Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 12.djvu/616

 J. DELBOEUF, LA MATINEE BRUTE, ETC. 603 Organism no longer retains the capacity of transforming itself. Its "relative stabilisation" has reached the degree known as "death". The division into a free or ''unstable" and a "mechanical" part on which it depends for its specific and individual characters only appears in the higher organisms. And a higher organism is not completely unstable even at the beginning of its life. There is a "mechanism transmitted by generation," which is " the will and intelligence of ancestors". In every individual there is a psychological "nucleus" of instinct or hereditary habit. And, physiologically, the ovum is not indifferent, but has a tendency to grow into a certain specific and individual form. What is made possible by the process of generation is the recovery, for another individual, of a portion of the "instability" that pre-existing individuals must lose. True or sexual generation is itself made possible by the specialisation that is the result of cell-division. Death of the individual, as has been seen, is the consequence of the specialisation of a complex organism, its division into a stable and an unstable part, and of the tendency of the latter to become stable, so that no further change is possible. Generation is now seen to be the correlative of death. For only by the double pro- cess of death and generation is the continued existence of special- ising organisms possible. In the case of those un specialised organisms that multiply by "fission" there is "birth," but, as there is no true (that is, sexual) generation, so there is no " death," except from external accidents. These lowest forms of life are "immortal". We cannot apply to them " the integral notion of natural death," for they " leave no corpse ". " But also we cannot apply to them the complex notion of individuality, physical or psychical, since this comprises indivisibility and mechanism." The discussion of individuality in its relation to generation naturally suggests the question, What is permanent in the indi- vidual ? Is it a certain portion of matter, an atom or a group of atoms, already present in the germ and unchanged through life, or is it merely a certain form ? Can we suppose, as physiologists usually do, that all the matter of the organism is "fluent," and that physical and psychical identity is still preserved, or does individual identity require some material substratum however small ? The author inclines to the second alternative. He shows that there is no absolute proof that at the end of a certain time (usually fixed at seven years) every particle of matter in the body has been exchanged with another from outside. It is possible that the matter of the "stable" parts is more persistent than physiologists suppose ; and the supposition that a certain portion of germinal matter persists from birth to death is incapable of disproof. The whole body, it is suggested, may be regarded as " a single molecule of infinite complication " consisting of atoms collected around itself by the germinal group on which depends the identity of the organism (p. 133). This theory is not fully worked out, but, as far as it goes, it is strikingly similar to the