All hypotheses which attempt to describe the functioning of the differentiating ovum, or the functioning organism, in terms of the physical concepts of matter and energy alone, fail on being subjected to close analysis. The manifestations of the life of the organism are, it is said, particular “energy-forms,” of the same order as light, heat, chemical and electrical energy, etc. All these energy-forms are “concatenated,” that is, each can be converted into any of the others. A particular frequency of the vibration of the ether can be converted into a movement of the molecules of a material body, and so become heat, while chemical energy may become converted into electrical energy, or vice versa, and so on. It is said that life may be merely a transformation of some “energy-form” known to us: the potential energy of food may be converted into “biotic energy,” and this may then manifest itself in the characteristic behaviour of the organism. This is the method of physical science. Energy continually disappears from our knowledge: the mechanical energy which was employed to carry a weight to the top of a hill, or that which raises a pendulum to the highest point of its swing, apparently disappears. If we pass a current of electricity through water, energy disappears, for it requires more current to pass through water than through a piece of metal of the same section. In these and similar cases physics invents potential energies in order to preserve the validity of the law of conservation. The kinetic energy of the weight, or that of the swinging pendulum, becomes the potential energy of the weight resting at the top of the hill, or that of the bob of the pendulum at its highest point, while the electrical energy that has apparently been lost becomes the potential energy of the changed positions of the molecules of oxygen and hydrogen. This assumption that the visible kinetic energy of motion becomes converted into the invisible potential energy of position is justified by our experience, for (neglecting dissipation) we can recover this lost energy, in its original quantity, from the condition of the bodies which became changed physically when the kinetic energy disappeared. Apply the same method to the phenomena of the organism and suppose that the chemical potential energy of the food consumed becomes converted into the kinetic energy of motion of the parts of the body: we are justified in this assumption by the results of physiology. But then some of this chemical energy undergoes a transformation of quite another kind and becomes the “biotic energy,” which is apparently that which is in us which enables us to perform regulations, or establishes that condition which we call consciousness. We cannot say exactly what this “biotic energy” is, or what are the steps by which the energy of food becomes converted into it; but no more can we say what is electrical energy, nor what are the steps by which chemical energy becomes converted into it. Thus our ignorance of the precise nature of the energy-transformations of inorganic things—an ignorance which is all the while disappearing—becomes the excuse for a comparison of these with vital transformations, and for the assumption that there is a fundamental similarity in the two kinds of happening.
Less is assumed in the assumption of an entelechian agency than in assuming that the manifestations of life are the consequences of a vital “energy-form,” different from inorganic forms, though belonging to the same order, inasmuch as it may be concatenated with these inorganic energy-forms. We need not suppose that a particular kind of transformation occurs only in the sphere of the organic: all that we need assume is that, by some agency inherent in the activities of the organism, chemical reactions that would occur if the constellation of parts were an inorganic one are suspended. Nothing unfamiliar to physical science is involved in this assumption. Hydrogen and chlorine, gases that combine together when mixed with the production of heat and light, may be mixed under conditions such that the combination may be delayed for an indefinite time. Iron which dissolves in nitric acid may nevertheless be brought into the “passive” form when it remains in contact with the re-agent but is not dissolved by it. Enzymes which are in contact with the walls of the alimentary canal do not dissolve these membranes so long as the tissues are alive, and they do not dissolve the food stuff until they have been “activated.” Oxygen which is contained in the tissues does not oxidise the tissue substances until an enzyme or a catalase has exerted its influence. More and more, as physiology has become more searching in its study of the functions of the animal, has it sought to explain the metabolic processes by assuming the intervention of enzymes, until the number of these substances has become legion, and much of the original simplicity of the notion of ferment-activity has been lost. But why do not these enzymes, if they are always present in the tissues, always act? They must be activated, says modern physiology; that is, the enzyme really exists in the tissues as a “zymogen” or a substance which is not, but which may become, an enzyme; or they exist as “zymoids,” that is, substances which appear to be chemically enzymes, but which must be activated by “kinases” before they can become functional.
Undoubtedly it is along these lines that physiology is making advances, has increased our knowledge of the activities of the animal, and is conferring on the physician greater power of combating disease; but the hypotheses of the activity of the enzymes is obviously one which has been based on the results of the physico-chemical investigation of inorganic reactions, and it has taken the precise form it has because of the attempted analogy of many metabolic processes with catalytic processes. Why do the inert zymoids become activated by the kinases just when they are required by the general economy of the whole organism? We do know that kinases are produced by the entrance of digested food into certain parts of the alimentary canal, and that these kinases are carried in the blood stream to other parts where they activate the zymoids already there. But of the nature of the machinery by means of which all this is effected physiology gives us no hint, and it is an assumption that the mechanism involved is a purely physico-chemical one. Suppose we say that the entelechy of the organism possesses the power of suspending the activation of the enzyme, that is to say, of arresting the drop of chemical potential involved in the process of the hydrolysis of (say) a proteid. When this process of hydrolysis is necessary in the interest of the organism entelechy can then institute the reaction which it has itself suspended: all this is in accord with the law of conservation. Entelechy does not cause chemical reactions to occur which are “impossible”: it could not, for instance, cause sulphuric acid and an alkaline phosphate to react with the formation of hydrochloric acid. But chemical reactions which are possible may be suspended, and suspended reactions may then become actual when this is necessary in the interest of the organism.
Entelechy is therefore not energy, nor any particular form of energy-transformation, and in its operations energy is neither used nor dissipated. In all that it does the law of conservation holds with all the rigidity with which we imagine it to hold in purely inorganic happening—at least we need not assume that it does not hold—and this is the essential difference between the entelechian manifestations and the manifestations of the “vital” or “biotic” forces or energies of the historic systems of vitalism. It is essentially arrangement, or order of happening, and it is therefore a non-energetic agency. The workman who may build half-a-dozen zigzag walls, or an archway, or a small house, from the same materials and with the expenditure of the same quantity of energy, is indeed an energetical agent, but he is more than that. He is a physico-chemical system in which any one phase is not determined by the preceding phase. Different results may arise from the same initial arrangement of materials and energies, and this is because the system contains more than the material and energetical elements. It contains the intelligence or entelechy of the workman.
What is this entelechy? Sooner of later in all our speculation on organic happening we must cross the arbitrary line which divides the space of our concepts from the non-spatial—the intensive from the extensive. Just as the physicists have left materiality behind them in their speculations and treatment of the phenomena of radiation, so biology must attempt to trace back the materiality of the organism to something which is immaterial. Just as physics has now abandoned the idea of matter as something which consists of discrete particles, or atoms, having extension in space, and which therefore exclude each other, so biology must seek the origin of living things, not in the hypothetical “biophoridæ,” or other ultimate living material particles, but in the intensive manifoldness of entelechy. There is a manifoldness in the potentiality which the simple and homogeneous ovum possesses of becoming the heterogeneous adult organism. This manifoldness, says the mechanistic biologist, consists of a manifoldness of extended material units, the determinants of Weismann, and the organisation that arranges these units—what is this organisation? It cannot be a three-dimensional machinery, as all close analysis of the facts of development and regulation shows. It is then something that is intensive, something which is not in space, but which acts into space, and the result of which is manifested in spatial material arrangements and activities. Vague and incomprehensible as is this concept of the activities of the organisms, it is only vague and incomprehensible because we have been accustomed to express all chemical and physical happening in terms of the fundamental concepts of matter and energy, and the science of the last two centuries has left us with a terminology which applies strictly to operations in which only these concepts are involved. But if, as all minute analysis of vital phenomena shows, the search for the antecedents of some energetic, material, extended system of elements in a preceding energetical, material, extended system of elements only leads to confusion and contradictions, then this concept of an agency which is neither energetic, nor material, nor spatial must be formulated. Entelechy, then, is not energy, but rather the arrangement and co-ordination of energetic processes. It is not something that is extended in space, but something which acts into space. It is not material, but it manifests itself in material changes. It is a manifoldness, or organisation, but the manifoldness is an intensive one. Compare this definition with the notion of the ether of space now accepted by the mathematical physicists, and it will be seen that our speculations are similar to those of the physicists, and, like them, the test of their reality and usefulness is to be justified pragmatically.
We may now attempt a formal description of the organism based on the discussions of the previous chapters.[34]
The organism is a typical constellation of physico-chemical parts or elements.
That is to say, it is an object in nature possessing a definite form, which is the result of the arrangement of its tissues. Each tissue is again an arrangement of cells, and each cell is a complex of chemical substances. The organism therefore resembles, so far as our definition goes, an inorganic crystal. But it is the typical organism that we are considering, and this is a pure conception, for our typical organism does not occur in nature. The organisms that are accessible to our observation are constellations of physico-chemical parts, but these constellations tend continually to deviate from the conceptual arrangement. Progressive variation from the type is something that distinguishes the organic constellation from the inorganic one.
The organism is an entity in which energy-transformations of a particular nature are effected. These transformations raise energy from a state of low, to a state of high potential.
This is the general tendency of terrestrial life, and it is expressed most fully in the metabolism of the green plant. The energy-transformations that are effected here are those in which the kinetic energy of radiation is employed to build up chemical compounds of high potential, from inorganic substances incapable in themselves of undergoing further transformations. The general tendency of all inorganic transformations is towards inertia. In them energy is not destroyed, but it is dissipated: it becomes uniformly distributed throughout material bodies as the un-co-ordinated motions of the molecules of which those bodies are composed, and it ceases to be available for further transformations. The green plant reverses this transformation, and accumulates energy in the form of chemical compounds of high potential. Inorganic processes are those in which available energy becomes unavailable, and this unavailable energy can only become available again if a compensatory energy-transformation is effected. Life is that which effects these compensatory energy-transformations.