LIFE AS MECHANISM 



ables seems to my judgement so obvious that it needs 

 no argument and risks no serious denial. It involves, 

 doubtless, an uncomfortable dualism, an awkward 

 breach in the continuity of our thinking. I must leave 

 it at that ; and be content to state rather than to de- 

 fend my dualistic attitude. Biology, then, for the 

 present, I take to mean the study of the forms, 

 whether gross or molecular, assumed by matter in the 

 fabric of living things, and all the changes, processes, 

 activities associated therewith, so far (and it seems 

 to me a long, long way) as we can study them apart 

 from consciousness, or 'conscious reactions.' ""^ Now 

 Dr. Thompson must either assume that plant life as 

 well as the higher forms of animals have conscious- 

 ness which he means us to take as synonymous with 

 life or else that consciousness is an added attribute 

 to biological life. He admits a miraculous^* break be- 

 tween psychology and physics but not between biolo- 

 gy and physics. If it is the province of biology to 

 study only the mechanical corpus of the body, then, 

 of course, there is no break between the two sciences. 

 But he does not mean that, and his fallacy, just as 

 always happens, lies in his ambiguous use of the 

 phrase "the forms, whether gross or molecular, as- 



23 Ibid., p. 30. 



2* The definition of miraculous is to be thought of as signifying a 

 supernatural event which is beyond or exceeding the powers or 

 laws {i.e., observed sequences) of nature. Since Professor Thomp- 

 son admits such a break when the self-consciousness of man ap- 

 pears in the biological world, he also admits that natural evolu- 

 tion is not a sufficient scientific law, and he must admit that the 

 first appearance of organic life may have been another such super- 

 natural, or miraculous, event. 



1:281 3 



