If I grind the Venus of Milo into dust, I am at once in a totally different world with this dust. I am amongst the raw material of nature, untouched by æsthetic influence. From this calcareous powder I can, in reality or imagination, pass on to the world of crystals, molecules, and atoms. In that case I shall have done with æsthetic morphology. I come to the morphology of the inorganic, a very different branch. What do we find in the case of the living turtle?
It is true that I can break up the turtle into simple chemical substances. In that case I make the same transition; I abandon organic morphology, and pass, with the same salto mortale as in the case of the Venus of Milo, to the lower science of inorganic morphology.
But when I examine the structure of the living individual turtle before me I notice a special feature. Let us suppose that I break up the Venus of Milo only to a certain degree; or, with less vandalism, I do not break it up, but light up its inner structure to some extent by a sort of Röntgen-ray apparatus. And suppose I found that this one æsthetic individuality is made up of millions of much smaller and æsthetically finer and more unified images. I do not mean of millions of repetitions of the large Venus in miniature, but of real and unmistakable little works of art, each of which, regarded separately and without any injury to its narrower individuality, might be just as excellent a subject for æsthetic examination as the whole Venus.
This is, of course, nonsense as regards the Venus of Milo. There is nothing of the kind in it. I have given the paradoxical supposition merely for the purpose of showing what we really find in the case of the turtle.
When the organic individual turtle is closely studied it breaks up first into so many simpler organic individuals, which undoubtedly belong as such to the province of organic morphology. They are the cells. The theory of Schleiden, Schwann, and Virchow here comes into direct touch with morphology. Every higher animal or plant has its own individuality; and within this individuality there is a conglomerate, a community, or a state, of individuals of a lower order, that have their own life and their corresponding individual life-form. Man himself, the highest of animals, is a cell-state. So Virchow taught. Each one of us is an individual, and as such an object of morphology. The cell, each single cell in each of us, is also an individual, and as such is equally an object of morphology. Hence it is the task of the morphology of organisms, not only to describe these higher individualities as such, but also to look on them as glass-houses, as it were, with so many shelves, divisions, and smaller houses within of a lower rank. These internal arrangements have to be described, piece by piece, with the same fidelity.
This will probably suffice to convey a general idea of the subject. Clearly, the great work that ought to form the general part of morphology at this point was the precise determination of all these various layers of individuality that are found in the animals, plants, and protists, and, as we rise upward, enter into more and more complex relations to each other.
The difference between, say, a turtle or a man and the cell which combines in its millions to form them is not the only one. Between them we seemed to find individualised, or almost individualised, links. Think of the idea of an organ. What is my heart? It is made of a number of cell-individuals, like my whole frame. But these cells form a sort of intermediate individuality in me. We may go further. What is a segment of a worm? What is an arm of a star-fish? They have so much independence that they can continue to live, rapidly producing new cells and forming a new worm or star-fish of the higher individual type, if they are cut off. The arrangement is still more difficult in the case of the plant. Where in their case shall we find the stages of individuality that correspond to the animal-human? The cells are distinct in both cases. The individual plant-cell corresponds to the individual animal-cell. But what is there in the plant that corresponds to me, as the animal-human multicellular individual? Does the oak-tree, for instance? Certainly, the oak is an individual. But it seems that it is the single sprout of it that corresponds to what I am. What is the relation of the tree to this sprout?
Here our ideas grow dim and confused. We human individuals unite to form certain higher communities. The word “social” reminds us of the fact: then we have the nation, the race, humanity. At least the earlier of these stages certainly perform various combined functions, and are understood to form, or wish to form, new individuals. We speak of the social organism, the body of the people, the soul of the people, and so on.
We see that still more clearly in the case of the animals about us. Individuals, that correspond to our conception of an individual man, combine and form stocks and colonies, with division of labour. We find this in the medusæ, corals, anemones, tunicates, and vermalians. One of these animal stocks, to which our human social combinations only correspond in a much wider sense, gives us a stage that is represented by the tree in the plant-world. Infinite perspectives open out, and also infinite complications. Infinite problems spring up for morphology to deal with; it must make its way through the labyrinth of these complicated types of individualisation.
The matter is still more intricate if I begin at the bottom of the biological series and proceed upwards. I, man, am an individual of a certain stage in my own collective activity. It is true that I am made up of millions of cell-individuals, but when we look at the whole these are merely elementary units. But take a being from the protist-world that is too lowly to be either animal or plant. In respect of its whole activity it is an individual just as much as I am, and therefore in this regard at the same stage as I. At the same time it consists of a single cell. The distinction in me between unit and whole does not exist in it. Its unit is the whole. It would seem a Sisyphean task to reduce all this to a system.