104 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



the first law : even Dr. Johnstone admits that. The proof was 

 a severe blow to the vitalist party, which Dr. Johnstone now 

 tries to retrieve with the help of the second law. Not in this 

 case, any more than in the other, is there any sort of basis for 

 the allegation ; and we can only contemplate with calm the 

 desperate expedients to which vitalists are now driven. They 

 search high and low for some instance of a law of physics, 

 broken through by organic activity ; and no such instance can 

 they find. If their theory demands, as it seems to do, that some 

 fundamental law of physics shall be broken, surely they would 

 be well advised to drop the subject, and pass quietly over to the 

 orthodox biological school. 



The work of Dr. Paul Carus, The Mechanistic Principle and the 

 Non-Mechanical, is in great part an attempt to deny that evil 

 consequences in practical life flow from a belief in mechanism. 

 There are many writers — and Dr. Carus quotes Mark Twain as 

 an illustration — who are inclined to believe in the mechanistic 

 principle, but deplore the supposed slight which it involves 

 upon the dignity and "divinity" of man. To use such an 

 argument against the truth of the theory is of course nothing 

 else than setting up our ignorant and uneducated desires as the 

 standard of truth. Just the same argument was used during the 

 evolution controversy : some people felt that man lost something 

 of his " divinity " if he was descended from an ape-like ancestor ; 

 they denied in consequence that he was descended from such 

 an ancestor. It is scarcely necessary in Science Progress to 

 point out the hopeless confusion of thought involved. The 

 truth of a theory does not depend upon whether or not we like 

 it : to say so would be to prostitute truth to sentiment and 

 desire. Nevertheless it is very difficult to see why anyone 

 should be depressed by the establishment of one or other theory 

 of human functions. As Dr. Carus remarks, " A man's a man 

 for a' that." No theory, either of his origin or of his physiologi- 

 cal processes, alters in the slightest degree his actual nature. 

 He remains just the same, whatever view we take of his con- 

 stitution; and if we regarded him as suffused with divinity before, 

 we must still regard him as suffused with divinity after we have 

 corrected our theories about him. The whole matter is, however, 

 too elementary and too obvious for further discussion. Dr. 

 Carus examines the mechanistic theories of four different writers, 

 somewhat strangely assorted, Mark Twain, La Mettrie, Prof. 



