PHYSICS 323 



PHYSICS 



By Professor ERNEST FOX. NICHOLS 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



IjST the upbuilding of all the great and diverse departments of 

 thought, characteristic methods have arisen which the human 

 reason has found best suited to the pursuit of the many phases of 

 truth which it seeks. In the perfection of methods and resourceful- 

 ness in applying them, no age has been more fertile than our own. 

 Yet one ever present danger to the orderly and symmetrical develop- 

 ment of modern thought, is that those working in different fields for 

 its advancement may lose touch with one another, and the interchange 

 of methods and results so essential to balanced growth be neglected. 



If in such a course of lectures as this, each lecturer coming from a 

 neighboring or distant field succeeds in showing the nature of the evi- 

 dence he has been taught to consider, his methods of weighing it and 

 some of his results, the university will be the gainer in increased 

 knowledge, in broadened sympathies and in a deeper realization of the 

 wholeness of truth. 



It is doubtful if our understanding of the unity of external nature 

 can ever be illuminated by the lamp of any one of the natural sciences. 

 The division of nature into separate departments of study has been an 

 intellectual necessity caused by the greatness of the task. 



The easiest cleavage would separate the animate from the inanimate, 

 the biological from the physical sciences. This cleft, the first to form, 

 will be the last to close; for to define the precise relations of life to 

 matter is now one of the most intricate and difficult problems in the 

 whole range of human endeavor. Who will fundamentally answer the 

 question, how does a seed become a tree? 



The phenomena of inanimate matter are involved and complicated 

 in the extreme, but those of living matter are even harder to under- 

 stand. The outward or objective manifestations of life are of a material 

 or physical character, and the purpose of the biologist is to apply to 

 them the principles of physics and chemistry as far as these will carry 

 him, and in many directions they have already carried him far. When, 

 however, we consider the subjective phenomena of life, or consciousness, 

 the question seems to me a metaphysical one and we are without as- 

 surance that physics and chemistry can lead us beyond the boundaries 



1 A lecture delivered at Columbia University in the series on science, philos- 

 ophy and art, as the opening lecture in the natural science group, October 

 23, 1907. 



