The System of Animate Nature: The Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of St. Andrews in the Years 1915 and 1916

Abstract

THE subject of the Gifford lectures was intended by the founder to be natural theology regarded as a natural science and treated, just as astronomy or chemistry would be, with entire freedom from any prepossessions whatever. This rather difficult task has been attempted by two biologists, Dr. Hans Driesch in 1907–8, and Prof. J. Arthur Thomson in 1915–16. The first of these lecturers tells us that he set out to follow biology along its own path—that is, from its nineteenth-century “naïve realism” towards its transition to “a branch of the philosophy of Nature,” and such a progress he accelerated in no small degree by a method of treatment that was both critical and constructive. It was critical inasmuch as it included a penetrating analysis of the nature of the transformations that occur in living substance, thus leading to the rejection of the notion of a peculiar “vital energy form,” and—which is equally important—it involved also a thorough criticism of the “pseudo-psychology” that had been employed in the study of animal behaviour. But it was also constructive in that it developed an old concept—that of “entelechy”—deriving from this a series of “psychoids” which were regarded as factors in organogenesis, metabolism, and behaviour. The Drieschian psychoids are not energetic agencies, but they function, as Leibnitz suggested in regard to the human soul, like a wise prince among his subjects, or a good father in his household, by directing, suspending, and releasing activities rather than by exerting them.

The System of Animate Nature: The Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of St. Andrews in the Years 1915 and 1916.

By Prof. J. Arthur Thomson. (In two volumes.) Vol. i. Pp. xi + 348. Vol. ii. Pp. v + 349–687. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1920.) Price 30s. net two vols.