INTRODUCTION 



were directly dependent on the Divine Will, and that 

 the attempt to investigate them was not only futile, 

 but blasphemous. And there is a wonderful tenacity 

 of life about this sort of opposition to physical 

 science. Crushed and maimed in every battle, it yet 

 seems never to be slain; and after a hundred defeats 

 it is at this day as rampant, though happily not so 

 mischievous, as in the time of Galileo. . . . To those 

 who watch the signs of the times, it seems plain that 

 this nineteenth century will see revolutions of thought 

 and practice as great as those which the sixteenth wit- 

 nessed."^ 



The analogy is the specious one that, because the 

 Galilean revolution was successful, so also Darwin- 

 ism and sociological evolution must be accepted. The 

 fallacy lies in the fact that the physical sciences dealt 

 with a specialized field. Physicists had rigorously ab- 

 stracted from their problems all considerations of 

 what we call life. And they could do this because liv- 

 ing organisms are associated with the physical and 

 chemical machines we call their bodies, and no one 

 has ever doubted that many actions of the body are 

 physical and chemical. Thus, the problem of physics 

 was to find laws of force and energy acting on matter. 

 But, when biology arose, men of science were con- 

 fronted with the fact that the gap between the inor- 

 ganic and the organic worlds must be bridged. In 

 brief, they must show that a dead man is the same as 



^Ibid., vol. II, p. 77. 



