Smutsian Holism - A Centenary Appraisal - Holism and Evolution (1926): Chapter III of The Reformed Concept of Matter

Chapter III of Smuts's Holism and Evolution (Macmillan, 1926) is the second structural and empirical testing ground of the critique of analysis and abstraction established in Chapter I, an immanent critique in the domain of matter. Where Chapter I restores the field as medium of possibility (Field Ontology), Chapter II re-identifies the units of reality as events — Action in Space-Time (Einsteinian Conjoint Realism), Chapter III re-identifies matter as active structure (Bohrian Structural Realism). The scholarly consensus reading of Chapter III at the centenary mark advances the interpretation that Chapter III is a survey of the New Physics in support of a metaphysical claim, missing its place as the second test of Chapter I's critique, where the reform of matter yields active structure. The paper reconstructs an eight-step argument. Structure is indispensable to chemistry: "without it one may safely say that organic chemistry becomes unintelligible" (p. 38). The New Physics shows it "is not static in space, but dynamic and intensely active" (p. 38), so matter is "a structure of energy units revolving with immense velocities in Space-Time" (p. 35), and the properties of an element are "simply the expression of its internal structure and its condition of stable or unstable equilibrium" (p. 44); there is structure "through and through," not only in matter "...but also in the field which surrounds this matter" (p. 44). Crystal structure is "the index and source of all external properties and activities" (p. 45); the colloid state shows "a peculiar and almost mysterious selective action" (p. 46). The atom's structure is "no more than an inference" (p. 49), accepted because "without such structure the observed facts are unintelligible and inexplicable" (p. 50). Hence matter is "nothing but concentrated structural energy, energy stereotyped into structure" (p. 51), and "the very nature of the physical universe is activity or Action" (p. 52). The construction repeats Chapter II's: necessity and fact are offered together, under the rule that "the sensible order is the governing factor to which the conceptual order has to conform" (p. 50). It is categorical where it argues what the old concept cannot be, and open where it marks its model as inference and its extensions as suggestions. The old concept of matter as "inert, passive, barren, dead… with absolute contours and nothing beyond" (p. 51) is the abstraction, and the five results — activity, Radioactivity and Organic Descent, the Periodic Table and systematics, creativeness of form, the colloid threshold — re-describe the gap it produced, narrowing the gulf with life (p. 36). Each states a likeness with its limit: "something very much like a family resemblance" (p. 54), "in a sense analogous" (p. 55), "only a mutation — the greatest mutation of all" (p. 57). The chapter points back to "the first chapter" (p. 50) and to the cage and disc of Chapter II (p. 55), and ends at a gap it names: "A gap remains; a great leap may have taken place across it" (p. 58). Conclusion of the immanent reading: that the physical universe is active energy stereotyped into structure (Bohrian Structural Realism). Matter is active structure — structural energy whose inner arrangement is the expression and source of its external properties and activities. The field is continuous with matter and equally structural (p. 44). The difference between matter and life is a difference in the character of activity, not between deadness and activity (pp. 36, 51). The inert body is the abstraction; active structure is the real.