The Unity of the Organism*

Ritter's timely, interesting and suggestive work is a digest of the biological evidence for an organismal as opposed to an elementalistic conception of the living organism, be it plant, animal, or man. He traces the evidence through the whole biological series from the unicellular organisms, including a consideration of protoplasm, through the multicellular organisms, including a consideration of the bio-chemical integrations, the phenomena of heredity and of growth, and of neural integration, to the psyche and the phenomena of consciousness. It is a masterly assemblage of the evidence which is of peculiar significance and importance for psycho-pathology in view of its present individualistic and interpretative tendencies, and coming, as it does, from the whole field of biology.

The antagonism between elementalism and organismalism is fundamental and bespeaks the type of personality that approaches the problem. It was a great step when evolution was able to supplant the special creation hypothesis and trace each organism in its phylogenetic unfolding, and demonstrate the homologies of its several parts in the several members of the series. It was fascinating and seductive to work these out as between the seal's flapper and the bird's wing, the horse's hoof and the toes of other quadrupeds and in this search for analogies the importance of differences was often lost sight of, “as though an embryologist, having discovered that a bird's wing is the genetic counterpart of a salamander's forelimb, should instruct the ornithologist that it is wrong for him to call the bird's wing a wing, because the member may be reduced to a lower type of limb.”1 “Either analytic knowledge or synthetic knowledge of nature would be wholly void of meaning were it to be completely wrenched from the other.”2 And so the main thesis of the organismal