Problems of biology / [George Sandeman].

  • Sandeman, George.
Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Problems of biology / [George Sandeman]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    206/232 (page 194)
    or do not do so. Those which do so are those which we see and which exist, and we necessarily interpret them in relation to their conditions. Those which do not do so neither exist nor are seen, and they are, in a word, purely imaginary. And the achievement of the method is not to explain anything which is, but it is merely to afford us a transition from the really unintelligible of accidental production, to the formally intelligible of conditioned existence. It enables one to follow, hypothetically, the production of the parts of the system of the body, or of the organism and environment, as unconditioned by the other parts of those systems. Then, at a certain point which cannot be shown as phenomenal, these parts come into collision with their conditions, and those only which fit the latter (that is, all those which exist) come to be selected. Thus the Darwinian thunder-clap follows upon its proper blaze of abstraction. And all that it succeeds in doing is to offer to us an empty formula of explanation which enables us to explain the parts as essentially unrelated to one another. In this respect, and in harmony with the first postulate, it is an alogical principle, and is necessarily, as in fact, without interest to research. The factors of organic evolution are thus attempts to put together again the unity of the organism. For that was first, as we saw, disrupted. The second movement was to put it together again by means of the agent. This stage did not complete the whole matter, because the action of the agent was of necessity arbitrary and unintelligible, and its products were not at the same time, and immediately, the products of one another. So we have recourse, in the third postulate, to the fiction of the becoming related to one another of parts which were inwardly dissociated from one another, or, if associated, then only joined by the unexplored mediation of the idioplasm, physiological units, or immanent soul. And this is the case, as we have seen,