The organism-environment interactions

The organism-environment interactions are both local and general; often there are several different local interactions, each of which must occur concurrently with the rest, so that the general reaction is a complex integrated whole. This requires that the environmental field itself be capable of several related interactions with the organism, and points to the fact that the reciprocity of outer and inner is itself an organized event. The life process is not simply a series of events within the organism, but a field of events in which inner and outer processes constitute a complex totality. The potentialities of life, as in the spore of a fern, can conveniently be conceived as packed within a particle, but the life process itself is not so narrowly localized. A man's life, too, is not within his body, nor is his personality. Potentialities, yes; if we mean by personality the potentiality of individual achievement or social reaction, they are there. The potentialities also exist in an environment which liberally interacts with the potentialities within the man. The actual event, the personal life history, is an innerouter reciprocity, as is all life; personality as we know it is not within the skin, but coextensive with the individual life process, the sequences of liberated potentialities. We know in fact only an infinitesimal fraction of the potentialities within the skin; their status is indeterminate. The more we can find out, the better. But personality study should not be defined in terms of what lies within the skin until we can describe these potentialities adequately. The life processes which we can observe are rewarding objects of study. It is likely, in fact, that it is chiefly through these that such knowledge as we shall ever have about human potentialities will be achieved.

Biochemical systems or fields need first to be defined at given points in time; but it is of their nature to exhibit a time dimension, just as they exhibit three space dimensions. Fields--distributions of energy in space and time--are forever in flux. The most important thing to know about a field may frequently be its direction of change, a direction which can be understood in terms of its own "orthogenesis" and its relation to still larger fields which make up its context.

There need be nothing vague about the matter of interdependence; the reasons for it are often clear. One type of interdependence is exemplified in the selective affinities of various chemical reagents for one another; for example, in the tendency of toxins manufactured within the body, or introduced into it, to react most intensely with particular groups of cells and to have slight or no effect upon others. just as the histologist's stain picks out certain tissues, so the chemical gradients involve not the haphazard but the selective extension of chemical influences in certain directions rather than in others. The same is true of gradients of muscular tension which spread because of neural communication elements and reach some regions more easily than others. There is, indeed, much evidence to show that part of the synchronization of muscles is biochemical, part neural. In the broadest sense then, communication systems within the organism are lines of transmission of energy, following either anatomical paths such as are provided by nerves, or functional lines defined by selective affinities. Interdependence and intercommunication are questions of directed flow within the organic system. They are, in other words, organized at the very start, in the sense that many types of intercommunication are constantly going on, each tissue being the recipient of many kinds of messages and serving in some degree, as a result of its own metabolism or excitation, to initiate such impulses to many other cells.