CHAPTER IX 



LIFE 



^ I. — TJie Relation of Biology to Physics 



It does not fall within the range of the present work, still 

 less within the power of its author, to treat at length of 

 the elementary principles of biological science. In the 

 present and following two chapters only certain funda- 

 mental conceptions will be discussed. The object of our 

 Grammar so far has been to investigate the radical con- 

 cepts of physics, the basis of that " dead " mechanism to 

 which science is popularly supposed to reduce the universe. 

 In the course of this investigation we have had occasion 

 to call in question several of the notions commonly 

 associated with these physical concepts ; we have seen 

 that in speaking of matter and force much of our current 

 language requires to be remodelled for scientific purposes. 

 Now physics is a much older branch of science than 

 biology, and biologists have been so wont to look with 

 something of awe and a little of envy to the presumed 

 exactness both in language and in conclusions of 

 mechanical science, that it may come with rather a shock 

 to them when they hear that physics, like biology, is 

 solely a description and not a fundamental explanation. 

 While on the one hand, however, physicists can get on 

 very well without biology, at any rate within a certain 

 limited field of observation, biologists, on the other, have 

 not only adopted many of the physicist's notions as to 

 matter, force, and eternity, as modes of describing biological 

 facts, but they are further, whether they wish it or not. 



