The activity of the organism, whether it be the energy-transformations
of the plant or the motile activities of the animal, are directed and
regulated activities. The activity of the organism is not a functional
activity in the sense that the activity of a dynamo is a function of
the nature of the machine, and of the nature and quantity of the energy
supplied to it. The nature of the activity of the organism is regulated
autonomously by purposes which it “wills” to carry out.
_The organism is a phase in an evolutionary flux._
Categories of organisms--varieties, species, genera, etc.--are
fictions. They are arbitrary definitions designed to facilitate our
description of nature. They are types or ideas. In constructing them
we follow the method of the intellect, and we represent by immobility
that which is essentially mobile and flows. Between the fertilised egg
and the senile organism there is absolute continuity. Our description
of the individual organism is a description of it at a typical moment
of its life-history, and this description includes all that has led up
to, as well as all that will fall away from, the morphology at this
particular typical moment.
Even then the arbitrarily defined organism is only a phase. In
defining it we arrest, not only the individual, but also the racial,
evolutionary flux. The specific morphology is that of a typical
moment in a racial flux. Leading up to it at this moment are all the
variations that have joined it with its ancestry, and leading away from
it will be all the variations that will convert it into its descendants.
The individual and racial developments are true _evolutions_. They are
the unfolding of an organisation which was not expressed in a system
of material particles or elements interacting with each other, and
with the elements of the environment, but which we must seek in an
intensive, non-spatial manifoldness.
In the evolutionary flux the changes are non-functional ones, that
is to say, any phase, whether it be one in an individual or a racial
development, is not merely a rearrangement of the elements of the
preceding phases, as in the case of a transforming system of material
particles and energies. There is inherent, spontaneous variability.
_The organism endures._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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