The Science and Philosophy of the Organism

The Science and Philosophy of the Organism Synopsis

Excerpt from The Science and Philosophy of the Organism: The Gifford Lectures Delivered Before the University of Aberdeen in the Year 1907

This work is not a text-book of theoretical biology; it is a systematic presentment of those biological topics which bear upon the true philosophy of nature. The book is written in a decidedly subjective manner, and it seems to me that this is just what Gifford Lectures ought to be. They ought never to lose, or even try to lose, their decidedly personal character.

My appointment as Gifford Lecturer, the news of which reached me in February 1906, came just at the right moment in the progress of my theoretical studies. I had always tried to improve my previous books by adding notes or altering the arrangement; I also had left a good deal of things unpublished, and thus I often hoped that I might have occasion to arrange for a new, improved, and enlarged edition of those books. This work then is the realisation of my hopes; it is, in its way, a definitive statement of all that I have to say about the Organic.

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