it
operates he is not clear. This general criticism can be
made of most field theories proposed by other biologists.

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 39

More concrete, however, is the suggestion of Burr and
Northrop, 9 who believe that the secret of organization lies
in the presence of a characteristic bioelectrical field in and
about a living individual, which controls its development
They state the problem in terms of the physics of fields
rather than of particles. This is a stimulating idea and
well worth developing, but it is difficult to picture ex-
actly how it operates in terms of what we now know
about the activities of living things.

Physiological regulation is better understood than that
in development and is known to be related to the activity
of specific chemical substances. This regulation is ex-
tremely delicate, as any one administering insulin well
knows, for there is always danger from too much or
too little. The normal system, however, controls blood
sugar automatically and with beautiful accuracy, an ex-
traordinary accomplishment considering all the things
that might go wrong and upset it. We are reminded of
Henderson's remark that "sooner or later ... we come
upon the fact that a certain organ or group of cells
accomplishes that which is requisite to the preservation
of the equilibrium, varying the internal conditions accord-
ing to the variation of the external conditions, in a man-
ner which we can on no account at present explain." 10

One of the most spectacular attempts to account for
organic regulation-has recently come from the engineers.
Automatically controlled machines have long been far

9 H. S. Burr and F. S. C. Northrop, "The Electro-dynamic Theory o
Life," Quarterly Review of Biology, X (i935)> 322-33.
10 L. J. Henderson, The Order of Nature, p. 86.

40 CELL AND PSYCHE

miliar, but their complexity has been raised to an ex-
traordinary degree in the production of the electronic
calculator. This is a truly amazing device consisting of
thousands of radio tubes connected in a complex fashion
by which, almost instantly, huge sums can be manipulated
and calculations made which would take a corps of com-
puters years to perform. Such a calculator can store in-
formation for later use and thus possesses the rudiments
of memory. The principle on which it is built may make
possible, its inventors believe, the construction of a ma-
chine which will answer abstruse questions and may be
said to display some degree of ability to reason. Properly
constructed it might even play a moderately good game
of chess! Dr. Wiener 11 has shown the marked similarities
between the behavior of such a machine and that of the
nervous system and believes that the key to a knowledge
of the latter lies in the principles developed in these cal-
culators and especially in the so-called "feed-back** mech-
anism. We must salute those who have built machines
which have such fantastic possibilities for the service of
man. One may question, however, whether these artifacts
really give us more than an instructive analogy with proto-
plasmic regulation. After all, we are not made of tubes,
wires, and gears, but of protein molecules. Our bodies
are a triumph of chemical, not mechanical, engineering.
The electronic calculator may grow into an accomplished
robot, but one doubts if it can have an original idea or
write a beautiful sonnet, as protoplasmic systems can.

11 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics.

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 41

We must frankly admit, I think, that, despite our in-
genious experiments and speculations, no adequate expla-
nation of biological organization is forthcoming* Despite
all the advances in a knowledge of physiology and of the
physical and chemical character of living stuff, such a
solution seems to be almost as far away as ever. Biology
has made enormous strides in the study of processes, of
the successive series of chemical changes whkh go on in
protoplasm; but these organizing relations which living
things display present a much more formidable problem,
and it may be that some new idea, some great generaliza-
tion comparable to that of relativity for physics, will be
necessary before we shall be able to understand the true
nature of protoplasmic systems, so deceptively simple to
outward view but the seat of that complex organized
activity which is life.

The fact of organization has so impressed some biol-
ogists that they are even inclined to rank it as one of the
basic facts in the universe. Thus L. J. Henderson, a
biochemist who thought deeply in these matters, says,
"I believe that organization has finally become a category
which stands beside those of matter and energy." 12 Need-
ham, in somewhat the same vein, writes: "Organization
and Energy are the two fundamental problems which all
science has to solve/' 18 This is not far from the concept
of complementarity proposed by Bohr. The important
implications of these ideas are obvious.

im L. J. Henderson, The Order of Nature, p. 67.

11 Joseph Needhaxn, rime: The Refreshing Kver, p. 33.

42 CELL AND PSYCHE

Our problem, though first the task of the biologist,
must evidently transcend his domain and enter that of
philosophy. The list of philosophers who have under-
taken to deal with it is considerable. Most notable among
them, perhaps, is Whitehead, who based an important
part of his system upon the fact of organization, not only
in living things but throughout the universe. Biology
for him is the study of the larger organisms and physics
that of the smaller ones. The notion of particle he would
replace by the notion of organism.

Whatever we may think of these deep matters, it is evi-
dent that organization as one sees it in living things is
a very real fact, explain it how we will. In any problem
dealing with life it must be taken into account. The
hypothesis which I wish to propose here is that in the
regulatory and organizing processes in protoplasm lies
the foundation of what are called the psychological or
mental activities in animals and especially in man. From
a study of it some interpretations will suggest themselves
which may help toward the solution of those great prob-
lems which were posed at the beginning of our discussion.

CHAPTER II

BIOLOGICAL ORGANIZATION

AND
PSYCHOLOGICAL ACTIVITY

WE HAVE UNDERTAKEN the ambitious task of drawing from
the resources of the life sciences some ideas useful in the
construction of a satisfying life philosophy, and to this
end have attempted first to discover what is the most
distinctive character of all life, that which most sharply
marks it off from lifeless things. What relation is there,
you may ask, between the rather technical discussion of
this question in the preceding chapter and the profound
problems to which we addressed ourselves at the beginr
ning? These were problems about life, to be sure, but
life in its uppermost reaches, life expressed not in body
but in mind, in purpose, in aspiration, in those mani-
festations of it which we call the spirit of man. What
have the biological facts explored here to do with these
higher phenomena of life ? Is there anything to be learned
from life at its lowest levels which may help toward an
understanding of its loftiest ones ? We shall find, I think,
that there is, and I now propose to explore the possibility
that what is called biological organization may indeed
be the foundation upon which rest these highest aspects
of the life of man.

44 CELL AND PSYCHE

It is characteristic of living material, as has been
shown, that the organisms which it builds grow by orderly
progression from one step to the next so that a definite
series of bodily structures with specific forms and inter-
relationships are produced, and that physiological equilib-
ria within them are maintained by constant regulatory
adjustments. This progressive, organized, and integrative
character of life, its conspicuous and distinctive quality,
is most commonly recognized in the development and
physiological activity of the body, but it bears a remark-
able resemblance to phenomena which are admittedly
psychological. There have not been lacking biologists
from time to time who, at the risk of being called vitalists
and visionaries, have drawn attention to this resemblance
between the developmental and the psychological activ-
ities of living things, between the facts of growth and
those of behavior. The embryologist Spemann, in the
last paragraph of his book on embryonic development,
says: "Again and again terms have been used (in this
book) which point not to physical but psychical analogies.
This was meant to be more than a poetical metaphor. It
was meant to express my conviction that the suitable
reaction of a germ fragment, endowed with the most
diverse potencies, in an embryonic 'field,' its behavior in
a definite 'situation,' is not a common chemical reaction,
but that these processes of development, like all vital
processes, are comparable, in the way they are connected,
to nothing we know in such a degree as to those vital
processes of which we have the most intimate knowl-

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 45

edge, viz., the psychical ones. It was to express my opin-
ion that, even laying aside all philosophical conclusions,
merely for the interest of exact research, we ougfct not
to miss the chance given to us by our position between
the two worlds." 1

In the same vein the zoologist E. S. Russell writes:
"The directiveness of vital processes is shown equally well
in the development of the embryo as in our own conscious
behaviour. It is this directive activity shown by indi-
vidual organisms that distinguishes living things from
inanimate objects." And again: 'The fact is that the com-
mon ground of both organic and psychological activity
lies in the directiveness or 'drive* which is characteristic
of both. We must regard directiveness as an attribute not
of mind but of life. . . . Purposive activity, as seen in
its highly developed form in the intelligent behaviour of
man, is a specialized and elaborated kind of directive
activity, concerned mainly with the mastery of his mate-
rial environment.** 2

Herbert Muller puts the idea very well thus: '"Pur-
pose* is not imported into nature, and need not be puzzled
over as a strange or divine something else that gets inside
and makes life go; it is no more an added force than mind
is something in addition to brain. It is simply implicit
in the fact of organization, and it is to be studied rather
than admired or 'explained.' ** s

It is to Ralph Lillie that we owe an especially extensive

1 H. Spemann, Embryonic Development and Induction, p. 371.
*E. S. Russell, The Directiveness of Organic Activities, pp. 178-79-
* Herbert J. Muller, Science ttnd Criticism, p. 109.

46 CELL AND PSYCHE

discussion of this problem. "The general conclusion to
which we arc led by these considerations,'* he says, "is
that in living organisms physical integration and psychical
integration represent two aspects, corresponding to two
mutually complementary sets of factors, of one and the
same fundamental biological process." And again: "Con-
scious purpose, as it exists in ourselves, is to be regarded
as a highly evolved derivative of a more widely diffused
natural condition or property, which we may call 'direc-
tiveness.' . . . This psychical integration, so characteristic
of the living organism on its conscious side, implies the
existence of a parallel physical integration, the two form-
ing together a psychophyskal unity In the character-
istic unification of the organism an integrative principle
or property is acting which is similar in its essential nature
to that of which we are conscious in mental life/* 4

What impresses these thinkers is the striking resem-
blance between the progressive, regulatory, and (as Rus-
sell says) "goal-directed" processes of development and
physiological activity, on the one hand, and on the other
die phenomenon of purpose, of the drive toward an end,
which is the basis of most mental or psychological activ-
ities. Life is not aimless, nor are its actions at random.
They are regulatory and either maintain a goal already
achieved or move toward one which is yet to be realized.
A developing embryo, especially if its growth is speeded
up by time-lapse photography, certainly loot(s as if it were

* Ralph S. Lfllie, The Gencrd Biology sad Philosophy of Organism, pp. 50,

196, 200, 201.

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 47

moving toward a goal which it is bound to reach in spite
of the obstacles which we may put in its way to test the
intensity and resourcefulness of its "purpose." Needham's
phrase, "the striving of a blastula to grow into a chicken,"
may be a figure of speech, but to some minds it is not
far from actual truth.

In all such questions we are forced to leave the com-
fortable certainties of the laboratory and plunge into the
twilight zone of speculation, where fact and fancy are
hard to distinguish from each other but where the shapes
of great ideas, tantalizingly vague, move among the shad-
ows. Such speculations are often frowned upon by scien-
tists and the tough-minded generally, and they do lead
all too easily to absurdities which tempt one from the path
of orderly thinking. Many will smile, I am sure, at the
speculations which I shall here propose. But we should
lose our fear of being too unorthodox. Adventurous
hypotheses to deal with unexplained facts are one of the
chief lacks in a world which has piled up more data than
it has been able to digest; and speculation, so long as it
is intelligent and based on a modicum of established fact,
is to be encouraged and may well lead to insights into
nature which would not be open to those who never stray
from the bounds of orthodox thinking. **We are in dan-
ger," says Woodger, "of being overwhelmed by our data
and of being unable to deal with the simpler problems
first and understand their connexion. The continual
heaping up of data is worse than useless if interpretation
does not keep pace with it. In biology this is all the more

48 CELL AND PSYCHE

deplorable because it leads us to slur over what is char-
acteristically biological in order to reach hypothetical

'causes.'"*

The possibility of a relation between development and
purpose between biology and psychology is such a
speculation. I confess to being attracted by it, for it pre-
sents an opportunity of unifying our ideas of life at all
levels, and of providing some hopeful answers for at least
a few of man's great and ancient philosophical difficulties.
I ask the reader's forbearance, therefore, while the argu-
ment is pushed a bit further than has usually been done.

Tbc position which I propose to defend the thesis I
am nailing to the cathedral door is briefly this: that bio-
logical organization (concerned with organic develop-
ment and physiological activity) and psychical activity
(concerned with behavior and thus leading to mind) arc
fundamentally the same thing. This may be looked at
from the outside, objectively, in the laboratory, as a bio-
logical fact; or from the inside, subjectively, as the direct
experience of desire or purpose. In the present chapter I
should like to explore this position with some thorough-
ness, and in the final one to consider what implications
k may have for the problems which Were posed at the
start of our discussions.

A conscious purpose and the development of an em-

> bryo appear at first sight to be so unlike that a comparison

between them seems preposterous. One is an experience

in vivid, focal consciousness and is centered in the vast

1 J. H. Woodgcr, Biologic* Principles, p. 318.

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 49

complexity of the tissues of the brain. The other is cer-
tainly not a conscious process in the usual sense of the
word and is rekted to no particular tissue but is an attri-
bute of the entire organism. Both, however, are biolog-
ical activities, phenomena of life, and to compare them
profitably we should therefore first reduce both to their
lowest common denominator, protoplasm itself. The
activities of nerve cells, the central nervous system, and
the brain, structures with which we chiefly associate all
forms of psychical activity, may for the moment be dis-
regarded. This is neither the time nor the place to
discuss the origin of the nervous system, but good evo-
lutionists can hardly fail to admit that it must have risen
to its present highly developed state from very simple
beginnings and presumably from unspecialized proto-
plasm in response to requirements for survival of motile
organisms in a complex environment. This conclusion
is supported by the fact that the lowest animals and the
entire plant kingdom lack a nervous system entirely (or
any specialized nervous mechanism) and yet are able to
perform, albeit in a sluggish and primitive fashion, most
of the activities which in higher forms are under the con-
trol of nervous tissue. As Bergson says, we need not
assume that consciousness "involves as a necessary condi-
tion the presence of a nervous system; the latter has only
canalized in definite directions, and brought up to a
higher degree of intensity, a rudimentary and vague
activity, diffused throughout the mass of the organized
substance." 6 To talk about "mind" in a bean plant or a

50 CELL AND PSYCHE

protozoan, or even in a worm, may seem absurd, but it
is more defensible than trying to place an arbitrary
point on the evolutionary scale where mind, in some
mysterious manner, made its appearance. We are deal-
ing here with a quantitative and not a qualitative
difference*

All living stuff has definite resemblances to nervous tis-
sue. Protoplasm is irritable, will respond in character-
istic ways to stimuli from without. Even a naked mass
of it like an amoeba moves slowly about and is con-
tinually reacting to the presence of food, water, oxygen,
and mechanical factors in a manner quite comparable to
that of higher organisms equipped with specialized sen-
sory and jnotor nerves. Even plants, the most static of
living things, will respond to environmental changes by
characteristic growth movements or tropisms. The region
which receives the stimulus here is often not the one
which shows the response, proving that the stimulus can
be transferred from one place to the other though not
through nerves or other specialized cells. Even more like
an animal's reaction is the behavior of Mimosa, the well-
known "sensitive plant" The stimulus of mechanical
shock at the leaf tip causes the leaflets of this plant pro-
gressively to fold together, and finally the whole leaf
bends sharply downward. The course of this reaction
takes but a few seconds, and a study of its electrical cor-
relates by Burr 7 shows its remarkable similarity to a nerv-
ous response.

T H. S. Burr, "An Electrometric Study of Mimosa," Yak Journal of Biol-
ogy and Medicine, XV (1943), 823-29.

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 51

The effect of past events in modifying present activity,
the essential feature of what we call habit and memory
in psychological terms, is also evident in organisms with-
out a nervous system. As Jennings has shown, protozoa
are teachable and learn to reject harmful substances
after a few trials. Even plants can acquire specific
rhythms, like those of the u sleep" movements of their
leaves, which depend on the duration of light and dark
periods, and these "habits" will survive for some time
after the external rhythm has ceased.

Mind, of course, involves far more than a reception of
stimuli and response to them. What goes on between
these two events, in the highly organized nervous system,
is obviously of the utmost consequence. Here originate
the desires, purposes, emotions, and other aspects of
psychical life, together with conceptual thought and the
highest developments of intellect. In a famous argument
between Jennings and Loeb many years ago, the former
showed that a single-celled protozoan (Paramccium),
far from being at the mercy of its surroundings and re-
sponding invariably to their stimulation, behaves very
differently depending on its particular physiological state
at a given time. Whether, for example, it will swim to-
ward light or not seems to depend in large measure on
whether it is hungry or full-fed. In any living thing this
organized system, this coorduSating rngchanism which
regulates behavior in conformity with some established
standard or goal, this decisive intermediary that stands
between sensation and reaction, is the basis of purposive

53 CELL AND PSYCHE

behavior and thus ultimately of mind itself, My argu-
ment is that this system is the same as that which
coordinates all other vital activities, notably those of
development and function.

Superficially the resemblance between the mental and
the developmental is close enough so that the case for
their identity seems not too implausible. But let us not
underestimate the momentous character of such a con-
clusion. To admit that the developmental norm, standard,
or "goal" set up in a growing organism is a manifestation
of the same control that guides its behavior, that it is in
effect a very primitive purpose, is to grant my whole
argument Concede this, and most important and sig-
nificant conclusions will follow* Deny it, and the entire
hypothesis falls to the ground* This is the decisive step.
Here, and not in the upper reaches of the psychical, I
believe, must be fought out the major philosophical
battle* The issue is primarily a biological one, and un-
less it is explored as such we shall never finally come to
grips with it It is therefore worth most careful scrutiny.

First, let us examine what is meant by a norm or goal
or "purpose** in organic development It must evidently
be a set of conditions or relations, in living substance,
which in its operation in space-time results in a progrcs-
'sivc series of specific embryonic forms culminating in
that of the adult An understanding of the means by
which this is accomplished is at the heart of our prob-
lem. Hie most familiar example of such a develop-
mental norm is the genetic constitution of a cell like the

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 53

fertilized egg, the living substance of which must have a
very specific constitution and organization, for out of it
comes a very specific organism. Various suggestions
were made in the past as to what this constitution is, but
we now know that its most important component is a
series of genes which control the processes of develop*
ment. In each race these have a definite distribution
among the chromosomes of the nucleus, and in most
species the genie constitution of every cell seems to be
identical. Sometimes, as we have seen, almost any cell
of the body is capable, under favorable conditions, of pro-
ducing an entire individual. The problem of gene action
is being vigorously investigated and with encouraging
success; but certainly one of the major enigmas of biol-
ogy is how these thousands of genetic units, scattered at
random throughout the chromosomal complement of
every cell, cooperate with such amazing nicety and pre-
cision that a complex and highly coordinated individual
is produced. Innumerable chemical reactions, accurately
timed and located, must be involved Here the problem
of organization is presented most vividly. There must
certainly be some sort of controlling mechanism, struc-
ture, or system in the egg (and doubtless in every cell)
which definitely foreshadows the character of the par-
ticular organism into which it will develop or of which
it forms a part It is this organization, whatever it may
turn out to be in terms of matter and energy, space and
time, which, as experienced by the organism, I believe to
be the simplest manifestation of what in man has become

54 CJBZ-L. AMU

conscious purpose. Just as the form of the body is imma-
nent in the egg from which it grows, so a purpose, yet
to be realized, may be said to be immanent in the cells
of the brain.

Physiological regulation shows the same sort of in-
ternally organized directiveness toward the maintenance
of a specific condition, a steady state. The remarkable
processes in homeostasis have already been discussed, by
which the various components and conditions of the body
are precisely maintained. Any change in them at once
calls forth a corresponding increase in an opposing proc-
ess and thus keeps the steady state in delicate balance.
Shenington has well described these orderly changes
which go on within a cell. "We seem to watch battal-
ions of specific catalysts," he says, "like Maxwell's 'de-
mons,' lined up, each waiting, stop-watch in hand, for its
moment to play the part assigned to it, a step in one or
other great thousand-linked chain process. ... In the
sponge-work of the cell, foci coexist for different opera-
tions, so that a hundred, or a thousand different processes
go forward at the same time wit-bin its confines. The
foci wax and wane as they are wanted. . . . The proc-
esses going forward in it are cooperatively harmonized.
The total system is organized. The various catalysts work
'as o>oniinately as though each had its own compartment
in the honeycomb and its own turn and time. In this
great company, along with the stop-watches run dials
telling how confreres and their substrates are getting on,
so that at zero time each takes its turn. Let that catas-

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 55

trophe befall which is death, and these catalysts become
a disorderly mob and piril the very fabric of the cell to
pieces. Whereas in life as well as pulling down they
build, and build to a plan.'* 8

It is this building to a plan which is so characteristic
of all life. Such a physiological plan, refined and far
more complex in the cells of our nervous system but
essentially like the developmental plan, I believe is that
which in man can be experienced as conscious purpose.
Its roots are deep in the regulatory behavior of proto-
plasm. Homeostasis is not simply a curious process in
physiology. It is the satisfaction of our most basic desires.

It is clearly impossible, of course, to speak of conscious
purpose at such a primitive level as this, or even of con-
sciousness at all. From such humble beginnings, how-
ever, the consciousness which we experience so vividly
must have arisen. In some unexplained fashion there
seems to reside in every living thing, though particularly
evident in animals, an inner, subjective relation to its bod-
ily organization. This has finally evolved into what is
called consciousness. Such an inner relationship is most
evident in the sensations experienced when nerves are
stimulated, its origin evidently going back to the begin-
ning of the stimulus-response reaction in the simplest of
living things. I ask you to consider the possibility that
through this same inner relationship the mechanism
which guides and controls vital activity toward specific
ends, the pattern or tension set up in protoplasm which

* Sir Charles Shcrrington, Man on His Nature, pp. 78, 70.

56 CELL AND PSYCHE

so sensitively regulates its growth and behavior, can also
be experienced, and that this is the genesis of desire, pur-
pose, and all other mental activities.

Incidentally, this inner relationship gives us a great ad-
vantage in a study of the life of man, an advantage which
should be exploited to the utmost Each of us is inside a
living organism. The usual method of science is to ob-
serve from the outside, objectively. All of our knowledge
of plants and animals has come in this way; and, strictly
speaking, so has what we know of other human beings.
Behaviorism emphasized this laboratory method of study-
ing psychology as all-important Surely the preferred
position which we occupy in our own systems ("between
the two worlds," as Spemann says), our ability to fed
what a complex organism is like, can tell us much about
ourselves and, by inference, about our fellows and even
the animals which could not be discovered in any other
way. "TTie biologist," as Jennings says, "has a more inti-
mate access to a certain sample of his material, for he is
himself that sample. Through this fact he discovers cer-
tain things about the materials of biological science that
he cannot discover by the other method alone. . . . He
finds that the things to be studied by the biologist in-
clude emotions, sensations, impulses, desires. . . . Thus
die biologist has two sets of data, discovered in somewhat
different ways, one set being discoverable only through
the fact that the biologist is himself a biological speci-
men/'* Eddington believes that "consciousness, looking

* H. S. Jennings, The Universe taid Ufa pp. 9, 10.

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 57

out through a private door, can learn by direct insight
an underlying character of the world which physical
measurements do not betray." 10 The information thus
gained through our own inner experiences is much more
vague, however, than that which comes from the labo-
ratory and is far less open to measurement and exact
analysis. It depends in no small degree on our particular
physiological state at the time it is rendered. Because of
this, scientists have always been suspicious of introspec-
tion as a reliable basis of knowledge about life and man.
For biology to ignore the reports from this inner observer,
however, or to deny their importance or even their reality,
is to give up any attempt to understand life as a whole.
These subjective experiences must ultimately be the con-
cern of the biologist as much as are the actions of genes
or the chemical nature of hormones. Biology will need
to widen its borders for this purpose and to call into
consultation its colleagues in other fields of knowledge,
but it cannot disregard such experiences if it is finally to
tell us what life really is. In our present speculations,
therefore, and particularly in any consideration of desire
and purpose, we are justified in gaining whatever knowl-
edge we can from introspection. It may be that the
present hypothesis can help to reconcile the conflicting
inner and outer aspects of man.

At this point some hard-headed objector will no doubt
arise and ask why, if purpose is simply the subjective
side of the operation of a regulatory mechanism, we

10 A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World* p. 91.

5 8 CELL AND PSYCHE

should not speak of a thermostat or a gyroscope as hav-
ing a "purpose" (quite apart from the purpose for which
it was made). Certainly one of the new electronic cal-
culators with its vast complexity and beautifully regula-
tory behavior ought at least to have a purpose, if not a
soul, of its own! Indeed, a suggestion not very different
from this has recently been made by Norbert Wiener,
who looks forward to bigger and better machines which
will to all intents display purpose, memory, and some
ability to learn and reason. If all this is so, continues our
objector, why clutter up the argument with talk of psy-
chical factors? Purpose is obviously the accompaniment
and result of a fundamental physico-chemical mechanism,
and this mechanism is our only real problem.

He may well be right One can reduce my argument
to absurdity by suggesting that a stone, pushed from the
top of a hill, has the "purpose" to roll downward, or that
a stretched bow has the "purpose" to shoot an arrow.
Any physical system which operates under natural forces
may be said to have a purpose to perform whatever
changes are by necessity latent in the system. A piece of
fireworks has a definite structure which results, when it
is set off, in a specific pattern of moving light. Is not a
"purpose" to do this present in the pattern of powder and
fuses? The step seems not a long one from such a struc-
ture to the mechanism of a living cell, vastly more
complex but still a mechanism, in which a precise physico-
chemical pattern (or "purpose") is bound to unfold in a
precise and regulated fashion. Here is involved the

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 59

whole problem of the nature of a living organism. If
this is a mechanism of the sort with which science is
familiar, its internal pattern, somehow capable of being
felt in experience, can well be interpreted as a purpose.
This is the position of all mechanistic philosophy, which
regards the psychological event as secondary and merely
the result of a physical one. But we should remember
that the living mechanism is one of a very special kind
and that its organization, and thus the origin of psycho-
logical phenomena, may involve principles not yet dis-
covered. An advantage of the hypothesis here presented
is that it can be accepted by either the materialist or the
idealist as a sound interpretation of purposiveness. It
does not take sides. It implies neither mechanism nor
teleology, fate nor freedom, but simply attempts to tic
together, as identical, the biological and the psychological
events. Which philosophical theory-Hoaechanistic, ideal-
istic, or other will ultimately best explain the facts de-
pends on what the nature of biological organization
ultimately turns out to be. Here is where the real issue
lies.

But the phenomena of development and of psychology
are not quite as far apart as they would appear to be if
one limits oneself to the extreme expressions of each.
Growth, physiological reaction, and true behavior form
an ascending series the steps in which grade into each
other imperceptibly, and my argument, I think, is meas-
urably strengthened by this fact

It has often been said that function is the correlate of

60 CELL AND PSYCHE

structure. In any living system one cannot separate the
processes of growth which lead to the development of
die body from those by which the life of the body is
maintained. Both are physiological activities, and changes
involved in growth are essentially the same as those con-
cerned with the maintenance of vital activities and the
repair of tissues* Some are centered in or controlled by
nerve cells but many arc the activities of other types of
cells or of unspecialized protoplasm. It is equally hard
to separate some of these physiological processes from
true behavior; from activities, in other words, which are
commonly held to be psychical in their character. Is
breathing, for example, a physiological process or is it a
part of the way an animal behaves? The instinctive
activity of die simplest organisms seems to be far closer
to the physiological than to the mental level. One does
not usually speak of instincts in plants, though many of
their reactions, such as the tropisms, differ little from the
instincts of the simplest animals. Animal instincts range
from the simplest sorts of reactions in the lowest groups
of invertebrates to the complex and marvelous ones of
the bees and ants and reach up toward the essentially
rational activities of the higher vertebrates.

The close relation of developmental activities to these
instinctive and behavioral ones has been stressed by Berg-
soa and others. "We cannot say," he writes, "as has
often been shown, where organization ends and where
instinct begins. When the little chick is breaking its shell
with a peck of its beak, it is acting by instinct and yet

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 61

it docs but carry on the movement which has borne it
through embryonic life." 11

Lillie makes much the same point. "Development,"
he says, "has been compared with instinctive activity by
many biologists, and instincts have their close affinities
with conscious behavior. The development of an egg
into the adult animal is a sequence of biological activity
which has much in common with such an instinctive
performance as the building of a nest; in both cases there
is an integrated sequence of morphogenetic or structure-
forming activity/' 12

The regulatory character of instinct is obvious. An
animal usually tends to act, under normal conditions, in
ways that will insure its survival and reproduction. It
avoids enemies, captures food, seeks a favorable habitat,
and in other ways adjusts its reactions to the environment
in a manner favorable to the maintenance of its own life
and the perpetuation of its species. In this respect the
similarity between these simple types of animal behavior,
on the one hand, and biological organization as ex-
pressed in development and physiology, on the other, is
striking and seems to be fundamental The primary
reason for the rise of higher types of psychological be-
havior, culminating in mind, seems to have been the ne-
cessity of speedy regulatory reaction to insure the survival
of a motile organism in a complex and changing environ-
ment. Here the sensations received are numerous and

11 H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 165.

ia Ralph S. Lillie, General Biology and Philosophy of Organism, p. 172.

6a CELL AND PSYCHE

varied and the number of possible reactions to them is
very great To determine just which of these reactions
should be made to insure survival and a successful life
required a series of specialized cells and finally a rather
elaborate central nervous system. The more complex
problems the species was called upon to meet, the more
highly developed this system became, reaching its climax
with the brain, active consciousness, and high intellectual
ability of man. Consciousness must mean something.
We shall agree with Henderson, I think, when he says
that "consciousness was never produced in the process of
evolution merely as an impotent accompaniment of re-
flex action." 13 William James has put the matter well
thus: "Primarily," he says, "and fundamentally, the men-
tal life is for the sake of action of a preservative sort.
Secondarily and incidentally it does many other things." 14
This "action of a preservative sort," it seems to me, is
the same kind of action that is found in physiological
regulation and the coordinated control of life processes
generally. The latter are less obvious and spectacular
than the reactions seen in behavior, but both are activities
of an organized protoplasmic system. If the primitive
purpose to survive is the basis of all psychical behavior,
the argument, I think, is sound that such behavior, and
thus all mental life, is anchored in the general regulatory
activity of living stuff, whether this is in behavior or
in development

11 L. J, Henderson, The Order of More, p. 93.
"William James, Psychology, p. 4.

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 63

One might present evidence from many fields in sup-
port of this contention, but only a few examples will be
offered here.

Mental development in its unfolding often presents a
series of steps as precise and predictable as those in em-
bryonic development. Gesell in his classic studies of
infant behavior shows that the progressive steps in a
small child's psychological development fall into a defi-
nite pattern and that these earliest instinctive reactions,
the beginnings of the life of his mind, are simply a con-
tinuation of the biological (embryonic) activities which
brought it into being. The mind has a morphogenesis as
well as the body, and both have a definite biological
basis. " 'The mind' may be regarded as a living, grow-
ing 'structure,'" says Dr. Gesell, "even though it lacks
corporeal tangibility. It is a complex, organizing action
system which manifests itself in characteristic forms of
behavior in patterns of posture, locomotion, prehension,
manipulation, of perception, communication, and social
response. The action systems of embryo, fetus, infant
and child undergo pattern changes which are so sequen-
tial that we may be certain that the patterning process
is governed by mechanisms of form regulation the same
mechanisms which are being established by the science
of embryology, . . . The growth of tissues, of organs
and of behavior is obedient to identical laws of develop-
mental morphology. . . * Already many of the current
morphogenetic concepts have more than vague analogy
to psychical processes: embryonic field, gradient theory.

64 CELL AND PSYCHE

regional determination, autonomous induction, potency,
polarity, symmetry, time correlation, etc/* 15 Surely this
is strong support for my contention.

In the later part of the organic cycle there are also
resemblances between body and mind. It is well known
that during its early stages development is much more
adaptable than it afterward becomes. Often each cell at
its beginning is capable of growing into an entire indi-
vidual, if isolated. As the organism gets older this
capacity to regenerate becomes more and more restricted
until in most animals it is lost altogether save for such
activities as the renewal of worn-out structures and the
healing of wounds. A cell which in the early stages
can develop into almost anything suffers a progressive
reduction in its potencies until at last there is only one
fate in store for it instead of many possible ones. The
similarity between such progressive restrictions in develop-
mental potency and the losses in mental plasticity and
adaptability with increasing age again suggest a common
basis for both.

A similarity between biological and psychological or-
ganization exists even in the manner in which they
become disorganized. Neither is perfect or infallible.
As has been mentioned, the beautifully regulated prog-
ress of embryonic development, which usually marches
so precisely toward its destined goal, may sometimes be
grievously deranged. The disorganization of mental
processes resembles that of bodily ones in so many re-

" A. GeseH, Studies in Child Development* pp. 54, 55.

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 65

spects as to suggest that both arc the result of disturb-
ances in fundamentally similar mechanisms.

Finally, from quite a different quarter, support for the
present hypothesis comes from the concepts of Gcstalt
psychology. I am not competent to discuss these in de-
tail, but the basic position of this theory is that sensations
are not separate and independent things, each nerve cell
carrying a specific message which is unrelated to any
other message, but that there is a spontaneous and com-
pulsory grouping of them into patterns (Gestalten).
These have not arisen from chaotic jumbles of sensation
by slowly acquired experience, but are there by virtue
of the organizing capacity of the nervous system itself.
As Kohler says: "Organization in a sensory field is some-
thing which originates as a characteristic achievement of
the nervous system*'; and again: "The organism is not
barren functionally; it is not a box containing conductors
each with a separate function; it responds to a situation,
first, by dynamical events peculiar to it as a system and,
then, by behavior which depends upon the results of that
dynamical organization and order." 16 In other words the
nervous system is morphogenetic It organizes its chaotic
data into forms, patterns, wholes. This is most readily
recognized in visual patterns. In a series of apparently
meaningless lines an observer will often see particular
forms which stand out from the rest. In a puzzle where
one is told to "find the elephant,** for example, suddenly
from the tangle of lines the figure of an elephant stands

W. Kohler, Gcsttdt Psychology, pp. 174, 180.

66 CELL AND PSYCHE

sharply out Such patterns arc seen as wholes and at
once, not as groupings of units. This formative, organ-
izing capacity of nervous tissue which shows itself in the
integration of sensations into wholes bears, it seems to me,
a striking resemblance to the formative capacity of proto-
plasm generally, as expressed in development and co-
ordinated maintenance. It certainly is evidence of a basic
similarity between the physical and the psychological
elements of protoplasmic behavior. Gestalt psychology
is one aspect of what may well be called Gestalt biology.
You will perhaps ask what relation there may be be-
tween our present hypothesis and the one proposed by
several writers, notably Samuel Butler, that heredity and
memory are fundamentally the same and even that re-
generation is a kind of "remembering." These ideas,
especially at the time when they were presented in the
challenging form which Darwin's great antagonist knew
how to use so well, attracted much attention. Even to-
day Unconscious Memory is good reading. But the great
advances in biology since Butler's day, and especially the
development of modern genetics, make it clear that he
was mistaken. It seems certain today that what is in-
herited is a series of genes, well insulated from external
change, and that these do not accumulate a record of
the bodily alterations acquired by the organism during
its life in the way that its nerve cells acquire a memory
of past events or a habit which these induced. There is
a resemblance between Butler's ideas and those here pre-
sented only in that both regard biological and psycholog-

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 67

ical facts as having a common basis. Our hypothesis sees
in purpose, however, rather than in memory, the process
common to life and mind.

One might well extend the argument further, but per-
haps enough evidence has been presented to convince the
reader that the simplest types of psychological activity bear
so many resemblances to the organizing processes of pro-
toplasm, as manifest in the regulatory character of all
vital activities, that it is at least reasonable to regard them
as having a common basis and origin. But many, I am
sure, are ready to remind me that it is not tropisms and
instincts and the behavior of plants and the lower animals
which chiefly interest us. Man is the only organism we
wish to explore; man, the flower and summit of the evo-
lutionary process; man, the possessor of intelligence and
rational thought, and subject^ therefore, to those doubts
about his nature and destiny which have so troubled his
kind from the beginning. The arguments here presented
are of significance, perhaps, for biologists and genetic psy-
chologists, but what do they tell us, one may ask, about
the upper reaches of man's mind and those higher quali-
ties of his spirit which set him up above the brutes?
What relation does biological organization have to this
vividly conscious, thoughtful life of ours?

The only answer I can offer is the old one of upward
evolutionary change. Most will concede that man's mind
as well as his body has ascended to its present high estate
from humble origins in lower forms of life. Reason and
abstract thought, the possession chiefly now of man alone,

68 CELL AND PSYCHE

have evidently come from the simpler psychical life of
his ancestors. The steps through which this has been
accomplished one can guess by observing the behavior of
the higher vertebrates and particularly the members of
the primate stock. Perhaps, as Bergson believes, the de-
velopment of man's intellect and capacity to reason has
resulted from his use of tools, a trait not shared by other
animals. This has enabled him to see relationships
among objects outside his own body and to recognize
uniformities in nature and the existence of causes and
their effects. Out of this has grown the ability to reason.
The power of imagination endows him with the capacity
of abstract thought which has proven so vastly important
to his progress. One cannot minimize the tremendous
importance of this development of man's mind to himself
and to the world, for the advantage it gave him has set
him above the rest of animate nature far more than his
very modest bodily attainments would ever have done.
It is hard to see in it anything qualitatively new, how-
ever. The argument still stands up that intellect is sim-
ply a very complex expression of the regulatory character
of all protoplasmic activity. Secondarily, as James says
in the quotation of a moment ago, the mind does many
other things. These are of the greatest significance for
our lives, but from the viewpoint of evolution they are
indeed secondary to its major biological function.

When we come to the origin of man's spiritual quali-
tieshis love of beauty, his aspirations to virtue and god-
liness, his yearning for understanding qualities which

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 69

have been the hope and despair of his race, we are con-
fronted by a more difficult question. Whence have such
traits arisen? They seem, indeed, to be something new
among living things. Most of them arc either unknown
among the lower animals or represented there only in
rudimentary fashion. They are surely most significant
and worthy of study, and evidently tell much about the
complex biological systems which we are. These I shall
discuss more fully in the concluding chapter.

Finally, another serious objection to my whole argu-
ment will occur to many. The goal of biological develop-
ment is a single complete organism. Its attainment and
maintenance in a given state fulfill the primitive "pur-
pose" in the egg. What relation can there be between
such a single, persistent goal and the stream of thoughts
and purposes which make up man's rich conscious life?
If mind indeed is at bottom a glorified expression of the
organizing power of protoplasm, how can we explain its
constantly changing content, its vast versatility?

This is not an easy question, but I believe it can be
answered. The stream of consciousness, to be sure, is far
more complex than the plodding, single-track purposive-
ness of development. Nevertheless, the latter process is
not as limited as it often appears. A single organism is
its goal, or a specific functional state, and the persistent
drive to attain this goal despite all obstacles is the most
significant thing about life. The exact character of the
organism produced, however, will depend, in some meas-
ure at least, on the environment in which it develops.

TO CELL AND PSYCHE

There is a variety of primrose, for example, which will
produce white flowers if grown in a warm greenhouse,
but red ones in a cooler one. Here the end, the goal, the
"purpose," is quite different depending on the temper-
ature at which development proceeds. The small vinegar
fly, Drosophila, which is such an important animal for
modern genetics, can be grown under experimental con-
ditions as to temperature, food, and other environmental
factors quite different from those met in normal develop-
ment; and when this happens, individuals may be pro-
duced which are markedly unlike the typical flies. The
literature of genetics is full of such examples.

In all these cases the genetic constitution of the organ-
ism is not changed, but the way in which this expresses
itself in development is very different depending on the
conditions under which development takes place. Genet-
ics has learned that most genes are not ones "for" certain
characters but that what each will do depends on the
internal and external conditions under which the gene
operates. It has not one role but a whole repertoire.
Physiological equilibria, delicately maintained under one
environment, may also change their levels as conditions
change.

The relation of these changing developmental goals to
a stream of conscious thoughts is not too remote, for
psychological goals also change as the environment
changes. A simple animal like a mollusk, anchored in
one spot or moving but slowly, is adjusted to a relatively
stable environment When this is altered, it changes

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 71

accordingly, but the number of necessary alterations is
slight. Its "purposes" are few and constant. Its "men-
tal" life must be sluggish in the extreme! An insect,
moving about much more rapidly and exposed to a far
more varied environment, is continually adjusting its
inner state to these changes and has a far more complex
psychical activity, as its well-developed nervous system
indicates. The mental life of man, however, has been
stepped up to so much higher a level that it seems to be
quite different in character from that of animals. His
environment is vastly more complex than theirs not only
because of the development of his intellect and social rela-
tionships but because he responds to symbols pictures
and the spoken and written word. Among civilized men
the number of symbols and the reactions they induce
the ideas they convey are exceedingly numerous and for
many persons are among the most important factors in
the environment. Beyond all this, man possesses an abil-
ity which further enriches the life of his mind and sets
him sharply apart from the brutes: he can conjure up
before him, so to speak, images of events in the past or
in the possible future, hypothetical conditions, assumed
relations. Thus in the quiet of his chamber, physically
at rest and subject to no change in his surroundings, he
can indulge in that highest of intellectual activities, ab-
stract thought. In the mind of an artist there may arise
the idea for a great picture, and without this idea any
collection of paint and canvas is meaningless. These are
among those secondary qualities of the mental life of

73 CELL AND PSYCHE

which James speaks. Memory, imagination, and abstract
thought, the ability to bind the past and future into the
present and to single out and manipulate particular quali-
ties or relations in the environment, these are great ac-
complishments and enrich the mental life of man far
above that enjoyed by any other animal. How this
is accomplished psychologists cannot tell us. How we
arc able to say, lo, I will close my eyes and fill my mind
with the sensations and actions and experiences of yester-
day, or with a picture of events which I should like to
bring to pass tomorrow this is still a mystery. In the
terms of our present thesis, however, the mystery is one
of protoplasmic mechanics, for each of these ideas, these
thoughts, these mental pictures is ultimately resolvable,
I believe, so far as its mechanism is concerned, into the
same sort of an organized norm or goal as is found in
die protoplasmic system which controls and regulates
development Ideas were presumably desires or purposes
at first and expressed themselves directly in action; but
such psychological events do not necessarily lead to action.
A continuous stream of them may fill the mind without
producing any visible physical changes in the body. The
wish may thus indeed be father to the thought.

Interpreted in terms of the present hypothesis, there-
fore, the whole conscious life of man, rich in ideas, in
inspirations, in intellectual subtleties, in imagination and
emotion, is simply the manifestation of an organized bio-
logical system raised to its loftiest levels. Upon this the
outer world impinges as a series of sensations, real or

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 73

imagined, and out of it come actions, either actual phys-
ical responses or the more subtle ones of the mind. What
takes place between these events is, at bottom, the regu-
latory activity of the protoplasmic system. In its lowliest
expression this appears as regulatory control of growth
and function. This merges imperceptibly into instinct,
and from these simplest of psychical phenomena grad-
ually emerge the complex mental activities of the higher
animals and finally the enormously rich and varied life
of the mind and spirit of man. At no point is there a
sudden break, a radical innovation. The complex has
come from the simple by a gradual process of evolution-
ary progression. The basic phenomenon from which all
this ultimately arises, the fact that living things are
organized systems, is the fundamental problem, still un-
answered. Upon its solution will depend our under-
standing not only of biology and psychology but of the
whole of man.

Such is the statement of my hypothesis. There is noth-
ing very novel about it, for ideas of this sort have often
arisen in the minds of biologists and philosophers, though
no one, perhaps, has pushed them to quite the extremes
that I propose to do. They are highly speculative and will
seem nebulous and of little meaning to many hard-headed
scientists. They suffer, too, from a certain psychological
naivete, for one can hardly hope to explain the vast com-
plexity of man's mind in such short space without over-
simplifying the problem. We have set out, however, to
try to bring the facts of biology and psychology under a

74 CELL AND PSYCHE

single aegis, and I believe that the hypothesis here pre-
sented offers a defensible attempt. These ideas would be
interesting and worth pursuing for their own sake and
their relation to the sciences of life and mind; but their
chief importance, it seems to me, is in their bearing on
some of the great problems of man's nature and his rela-
tion to the universe, problems which have troubled him
from the beginning and which were set before us at the
start of these discussions. The significance of such a con-
cept of life and mind for the solution of these problems
I shall discuss, albeit most inadequately, in the final
chapter.

CHAPTER III

SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR
PHILOSOPHY

IN THE FIRST CHAPTER the conclusion was reached that the
fact of organized growth and activity, leading to the
production and maintenance of those self-regulating struc-
tures so appropriately called organisms, is the most dis-
tinctive feature of living things. In the second, your
attention was called to the close resemblance between
this biological organization, on the one hand, and desire,
purpose, and the higher phenomena of mental life, on
the other. I then tried to persuade you that these two
are manifestations of the same underlying fact, whether
observed from the outside by a biologist studying an
organism or experienced from the inside by the organism
itself.

Such a hypothesis may be interesting as a philosophical
speculation, one will say, but what can it do to answer
the questions we asked ourselves at the beginning of these
discussions? Can it lead to any new insight into the
nature of life, especially as expressed in the remarkable
species to which we belong, and into our relationship
with the rest of the universe? I believe that it can. My
concluding task is to present reasons for this belief and

j6 CELL AND PSYCHE

to discuss six such problems upon which the hypothesis
here proposed may throw some light.

The first of these is one which has tormented man
throughout his history: the relationship between those
two parts of h*\ which seem so vastly different his body
and his mind. These evidently have much to do with
each other, but just how are they related ? Is the body-
tough, tangible, and material the part of a man which is
truly real and the mind but a curious result of physical
forces only, an epiphenomenon, something that rides
along on the crest of the material wave but has no con-
trol over it, no existence independent of it? Such has
been the belief of many men through the ages, and such
is the creed of scientific orthodoxy today, confident in
matter, suspicious of all else. Or is mind, with those
deeper feelings which accompany it, the essential member
of the pair, autonomous, ruling matter, and in some mys-
terious way the true and permanent reality, and all else
illusion? Yes, say the poets, the dreamers, the believers,
those who walk by faith, not by sight. Whichever is
dominant, this vexing dualism, splitting man in two, has
>long wrought confusion in his thinking. But if the view
of life which I have presented is correct, such dualism is
apparent only, and not real. Body and mind are simply
two aspects of the same biological phenomenon. The
first is no more real than the second, for they are one.
The pulling together of matter into an organized living
system is what we feel as a mental experience.

The advantage of this point of view is that it does not

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 77

commit us to the position of either the materialist or the
idealist. It simply asserts that there is one basic problem,
common to both, which must be solved before we can
understand either. The materialist may well maintain
that this view is a sound one and essentially what he has
always believed. Since matter and energy in his opinion
are the only true realities in the universe, to assert that
what we know as mind is nothing but the organizing
process in the development of those material systems
which living things are, is to admit the truth of his posi-
tion that mind is simply one expression of the activity of
such a system. The profound effects of drugs upon men-
tal phenomena of all sorts, the clear relation between
specific regions of the brain and psychical states, and the
notable achievements of neurophysiology generally all
lend support to such a view.

But this hypothesis, if carried to its logical conclusion,
makes such severe demands that the idealist may fairly
entertain a doubt as to whether matter and energy, in the
traditional sense, can satisfy them. If material changes re-
lated to the processes of growth and function account for
mental changes as well, and if the simpler desires and
purposes are thus rooted in the regulatory character of
protoplasm, we cannot restrict the responsibility of this
material system but must expect it also to explain the
highest qualities and triumphs of the mind. These are
as much an expression of protoplasmic integration as the
form of a leaf or the growth of an embryo. The organ-
izing capacity of living stuff so clearly manifest at the

78 CELL AND PSYCHE

lower biological levels is equally effective far above them
and is the source of new ideas, of high aspirations, of
lofty flights of the creative imagination; the means, in-
deed, by which man launches out into the deep and chal-
lenges the unknown universe. Surely matter and energy
which can thus come to flower must be more than the
simple things which the student of the physical sciences
sometimes considers them. Indeed, our respect for the
complexities and possibilities of the material world has
vasdy increased during the past generation, largely be-
cause of the labors of some of these physicists. The
possibility emerges that instead of matter and energy
explaining life, life as a very special category of the
physical universe may in time make contributions of its
own to our knowledge of matter and energy. Genetics
and physiology have thus already posed new problems
for the physical sciences. Needham remarks that "em-
pirical discoveries on the purely biological level thus serve
as stimuli to the physiologist to investigate processes
which his methods alone would never have revealed in
the first place." 1 J. S. Haldane goes even further: "As
the conception of organism/* he writes, "is a higher and
more concrete conception than that of matter and energy,
science must ultimately aim at gradually interpreting the
physical world of matter and energy in terms of the bio-
logical conception of organism.** 2 Hie English mathe-
matician and philosopher J. W. N. Sullivan agrees. Says

1 Joseph Needham, Order and Ufa p. 22*

* J. S. Haldane, Ucchawsm, Life **d Persond&y, p. 98.

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 79

he: "It is possible that our outlook on the physical uni-
verse will again undergo a profound change. This change
will come about through the development of biology. If
biology finds it absolutely necessary, for the description
of living things, to develop new concepts of its own, then
the present outlook on 'inorganic nature* will also be

profoundly affected The notions of physics will have

to be enriched, and this enrichment will come from
biology." 3

If this is true, is it not possible that, in like manner, a
study of those qualities of the human spirit which we
regard as the highest expressions of life may throw light
upon problems which neither biology nor the physical
sciences alone could ever solve?

Such speculations are perhaps of little merit now, but
in this ancient problem of the mind and the body it is
not without value to remember, whatever our views about
riiCTfi may be, that they have a common denominator, a
fundamental similarity, and that whatever commerce
there is between them is based upon this fact A drug
affects a mental process, or an emotion a physiological
one, not directly and specifically but through its influ-
ence upon the entire organized system. The rise of psy-
chosomatic medicine is a recognition of the fact that the
entire individual, mind and body, is the important entity
in health and disease, and that no one part can suffer or
be ministered to without affecting all the rest. Hie
patient is a biological system, not a collection of organs

* J. W. N. Sullivan, The Limitations of Science* pp. 188, 189.

8o CELL AND PSYCHE

and symptoms. This system is the unity, the synthesis
of the mental and the material, because both are aspects
of it, and an understanding of what such a living system
is and how it works will ultimately solve the ancient
enigma which we have been discussing.

The second problem for an understanding of which
the hypothesis here presented may be useful is that of
motivation, of the desires and purposes which drive us
on and which are the foundation of all mental life. We
have discussed the similarity between the regulatory
character of development and physiological activity, on
the one hand, and that of behavior, instinct, and conscious
purpose, on the other. A standard, norm, or goal set up
in living stuff but still to be reached creates the desire for
its attainment; and if this attainment is prevented, or if
the equilibrium is thrown out of balance, the organism
experiences unease, pain, or distress of body or mind.

The desire to reach such a goal can hardly be separated,
at the lower levels, from the purpose to do so. Around
this idea of purpose there has long raged one of those
philosophical polemics which touch a problem so funda-
mental and so difficult that it seems to defy solution.
Aristotle distinguished efficient causes, which produce
effects through direct and evident physical means, from
find ones, which are goals or purposes in the mind and
effective through man's moving toward them. Final
causes, as it were, leap across a gap to accomplish their
effect and seem not to require the operation of any mech-
anism. It is the existence of this type of cause which

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 81

science often has so strenuously denied, since it seems to
involve a mysterious non-mechanical, non-material agency.
If I wish a cup of coffee and pour it out, the real cause
of this action is not the purpose which exists in my mind,
says the psychologist, but a complex chain of physical and
chemical steps in my nervous system. Purpose is often a
"fighting" word nowadays. Whitehead remarks rather
quizzically that scientists who are animated by the pur-
pose of proving that they are purposeless are an interest-
ing subject for study. An advantage of the hypothesis
which I have here been defending is that it eliminates the
antithesis between efficient and final causes since what
appears in the mind as a purpose, later to be realized in
action, is the same thing as the physiological, protoplasmic
norm or "goal" set up in the brain and coming to realiza-
tion through a series of regulatory processes.

Such a hypothesis, it seems to me, if it is sound, would
dispose of the difficulties involved in the concept of final
causes and teleology generally* This has long been the
bogey of the scientist, particularly of the biologist, since
it is often carelessly invoked to explain natural phe-
nomena. The plant is sometimes said to grow toward the
light "for the purpose" of illuminating its leaves, or be-
cause the plant "needs" light to make food. It is clear
that to call such behavior purposeful and to fail to point
out to the student the physiological mechanisms involved
and the long evolutionary history that lies behind them
is vastly to oversimplify the problem in his mind and to
give kirn a false idea of the character of living organisms.

fa CELL AND PSYCHE

The teaching of elementary biology is too often vitiated
by such naive comparisons. The present hypothesis, al-
though it contends that these reactions in their essential
nature can be regarded fundamentally as manifestations
of purpose, recognizes this purpose to be at a far lower
level than that with which the student is familiar in his
own mind.

Much of the difficulty in accepting the idea of purpose-
ful action by plants and animals comes from the assump-
tion that this implies an ability to do what is best for
them, what will always tend toward their survival. This
would indicate an unexplainable ability of living sub-
stance invariably to do the right thing, to adapt itself in
a favorable manner to changing conditions. This it seems
by no means to possess. Many of the races of plants and
animals which have appeared as mutations certainly lack
it The type of corn known as "lazy/' for example,
grows flat on the ground, and no amount of propping up
will induce it to become erect It is not weak-stemmed.
It is naturally prostrate, held there by the unusual dis-
tribution of its growth substances, in turn controlled by
its genetic constitution. In our sense of the word it has
a purpose to grow horizontally but this would soon
lead to its extinction in nature. Organisms often fail to
act in such a way as to favor their survival. As Jennings
has said, to make mistakes is one of the characteristic
phenomena of biology. In other words, we can and often
do have purposive organization without adaptation. Each
individual has its own genetic equilibria or physiological

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 83

norms, its own primitive purposes, and new ones which
arise may well be unfavorable. Natural selection elimi-
nates these and preserves individuals which tend to react
in a favorable way, which have "purposes" that are con-
ducive to successful life and survival, which "want" the
right things. There is really more here, I believe, than a
figure of speech. We are justified in saying that the ulti-
mate interpretation of why a leaf turns toward the light
is that such action is a regulatory and thus a purposive
but not necessarily an adaptive phenomenon. This does
not mean, of course, that the mechanisms by which this
is accomplished hormone distribution and other physical
changes are not essential. These are the means by which
a specific regulatory behavior is attained. Such behavior
enables the plant to survive, however, by virtue of long
evolutionary selection and not because of any innate tend-
ency to react in a favorable manner. Adaptation, the
beautiful and precise fashion in which organisms so com-
monly respond to their surroundings in such a way as to
live and reproduce successfully, is simply the result of
past competition between many different inherited indi-
vidual purposes.

This vexing problem of purpose is somewhat simplified,
I think, if we thus are able, in the individual organism,
to reconcile efficient with final causes, mechanism with
teleology, by showing that they are essentially the same.
In all this, again, the nub of the problem, the question on
which everything else depends, is the nature of this organ-
izing, regulatory behavior which runs through all life

84 CELL AND PSYCHE

and seems always purposive, making action conform to
a goal set up in the system. The ultimate explanation
advanced for this basic biological fact will determine our
interpretation of purpose at every level from the growth
of an embryo to the aspiration of a saint.

The third question is related to this the ancient one
of value. Why do some things seem inherently desirable
and worthy of our devotion, and others unattractive or
abhorrent? The elusive quality called beauty, for example,
surely exists and for many is a supreme value in the uni-
verse. But what is it, why do we admire it, and how
can it be recognized? It bears no sure sign upon it, nor
is there any yardstick to measure its degree. Men often
differ as to its presence, as to whether a painting or a
piece of musk is beautiful or not, and the tides of opinion
rise and fall from one generation to the next So is it
with what is called the right; all are far from agreement
as to what acts and attitudes are right and what are
wrong, and moral codes often change at frontiers and
with time. Yet the right is surely another of the supreme
values, and men innumerable have died for it. A chief
cause of confusion in the world today is that men cannot
agree as to what values are, cannot establish for them any
code which will command wide acceptance. And yet,
uncertain as values often seem to be, there is something
in them which demands our allegiance and utters an
imperative that we cannot disregard.

This problem comes down at last, I think, to the direc-
tion and character of the goals of life. Those desires set

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 85

up in protoplasm and determining the ends toward which
an organism moves are not random ones. Many lower
animals show preferences among the various tastes, odors,
and colors of which their sense organs give report. The
growing parts of plants move toward or away from light
or the earth's center* Even the naked protoplasm of a
slime mold pushes out toward certain objects and pulls
back from others. Of course, these reactions have long
been winnowed out by selection and are usually such as
favor the survival of the organism; but, if our hypothesis
is sound, they are the primitive beginnings of what in
man have become conscious preferences, judgments as to
value. The fact that these preferences follow certain gen-
eral directions, vague though these often are, is certainly
not without significance for the problem of value. We
may not all agree as to the beauty of a given object, but
the fact that training can increase an appreciation of the
beautiful and that the accumulating opinions of men
through the years seem to move toward ever greater agree-
ment encourages us to believe that human judgments as
to values have some meaning. We may well gain insight
on these problems by studying the preferences set up in
living things, the course and orientation established by
those protoplasmic systems we have been considering.
They are vanes which show the way the winds of the
universe are blowing. If there is any harmony between
our instinctive preferences as living things and any stand-
ards of value established in nature, its basis lies in this
organized stuff of life.

86 CELL AND PSYCHE

The fourth question on which our hypothesis may be
of help grows directly from the last two. It is another
ancient battleground the problem of free will versus
determinism. Are we really free to move toward the
fulfillment of our desires, toward the accomplishment of
our purposes, or is this sense of freedom an illusion and
are we actually machines, as truly determined and as sub-
ject to mechanical laws as an automaton? Perhaps noth-
ing new can be said on this venerable issue, but with the
progress of knowledge it continues to be stated in fresh
terms.

Evidently something must determine our acts, or else
we must believe in chaos. The issue is whether we deter-
mine them or whether something not ourselves does so,
something alien to us, either within our bodies or with-
out. Surely we have the feeling, and so strongly that it
is taken for granted as the basis of our moral and social
codes, that we do determine our own deeds, that we are
responsible for them. To be sure, we are often buffeted
by our environment, often kept from our heart's desire;
but in normal individuals this does not shake the feeling
that we are still the masters of our fates, the captains of
our souls.

And yet almost the whole weight of modern physical
science speaks in no uncertain terms against this con-
clusion. What are our desires, that they should turn aside
the inevitability of a chemical reaction? How can we
expect to modify so truly sublime a certainty as the Second
Law of Thermodynamics ? To do so, tough-minded men

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 87

tell us, is to give up the battle, to believe in fairies, to
expect miracles, to turn our backs on the whole faith and
fabric of science. This dilemma between what we feel
is, and what we think must be, has troubled generations
of men and is perhaps no nearer a solution today than
ever. Says Henderson: "It is a strange irony that the
principles of science should seem to deny the necessary
conviction of common sense/* 4 The hypothesis which has
been presented here may help to frame the issue in a some-
what different and perhaps a clearer light.

I have interpreted a purpose as essentially similar to a
developmental or physiological equilibrium, a tension or
prospective goal set up within the living system and nor-
mally realized in action if external forces do not prevent
As an open-field runner in football side-steps one tackier,
dashes ahead, dodges another, perhaps to cross the goal
line, perhaps to be stopped short of it, but always with
the transcendent purpose in his mind of making a touch-
down, so in a far less dramatic and obvious fashion an
embryo moves toward its "purposed" goal, surmounting
as best it can the obstacles in its way. Such obstacles, to
it and to us, are often too powerful and prevent the attain-
ment of an end. But this sort of bondage we recognize
as such. It does not destroy our belief that we are really
free, for it does not affect the fundamental mechanism
through which purpose is translated into deed. This
translation is dearly part of the same dynamic system as
the setting up of the purpose itself. Furthermore and

* L. J. Henderson, The Order of Nature, p. 92.

88 CELL AND PSYCHE

this is the important thing the ego, the self which does
the purposing and acting, is also a part of this same sys-
tem, is indeed the core of it and the sum of all the organ-
izing relations of the individual. The purpose and the
purposer are one. It is we who will and do, not some
agent foreign to us. Surely, if this is so, we do what we
will, for the desires that arise in us are an essential part
of us, and to speak of compulsion here seems foolish.
How these purposes and how we ourselves arise through
the organizing activity of living matter is the real ques-
tion. If this is all part of a rigid, determined, material
order, then our sense of freedom, which is merely the
coincidence between ourselves and our acts, is, in the strict
sense, illusion, as so many philosophers have maintained;
but it is an illusion which bears the stamp of reality and
for practical purposes is real.

But there is another way of looking at this problem.
Life is not static. It is creative. It begets novelties. Each
organism is a new and different event. It may be that
this creativeness i$ expressed not only in genetic changes
in protoplasm but in new purposes and ideas arising
within us, and that the organized system we have been
discussing in some way calls these up, brings them to
pass independently of external compulsion, and therefore
that in a more distinctive sense it is a free, creative agent.
As Whitehcad says, the psychical is a part of the creative
advance into novelty. Vitalism, you will say; but the
inner springs of creativeness in protoplasm still are so
obscure that we should not be dogmatic about them. The

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 89

human spirit, like an explorer in an unknown sea, may
really be steering its course as it will, free and untram-
melled, with nothing to guide it but its own inner direc-
tive. Whence this arises may be one of the sources of
the new and unpredictable in the universe.

The real issue in the problem of freedom is again the
fundamental character of biological organization, of what
it is that sets up self-regulating mechanisms in a living
thing, and ultimately in the nervous system of man, and
which thus creates purposes and fulfills them in action.
To bring into this ancient controversy the conception
that man is such an organized system, with all that we
have seen this to imply, makes possible, it seems to me,
a somewhat clearer statement of the issue involved.

A fifth question which our hypothesis may tend to
clarify and which has already been mentioned is that of
the self, the ego, the individuality of a human being. One
of the most noteworthy features of living matter is that
it not only tends to pull itself together in an organized
fashion but that the systems it thus creates form separate
and distinct organisms. Almost of necessity this is so.
The goal of the organizing process seems always to be a
single, whole individual* This is evident not only in nor-
mal development but especially in cases of regeneration,
for if a part of an individual is removed the course of
growth will be altered in such a way that the missing part
or an equivalent structure is replaced and a whole organ-
ism thus restored. There is reason to believe that every
cell, at least in its early stages, is capable, if separated

90 CELL AND PSYCHE

from the rest, of growing into an entire individual. A
single whole is immanent in all its parts. When a proto-
plasmic system is continuous, it tends to produce and
maintain a single organism. Where parts of it arc sep-
arated from each other, cither actually or functionally,
each of them normally does this. Protoplasm always
comes in separate packages. One of the most fascinating
aspects of the study of organic development is to observe
how universal is this tendency to form single organisms.
Such organisms may be combined into societies, or may
actually be united into colonial masses, and in some, as
in most plants, the individual is a rather loosely knit
aggregation of multiple parts. Nevertheless the product
of the developmental process is almost invariably a single,
functioning, coordinated, living unit. The significant
fact in all this is that the individual is the sum of all the
organizing relations within it It is the center of inte-
gration, the core of the processes of coordination, all of
which are knit together into a single physical and psycho-
logical whole. The result of all this, of course, is the
production of countless centers of organization, each of
which thus has its own psychical identity. These selves
in the lower organisms arc relatively simple, but in the
upper portion of the evolutionary series among the ani-
mals they have developed into the complex beings which
culminate in human personalities.

Such a living individual is a remarkable thing. It is
a unit not only in space but in time. It persists. Its his-
tory is a continuous progress, not a mere repetition of the

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 91

same reactions. In the pulse and stir of time it maintains
its own identity. Bergson has emphasized this fact. "Like
the universe as a whole," he says, "like each conscious be-
ing taken separately, the organism which lives is a thing
that endures. Its past, in its entirety, is prolonged into its
present, and abides there, actual and acting. How other-
wise could we understand that it passes through distinct
and well-marked phases, that it changes its age in short,
that it has a history?" 5 However long its history may be,
however varied its surroundings and its activities, it re-
mains the same individual. Matter enters and leaves it,
and its material constitution may be replaced many times,
but its fundamental organization is unaltered. It is
unique; not just one of a long series of similar units, but
unlike or so it seems any other individual that ever
lived* An unchanging genetic constitution is doubtless
of basic importance here, but characteristics acquired dur-
ing the individual's history bodily skills, memories,
tastes, and prejudices are also built into the persisting
self. For any living machine to maintain the delicate
physiological balance necessary for life is remarkable
enough, but to preserve its specific character, unaltered
by the flux of chemical and physical change, is indeed
past our understanding now. Human personality, ten-
uous as it may sometimes seem to be, is of surprisingly
tough fiber. The knot of norms, goals, steady states,
potencies, and purposes of which it is composed is almost
impossible to loosen. To kill it is easy, and to direct the

*H, Bergson, Creative Evolution, p. 15.

92 CELL AND PSYCHE

coarse of its development not difficult; but to break it
down and make it into something different, as a sculptor
does with his cky; to shake it free from its past, to de-
stroy its identity this the organized pattern of personality
most successfully resists.

Around the fact of individuality centers a whole group
of problems. What is human personality? Has it a value
of itself, or is this submerged in the greater value of a
society? What is this elusive thing we call the soul?
What prospect is there that it may be so sturdy as to
survive the disorganization of the body? Can it com-
municate directly with other souls ? Here also arise those
great ethical questions of the relationships between hu-
man individuals, of selfishness, hatred, altruism, and
love. These are questions of the utmost importance not
only for an understanding of the universe but for their
bearing on the philosophies of men. The hypothesis
which has been presented in these pages will certainly
not solve them, but it does suggest that they all neces-
sarily arise from the one fundamental fact which under-
lies the argument here. Whatever one may think of
psyches, egos, or souls, they all originate in this remark-
able process by which living matter pulls itself together
into integrated and organized self-regulating systems.
The real problem, as has been pointed out repeatedly, is
the character of these systems. The soul is the internally
experienced aspect of bodily organization.

Again the materialist can readily accept our conclusion.
The soul to him is simply the psychical aspect of the

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 93

material bodily system and nothing more. The ties be-
tween physiology and psychology are still obscure, but the
latter, he maintains, must certainly be subordinate to the
former. The idealist may not be convinced, however.
This fact of the organization of living stuff is the very
nub of all these problems and until it is disposed of, says
he, no certain conclusions can be drawn. Organization,
as some philosophers think, may be one of the major
categories and may control, rather than arise from, mat-
ter* Perhaps these centers of organization are primary
things, not secondary ones. Perhaps they may even exist
independently of the matter in which they arc now cm-
bodied. Perhaps, as Schrodinger suggests, 6 they are each
a part of a universal spiritual whole. All these ideas the
materialist will look upon with amusement or indigna-
tion, depending on the toughness of his mind; and, in-
deed, in the clarity of the laboratory it does savor of the
preposterous to think of the soul as anything but a tem-
porary phenomenon, dependent on a series of complex
chemical reactions in the body. But the universe is a
remarkable and often unpredictable place, and unexpected
things keep coming out of it. The obvious is not always
the true, as physics has learned so well. Living matter
may conceal mysteries deeper and more difficult to com-
prehend even than this. To say that the soul has nothing
to do with the body is foolish. To say that it is a mere
accessory to the body may prove equally so. All we arc
maintaining here is that soul and body are manifestations

e E. Schrodingcr, What If Ufa?, pp. 88-91.

94 CEIL AND PSYCHE

of the same basic phenomenon, are a fundamental unity.
Whence this comes and whither it may go is the ultimate
question. Meanwhile the fact that living nature so in-
variably expresses itself in individuals should emphasize
their importance in the nature of things, and the fact
that the highest manifestations of the life of m?n come
not through groups but through single human person-
alities should convince us that these are worthy of our
deepest respect and concern.

Out of this problem of the origin of the self and human
personality grows that deep final question of what man's
nature really is and what is his place and significance in
the universe. To seek from our hypothesis aid in the solu-
tion of these questions may seem to exalt the fact of
biological organization far beyond its natural limitations;
but even here I believe that we may gain from it some
suggestions which are not without value.

Man is indeed the paragon of animals. Arisen in a
few score millennia from the rank of a second-class mam-
mal by his mastery of the power to reason, he has gained
ascendancy over every living thing and is set off from
the rest by differences which mark Km as unique in all
creation, the crown and climax of the evolutionary
drama. But a human being, the organized self in which
the life of man is expressed, is far more complex than a
study of his evolutionary history might lead one to ex-
pect. He is no mere glorified robot, ruthless, weighing
everything in the scales of survival and physical satisfac-
tion. He is a vast deal more than a bundle of purposes

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 95

with an intellect to help accomplish them* From far
down within hirr^ in that deep subconscious matrix
where matter and energy and life are so inextricably
mixed together, there surge up into consciousness a
throng of emotions, longings, loves and hates, imaginings
and aspirations, some exalted and some base, which form
the most important part of what he is. Here are not only
the passions, lusts, and cravings of a species but newly
risen above the level of the beasts, but qualities foreign
to the brute creation, longings for higher things than they
can ever know. "Man," says Du Nouy, "is not merely a
combination of appetites, instincts, passions and curiosity*
Something more is needed to explain great human deeds,
virtues, sacrifices, martyrdom." 7

Man is stirred by the marvel of beauty in the world
around him. Imagination is his alone, the capacity to
build in the chambers of his mind things never seen be-
fore and thus to create the arts and the sciences. For
him the noble and the good exist, and he aspires to reach
them. Love for his fellows and a desire unselfishly to
serve them have reversed the jungle code and given fatn
a vision of the brotherhood of man, whether he calls it
the Paradise of the Proletariat or the Kingdom of Heaven*
He is consumed with eagerness to learn the truth, to
penetrate the secrets of nature and thus to push forward
the frontiers of human knowledge. The wonder and
mystery of the universe overcome him, and he falls on
his knees in reverence. The conviction stirs in his heart

T Lccomte du Nouy, The Road to Reason, p. 234.

96 CELL AND PSYCHE

that he is not alone in it but that something not unlike
himself is there with which he can hold communion.

These qualities are far from universal in our race, but the
goals which they erect, however differently described and
varying in detail, have been acknowledged by all sorts
and conditions of men as the highest expressions of hu-
man life. These inner urgencies, these passionate and
imaginative longings for something higher than he yet
has found, are the expression of man's spirit This is a
great and mysterious thing. It is no minor or accessory
part of fair" but essential for his very life. Its values are
the highest that he knows. The universe comes to flower
not in atoms or galaxies but in poets and philosophers,
in scientists and saints.

To separate these yearnings of man's spirit from the
lowlier desires by which he gains his food and propagates
his race is hardly possible. Their germs are stirring in
the beasts. Maternal affection, herd loyalty, cooperative
effort, faithfulness these can be found in many animals,
and what we know of human evolution strongly suggests
that man's nobler qualities, which now seem so distinc-
tively his own, slowly emerged as he rose to his present
high estate. The theme of my argument has been that a
continuous progression exists from the biological goals
operative in the development and behavior of a living
organism to the psychological facts of desire and purpose.
What reason is there to exclude from this progression
these highest of desires, these most exalted of aspirations?
Indeed, their almost instinctive character seems to bring

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 97

them even closer to the biological level than is the intellect
itself. Thus to interpret the mysteries of the human spirit
in the pedestrian terms of embryology may seem fantastic,
but is it any more so than to believe that a thing of beauty
can be broken down into a series of chemical reactions in
its creator's brain? It is a lofty conception, I thinly to
regard the soaring spirit of man, which creates beauty,
strives for knowledge, and aspires to an understanding
of the mysteries of the universe, as rooted in the same
vital processes which fashion his limbs and time the beat-
ing of his heart; to look upon the inspiration which
welled up in Shakespeare's mind as he wrote Hamlet or
in Beethoven's to find expression in the Ninth Symphony ',
or the imagination which pictured the "Last Supper" to
Leonardo before he transferred it to the chapel wall, or
the vision of St. Francis in the Portmncula, as but loftier
expressions of that same creative urgency that stirs in
protoplasm everywhere. By means which still elude us
but are the goal equally of the biologist, the poet, and
the philosopher are born those yearnings which make n*an
the noble animal he is. Living things are seekers and
creators, and striving for goals is the essence of all life;
but in man these goals have risen to heights before un-
dreamed of, and he can set them ever higher at his wilL
Man's feet are planted in the dust, but he lifts his face
to the stars.

The question still remains as to why these highest
qualities of man came into being. The obvious answer
is that they were useful to his survival and that indi-

98 CELL AND PSYCHE

viduals and races which possessed them had an advantage
and were preserved by natural selection. Darwin's great
generalization is still in high repute and may well explain
the profound advances in man's reasoning powers which
have been achieved since the days of the ape man, but
selectionists have always had difficulty in explaining the
origin of his spiritual qualities. To be stirred by beauty
surely had no survival value in a primitive society, nor
would a cave man who foggily began to ponder the
mysteries of the world be likely to get his share of
mastodon meat.

The ruthlessness of the struggle for existence has
doubtless been over-emphasized, and many instances are
known where there is cooperation rather than conflict
between animals; but unselfishness and love of one's fel-
lows seem so opposed to the very basis of natural selection
that to derive them entirely by its means is to strain the
theory. Too many times in the long history of man the
light of civilization, kindled by desire for something
higher than savagery, has been snuffed out by the bar-
barians. Even today, who will be bold enough to say
that we are not still in peril from barbarism, from a sav-
agery more refined but not less brutal than its paleolithic
model? But always the upward tide, pushed back at one
point, begins to pour in elsewhere; and slowly, despite
discouragement and delay, it has continued steadily to rise.
The selectionist will say that the very persistence of these
higher ways of life proves their survival value. But it is
not the selective elimination of barbarous and selfish indi-

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 99

viduals and societies which, has lifted men from savagery.
Civilization comes not from an improvement of the germ
plasm but by experience and example, by the contagion
of higher and more satisfying ways of life. The true
cause, I believe, of man's upward climb is his persistent
yearning for those values which to him seem higher and
more satisfying and to which he instinctively aspires.

But whence do such strange longings arise? What is
there that should make man crave these higher things?
To the physiologist this is no mystery. These emotions,
passions, and longings of the human spirit, whatever
their evolutionary significance may be, must be anchored
firmly in the chemistry of protoplasm, in the physiology
of the nervous system itself. Is it not a fact that an extra
supply of adrenalin, poured into the blood by the glands
which secrete it, has a most profound effect on one's be-
havior? Many drugs are known which bring the user
dreams ineffable. Alcohol can alter one's whole person-
ality. Conscience dwells in the brain's frontal lobes, and,
if these are severed, the patient need fear no more the
chastening of this inner monitor. Genes control what
one can taste and see and hear, and our judgment of
what is beautiful must thus depend on our genetic con-
stitution. Love between male and female is conditioned
by the sex hormones. Even the tenderest of emotions,
mother love itself, is dependent on a sufficient supply of
prolactin in the blood. Here is our ancient problem
once again. To tie the spirit to material things, to
analyze a noble poem or symphony or picture into a

200 CELL AND PSYCHE

scries of chemical reactions and molecular changes, gives
but a dusty answer indeed to him who would seek to
understand the heights and depths of man's nature.

But if we are not satisfied with these somewhat pedes-
trian accounts of how man's spirit was born, what is there,
short of mysticism, to which we can turn? One great
fact in nature, it seems to me, does offer some light both
for this deep question and for the general problem of
goal-seeking. Man has climbed the age-long evolutionary
stairway from its simplest beginnings. In this progress
the organized living system in which successively his
ancestral life was passed became vastly more complex, and
the outreach of his mind and spirit grew ever wider. A
strange paradox of nature is the contrast between this
constant upward thrust in the evolution of life and the
downward drift of all lifeless nature as pictured by the
Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law, unshaken
by all the upheavals of modern physics, is a prophecy of
the fate of our material universe. It tells us that the
higher forms of energy are being degraded to heat, which
tends to spread itself evenly everywhere; that the ran-
domness of things is continually increasing, and that
complex physical systems tend always to be broken down
to simpler ones; in short, that the universe is slowly "run-
ning down" to a dead level of uniformity. What wound
it up is, of course, a major problem in cosmogony. But
an equally significant question is the place of life in this
vast process of material degradation; for life, in its evo-
lution from simple and still unknown beginnings up to

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 101

man, seems to move in just the opposite direction. This
great drama shows a continual increase in complexity, a
mounting tension, a steadily rising level of organization*
"The fundamental thread that seems to run through the
history of our world," says Needham, "is a continuous
rise in level of organization. . . ." And again: "The law
of evolution is a kind of converse of the second law of
thermodynamics, equally irreversible but contrary in
tendency." 8 There is here not an actual violation of die
Second Law, for the energy by which life is maintained
comes from the sun and is on its way down to lower
levels; but the tendency and direction of change of the
lifeless and of the living parts of nature are entirely
different, a contrast which has been recognized by many*
The course of evolution is marked by a continual rise in
the level of the goals we have been discussing develop-
mental, physiological, and psychological which life has
set up and toward which it has moved. Just as the up-
ward course of life introduces something new into the
world of matter, so the emergence of these qualities of
the human spirit has brought something new into bio-
logical evolution which finds no ready explanation in
mechanisms by which the rest of the organic world has
come to being. This is the culmination of that same
goal-seeking process which is found in the simplest liv-
ing cell. Pushing up against the weight of lifeless matter
it has organized protoplasm into the specific bodily forms
of plants and animals and expressed itself in desire, in

s Joseph Needham, Time: The Refreshing Pittcr, pp. 185, 230.

I0 2 CELL AND PSYCHE

purpose, and in the triumphs of mind. Pushing up still
further and seemingly beyond the governance of selective
forces, it has flowered in the spirit of man and borne
fruit in the lofty idealism which the noblest of our race
have shown. Not only does life express itself in organ-
ized systems of exquisite complexity wherein goals at
many levels are attained, but these systems are not static.
Their goals are ever changing. Man rides the crest of
this advancing wave. His nature and his destiny are ulti-
mately those of life itself, and the longings of his spirit
are part of the great upward surge of life from amoeba
to man. Who knows how far it still may carry him?
This creative quality in life seems to be a unique attri-
bute, setting it off from lifeless stuff; but what may be the
origin of it we do not know. If the fate of life is not
simply in die hands of outside forces but if the systems
in which it exists move forward under their own power,
so to speak, in directions governed by their own inner
urgencies, this is a biological and philosophical fact of
the first magnitude. If this inner directiveness, this au-
tonomy, of life can be explored, we shall approach an
understanding of the origin of those advancing goals in
the human spirit, deriving them as part of life's unfolding
course. Perhaps life has one great purpose, and the lev-
els we have followed developmental, physiological, psy-
chological, and spiritual may be successive stages in its
ultimate fulfillment-.

So much for the argument. The attempt in these

THE BIOLOGY OF PVRPOSE 103

speculations to bring together toward solution the ancient
problems of mind and body, of purpose, of value, of
freedom, of the soul, and of the pkce of man's spirit in the
universe by postulating for all of them a common basis
in the fact of biological organization is surely as ambi-
tious an undertaking as that to which a rash philosopher
has ever kid his hand. For many readers my words must
have carried scant conviction. I have certainly offended
the materialists by bringing an element of mystery into
what to them seems the straightforward story of the
physico-chemical basis of life, uncomplicated by purpose,
spirit, or other extraneous idea. Most biologists will not
approve of mixing their science so thoroughly with philos-
ophy, of complicating the discussion of organization and
regulation by introducing overtones of psychology and
metaphysics. Psychologists will surely regard the treat-
ment of instinct, mind, and consciousness as far too simple
and naive. To men of faith, on the other hand, I shall
seem to have surrendered at once to materialism by ad-
mitting that not only the psychical but even the highest
spiritual qualities of man are all manifestations of the
organizing capacity of protoplasm which shows itself
also in the biological phenomena of bodily development
and physiological regulation. To protagonists of both the
ideological left and right I shall appear as a tepid com-
promiser, disliking to follow the logical necessities of
science but afraid to take a firm stand on the side of
the angels. I admit the validity of these strictures and
can plead only the worthiness of my purpose. If what

104 CELL AND PSYCHE

I have attempted to do could be accomplished, if all the
manifestations of life from the lowest to the highest could
be gathered into a single bundle and shown to have an
essential character in common, this indeed would satisfy
our craving for simple interpretations and for unity in
nature, and therefore it has seemed worth undertaking.

But more than this, such a treatment makes it possible
to draw these great issues down to terms in which the
biologist can talk with the philosopher about them and
bring to their solution the great resources of his science.
To regard them all as aspects of the problem of biological
organization may seem a fantastic over-simplification, but
at least it avoids beclouding the issue with a host of
minor problems and gives us something very tangible to
attack. The basic question is the origin and nature of
this organizing, goal-seeking quality in life. Whatever
we may think of the implications which I have tried to
find in it, this at bottom is a perfectly definite biological
problem with nothing metaphysical about it

For this problem the materialist has his ancient answer
ready: there is nothing here but the activity of a physico-
chemical mechanism, particularly complex but funda-
mentally no different from those with which we are
already beginning to be familiar. Its self-regulatory char-
acter is essentially the same as that of an automatic
machine, and to read into these activities any concepts
useful in psychology or philosophy is but vague ration-
alizing, fit for acceptance only by those who believe in

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 105

the stuff that dreams are made on. This is a defensible
answer, and I cannot quarrel with it

But it is not the only possible answer. For many of us
the description it gives of man seems far too simple. If
there arises in living stuff a goal, an image, a longing-
call it what you will which comes to expression in a
noble deed, or a great poem, or a new insight into nature,
does not this tell us something more profound than pres-
ent scientific knowledge can do about that remarkable
process which at its lowest level goes by the prosaic name
of biological organization? This is not to advocate vital-
ism or any of the other subterfuges by which believers
in the free spirit of man have tried from time to time to
liberate him from the bonds of deterministic materialism.
It is simply to suggest that there are in biology facts and
principles as yet undiscovered which are concerned with
this regulatory, goal-seeking, upward thrust of life. Per-
haps a further study of bioelectrical fields will give a
clue. Atomic physics, far as it now seems from biology,
may help by the development of principles like that of
Pauli, which already seems to have a bearing on die prob-
lem of organization; or that of Heisenberg on inde-
terminacy, which affects the whole question of freedom.
Even telepathy and similar ideas should not be brushed
aside as impossible, for they may well turn out to be sig-
nificant for biology, as an eminent British zoologist,
Professor A. C. Hardy,* has recently maintained. It is

* A. C. Hardy, "Zoology Outside the Laboratory," Advancement of Science,
VI (1949). 213-23.

io6 CELL AND PSYCHE

of the utmost importance to keep our minds open to
suggestions from any quarter, however unpromising.
Our program must be to push out vigorously across the
frontier of the unknown everywhere and to explore that
region where life, matter, and energy so mysteriously are
joined. Surely science has a vast deal more to learn than
now it knows. It will discover not only new facts but
new concepts, new paths to understanding. **We fool
ourselves," writes Hardy, "if we imagine that our present
ideas about life and evolution are more than a tiny frac-
tion of the truth yet to be discovered in the almost end-
less years ahead."

The plain fact is that in the present status of science
biological organization remains still unexplained, and
that many investigators arc doubtful whether we are nearer
to the ultimate answer than we were half a century ago.
The problem may be fruitfully attacked in the laboratory
by objective, experimental study of the regulation of form
and function in plants and animals, bringing to this task
all the resources which science has placed at our com-
mand. This is the highest goal of biology. When it is
attained I believe we shall find that organization depends
neither on the operation of only those physical laws
which we now know nor on some superphysical or vital-
istic agent about which nothing can be learned, but that
a more perfect knowledge of nature and man will tell
us how the physical and the spiritual are linked in that
ascending, questing, creative system which is life. The
answer may also be sought subjectively, I believe, in man's

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 107

inmost experiences and intuitive perceptions, at biological
levels far different from those of science. "A poem,** says
Vannevar Bush in his recent book, "can touch truths that
go beyond those that are examinable by test tube or the
indication of needles on instruments.'* 10 Life can be
studied fruitfully in its highest as well as its lowest mani-
festations. The biochemist can tell us much about proto-
plasmic organization, but so can the artist Life is the
business of the poet as well as of the physiologist

My argument is that, if the idealist will admit that life
is his final problem and will halt his retreat to heights
where the scientist is unable to follow him, he can suc-
cessfully do battle at the level of biology itself and on
its terms. Here he has the opportunity not only to de-
fend himself but at last to counter-attack the position of
his adversary. In this combat, let both opponents employ
every scientific and dialectical force at their command to
solve life's riddle, and agree to abide by the result In
that day when the verdict is finally rendered there will
doubtless be surprises for both sides in store. The book
of life then opened will prove to be the work not only
of the biologists in laboratories but of those others who
call themselves poets and artists, philosophers and men
of faith, who yet all seek the same Promethean flame
kindled in organized protoplasm of the humblest cell but
rising thence to illuminate the world.

You will by now have guessed my own preference for
this sort of aggressive idealism over the usual material-

10 Vannevar Bush, Modem Arms and Free Men, p. 188.

io8 CELL AND PSYCHE

istic position. Indeed, a thoroughgoing materialism of
the sort that Hacckcl advocated finds fewer supporters
now. An understanding of modern physics and of rela-
tivity has convinced most thinkers that, as the old-
fashioned, three-dimensional universe with its solid atoms
and its Newtonian laws is out of date, so, too, is a philos-
ophy which puts its trust in such a system. The problem
is to bring the known and the unknown together in some
satisfying way. The present hypothesis is an attempt to
show how this may sometime be possible. Materialism
and idealism doubtless will continue to be different ways
of looking at the universe. Which will finally triumph,
or what monistic philosophy may come from a merging
of the two, no one yet can know; but the decision will
be of the greatest moment to our race, for it will largely
shape the character of that society which men will build.
You will share my disappointment that our excursion
has not come to any certain answer for all of the great
questions we so boldly faced at the beginning, questions
"which, of old, men sought of seer and oracle and no
reply was told." No sure solution, indeed, is to be found
for them today. But if we can set these problems up
against the background of life itself, if we can show that
mind and body, spirit and matter, are held together in
equal union as parts of that organized system which life
is, then the idealist is encouraged to speak with much
more confident voice. He can claim with assurance that
mind is as real as body, for they are part of the same
unity; that purpose and freedom arc not illusions but are

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 109

an essential part of the way in which events are brought
to pass in protoplasmic systems; that the soul has a sound
biological basis as the core of the integrated living or-
ganism; that our sense of values is not arbitrary but
results from the directions and preferences shown by such
systems; and that the course and history of life, so dif-
ferent from those of lifeless matter, give hope that it may
have an inner directive quality of its own.

But if we have been less than successful in laying a
foundation of solid biological certainty on which a philos-
ophy for today can safely be erected, our speculation will
perhaps encourage those who arc not content to stay close
to the safe shore of certainty but seek to launch out into
the deep; who nourish what William James used to call
"overbeliefs," rising still further into the unknown by
faith but needing some assurance of firm fact beneath
them* This we can help provide. The existence of an
unsolved problem at the very core of biological science,
and one which seems doubtful of solution by the con-
cepts and principles now familiar to us, makes dogmatic
materialism less assertive. Many of our overbeliefs can-
not be proven true, but in a universe which still remains
so far beyond our understanding they cannot longer be
dismissed by the tough-minded as impossible and intel-
lectually disreputable. Religious convictions and the
philosophy of idealism have today a more respectful hear-
ing than for many years.

If the goals set up in protoplasm, one thus may ask,
the ends to which all living stuff aspires, have risen so

no CELL AND PSYCHE

high that in ourselves they now include the love of beauty
and truth and goodness, may it not be that the organized
system which man's spirit is, refined and elevated far
above its simple origins, has grown to be the sensitive
instrument through which he comes to recognize the
presence of these same qualities in the universe outside
him? A scientist 11 has well likened such qualities in us
to "a hum given forth by the bronze bell of man as it
catches a note from the eternal harmony and thrills re*
spondingly from base to rim." Should we not look upon
these qualities, to which our spirits can so readily be
attuned, as lofty realities and worthy of our devoted
loyalty?

If these responsive systems which we call our souls
are found to be so stubbornly persistent in the flux of
time and matter; if our personalities are each unique and
seemingly so valuable in nature, does not this suggest that
they may be of more significance, perhaps even of more
permanence, than one would ever guess from a knowl-
edge of the lifeless universe alone?

If these goals set up by the organizing power of life
have been lifted ever higher through the ages, from
simple protoplasmic patterns to the lofty aspirations of
the human spirit, does not this bring a hope that life may
be moving toward its own great goal and even that the
universe itself is not the seat of aimless forces merely, of
chance and randomness, but that it, too, has a pattern?

11 Joseph Needham, The Sceptical Biologist, p. 40.

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE m

Is not faith an experience of the fundamental unity be-
tween our own highest goals and this great pattern of
the universe?

If each of us is thus an organized and organizing cen-
ter, a vortex pulling in matter and energy and knitting
them into precise patterns; and if we are able, though
in small degree, to create new patterns never known be-
fore, does not this suggest that we may actually be a part
of the great creative power in nature and hold communion
with it; and that, as James once said, we may come to
recognize that this higher part of us is continuous with
a more of the same quality operative in the universe out-
side and with which we can keep in working touch?
Does not this, indeed, present as clear a picture as the
scientist can draw of God Himself and our relation to
Him?

The study of life regulatory, purposeful, ascending
begins with protoplasm in the laboratory, but it can lead
us out from thence to high adventure and to "thoughts
beyond the reaches of our souls." In form of leaf and
limb and in the beautiful coordination of their powers
we see the first steps in that great progression which has
long been marching upward from the first bit of living
stuff toward some dim, final goal, as yet but dreamed of,
which the poet sings:

"One God, one law, one element
And one far-off divine event
To which the whole creation moves."

SUGGESTED READINGS

The literature of this field is very extensive and is by no
means covered fully by the following list of books. These are
all in English or in good translation and may prove of interest
to the reader who wishes to explore the subject further.
Among them arc represented the most important viewpoints
in this controversial subject.
Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Tr. by Arthur Mitchell

New York: Holt, 1911. 370 p.
Bertalanfiy, Ludwig von. Modern Theories of Development.

Tr. by J. H. Woodger. London: Oxford University Press,

1933. 204 p.
Compton, Arthur H. The Human Meaning of Science.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940.

Conklin, Edwin G. The Direction of Human Evolution.

New York: Scribners, 1921. 247 p.
Driesch, Hans. The Science and Philosophy of the Organism.

London: Black, 1908. 344 p.
Du Nouy, Lecomte. The Road to Reason. New York:

Longmans, Green, 1949. 240 p.
Eddington, A. S. The Nature of the Physical World. New

York: Macmillan, 1929. 353 p.
Haeckcl, Ernst. The Riddle of the Universe. Tr. by Joseph

McCabe. New York and London: Harper, 1900. 390 p.
Haldanc,J. S. Mechanism, Life and Personality. New York:

Dutton, 1914. 139 p.
Henderson, Lawrence J. The Order of Nature. Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917. 230 p.
Hogben, Lancelot T. The Nature of Living Matter. Lon-
don: Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1930. 316 p.

THE BIOLOGY OF PURPOSE 113

Holmes, S. J. Organic Form and Related Biological Prob-
lems. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1948. 163 p.
Huxley, J. S. Man in the Modern World. London: Chatto

and Windus, 1947. 281 p.
Jeans, Sir James. Physics and Philosophy. New York: Mao

Tnillan, 1944. 2I 7 P-
Jcnnings, H. S. The Universe and Ufe* New Haven: Yak

University Press, 1933. 94 p.
Kohler, Wolfgang. Gestalt Psychology. New York: Live-

right, 1920. 403 p.
Lillie, Ralph S. General Biology and Philosophy of Organism.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945. 209 p.
Loeb, Jaques. The Mechanistic Conception of Life. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1912. 233 p.
McDougall, William. The Riddle of Life. London: Mcthuen,

1938. 273 p.
Millikan, Robert A. Time, Matter, and Values. Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 1932. 99 p.
Morgan, C. Lloyd. Emergent Evolution. New York: Henry

Holt, 1923. 313 p.
Muller, Herbert J. Science and Criticism. New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1943. 298 p.
Needham, Joseph S. The Sceptical Biologist. New York:

Norton, 1930. 270 p.
. Order and Life. New Haven: Yale University Press,

1936. i68p.
Ritter, William E. The Unity of the Organism. Boston:

Badger, 1919. 359 p.
Russell, Bertrand. Religion and Science. New York: Holt,

1935. 271 p.

Russell, E. S. The Directiveness of Organic Activities. Cam-
bridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1945, 192 p.
Schrodinger, Erwin. What Is Life? New York: Macmillan,

1947. 91 p.

H4 CEUL AND PSYCHE

Sherrington, Sir Charles S. Man on His Nature. Cambridge,

England: Cambridge University Press, 1945.
Smuts, Jan C. Holism and Evolution. New York: Macmil-

lan, 1926. 362 p.
Sullivan, J. W. N. The Limitations of Science. London:

Chatto and Windus, 1933. 303 p.
Whitehead, Alfred N. Science and the Modern World. New

York: Macmillan, 1926. 304 p.
Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics. New York: Wiley, 1948.

194 p.
Woodger, J. S. Biological Principles. New York: Harcourt,

Brace, 1929. 498 p.

INDEX

ij\ growtxt, 33

Abstract thought, 68, 71, 72

AcraturcffOf, 26

Adaptation, not impl**H in organiza-

tion, 82, 83

Adrenalin, and behavior, 99
Alcohol, and personality, 99
Angleworm, regeneration in, 29
Anima, in development, 18
Aristodc, So
Artist, as biologist, 107
Atom, nature of, 3
Atomic physics, and biology, 105
Auxin, effects of, 36

Baitsell, G. A., 38

Beauty, as a value, 84, 95

Beethoven, L. van, 97

Behavior, relation to growth and

physiology, 59, 61; as regulatory,

62

Behaviorism, 56
Beliefs, importance of, i
Bergson, H, 49, 60, 68, 91, 112
Bcrtalanrfy, L. von, 9, 112
Biochemistry and organization, 8, 18,

107

Bioelectric Held, 20, 39
Biological organization, distinctive

character of lite, 15-42; and psy-

chological activity, 43-74
Biology, 4, 41; and psychology, 13,

48; and philosophy, 16, 52,
106; value of introspection for, 56,
57; service of, ID physical SCOTCC,
79; rrarhing of, 82
Biophysics and organization, 38
Blastula, "striving" of, 47
Bodily temperature, control of, 32
Body-mind relationship, 76-80
Bohr, No ii, 41
Brain, region of, and psychical stales,

77

Burr, H. S., 39, 50
Bush, V., 107
Butler, S., 66

Cannon, W^ 32

Catalysts, 54

Cause, efficient and final, 80

Cell, activities of, 20; an organic sys-
tem, 21, 37; independence of, in
slime molds, 26; a level of organ-
ization, 34; developmental norm
in, 52; genetic constitution of, 53

Chromosomes, 7, 53

Complementarity, 10, 41

Compton, A* H., 1x2

Conducting bundle, regeneration of,
29

Coniferous tree, form of, 22

Conklin, . G., 1x2

Conscience, in frontal lobes of brain,
99

INDEX

Consciousness, 48, 49, 55-62. 70, 72
Control, operating in development, 25
Cooperation, rather than conflict, in

evolution, 98

Correlative changes, in evolution, 36
Cuttings, regeneration in, 29

Darwin, C, 4

Death, from loss of organisation, 52
Determiners, in embryology, 6
yvHbfmjnigm f experimental, 9; versus

free will, 86-89
Development, control of, 24; similar-

ity to instinctive activity, 6z
Developmental norms, 52
Differentiation, 28
Directiveness, of vital processes, 45
Disorganization, resistance to, 31
Driesch, H., 3, 6, 28, 29, ZZ2

effect of environment on,

Evolution, 17; progression toward
spirit in, zo2

70

Drugs, effect of on mental states, 77
Du Nouy, I-, 3, 95, 112

Bddington, A. S., 3, 10, 15, 56, 112
"yj 80

Rinsurin, A-, 9

Electron microscope, genes seen, by,

19

Pif^frortig calculators, 40

Embryo, as an organized system, 23
Embryology, experimental, 5
Embryonic development, compared to

purpose, 48
Emergent evolution, 9
Emotions, as objects of biological

study, 56; based in chemistry of

protoplasm, 99
Engineers, and regulatory mecha-

nisms, 39

Entdechy, 6, z8, 29
Environment, effect on development,

*9

Enzymes, 8, 19
Evocator, in organization, 38

Faith, in
Feed-back

and nervous

system, 40
Field, bioelectrical, 20, 39; in devel-

opment, 38, 44
Final cause, 80
Form, as expression of organization,

24; immanent in egg, 54
Free will versus determinism, 86-89
Frog, regeneration in early embryo

of, 29

Gene, 7, 19, 53, 66, 70, 99; action,

problem of, 53

Genesis, account of creation in, 2
Genetic constitution, of cell, 53; and

individuality, 91
Genetics, developmental, 7
Gcscll, A., 63
Gestalt psychology, 65, 66
"Goals,** reached by different means,

33; set up in protoplasm, 52, 80,

8z, 87, 102; striving for, as es-

sence of life, 97
God, in

Good, aspiration to, 95
Gourd fruit, ratio of growth rates in,

*5

Growth, abnormalities in, 33
Growth rate, relative, 25
Growth substances, 20, 36
Gurwitsch, A., 38

Habit, in organisms without nervous

systems, 51

Hacckel, E., 3, 5, 10, 108, 112
Haldane, J. S., 3, 7, 9, 37, 78, 112
Hardy, A. C, 105
Harrison, R. G., 34
Heisenberg, W., 10, 105
Henderson, L. J., 3, 39, 41, 62, 87,

ZI2

Hogbcn, 1^, 8, zz2

INDEX

Holmes, S. J., 113
Homeostasis, 32, 54, 55
Hormones, 8, 20, 23, 36
Huxley, J. S., 3, 38, 113
Huxley, T. H^ 3 -5
Hydrogen-ion concentration, mainte-
nance of, 32
Hypotheses, adventurous, 13, 47

Idealism, 108; as ^ ;Tr>g<r of evolution,

102

Ideas, first expressed in action, 72

Tfi^aginattnytj 58, 72, 95

Indeterminacy, principle o 105
Individuality, as result of organiza-
tion, 89-94
Insects, metamorphosis in, 27, 28;

nervous system of, 71
Insight, as door to truth, 57
Instincts, 73; regulatory character of,

61
Integration, physical and psychical,

46

Intellect* regulatory character of, 68
Introspection, and bioiogkal knowl-
edge, 56, 57

James, W^ 62, 109, in
Jeans, J., 3, 10, 113
Jennings, H. S., 51, 56, 82, 113
Joad, C. E. M., 3

Kohler, W., 65, 113

"Lazy" corn, 82
Leonardo da Vinci, 97
Levels, of organization, 34, 101
life, an elementary fact, zi; the ulti-
mate problem, 16, 107; distinctive
character of, 43; purpose in, 45, 48,
77, 102; directive quality of, 45,
109, no; contribution of to phys-
ical science, 78, 79; goals of, 84;
creative character of, 88; opposed
to lifeless matter in direction, 100

Lillie, R. S., 45, 6x, 113
Loeb. J-, 3. 8, 10, 51, 113

Marx, K., x

Materialism, 5, 8, xo, 77, 108
Maxwell's "demons,** 54
McDougall, W-, 13, 113
Mechanism, physico-chemical, 58, 72,

104
Mechanistic philosophy, 6, 8, 18, 59,

83.

Memory, 51, 72
Mendel, G., 7
Mental, relation to developmental,

52, 73; plastkkf, loss of, 64
Mental life, preservative action of,

62$ dis^rggfti^ T^yy in, 64
Metabolism, 19
Millikan, R. A^ 1x3
Milton, J., account of creation by, a
Mimosa, reaction ot 50
Mind, 49, 50
Morgan, C. I~, 9, 1x3
Morphogenesis, science of, 30; of

mind, 63
Muller, H. J^ , 45, 113

Natural selection, 4, 83

Needham, J, 3, 25, 35, 41, 47, 78,

xoi, 113
Neo-vitalists, 6
Nerve cells, 49
Nervous system, origin of, 49, 62;

morphogenetk character of, 65
Northrop, F. S. C,, 39
Nucleic acids, 8, 17

Open system, in physiology, 31

Organkists, 9

Organic order, derived from environ-
mental disorder, 31

Organism, 21, 22; produced by pro-
toplasm, 7, 22; concept of, 9, 42,
78; an organized system, 20; as
having a history, 91

Organization, biological, 15-42, 43,

INDEX

75, 104-106; a matter of relations,
34; levels of, 34, zoi; evolution
of, 35; as a category, 41; relation
to psychological activity, 43-74*
relation to purpose, 45* 4& 77
202; of egg, 53; and freedom,
89; and the soul, 92
Organized system, 20-24, 27, 5* 73

9*

Organizer, 20, 37
OverbelJefs, foundation for, 109

Pauii, W., 105

Personality, 92-94

Philosophy, fundamental, 2, 43, 52;
practical importance of, 2; and
biology, 26, 52, 104-206; implica-
tions of present hypothesis for, 75"

2X2

Physical sciences, revolution in, 25;
service of biology to, 78, 79

Physics, undiscovered laws of, 22

Piaocfc, M., 20

Planes of cell division, in growing
jQiuU, 25

Poet, as biologist, 207

Potencies, in development, 64

Primrose, flower color in, 70

Progression, from biological to spirit-
ual goals, 96, 97

Prohctin, and mother love, 99

Proteins, 8, 27, 38

Protoplasm, 26-22, 49, 50; synthesis
of, 1 8; organizing ability of, 30,
67, 88; goals set up in, 52, 80, 82,

87, 202

Protoplasmic reactions, as basis of
values, 85

Psychical behavior, and survival, 62

Psychological activity, 42; and bio-
logical organization, 43-74; re-
semblance to that in development,
44-48

Psychology, 23, 48

Purpose, 45, 46, 52, 54, 55, 58, 59,

80-84, 88; relation to biological
organization, 45, 48, 77, 202;
immanent in brain cells, 54; gene-
sis of, 56; in any physical system,
58; improper use of term in teach-
ing, 82

Quantum mechanics, 9, 22

Regeneration, 29, 30, 36, 89; re-
striction with age, 64

Regulation, 32, 33, 62, 62, 73, 83;
in physiology, 32, 39, 54; origin
of, 35 36; and purpose, 46, 77

Relations, in organization, 20, 36, 42

Relativity, 20

Religious convictions, hearing for,
209

Reverence, attitude of, 95

Rhythms, in plants, 52

Right, as a value, 84

Rkter, W. ., 9, 213

Russell, &., 223

Russell, E. S., 45, 223

St. Francis, 97

Salamander, embryo development in,

23> f4 37

Schrodinger, E-, 3, 20, 22, 93, 223
Sea urchin, regeneration in embryo

ot 29
Second Law of Thermodynamics, 86,

200, 202

Sensitive plant, 50
Sex hormones, 99
Shakespeare, W., 97
Sherrington, C., 3
Sleep movements, of leaves, 52
Slime molds, organization in, 26, 27
Smuts, J. O, 9, 224
Soul, 92, 93, 220
Speculation, justification of, 47
Spemann, H., 37, 44, 56
Spirit, man's, 96; contribution to

science, 79; as climax of evolution,

202

INDEX

119

Spiritual qualities, 68; origin o 96-
100; survival value of, 98; linked
with physical, 106, no
Sponges, restoration of organization

in, 27

Steady state, in physiology, 31
Stimulus-response reaction, 55
Subjective relation, to organization,

55 57

Substances, in organization, 20, 36
Sullivan, J. W. N., 78, 114
Survival value, of spiritual qualities,

98
Symbols, response to, 71

Teleology, 59, 81, 83
Telepathy, significance of, 105
Tennyson, A., 17
Thermostat, "purpose" in, 58

Time-lapse photography, use of in

embryology, 23
Tissue cultures, lack of organization

in, 33

Totipotent character, of every cell, 30
Tropisms, in plants, 50, 60
Truth, man's desire for, 95

Ussher, Bishop, 2

Values, 84, 85
Vitalism, 6, 18

Weismann, A., 6

Whitehead, A. N., 42, 81, 88, 114
Whole organism, as goal of develop-
ment, 69, 89
Wiener, N., 40, 1x4
Wilson, E. B., 20
Woodger, J. S., 21, 47, 114