Page:Philosophical Review Volume 19.djvu/144

130 find the slightest hint of a diminution in the all-pervading orderliness, nor can we conceive an organism existing for a moment in any other state."

I have quoted the paragraph somewhat at length in order to show the direction which the biological research of today is taking. It is towards an intelligible account of the vital processes. The 'orderliness' of these processes does not mean necessarily that they are to be eventually explained in a purely mechanical way; on the contrary, according to Mendel's law the elements entering into the varied combinations are still vital units.

It does mean, however, that whether the secret of life is to be discovered in an original élan vital as Bergson puts it, or in an entelechy as Driesch emphatically insists, or in the elementary accumulators of nervous energy acting after the manner of electrical phenomena, as Rignano conceives it, it must as the inner spring of life operate according to the law of its own nature, and exhibit as its essential features order and regularity. And if it exhibits order and regularity in its functioning, it is so far forth intelligible, and there is, to say the least, no presumption against its being conceptually discerned. Every presumption favors an intelligible process, expressible in terms of law or laws.

I believe most profoundly that the processes of thought are essentially the processes of organization, and not of mere "fabrication" as Bergson very stoutly insists. For thought does not work upon its material from without, combining part to part in an external way, but it works from within after the manner of the architectonic principle of a plant which accumulates its material and informs it, building up its structure by building it into its own nature. It is just because the thought processes are vital, organic, metabolic, that I believe they possess no inherent incapacity for interpreting the phenomena of life.

Another count against logic is that it fails in dealing with the special case; that there is always something about the concrete instance which no abstract category, rubric or formula can adequately cover; that what is needed is a logic of particulars, that conceptual logic must carry on its process by means of universal