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THE PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGY
London: FETTER LANE, E.C.
C. F. CLAY, Manager
Berlin: A. ASHER AND CO.
Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS
New York: G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
Bombay and Calcutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd.
Toronto: J. M. DENT & SONS, Ltd.
Tokyo: THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA
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THE PHILOSOPHYOFBIOLOGY
INTRODUCTION
It has been suggested that some reference, of anapologetic nature, to the title of this book may bedesirable, so I wish to point out that it can really bejustified. Science, says Driesch, is the attempt todescribe Givenness, and Philosophy is the attempt tounderstand it. It is our task, as investigators ofnature, to describe what seems to us to happen there,and the knowledge that we so attain—that is, our perceptions,thinned out, so to speak, modified by ourmental organisation, related to each other, classifiedand remembered—constitutes our Givenness. This isonly a description of what seems to us to be nature.But few of us remain content with it, and the impulseto go beyond our mere descriptions is at times anirresistible one. Fettered by our habits of thought,and by the limitations of sensation, we seem to lookout into the dark and to see only the shadows of things.Then we attempt to turn round in order that wemight discover what it is that casts the shadows, andwhat it is in ourselves that gives shape to them. Weseek for the Reality that we feel is behind the shadows.That is Philosophy.
The Physics of a generation earlier than our ownthought that it had discovered Reality in its conceptionof an Universe consisting of atoms and molecules inceaseless motion. What it described were only motionsand transformations, but it understood these motionsand transformations as