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In content and format this small book is comparable to the volumes which appear in English in the Home University Library and similar series. It belongs to the type of popular presentation which comes from the pen of a specialist and for that reason, unlike journalistic writing, the writer is sensible of a greater degree of intellectual responsibility.
Professor Sapper calls the material which the book covers “Philosophy of the Organic,” but in more concrete terms it might be referred to as the theoretic assumptions of biology. It is the kind of subject-matter that we usually have to wade through in textbooks of zoölogy and biology before the more specific data is arrived at. The chapter headings, such as “General Characteristics of Life Phenomena,” “The Physical-Chemical Meaning of Life Phenomena,” “The Forms of Inanimate and Animate Nature” at once suggest their content. One of course would hardly expect any original contributions in a work of this kind.
It is unfortunate that the author finds it necessary to devote a chapter each to the outworn doctrines of mechanism and vitalism. Both of these metaphysical assumptions transcend the strictly objective data of the science of biology and their development was made possible in an age when adherence to an objective outlook in biology was less firm than today. Just as “the freedom of the will”—upon which, incidentally, the book touches—has only a historic significance for modern philosophy, so, in this field of human enterprise, the concepts of mechanism and vitalism have become irrelevant metaphysical notions.
Precisely the same tradition which permits him to discuss these antiquated doctrines in biology leads him into the error of a dualistic psychology in which the organism is split up into a “psychic” phase and its “organic basis.” With all the inherited misconceptions of the subject-matter and its methodology on his hands, the author tries valiantly to overcome the Cartesian pitfalls of “res cogitans” and “res exten