Passage 1
In the light of this more adequate hypothesis the parts and activities which we discern in a living organism and its biological environment can be understood only as manifestations of a whole which is the life of the organism, and which expresses itself in activity. The parts and their spatial arrangements, including environment, are the expression of active and unceasing maintenance, nutrition, or metabolism; and the activities are activities which express themselves in this maintenance. Reproduction is only a phase of that constant insensible reproduction which is ordinarily called nutrition. The structures or spatial arrangements and activities maintain themselves as a whole, and together constitute the whole which we call life. They cannot be understood as the separate parts and activities of a machine can be understood; and the spatial arrangements of the parts, including environment, cannot be understood as those of a mechanical system. Life does not exist as something localised in space. Spatial relations are within it, as an expression of it. An organism considered simply as such is blind to its experience. Its reactions are simply the expression of its nature. ... The characteristic distinction of a conscious organism is that it ‘learns’ from experience. This signifies that a conscious nervous response is determined not merely by the simultaneously inflowing influences from all parts of the living body and its environment, but also by what, in order of time, has preceded or will succeed.
Tools and agentsMachine minds and made personsinstrument · rejectsScientific or empirical evidenceMetaphysics of mind and lifeNo judgment offered
Haldane rejects both the reduction of life to separable mechanisms and the hypothesis of an independently acting vital force. Life is an active, self-maintaining organism–environment whole; conscious personality adds learning from experience, with past and future in view.
Summary of Book, pp. 140–45 (1921 printing of the 1913 lectures)