Page:Philosophical Review Volume 21.djvu/137

119 the exact relation of philosophy and science. Each of them seeks connections, and in the development of thought these vary; philosophy, however, remains as reason realizing itself in science and life. And this connection is in harmony, not perhaps with the definite systems of particular philosophers, but with the general spirit of philosophy in its development.

Though an excellent instrument of research, the mechanistic hypothesis has not been able to formulate the biological facts, Organisms manifest purpose; they tend to respond effectively; they profit by experience. Not a single every-day function such as digestion, respiration, or the irritation of nerves, has as yet received a description in physico-chemical terms. When physical and chemical processes take place in the organism, the living cells make a difference which we cannot explain but have to accept as a fact. Bunge, Haldane, and Driesch show that the processes disclosed by physico-chemical analysis, are means made use of by the organism, but that they do not themselves constitute life. Physical laws do not account for the specific. Organic growth differs from inorganic change in that the organism assimilates, and in that it maintains its specific structure throughout all cell-division. Physico-chemical descriptions of all the activities of all the different parts of the organism would not show the harmonious coordination of the parts nor their capacity for adjustment to changeful external conditions. Adaptation or purposiveness requires a historical explanation; it is a supra-mechanical concept. Similarly, when we pass to animal behavior and observe such facts as the organic preparation of many creatures for one particular but absolutely indispensable stimulus. Furthermore, if we take the various items in a complex process such as that of migration and reduce it hence as far as possible to physical and chemical common denominators, we do not make any clearer the interconnection of all these items into the single act of migration. We must begin with the concept of an organism, a specific individuality, an historical being, a being which contains within itself the history, not merely of its own existence, but of all its ancestors. The necessities of biological method thus prevent the possibility of there being erected a single science of nature on a physico-chemical basis.

The attitude of Pragmatism is much older than the specific doctrine by that name. It finds expression, for example, in the common-sense school, in the Scottish school, in the Empiricism represented by Thomas Reid, and in Positivism. The realism of Pragmatism is the simple affirmation of common sense that the existence of the world is immediately known through the senses. The test of amount of existence in a given object is for Pragmatism, as for