Page:Greek Biology and Medicine.djvu/98

 GREEK BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE are easily overthrown; and such, generically, may be doomed. Yet life remains, very form- ative, apparently still purposeful, still tending toward self-fulfillment. The vital principle is utterly wonderful and elusive, a will-o'-the- wisp, and yet assuredly there. Anatomists, physiologists, biologists, even physicists, are not quite without it. Some among them crave such an explanatory principle " to save the phenomena! " Though it lead into swamps of mysticism, people will not give it up and be satisfied with mechanics and chemistry. The fact of life is the prime organic reality: it is still utterly wonderful and elusive, and yet assuredly there. While biology today works largely with mechanical and chemical data, and uses mechanistic and chemical hypotheses, the majority of biologists recognize that such data and such principles do not afford a suffi- cient explanation or description of living organisms. Seeing that chemical and mechanistic for- mulae give no real picture of the organism, many biologists still think that no real picture of it can be reached through such channels exclusively. There is still much Aristote- lianism in modern physiology. As Aristotle [76]