ABSTRACT
The world picture suggested by our review of the physical sciences is extended, and our notion of the fundamental principles of its general structure reinforced, by reflection upon the sciences of life. The physical world revealed itself as a single totality of distinguishable but inseparable elements, within which were generated microcosms each more fully and adequately embodying principles of order governing the whole. So also the biotic world is seen to be a single interconnected organic system containing a multitude of organisms each a complex whole auturgically maintaining its equilibrium by variations relevant to its own internal principles of order, which reflect and exemplify the general principles of organization governing the biocoenosis. The system of living species, more palpably than that of physical entities, arrays itself as a scale of forms increasingly complex and more closely integrated. Again, more emphatically than at the physical level, living reality reveals itself as essentially dynamic, as perpetual process, even where its structure appears to be most stable and permanent. Not only are the formed organs of the living body in constant process of decay and self-renewal, but the genes themselves, that seem to be the least changeable units of life, suffer constant dynamic breakdown and reconstruction. The living world is essentially a realm of dynamic wholeness, in which the realization of completeness is through a process of change; in which no whole is static, simple, uniform or undifferentiated; yetin which all movement subserves and tends towards order and coherence.
