The Science and Philosophy of the Organism

by Hans Driesch

A few instances may show you what great inconveniences may hence arise to impede practical biological research. We later on shall have to deal with experiments on very young embryos: parts of the germ will have to be destroyed in order to study what will happen with the rest. Now almost all germs are surrounded by a membrane; this membrane has to be detached before any operation is possible. But what are we to do if it is not possible to remove the membrane without killing the embryo? Or what if, as for instance in many marine animals, the membrane may be removed but the germs are killed by contact with sea-water? In both cases no experiments at all will be possible on a sort of germ which otherwise, for some special circumstances of its organisation, might have given results of importance. These results become impossible for only a practical, for a very secondary reason; but enough: they are impossible, and they might have thrown light on problems which now must remain problems. Quite the same thing may occur in experiments on physiology proper or functional physiology: one kind of animals survives the operation, the other kind does not, and therefore, for merely extrinsic reasons, the investigations have to be restricted to the first, though the second might have given more important results. And thus the biological experimenter always finds himself in a sort of dependence on his subjects, which can hardly be called pleasant. To a great extent the comparatively slow advance of biological sciences is due to this very fact: the unalterable specific nature of biological material.

But there is still another feature of biology dependent on the same fact. If a science is tied down to specific objects in every path it takes, it first, of course, has to know all about those objects, and that requires nothing else but plain description. We now understand why pure description, in the most simple sense of the word, takes up such an enormous part of every text-book of biological science. It is not only morphology, the science of form, that is most actively concerned with description; physiology also, in its present state, is pure description of what the functions of the different parts of the body of animals and plants actually are, at least for about nine-tenths of its range. It seems to me important to press this point very emphatically, since we often hear that physiology is from the very beginning a much higher sort of knowledge than morphology, inasmuch as it is rational. That is not at all true of the beginning of physiology: what the functions of the liver or of the root are has simply to be described just as the organisation of the brain or of the leaf, and it makes no difference logically that one species of description has to use the experimental method, while the other has not. The experiment which only discovers what happens here or what happens there, possesses no kind of logical superiority over pure description at all.

But there will be another occasion in our lectures to deal more fully with the logic of experiment and with the differences of descriptive knowledge and real rational science.

The three Different Types of Knowledge about Nature

Natural sciences cannot originate before the given phenomena of nature have been investigated in at least a superficial and provisional manner, by and for the practical needs of man. But as soon as true science begins in any limited field, dealing, let us say, with animals or with minerals, or with the properties of bodies, it at once finds itself confronted by two very different kinds of problems, both of them—like all “problems”—created in the last resort by the logical organisation of the human mind, or, to speak still more correctly, of the Ego.

In any branch of knowledge which practical necessities have separated from others, and which science now tries to study methodically, there occur general sequences in phenomena, general orders of events. This uniformity is revealed only gradually, but as soon as it has shown itself, even in the least degree, the investigator seizes upon it. He now devotes himself chiefly, or even exclusively, to the generalities in the sequences of all changes. He is convinced that there must be a sort of most general and at the same time of most universal connection about all occurrences. This most universal connection has to be found out; at least it will be the ideal that always will accompany the inquiring mind during its researches. The “law of nature” is the ideal I am speaking about, an ideal which is nothing less than one of the postulates of the possibility of science at all.

Using for our purposes a word which has been already introduced into terminology by the philosopher Windelband, though in a somewhat different sense, we shall call that part of every branch of natural sciences which regards the establishment of a law of nature as its ideal, “nomothetic,” i.e. “law-giving.”

But while every natural science has its nomothetic side, it also has another half of a very different kind. This second half of every natural science does not care for the same general, the same universal, which is shown to us in every event in a different and specified kind: it is diversity, it is specification, that constitutes the subject of its interest. Its aim is to find a sufficient reason for the types of diversities, for the types of specifications. So in chemistry there has been found a systematic order in the long series of the compounds and of the elements; crystallography also has its different systems of crystals, and so on.

We have already employed the word by which we shall designate this second half of every natural science: it is the “systematic” side of science.