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re probably only fixed pseudopodia. But scientists are far from agreed on the value of explanations and schemas of this sort. Chemists have pointed out that even in the organic--not to go so far as the organized--science has reconstructed hitherto nothing but waste products of vital activity; the peculiarly active plastic substances obstinately defy synthesis. One of the most notable naturalists of our time has insisted on the opposition of two orders of phenomena observed in living tissues, _anagenesis_ and _katagenesis_. The role of the anagenetic energies is to raise the inferior energies to their own level by assimilating inorganic substances. They _construct_ the tissues. On the other hand, the actual functioning of life (excepting, of course, assimilation, growth, and reproduction) is of the katagenetic order, exhibiting the fall, not the rise, of energy. It is only with these facts of katagenetic order that physico-chemistry deals--that is, in short, with the dead and not with the living.[15] The other kind of facts certainly seem to defy physico-chemical analysis, even if they are not anagenetic in the proper sense of the word. As for the artificial imitation of the outward appearance of protoplasm, should a real theoretic importance be attached to this when the question of the physical framework of protoplasm is not yet settled? We are still further from compounding protoplasm chemically. Finally, a physico-chemical explanation of the motions of the amoeba, and _a fortiori_ of the behavior of the Infusoria, seems impossible to many of those who have closely observed these rudimentary organisms. Even in these humblest manifestations of life they discover traces of an effective psychological activity.[16] But instructive above all is the fact that the tendency to explain everything by physics and chemistry is discouraged rather than strengthened by deep study of histological phenomena. Such is the conclusion of the truly admirable book which the histologist E.B. Wilson has devoted to the development of the cell: "The study of the cell has, on the whole, seemed to widen rather than to narrow the enormous gap that separates even the lowest forms of life from the inorganic world.[17]" To sum up, those who are concerned only with the functional activity of the living being are inclined to believe that physics and chemistry will give us the key to biological processes.[18] They have chiefly to do, as a fact, with p
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