III

DYNAMIC EQUILIBRIUM AND REGENERATIVE POTENTIAL

Acti11g a11d Reactill.l?

The organism', to quote Coghill once more, 'acts on the en­vironment before it reacts to the environment.' This statement seems to apply to every level and every aspect of organic life.

The lowliest creature and the highest, the moment it is hatched or born, lashes out at the environment, be it liquid or solid, with cilia, flagellae, or contractile muscle fibre; it crawls, swims, glides, pulsates; it kicks, yells, breathes, feeds, and sucks negative entropy from its surroundings for all its worth.

The patterns of these built-in motor activities we saw to be to a large extent autonomous; 'the structure of the input does not produce the structure of the output, but merely modifies it.' Moreover, the input itself is actively controlled and modified by the central nervous system from the moment it impinges on the peripheral receptor organs; and recent developments have caused, at least among an unorthodox minority of psychologists, a distinct 'shift from the notion that an organism is a relatively passive, protoplasmic mass whose res­ponses are controlled by the arrangement of environmental stimuli to a conception of an organism that has considerable control over what will constitute stimulation.'l

Even below the level of the single cell, organelles such as the mita­chondria and kinetosomes carry on their autonomous activities; their shadowy patterns under the electron-microscope are a reminder that the emergence of life means the emergence of spontaneous, organized exertion to maintain and reproduce originally unstable forms of equilibrium in a statistically improbable system in the teeth of an environment governed by the laws of probability. The live organism succeeds in this by creating an inner environment with which to

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