Page:An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge.djvu/17

 material is to assert infinitely small volumes. But there are no such things, only smaller and smaller volumes. Yet (with this point of view) it cannot be meant that the surface acts on the interior.

Certainly stress has the same claim to be regarded as an essential physical quantity as have momentum and kinetic energy. But no intelligible account of its meaning is to be extracted from the concept of the continuous distribution of diverse (because extended) entities through space as an ultimate scientific fact. At some stage in our account of stress we are driven to the concept of any extended quantity of material as a single unity whose nature is partly explicable in terms of its surface stress.

1.4 In biology the concept of an organism cannot be expressed in terms of a material distribution at an instant. The essence of an organism is that it is one thing which functions and is spread through space. Now functioning takes time. Thus a biological organism is a unity with a spatio-temporal extension which is of the essence of its being. This biological conception is obviously incompatible with the traditional ideas. This argument does not in any way depend on the assumption that biological phenomena belong to a different category to other physical phenomena. The essential point of the criticism on traditional concepts which has occupied us so far is that the concept of unities, functioning and with spatio-temporal extensions, cannot be extruded from physical concepts. The only reason for the introduction of biology is that in these sciences the same necessity becomes more clear.