Abstract
READING General Smuts's presidential address to the British Association and listening to a sectional discussion on the nature of viruses, I have been wondering whether the following will satisfy those who find great difficulty in believing that things so small as the agent of foot - and - mouth disease or the bacteriophage can be live organisms. General Smuts says that the world is constructed on a biological plan, that it is made up of events, and that matter, life, and mind are three grades of the same thing. In common thought, inorganic phenomena are quantitatively related to the matter with which they are associated. Mind, on the other hand, has no perceptible quantitative relations. Life would be generally considered to be quantitatively related either (by the mechanist) to living matter or (by the organicist) to living organisms. But need this always be so? Cannot life sometimes or partly be more like mind, so that the events of life are quantitatively out of proportion to the perceptible matter involved?
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BOYCOTT, A. Nature of Viruses. Nature 128, 727 (1931). https://doi.org/10.1038/128727b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/128727b0
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