Within And Without The System

( Originally Published 1919 )

EXCLUSIVE and long-continued devotion to any special line of study is liable to lead to forgetfulness of other, even kindred, lines—almost, in extreme cases, to a kind of atrophy of other parts of the mind. There is the example of Darwin and his self-confessed loss of the aesthetic tastes he once possessed.

Nor are scientific studies the only ones to produce such an effect. The amusing satire in The New Republic has, perhaps, lost some of its tang now that the prototype of its Professor of History is almost forgotten, but it has not lost its point.

Lady Ambrose tells the tale : " He said to me in a very solemn voice, ' What a terrible defeat that was which we had at Bouvines ! ' I answered timidly—not thinking we were at war with anyone—that I had seen nothing about it in the papers. ' H'm ! ' he said, giving a sort of grunt that made me feel dreadfully ignorant, ' why, I had an excursus on it myself in the Archaeological Gazette only last week.' And, do you know, it turned out that the Battle of Bouvines was fought in the Thirteenth Century, and had, as far as I could make out, something to do with Magna Charta."

It is, however, among writers on biological subjects that we find the most salient instances of this contraction. With extraordinary self-abnegation they seem, in the contemplation of the problem with which they are concerned, to forget that they themselves are living things, and, more than that, the living things of whom they ought to know and could know most, however little that most may be. When the biologist begins to philosophise as, after the manner of his kind, he often does, he should leave his microscope and look around him ; whereas he often forgets even to change the high for the low power. Thus he limits his field of vision and forgets, when attempting his explanation, that it is only within a system that he is working. Professor Ward, in Naturalism and Agnosticism, says :

" From the strict premisses of Positivism we can never prove the existence of other minds or find a place for such conceptions as cause and substance ; for into these premisses the existence of our own mind and its self-activity have not entered. And accordingly we have seen Naturalism led on in perfect consistency to resolve man into an automaton that goes of itself as part of a still vaster automaton, Nature as mechanically conceived, which goes of itself. True, this mechanism goes of itself because it is going, and being altogether inert, cannot stop or change.

How it ever started is indeed a question which science cannot answer, but which, on the other hand, it has no occasion to ask : time, its one independent variable, extends indefinitely without hint of either beginning or end. Such a system of knowledge, once we are inside it, so to say, is entirely self-contained and complete."

" Once we are inside it ! " what so many writers forget or ignore is that they are inside it, and that their explanations do not explain the system or how it came to be there or to be in operation.

Everybody is familiar with Paley's example of the watch found on the heath. Let us carry it a little further. Suppose some student, after devoting years of patient examination to the watch, were to come forward and say : " I have discovered the secret of this watch. There is a spring in it which possesses resiliency, and it is that which drives the wheels. I think I have heard people say that there must have been a watchmaker to design and construct this piece of machinery, but, in face of my discoveries, any such explanation is wholly unnecessary and may be altogether abandoned."

Perhaps this analogy may be regarded as exaggerated ; but, before thus condemning it, let the following passage be studied. It is from a very important book recently published, which claims (and has had its claim supported by many periodicals) to have done away with any need for an explanation of life beyond that which can be given by chemistry and physics, Jacques Loeb's Organism as a Whole, from a Physico-Chemical Viewpoint.

It would be hard to find a worse example of confused thinking than that of the following passage :

" The idea that the organism as a whole cannot be explained from a physico-chemical viewpoint rests most strongly on the existence of animal instincts and will. Many of the instinctive actions are ' purposeful,' i.e. assisting to preserve the individual and the race. This again suggests ' design' and a designing ' force,' which we do not find in the realm of physics. We must remember, however, that there was a time when the same ' purposefulness ' was believed to exist in the cosmos where everything seemed to turn literally and metaphorically around the earth, the abode of man. In the latter case, the anthropo- or geo-centric view came to an end when it was shown that the motions of the planets were regulated by Newton's law, and that there was no room left for the activities of a guiding power. Likewise, in the realm of instincts, when it can be shown that these instincts may be reduced to elementary physico-chemical laws, the assumption of design becomes superfluous." (Italics mine.)

In the first place the " purposefulness " of the movements of the planets is not affected in the very least by the question of heliocentricism.

What the author is probably thinking of is an exaggerated and obsolete teleology, but that is not what seems to be the purport of the passage. Let that pass. The main confusion lies in the application of the term " Law." The Ten Commandments, and our familiar friend D.O.R.A., are laws we must obey or take the consequences of our disobedience. The " laws " which the writer is dealing with are not anything of this kind. Newton's Law is not a thing made by Newton, but an orderly system of events which was in existence long before Newton's time, but was first demonstrated by him. It tells us how a certain part of the system works when we are " inside it." It does not in the least explain the system any more than the discovery of the resiliency of the spring of the watch explains the watch itself. So far from dispensing with " the activities of a guiding power," Newton's law is positively clamant for a final explanation, since it does not tell us, nor does it pretend to tell us, how the " law " came into existence, still less how the planets came to be there, or how they happen to be in a state of motion at all. Writers of this kind never seem to have grasped the significance of such simple matters as the different kinds of causes, or to be aware that a formal cause is not an efficient cause, and that neither of them is a final cause. Coming to the latter part of the paragraph, it is in no way proved that instincts can be reduced to physico-chemical laws, and, suppose it were proved, the assumption of design would be exactly where it is at this moment. It is the old story of St. Thomas Aquinas and Avicenna and their discussion on abiogenesis, and surely biologists might be expected to have heard of that.

The same confusion of thought is to be met with elsewhere in this book, and in other similar books, and a few instances may now be examined. Samuel Butler, in Life and Habit, warns his readers against the dicta of scientific men, and more particularly against his own dicta, though he made no claim to be a scientist. If his reader must believe in something, " let him believe in the music of Handel, the painting of Giovanni Bellini, and in the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's first Epistle to the Corinthians." And he exclaims : " Let us have no more ' Lo, here ! ' with the professor ; he very rarely knows what he says he knows ; no sooner has he misled the world for a sufficient time with a great flourish of trumpets than he is toppled over by one more plausible than himself." That is a somewhat unkind way of putting it ; but undoubtedly theory after theory is put forward, and often claimed to be final, only to disappear when another explanation takes its place. Thus at the moment we are in the full flood of the chemical theory which is employed to explain inheritance. That heredity exists we all know, but so far we know nothing about its mechanism. Darwin, with " Pangenesis," and others, using other titles, argued in favour of a particulate " explanation, but the number of particles which would be necessary to account for the phenomena involved, this and other difficulties, have practically put this explanation out of court. Then we had the Mnemic theory of Hering, Butler, and others, by which the unconscious memory of the embryo—even the germ is the explanation. Quite lately the mnemic theory has been claimed by Rignano in his Scientific Synthesis as a complete explanation, in forgetfulness of the fact that even the all-powerful protozoon can only remember what has passed and could certainly not remember that it was some day going to breed a man. At the moment, things are explained on a chemical basis, though that basis is far from firm ; is of a shifting nature, and a little hazy in details. Sometime ago, colloids were the cry. A President of the British Association almost led one to imagine that " the homunculus in the retort " might be expected in a few weeks. But the chemists would have none of this, and denied that the colloids, about which they ought to know more than do the biologists, had that promise in them which had been claimed. We had Leduc and his " fairy flowers," as now we have Loeb and others with their metabolites and hormones. As to these last, there seems to be no kind of doubt that the internal secretions of many organs and structures have effects which were, even a few years ago, quite unsuspected. Those of the thyroid and adrenals are excellent examples.

It seems to be the fate, however, of all supporters of new theories to run into extravagances.

Darwin had to remind his enthusiastic disciples that Natural Selection could not create variations, and we may feel some confidence that Hering, were he alive, would urge his followers to bear in mind that memory cannot create a state of affairs which never existed. So far we may certainly say that these internal secretions do produce certain physical effects, some of them effects not to be suspected by the uninformed reader.

There seems to be very good evidence that the growth of antlers in deer depends upon an internal secretion from the sex-gland and from the interstitial tissue of that gland ; for it is apparently upon the secretions of this portion of the gland that the secondary sexual characters depend, and not merely these, but also the normal sexual instincts. And this takes us a stage further.

The extreme claim is that all instincts, in fact all thoughts and operations, are in the last analysis chemical or chemico-physical. Let us examine this claim for a moment. The adrenals are two inconspicuous ductless bodies situated immediately above the kidneys. Not many years ago, when the present writer was a medical student, all that was known about these organs was that when stricken with a certain disease, known as Addison's disease from the name of its first describer, the unfortunate possessor of the diseased glands became of a more or less rich chocolate colour. Today we know that the internal secretion of these organs is a very powerful styptic, and there is good reason to believe that a copious discharge accompanies an unusual exhibition of rage. When we are told things of this kind we must first of all remember that the adrenalin does not cause the rage, though it may produce its concomitant phenomena. If a man flies into a violent passion because someone has trodden upon his corns, and there is a copious flow of adrenalin from the glands, it is not that flow which has caused his rage. It may be the flow from the interstitial tissue of the sexglands which engenders sexual feelings, but then those are almost wholly physical, and only in a very minor sense—if even if any true sense—psychical.

Persons who take the extreme view have never yet suggested that there is a characteristic hormone connected with those psychical attributes alluded to in the chapter of the Corinthians recommended to our notice by Butler. In fact they seem to ignore all but the lower or vegetable characters when dealing with psychology from the chemico-physical point of view.

Finally, we come again to the fatal and fundamental defect of this as of other " explanations " ; it is an explanation " within the system," and therefore unphilosophical in so far as it fails to explain the facts through their ultimate or deepest reasons.

A large part of Loeb's book is devoted to a description of the author's remarkable experiments in artificial parthenogenesis, and an attempt to show that they offer a complete explanation.

Sir William Tilden, one of the greatest living authorities on organic chemistry, tells us that " too much has been made of the curious observations of J. Loeb and others " ; and he definitely states that when we consider " the propagation of the animal races by the sexual process . . . there can be no fear of contradiction in the statement that in the whole range of physical and chemical phenomena there is no ground for even a suggestion of an explanation." Behind this pronouncement of an expert, one might well shelter oneself ; but the question under consideration merits a little further treatment.

The reproduction of kind, though usually a bisexual process, may, however, normally in rare cases be uni-sexual, and this process is known as Parthenogenesis. Even in human beings certain tumours of the sex-glands, known as teratomata, very rare in women and even rarer, if ever existent, in men, have been claimed as examples of attempts at parthenogenesis, and so far no better explanation is available.

Now Loeb and others have succeeded in certain forms—even in a vertebrate like the frog —in inducing development in unimpregnated ova. The evidence for all these things is still slender ; but we will content ourselves with noting that point and passing on to the consideration of the phenomena and the claims put forward in connection with them. We find the task of unravelling the writer's meaning rendered more difficult by a certain confusion in his use of terms, since fertilisation, i.e. syngamy—the union of the different sex products—seems to be confused with segmentation, i.e. germination ; and this confusion is accentuated by the claim that " the main effect of the spermatozoon in inducing the development of the egg consists in an alteration in the surface of the latter which is apparently of the nature of a cytolysis of the cortical layer.

Anything that causes this alteration without endangering the rest of the egg may induce its development." When the spermatozoon enters the ovum it causes some alteration in the surface membrane of the latter which, amongst other things, prevents the entrance of further spermatozoa. Loeb thinks that in causing this alteration it sets up the segmentation of the ovum.

That there is a close connection between the two events seems undoubted ; that they are in relation of cause and effect seems likely. It is quite evident that an artificial stimulus can in certain cases set up segmentation, but never can it cause the fertilisation of the ovum. It may very likely produce the same change in the membrane that is caused by the entrance of the spermatozoon under normal circumstances—membrane formation may be necessarily coincident with the liberation in the egg of some zymose which arises from a pre-existent zymogen. But we are still some way off any assurance that the main object of the spermatozoon in inducing the development of the egg is this surface alteration. It may be the initial effect ; very probably it is ; but since the main function of the spermatozoon must be the introduction of germplasm from the male Loeb argues that the change in the surface membrane is of a chemical character, and that no doubt may be correct ; but even if we allow him every scientific fact, or surmise, he is still, as in the other cases with which we have dealt, miles away from any real explanation. He is still inside his chemico-physical explanation to begin with ; and, even within that, he still leaves us anxious for the explanation of a number of points—for example, as to the nature of the chemical process which accompanies, or is the cause of, segmentation. We in no way press these questions ; for similar demands could be made in so many cases ; we only indicate that they are there. What we do press is this—that when an authority comes forward to assure us that all the processes of life, including man's highest as well as his lowest attributes, can be explained on chemico-physical lines, we are entitled to ask for a more cogent proof of it than the demonstration, however complete, of the germination of an egg, caused by artificial stimulus and not by the ordinary method of syngamy, even though that germination may lead to the production of a perfect adult form. We are entitled to ask him to make clear to us not only what is happening within his system, but—which is far more important--what that system is, and how it came into existence. We are entitled to ask why the artificial stimulus, or the entry of the spermatozoon, produces the effects which it is claimed to produce instead of any one of some score of other effects which it might conceivably have produced. Above all we are entitled to ask why there are any effects, or even why there is any ovum or any spermatozoon or curious physiological investigator, to give the artificial stimulus. Until some light is thrown upon these things we are still within the system, or merely hovering round its confines, and are far away from any final or philosophical explanation such as would satisfy the mind of the man who wants to get a real and not a partial knowledge of the things around him.

We may now turn to the question of Vitalism.

It was long the regnant theory ; then temporarily the Cinderella of biology ; it is now returning to its early position, though still denied by those of the older school of thought who cannot imagine the kitchen wench of yesterday the ruler of today. One of the objections to Vitalism is that this explanation of living things is thought by ignorant writers to be so inextricably mixed up with theological considerations as to furnish a case of stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae. That is, of course, absurd ; but it creates an undoubted bias against the theory. Hence it is the fashion amongst its opponents to write of it as " mystical " or, as Loeb does, as " supernatural," probably the most illogical term that could possibly be used. What is Vitalism ? It is the theory that there is some other element—call it entelechy with Driesch, or call it what you like—in living things than those elements known to chemistry and physics. If it is not there, cadit quaestio ; if it is there it is not " supernatural." It might with reason be called " super-mechanical," or super-chemical," or " super-physical " ; but if it is in Nature, as it is held to be, it is not " supernatural " in any true sense of that word—no dictionary confines the term " Nature " to the operations of chemistry and physics.

A good deal of the misconception existing on this point comes from pure ignorance of philosophy, a subject with which writers of this school seldom have even a nodding acquaintance. " The idea of a quasi-superhuman intelligence presiding over the forces of the living is met with in the field of regeneration." Echoes of the Cartesian idea of the soul seem to ring in this statement ; but it could not have been written by anyone who had mastered the Aristotelian or the Scholastic explanation of matter and form. But let us take this question of Regeneration ; the power which all living things have, in some measure, though in very different measure, of reconstructing themselves when injured. It has been dealt with in a masterly manner by Driesch ; and we may at once say that we do not think that Loeb has in any way contraverted his argument, nor even entered the first line of defence of that which is built up around what he calls by the somewhat forbidding name of " Harmonious-Equipotential System."

Let us take one particular example, a very remarkable one, which has been cited by both writers—Wolff's experiment on the lens of the eye. The lens is just behind the pupil or central aperture in the iris or coloured ring at the front of the eye, and behind the cornea which is to the eye what a watch-glass is to a watch. If the lens of the eye be removed from a newt, as it is from human beings in the operation for cataract, the animal will grow another one. How does it do it ? In certain cases a tiny fragment of the lens has been left behind after the operation, and the new one grows from that. This is sufficiently wonderful, but by no means so wonderful as what happens in other cases in which the entire lens has been removed and the new lens grows from the outer pigmented layer of the margin of the iris.

To the unbiological reader one source of origin will not seem more wonderful than the other, but there is really a vast distinction between them.

At an early stage in the development of the embryo, the cells composing it become divisible into three layers. It is even possible, as Loeb maintains, that this differentiation is present in the unsegmented ovum, in which case the facts to be detailed become still more remarkable and significant. These layers are known as epimeso-, and hypo-blast ; and from each one of them arise certain portions of the body, and certain portions only. It would be as remarkable to a biologist to find these layers not breeding true as it would to a fowl-fancier to discover that the eggs of his Buff Orpingtons were producing young turkeys or ducks. Now the lens is an epiblastic structure, and the iris is mesoblastic.

Hence the wonder with which we are filled when we find the iris growing a lens. Loeb attempts to explain this in the first instance by telling us that the cells of the iris cannot grow and develop as long as they are pigmented ; that the operation wounds the iris, allows pigment to escape, and thus permits of proliferation. We may accept this, and yet ask why it takes on a form of growth familiar to us only in connection with epiblast ?

The reply is : " Young cells when put into the optic cup always become transparent, no matter what their origin ; it looks as if this were due to a chemical influence, exercised by the optic cup or by the liquid it contains.

" Lewis has shown that when the-optic cup is transplanted into any other place under the epithelium of a larva of a frog the epithelium will always grow into the cup where the latter comes in contact with the epithelium ; and that the ingrowing part will always become transparent."

A most remarkable and interesting experiment ; it has this very important limitation—that it is always epithelium with which it has to do, whereas in Wolff's experiment the regeneration takes place from mesoblastic tissue. The cause of the transparency may be a chemical reaction—it depends a good deal upon our definition of that phrase. Is protoplasm a chemical compound ?

Some have considered it so, and spoken of its marvellously complicated molecule. Of course it is made up of carbon, hydrogen, and other substances within the domain of chemistry. But is it, therefore, merely a chemical compound ?

The reply involves the whole riddle of Vitalism.

The author would say that it, as well as all the living things to which it belongs, is purely and solely a chemical compound ; and he must take the consequences of his belief. One of these consequences, from which doubtless he would not shrink, would be that a super-chemist (so to speak) could write him and his experiments and his book down in a series of chemical formulae-a consequence which takes a good deal of believing.

But it also involves him in a belief in the rigidity of chemical reactions ; and we are entitled to ask for an explanation of the identical behaviour of the chemical reaction in connection with epiblastic and mesoblastic cells—both pure chemical compounds ex hypothesi and, as far as we can tell from their normal behaviour, widely differing from one another. The optic cup, or its contained fluid, is one chemical compound ; epithelium is another; mesoblast is a third. We want an explanation of the identical behaviour of the first with either of the two latter ; and this should be borne in mind that the reaction is not a mere matter of " clearing " of a tissue as the histologist would clear his section by oil-of-cloves or other reagent, but of the construction of a different type of cell epithelial, not connective tissue.

It certainly follows that there must be some superior, at least widely different, agency at work than one of a purely chemical character—something which transcends chemical operations.