LECTURES IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES 



predictable. This was a comforting thought; and yet, it did not 

 wholly remove the sting from Pascal's anguished cry: "The 

 eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." 



The Cartesian dualism was soon abrogated in favor of a new 

 monism, but this time a materialistic monism. Laplace boasted 

 to Napoleon that in his studies on celestial mechanics he found 

 God an unnecessary hypothesis. Helmholtz, the discoverer of 

 the law of conservation of energy, wrote in 1847 that "The task 

 of physical science is finally to reduce all phenomena of nature 

 to forces of attraction and repulsion. . . . Only if this problem 

 is solved are we sure that nature is conceivable." 2 But if this be 

 true of physics, why not also of biology and psychology? Des- 

 cartes believed animals to be mere machines, but regarded man 

 as a possessor of an un-mechanical soul. John Locke concluded, 

 however, that the human mind contains nothing which did not 

 enter in via the senses. The sense organs operate by means of 

 physical forces, albeit very complex and subtle ones. Descartes 

 proved to be the loser and Locke the gainer. Man's arrogant 

 illusion of spirituality, and even of rationality, was steadily 

 eroded during the nineteenth century, and finally dissolved by 

 Freud early in the current one. 



The Darwin-Wallace theory of evolution arrived in 1858 and 

 1859, in the midst of a period of uninterrupted successes of 

 physical sciences and their technological applications. This 

 theory completed the picture of the universe as one vast ma- 

 chine, called "Nature," of which man is but a tiny part. Neither 

 the boundless cosmos, nor even the creatures which live around 

 us, were made for our benefit or were designed with us in view. 

 Nor have the animals and plants appeared suddenly; the rela- 

 tive perfection of their bodily structures and functions and their 

 marvelous adaptions to their environments have all arisen slowly 

 and laboriously in the process of evolution, which extends for at 

 least two billion years back into the history of our planet. Fur- 

 thermore, this process involves only "natural" causes, and at that, 

 of a seemingly rather unedifying sort, called "struggle for ex- 

 istence" and "survival of the fittest." 



Finally came the heaviest blow, or what seemed such to some 



"Ibid. 



98 



