The Whence and the Whither of Man: A Brief History of His Origin and Development through Conformity to Environment; Being the Morse Lectures of 1895Tyler, John M. (John Mason)
Religion
The Whence and the Whither of Man: A Brief History of His Origin and Development through Conformity to Environment; Being the Morse Lectures of 1895
Tyler, John M. (John Mason)
Evolution
An army is more than a mob of individuals; it is individuals plus
organization, discipline, authority. A republic is not square miles
of territory and thousands or millions of inhabitants. It is these
plus organization, central government. Webster claimed that the
central government was, and had to be, before the states. The
organism cannot exist without its parts; it has a very real
existence in and through them. It can coerce them. The state may be
an abstraction, but it is one against which it is usually fatal to
rebel, and which can say to a citizen, Go and be hanged, and he
straightway mounts the scaffold. Now these are analogies and prove
nothing. But in so far as they throw light on the essential idea of
an organism, they may aid us in gaining a right view of our "cell
republic."
Says Whitman in a very interesting article on the "Inadequacy of the
Cell-Theory": "That organization precedes cell-formation and
regulates it, rather than the reverse, is a conclusion that forces
itself upon us from many sides." "The structure which we see in a
cell-mosaic is something superadded to organization, not itself the
foundation of organization. Comparative embryology reminds us at
every turn that the organism dominates cell-formation, using for
the same purpose one, several, or many cells, massing its material
and directing its movements, and shaping its organs as if cells did
not exist, or as if they existed only in complete subordination to
its will, if I may so speak. The organization of the egg is carried
forward to the adult as an unbroken physiological unity, or
individuality, through all modifications and transformations." And
Wilson, Whitman, Hertwig, and others urge "that the organism as a
whole controls the formative processes going on in each part" of the
embryo. And many years ago Huxley wrote, "They (the cells) are no
more the producers of the vital phenomena than the shells scattered
along the sea-beach are the instruments by which the gravitative
force of the moon acts upon the ocean. Like these, the cells mark
only where the vital tides have been, and how they have acted."[A]
[Footnote A: See articles by Whitman and Wilson, Journal of
Morphology, vol. viii., pp. 649, 607, etc.]
"Interaction of cells" can help us but little. For how can
neighboring cells direct others placed in a new position? The
expression, if not positively misleading and untrue, is at the best
only a restatement of fact. It certainly offers no explanation.
Flood-tide is not due to the interaction of particles of water,
though this may influence the form of the waves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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