| 释义 |
organism|ˈɔːgənɪz(ə)m|
[f. organize v.: see -ism. Cf. F. organisme (1729 in Hatz.-Darm.).]
1. Organic structure; organization. Now rare.
1664Evelyn Sylva (1776) 648 So astonishing and wonderful is the Organism, parts and functions of plants and trees. 1701Grew Cosm. Sacra ii. iii. §11 It is the advantagious Organism of the Eye, by which that is procured. 1890J. Martineau Seat Author. Relig. ii. ii. §3. 245 From the complexion of the language and the organism of the style.
2. a. An organized or organic system; a whole consisting of dependent and interdependent parts, compared to a living being.
1768–74Tucker Lt. Nat. (1834) I. 474 When an artist has finished a fiddle to give all the notes in the gamut, but not without a hand to play upon it, this is an organism. 1840Carlyle Heroes vi. (1858) 365 To bridle-in that great devouring, self-devouring French Revolution; to tame it, so..that it may become organic, and be able to live among other organisms and formed things, not as a wasting destruction alone. 1860Motley Netherl. (1868) I. vi. 299 The weight of the strong Protestant organism..might have balanced the great Catholic League. 1889Spectator 16 Mar., An army is not a crowd of men, but a vast organism, travelling with indispensable baggage of enormous weight. 1900J. D. Robertson Holy Spirit iii. 53 Paul first taught us to speak of society as an organism.
b. Philos. The theory that in science everything is eventually an organic part of an integrated whole.
1925A. N. Whitehead Sci. & Mod. World (1926) 112 This doctrine involves the abandonment of the traditional scientific materialism, and the substitution of an alternative doctrine of organism. 1928Jrnl. Philos. Stud. III. 33 He [sc. Lloyd Morgan] saw no reason why the term organism should not be applied to all those ‘natural entities’, as he called them, existing throughout the universe in emergent degrees of complexity. 1959A. W. Levi Philos. & Mod. World xii. 486 The ‘philosophy of organism’..suggests the synthesis of incompatibles. 1965E. E. Harris Foundations of Metaphys. in Sci. xiv. 282 The appropriate philosophy for contemporary science must be..a philosophy of organism.
3. a. An organized body, consisting of mutually connected and dependent parts constituted to share a common life; the material structure of an individual animal or plant.
Sometimes treated as something possessed by an animal or plant; sometimes, as in minute organisms, a fossil organism, identified with the animal or plant itself.
1842H. Miller O.R. Sandst. i. (ed. 2) 40 There are formations which yield their organisms slowly to the discoverer. 1858Lewes Sea-side Stud. 157 The simplest organisms breathe, exhale, secrete, absorb, and reproduce by their envelopes alone. 1882A. W. Ward Dickens vii. 205 A mental and moral vigour supported by a splendid physical organism. 1889A. R. Wallace Darwinism 11 The total number of living organisms in the world does not, and cannot, increase year by year. 1894H. Nisbet Bush Girl's Rom. 60 Wounded and insulted in the most sensitive part of his organism.
b. Organized existence in the mass.
1887Ruskin Præterita II. 336 That quality of beauty which I now saw to exist through all the happy conditions of living organism.
4. organism–environment, designating the relationship between an animal and its surroundings.
1946C. Morris Signs, Lang. & Behavior iii. 84 One action rather than another..is ‘required’ by the organism-environment situation. 1958New Biol. XXVI. 84 His [sc. man's] social, mental, and technological achievements do not make his ‘organism-environment’ relationship less important than that of other animals. 1969Listener 13 Nov. 655/1 What lemmings are supposed to do when they get too many has become almost apocryphal and the simile has been used often enough to prophesy courses of human behaviour by people who have no understanding of lemmings or their environment or of the organism-environment relation.
Hence orgaˈnismal a., of, pertaining, or relating to organisms.
1861Wilson & Geikie Mem. E. Forbes iv. 125 The power of organic chemistry to alter and extend the organismal sciences was felt and acknowledged by all. 1887Athenæum 7 May 611/3 The internal or organismal [explanation of evolution] as naturally commences with the fundamental rhythm of variation in the lowest organism in nature. |