Note 87 — Chapter VI
Reading edition
“It is,” writes Wilson, “becoming more and more clearly apparent ... that Schwann went too far in denying the influence of the totality of the organism upon the local activities of the cells. It would of course be absurd to maintain that the whole can consist of more than the sum of its parts. Yet, as far as growth and development are concerned, it has now been clearly demonstrated that only in a limited sense can the cells be regarded as co-operating units. They are rather local centres of a formative power pervading the growing mass as a whole” (The Cell, pp. 58, 9).
What Prof. Wilson, absorbed like most scientists in the consideration of ponderable and visible masses, assumes to be “absurd” is of course the very thing which he is proving to be a fact The whole can be not merely the “sum” but the synthesis of its parts.