From the PREFACE . It is possible that the title of this book may be misleading to some readers, and so an explanation may, very appropriately, form the subject of this introduction. Well, then, by " the mechanism of life " is meant nothing more than the results of a scientific analysis of the activities of living animals. First, we must define what is meant by " scientific method," and this is not at all difficult now that Einstein, Eddington, and the other relativists, have persuaded us to think about what we do when we ...
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From the PREFACE . It is possible that the title of this book may be misleading to some readers, and so an explanation may, very appropriately, form the subject of this introduction. Well, then, by " the mechanism of life " is meant nothing more than the results of a scientific analysis of the activities of living animals. First, we must define what is meant by " scientific method," and this is not at all difficult now that Einstein, Eddington, and the other relativists, have persuaded us to think about what we do when we investigate something " scientifically." What we do, in that case, "is to observe space-time coincidences in a four- dimensional manifold - that is really and actually our procedure, though it seems rather dreadful! It would be very inconvenient, also, to sustain oneself in this plane all the while, and so we proceed to let ourselves down to earth, so to speak. From the space coincidences that we observe (for instance, the coincidences of the top of a column of mercury in a barometer tube with certain marks on the adjoining scale) we infer space measurements, and from the coincidences of the hands of a clock with marks on the dial we infer time measurements. That simplifies the method a good deal. Then it is only the relations between series of space-time measurements that form the data of science (its differential equations), but that, again, is very trying, and so we assume that there are things in nature. These things are separated from each other, at the same instant of time, by intervals of space, while they are separated from each other, in the same space, by intervals of time. Thus we have something to lean up against and sustain ourselves in this rather difficult process of apprehending nature. The things that we regard as existing apart from each other in space and time are electrons. But just yet that is rather inconvenient, and so we regard our natural things as atoms and molecules in motion in an arbitrary three dimensional space and an arbitrary one-dimensional time. Thus there are atoms and molecules which exist and move and form configurations - that is, constitute physico-chemical systems in space and time. When we speak about a "mechanism," we mean the motions and configurations of material particles. Already we have gone a long way, via inferences, from our " real and actual " observations of the passage of nature, which observations are space- time coincidences; but never mind that: let us stick to our notion of mechanism - systems of material particles and their motions and configurations. The descriptions of such systems by making use of space measurements, and the devising of mathematical relationships between them (the differential equations), are the method of science. What we call "space" may be measured in terms of x and y and z, the old space dimensions, and t the time one; and so the equations that we make involve the four "variables," x, y, z , and t . That is what physiology does; whatever its particular methods may be, they involve the observations of space-time coincidences - the readings of the pointers, scales, etc., of instruments. It observes systems of material particles (the atoms and molecules making up tissues) in certain configurations, and then, after intervals of time, in other configurations. Sometimes the differences between the configurations can be thrown into mathematical forms, but more often they cannot. This, therefore, is what is called mechanism, and it is the method of physiology. It is the study of the successive phases of a material energetic configuration or system. Note that it is not necessarily the study of an organism. Usually what is investigated is a part of an organism, or even the dead material of the latter. And in all cases it is the study of the physico-chemical activities of the organism that is the object of physiology....
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