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Living Systems and Non-Living Systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Ralph S. Lillie
Ralph S. Lillie*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago.
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Extract

Biology is in a unique position among the natural sciences. It is not simply complex physics and chemistry, for living organisms have a psychological as well as a physical side. Even as physical systems their character is highly special, largely because their material substance is continually changing; perhaps it was from them that Heraclitus derived his idea that all is flow. The comparison with vortexes and candle flames is an old one. Wilhelm Ostwald included living organisms in his class of “stationary systems”: they represent not a static but a kinetic equilibrium, what we now often call a “steady state”; there is a balance of constitutive and dissipative processes. Materials and energy converge to the living center, undergo there characteristic transformations, among which complex chemical and structural syntheses are conspicuous, and are again distributed at random to the surroundings. The living organism is thus the seat of a special type of physical and chemical activity found nowhere else in nature, and it is significant that this is associated with psychical activity—demonstrably in the higher organisms, by implication in the lower.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , October 1942 , pp. 307 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1942

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References

1 Paper read before the X-club, University of Chicago, 1942.

2 Vorlesungen über Naturphilosophie (Leipzig, 1902).

3 Cf. the admirable discussion of Aristotle's biology in the book by L. J. Henderson. “The Order of Nature,” Chapter 2 (Harvard University Press, 1917).

4 For a recent review of physiological genetics, with special reference to the gene, cf. the article by Sewall Wright, “The Physiology of the Gene,” Physiological Reviews, 1941. Vol. 21, p. 487.

5 The popular belief in maternal impressions dies hard, although it has no support from science. There appears to be no scientific method of determining whether, or at what stage, psychic factors enter in the developing child in ulero. (But see St. Luke's Gospel, Chapter I, 41-4).

6 In Sydney Hooper's recent article on Whitehead's philosophy (Philosophy, 1942, Vol. 17, p. 47) he describes the physical as a “residue from the past”. The past, however, is no longer changeable; the purely physical corresponds to stable process which has shed subjective aim; it is “completed process where the subject has perished”. In Whitehead, “subjective aim”, the psychic, is an indispensable character of the vital, as vital. Cf. the essay, “Nature and Life”, in Modes of Thought, New York, Macmillans, 1938.