ABSTRACT
FACTS about living things are more highly personal than the facts of the inanimate world. Moreover, as we ascend to higher manifestations of life, we have to exercise ever more personal faculties-involving a more farreaching participation of the knower-in order to understand life. For whether an organism operates more as a machine or more by a process of equipotential integration, our knowledge of its achievements must rely on a comprehensive appreciation of it which cannot be specified in terms of more impersonal facts, and the logical gap between our comprehension and the specification of our comprehension goes on deepening as we ascend the evolutionary ladder. I shall demonstrate this in the present chapter. But before entering on this enquiry, I want to anticipate yet another point; namely, that as we proceed to survey the ascending stages of life, our subject matter will tend to include more and more of the very faculties on which we rely for understanding it. We realize then that what we observe about the capacities of living beings must be consonant with our reliance on the same kind of capacities for observing it. Biology is life reflecting on itself, and the findings of biology must prove consistent with the claims made by biology for its own findings.1
