PHYSIOLOGY. Physiology is the science that deals with organic processes or function. In such a very general definition, the word °function° applies not to machines (because we do not know that organisms properly are ma chines), but to organism. It does not refer to organic motions merely, but to functions, and many motions are not functions or even proc esses. As part of the definition of this science, it may be worth noting that it is in logical con trast on the one hand with anatomy, and in probable continuity with psychology.
Varieties of ogy will be elsewhere in this work, but it is obviously as much physiology as is any other kind. Animal physiology deals with those organisms which, for example, consume oxygen both day and night, whose catabolism outruns their anabolism; but there is no sharp line of demarkation.
Animal physiology properly includes human physiology. Such differences as there are be tween brutes and humans are due mainly to man's unhygienic life, to the greater influence of his mind, and the larger development of his moral nature. Leave out the considerable in fluence of these, mostly social, forces, and human physiology is much more like animal physiology than many of us would care to admit,— however much we need to admit it. Academic physiology is nothing more nor less than unapplied physiology,— pure science for its own sake. As such, it has very great dis ciplinary value, equaling or perhaps exceeding in this respect anything that mathematics has to offer, for to many mathematics is actually repellant, while physiology is sure to interest even though it repels.
Medical physiology in its old form of 20 i years ago rapidly passing. On the other hand, in its new form, it is as yet undeveloped, so that to-day medical physiology is betwixt and between. It is neither a pure academic science nor a properly applied science, but in many medical schools a traditional hodgepodge of outworn and more or less useless material, especially in its laboratory aspects. Medical physiology is allied on the one hand to prophy laxis (hygiene), and on the other hand to therapeutics. Since, as a matter of fact, physi ology as taught is very largely found in the medical schools and the dental schools, we may there perhaps get the best notion as to its ma terial, if not as to its method.
The matter of physiology, then, relates to at least three distinct modes of viewing organic function: First, there is that ancient term re ferring of course to processes. An encyclo
pedia article is no place to enter into polemic discussions. On the other hand, to discuss physiology without a reference to this matter would be to leave such a discussion quite in adequate. More and more scientists and philos ophers to-day are thinking of °Life° as a cate gory, and one scarcely less general to the human mind than space, time and causality. Men are gradually realizing as they look farther afield into the reality of things, that life and consciousness and energy and matter are but aspects of the Real. This conclusion cannot be avoided, I think, by any serious student of Life, especially of human life as it actually is about us and within us. It is easier to be skeptical and even scorn the term °vital° (es pecially as a reaction against a former unwar ranted notion of it). than to replace that which it stands for with something more pre cisely scientific. Recent thought tends above all things to emphasize continuity, and the con tinuity Just suggested above obviously tends to give to the term uvitalisnl° a meaning which no one can properly deny, that is as an in separable part of the consciousness-subscon saousness-energy-matter ((continuum') with which physiology must be concerned.
But from a narrower point of view, the term ')vital') stands, it must be admitted, for proc esses not yet comprehended and understood. It is a real name, none the less, and stands for a reality. The splendid work of Jacques Loeb, now of the Rockefeller Institute, perhaps on the whole the most searching into these mat ters that has been carried out, has always left a distinct impression on the unbiased reader that the results stop just where they should be gin if vitalism really is to mean anything more than physics and chemistry. The old familiar example germplasm, and its indescribably intri cate content, the transfer of the energy of pro teins and of fats and of carbohydrates into the chromatin of nerve-cells, and therethrough into the nerve impulse called neurility, and there through again into mental processes, suggests a meaning to vitalism which the skeptic can deny only by refusing to think it out or by adopting some hypothesis of which there is no present proof, such as psycho-physical par allelism. In short, the broad-minded thinker on organic functions at the present time seems to have to admit relationships in organic life for which the word ((vitalism)) may well be al lowed to stand— until at least its uselessness has been demonstrated.