Problems of biology

Preface

This volume contains the criticism of the contemporary biological systems. That enquiry is necessary as an introduction to the study of the problems of organic life, but it is not in itself a doctrine of biology. The argument ought to proceed to the discussion of the philosophy of nature.

I have to thank Dr. C. M. Douglas, Dr. George R. Wilson, and Mr. A. B, Macaulay, for suggestions in connection with various parts of the book.

G. S.

COLINTON, October, 1896.

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Contents

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I. METHODS OF BIOLOGY . . . - j

II. THE FIRST POSTULATE OF BIOLOGY - - 46

Chapter I. Methods Of Biology

The aim of this essay is to inquire into the nature of the problems which come before us in the study of animals and plants, in order that we may define the right method and the limits of biology, and that we may obtain some adequate criterion by which to judge of the merits of the numerous theories which have arisen in explanation of facts about organisms. Its method is throughout that of inquiry; and I shall build up no systematic hypothesis as a solution of the problems. For we shall find that such hypotheses, as are most commonly used in this matter, bring with them certain unavoidable disadvantages, in that they are themselves in contradiction with the very possibility of research, and serve rather to hide the problems than to give any satisfactory account of them. And our material is two-fold ; for there are the theories of biology on the one hand, and on the other the records of research ; and these two sources are, for the critical study of problems, equally important.

Every serious student of biology must be conscious of a remarkable anarchy within the science, as well as of a certain indefiniteness in its scope. These inner and outer confusions, together with the complex and uncriticised meanings of biological terms, supply reasons why we should supplement and interpret biological theory by a critical method ; and that method seems to be equally necessary to any clear understanding of the problems, whether the conclusions of

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the present essay are found to be true or abstract. I shall describe the confusions in question, leaving the discussion of the reasons for them to a later place.

When the methods and form of any science are discussed, the argument moves between two dangers. For it is possible to lay down very close limits for the content of the science, and to define its methods with a hard pedantry, so that the conclusions which are based on such limitations are only true of a part, and that, perhaps, not an essential part, of the science. And, on the other hand, one may lightly enumerate the more obvious points of its content, and decorate the discussion with many apt illustrations of its method, yet gain no distinct impression of the unique business of the science. On the whole, I shall attempt to err in neither of these directions. For the purposes of this essay, biology includes the systems of explanation of the forms and functions and origins of animals and plants in general. For us, it is to be a science which is definitely distinct from morphology, physiology, embryology, and the other studies which deal with aspects, parts, and periods of organisms. Biology is not to be a mere encycloptedia of facts about organisms, it is in some way to include, and yet to be distinct from those other studies. It is not the science of form or of function, because it is the science of the union of those aspects, and of the union of morphology and physiology with the studies of the developing individual and the developing race. And since there is no need of a science to include the more special sciences merely side by side, the uniting action of biology is not the mere addition of one of them to the others. However narrowly we define the science for our present purpose, it will still include all that is commonly known as biology. We have to do with theories of the development of the individual, of inheritance, and of adaptation, such as those of Lamarck, Darwin, Naegeli, Weismann, and many other authors.

Now the inner confusion of biology depends on the form

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of the science; not on its necessary form, nor on its professed form, but on its actual form, which is the strange result of the other two. The necessary form is, as we shall see, a theory of individuality. The professed form is that of the induction of general laws from known facts, with the interpolation, here and there, of hypothetical facts which are supposed to be in the same kind, to fill the lacunre which are unavoidably left by tardy research or defective instruments. The actual form is a curious product of these two factors, and its several features are referable to their cooperation. For the great body of biological literature, as distinguished from the archives of research which have no theory behind them, is given to us in the form of a large number of independent systems ; and the quality of that independence is the source of the inner confusion. Speaking generally, one may say that the systems are each of them divided into two parts ; each includes a theory of the development of the individual and a theory of the progressive adaptation of the race; that is, a theory of ontogeny and another of the factors of organic evolution. Or in other words, each biological system has to answer two questions — How are the qualities of the individual related to one another ? And — How do the qualities exist by reason of their significance ? Every system, at least, Avhich has achieved any fame, has given a complete account of these two problems.

The systems, therefore, deal with the same matter, and the same wealth of recorded research is before them. As sober inductions built upon the sure ground of observation, they should, one would judge, differ from one another only in unimportant points. Indeed, they should so pass into one another that the character of independence of systems should be impossible to them. They should form one body of knowledge, going ever hand in hand with research, informing its method, and certainly capable of being affirmed or denied by a final reference to fact. There

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should be no such opposition and bare exclusion of cne another as that to which we are accustomed.

But consider their actual form. Each of them is complete and final, and will explain, in its own manner, everything which is organic. Each stands over against the others in the form of bare exclusion, and is hard and polished in its independent perfection. , And judgment cannot be made between two such mutually contradictory systems by the most exhaustive and ingenious test of facts. There is a complete independence of one another, and an almost complete independence of research. If it were not so, then they would combine, and research would discriminate between them. There are twenty good theories of the development of the individual, but I cannot say that any one seems to be better or worse than all the rest. A certain controversy with regard to natural selection and use inheritance lived long, and was discussed in every public place and with the aid of hosts of detailed observations. Yet it was never cleared up, and neither side had the advantage ; but because men became weary of it, it has now been allowed to rest. It is not otherwise with the history of biology. New systems supersede old ones, and the latter are not disproved but forgotten. If this seems to be a too sweeping judgment, then the archives of research are before you, and the theories are elaborately stated for every detail and exhaustively illustrated from facts about organisms ; wall you tell — not what maintains the form of the individual from day to day, for the theories abstract from that consideration — but what determines the rise of that individual form ; whether it be the clairvoyance of the unconscious, the immanent soul, the gemmules, the idioplasm, the pangenes, the stirp, the physiological units, or the struggle of parts ; that the palm may be given to Hartmann, Stahl, Darwin, Weismann and Naegeli, de Vries, Galton, Spencer, or Roux ? Or perhaps some other hypothetical agent seems to you preferable ? For my part, if

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the method of any one of these theories be allowed for a moment, I cannot see any reason for either affirming or denying any one of them. And if one of these principles made my hand, I have no doubt that it made my foot also, and I cannot be sure that it did not make my argument.

But it may be said that after all we have to some extent moved in accordance with research. Bonnet’s belief that the image of the adult was contained in the germ in little, difference for difference, has been expelled by the progress of microscopic investigation. Lamarck’s cause excitatrice has disappeared before physiological research. And on the other hand, Weismann’s idioplasm does correspond to granules which stain with logwood, and the struggle and selection of parts is certainly a fact so long as the parts are in any way related to one another. That is merely to say that hypothetical agents and hypothetical processes disappear before research ; and that the theories invent new processes and new determinant agents in as yet unexplored forms. We might point out that the agents which are at present in vogue are, in fact, unknown, but it is better to await the more conclusive demonstration that they are in necessity unknowable. These are some of the features of the inner confusion. They have made the very name of biology a by-word. And though the anarchy may not be obvious to a people delighting in formulas which may be applied with equal facility and barrenness to everything which is organic, it is so present to men of research that they leave the whole matter on one side as simply not pertinent to their occupation, and are not patient to bear even the mention of what they repudiate, with more justice than they are always aware, as metaphysics.

The outer confusion is not less notable. I have indicated that the formality and abstractness of biological systems is such that they are not affected by the differences in their content ; and that a particular fact has not its particular significance to them, but only its general signi-

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ficance as a fact about an organism. But we shall find 2 graver sign of that formality in the fitness of the systematic formulae to explain facts which do not come under the special sciences of living things, but wbicb still are facts about individuals or systems. It is not necessary to detail the particular results of the outer confusion. We have seen the arts of human life ascribed to the factors of organic evolution, and a vast literature has by this time accumulated under the form that every evolution, that is, everything individual, is a biological evolution, that is, is organism. I would be slow to condemn any wide view of the organism on account of its width, but danger arises when distinctively human qualities become mere adjectives of protoplasm. It is probable that the popular quasi-biological evolutionism is yet the promise of that working doctrine of individuality for science which at present we cannot find ; but so long as the biology from which it draws its eager metaphors is nothing but the denial of individuality, the formal application of the logic of bare identity to the organism, wc can expect no stable construction from such theories. In any case, the authority of biology over individuals of every kind which are not organisms, and the degree of its authority over the qualities of men, remain at present undefined ; and such indefiniteness is due to the abstractness and the fallacy of that method which can so freely be applied to what you please.

We must include among the features of biolog}' which demand criticism, the vagueness, ambiguity, or positive self-contradiction of its most important terms and conceptions ; for this character w-ill also be reduced to a common origin with the others. What, for instance, is functiotil The term is used as undefined and as needing no definition because of its simplicity. If it is all the qualities of a given jrart, then what is a functmiless siruciure f If it is the end of a part, that respect in which it subserves the whole, then what are its other activities, and in what respect are they

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not its end ? We learn that structure precedes function in ontogeny, and, for the purposes of abstract embryology, we know what the phrase means. But the thesis is a biological thesis, and biology deals throughout with the relation of structure to function in general. And I cannot think that such a general consideration can be firm while its terms are capable of the most various meanings. If the structure of to-day answers to the function of to-morrow and not of to-day, then it is not to-day’s structure. Such an objection can only seem captious until one has learned from the theories that the vehicle of qualities makes to-day’s structure and to-morrow’s function, and that therefore they fit one another. Such confusions of terms are the very source of controversy, for the latter never lives except upon the platform of a common and uncriticised fallacy. Are acquired qualities inherited ? Tell me first of a quality which is not acquired, or of one which is not inherited. Is variation purposive or no ? Let us first find anything organic which is not purposive. I do not wish to prejudge such matters ; but it certainly seems necessary that they should be judged.

There are thus certain reasons why we should examine biological methods. There are also certain apologies which may be made for the method of criticism which dominates this essay ; and they must be mentioned in this place because of the lively objections which that method must call forth in the reader’s mind. Criticism is not denial, and an interpretation and comparison of systematic theories is only possible by means of the demonstration of the various planes of abstraction on which they treat the problems. In thus bringing them together and studying them in relation to research, we come really to understand them for the first time. For w'hat is explicit in a theory, is in most cases by no means its most important part ; and the postulates which have been taken for granted, the infallible method of observation, and the ambiguities of conceptions, contain what is most influential in the systems. When their point of view'

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is given, the rest follows of necessity ; but it is the business of the student of theory to define the point of view. Further, this method of bringing implicit foundations into the light is the only means we have for arriving at a statement of problems, for such a statement does not form part of the programme of a systematic hypothesis. For the hypothetical agent, by means of its self-contradiction, assumes the whole problem into itself, and appears to be adequate to its solution only so long as that self-contradiction is not made manifest. In this way, as we shall see, all the various forms of vehicles of qualities hide, but cannot be said to be aware of the problem of the nature of organic individuality. In like manner the descriptions of the hypothetical processes of organic evolution hide, but are never the means of stating, the problem of the nature of organic qualities. For the same reason the critical method is necessary to biology, if that science is to present any continuity in its development, and any germinal relationship to research, because we must expose an implicit thread of continuity in the systems, and discover the manner in which the theories abstract from fact in order that they may take the form of systems. It would be a hopeless task to examine all the theories in detail, and to compare them externally. That has often enough been done with but little result, for this one reason, that their implications were not made evident.

But a more important defence for the method is its success in the interpretation of organisms and of the methods of describing them. The history of biology shows that critical doctrines have had their place in the development of the science, and that their influence has been greater and more permanent than that of the hypothetical theories. The doctrine of type, for instance, as followed by such men as Goethe, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, and Dugbs, as well as by more recent authors, has been the clearest guide to morphology. It is true that it was merely morphological and abstracted

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entuely from process and change ; but that is equally true of the works of Darwin, Naegeli, de Vries, and Weismann. It differed from the theories of these workers, however, in that it was an incontrovertible presentation of the nature of morphological qualities. For our recent schools deny, in their first postulate, the unity of plan in the structure of the individual, not recognising the necessity of organic proportions. The doctrine of vitalism, again, may be called critical, in that it does no more than to propound the problem of organic activity. Changes, it says, are conditioned in every case by ends ; as the doctrine of type asserts that measurements are in every case conditioned by proportions. These two doctrines differ from the hypothetical biology, in that in their case room is left for the progressive discovery of the how from observation, and that the teleological problem remains in evidence. That the how is abstracted from by the hypotheses may be easily learned from their treatment of inheritance. For, in that respect, as in others, they take no account of real process, yet supply its place with impossible and unknowable process. They take no cognisance of the rights of physiolog}', and, more fatally, contradict its possibility with their quasi-physiology. For the matter is treated as though variation were variation of the adult image —this quality having appeared, and that other quality having disappeared — whereas variation must be variation of the germ, or, better, of the whole. In the same way we must not think of inheritance as immediate, but as mediate ; and the middle term is not — except for hypothesis — the abstract qualities of the adult image carried each in its respective vehicle. A special case of the same abstraction is the habit of regarding structure as maintaining itself from day to day by no reason at all, as though it were made of cast iron, and persisted in a material which had no interest in the pattern. Yet this body, incomparably stable as it is, in the midst of ever varying accident, is maintained daily in material which is incomparably unstable — surely this occurs somehow. The

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Protozoa have complex structures and well-ordered changes^ yet many of them can put on form, and cast it off like a garment. And if the monad has its lash mediately because of evolutionary processes which have gone on through a very great number of years, yet it has it also immediately because of something else, for the lash has gone and has appeared again before your eyes. That other because has its rights — even prior rights; for that o\X\tx because is what is inherited. Yet it is not even formally allowed for by the hypothetical systems. It is not necessary to multiply examples of the abstractions by which alone the hypotheses can work. But it is largely in respect of such dogmatic abstractions that I would negatively characterise the critical method.

But the most important contributions under this method are those which we owe to the professed students of philosoph}^, and the last part of my apology must deal with the right to allude in parts to their work about organisms, as to certain biological doctrines among others, in our study of biological theory in general. I am aware of the maxims about the rights of every science in its own sphere. So far as the sciences of inorganic nature, and the abstract sciences of organisms are concerned, those statements have a certain though a limited validity. But the doctrine of the independence of science from philosophy, always over emphasised, has, in the case of biology, no meaning whatever. In a word, the problem of philosophy as regards organisms is the problem of biology ; and you may regard either development you please as an aberrant form of the other ; for the present point is merely that they are the same. The most concrete science of life may, for our purpose, be called by any convenient name. But we can, at least, be sure of its content. It deals, in alternative ways which absolutely exclude one another, with the ideal unity which underlies organic differences in the individual ; it effects a synthesis of abstract sciences by means of a theory of individuality ; it brings nature under the form of self consciousness. On

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I I

that ground we may regard the crhical study of organisms as organisms as having the right to a place among the hypothetical theories of organisms as hare orgafiisms, and we may justly use it as their criterion.

The theories which we shall examine will be found to deal with one feature of organisms alone, and that feature is universal. That is to say, it belongs to all organisms because they are organisms, and to every part and quality and stage of organisms. We judge that the feature is one because the theories exclude one another ; and we judge that it is universal, because the particular differences of organisms do not affect it, so that it is impossible to conceive of any organic forms or functions which would not support the formulae of the theories, so long as they were the forms and the functions of organisms or of their parts. It is universal because the hypotheses are empty of differentiated content and formal, and because to them, every phenomenon is of equal and of one significance. Now this universal feature in organisms is represented in the systems by means of the hypothetical agent. One need only mark the diversity of hypotheses in order to see at once that the agent is universally necessary, that it does not signify in the least what form the agent takes so long as it does its work, and that the peculiar nature of its activity is never expressed. We shall find that the agent has many qualities, of which we may here glance at the most significant. It is that in which the possible is actual, it is the vehicle for latent qualities. It is that which persists throughout the manifold changes of the organism, preserving thereby the specific image ; and it is that which is one and identical in all parts. It is that reality which lies behind the confusing ajipcarance of the creature, which yet is unknown except through those appearances, and therefore, is mediately and even falsely known. It is the sphere in which qualities are separate, discrete, numerable unities, and is the only avenue of relation between qualities. With regard to the qualities it is purely

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active, and they to it are purely passive ; it is in no relation of reciprocity with them, but is absolutely self determining and other determining. All the rationale of qualities is taken up into the agent, which effects this here, and that there, by no reason which can be given. It is the identical substance from which the manifold appearances radiate ; it is the secret of their teleological form.

I consider that everyone who marks this half of every system — that half, namely, which deals with the relation of the qualities to one another and to the agent— will be inclined to agree that we have here to do with a properly metaphysical conception. He will recognise in the agent the hypostasis of a logical distinction into a quasi-physiological or quasi-psychological distinction, and will be irresistibly led to compare the abstract identity of the individual organism, whatever form it may take through the caprice of hypothesis, with the abstract substance or the thing in itself of the popular metaphysic which depends on what is called the relativist theory of knowledge. And when he learns that this hypothetical agent is not only necessary to every system of the dogmatic biology, as explaining the development of the individual, but is also necessary to the doctrines of organic evolution which form the other half of every system, he will be willing to reconsider the maxim about the unassailable rights of every science in its own sphere ; for this reason, that the hypothetical agent is in every case in contradiction with the very possibility of those researches for which biology undertakes the synthesis.

But one may deny the validity of that maxim on more general grounds than these. Even though the identity of the biological and philosophical problems as regards organisms were not so obvious or so bare as it is, we should still be justified in bringing them together. There are no chasms in science, and so long as knowledge is man’s knowledge, it is one. The world is not made in compartments answering to university lectureships.

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Certainly if this matter of the independence of sciences had really been dominant in knowledge, we should by this time have had nothing but collectors’ catalogues on the one hand, and a dead scholasticism on the other. And many evils do at present come on us from the proverb in question, even when it is not merely a cover for cheap ridicule. Isolation is as abstractly self-assertive as is invasion, and a philosophy which is not in active sympathy with science is making a boast of its inadequacy. And the outstanding evil is that every science suffers from an insular ignorance of what is meant by the others ; philosophy, for instance, at present knows little of animals and plants but what it has learned through the biology of hypothesis, and accepts the results of the latter for observation ; and biology is content to find the true differences of organisms in the structure of small particles within them, through an inadequate knowledge of the methods of physics. In a word, one science is only too ready to accept the abstractions of others as answering to the nature of the matter studied. Certainly, on the other hand, there are limits to every man’s time. But, as I said, in the case of biology and philosophy, we have other and more definite grounds for denying a division. AVhat are evolution, epigenesis, individuality, adaptatio7i, quality ifi general, possibility or latency, and tiecessity ? I consider that these fundamental conceptions of biology, which form the content of its discussions, are conceptions of philosophy also and in the same way.

But biology has been defined in various ways, and these definitions must be compared with its actual endeavour. Perhaps it is most commonly regarded as one among the other sciences of organisms, and as on the same plane with them. In so far as it is not a term roughly applied to the whole study of life collectively, it comes to indicate a sort of supplement to the more definite observational sciences, dealing with distributions, origins, and the like. To such a point of view, biology is a vanguard to the whole force of

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investigation, dealing provisionally, and therefore more or less hypothetically, with matters which in the end are such as must be studied as form, function, and the like. Now there is a vast deal of inexact information scattered through biological literature, and the theories are on the whole as dependent on it as on research. Still, any one of the theories will be found to treat all morphological and physiological results as merely material for its purpose, and as by no means complete in themselves. To anatomy, structure is ultimate, and has nothing to do with change ; but to biology, structure is in some way derivative. And there is no result of any one of its fellow sciences which has not a significance to biology.

Another common definition is even more obviously untrue. It is, that biology is the most abstract of the studies of life, having the object of reducing their results to the form of mechanical and physical processes, and of translating the variety of the qualities of an organism into terms of the physical structure and chemical composition of its protoplasm. I have never seen a more remarkable instance of the self-deceptive power of a pretended method than this. For you will find that the method is to be that certain qualities, “ primary,” are the organism for biology, and that these are the quasi-crystallised manifestation of the fine structure of protoplasm. But the practice is to take, for biology, even the beauty and the joy of a creature as on a level with its bones, and to rank its instincts as no lower than the extraordinary variety of objects which are called its protoplasm. On the whole, our science is not a mere chemistry of hypothetical substances, or a mere physic of hypothetical “ aggregates.”