330 THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 



/ 



for immortality," etc. Now either these terms are 

 used figuratively, in which case we ought to find them 

 re-defined, or else biologists have adopted them from 

 physics and intend to use them in the sense of the latter 

 science. 



But there is small doubt that the latter alternative 

 represents the true state of the case. The biologist con- 

 siders his organic matter to be inexorably united to the 

 " matter " of the physicist, and he uses, or rather considers 

 he uses, such terms as matter, force, mechanism, etc., in 

 the sense of the sister science. This dependence of 

 biology on physics is so well brought out in the following 

 passage that the reader must pardon my quoting it at this 

 stage of the investigation : — 



Experience cannot help us to decide this cjuestion ; we do not 

 know whether spontaneous generation was the commencement of 

 life on the earth, nor have we any direct evidence for the idea that 

 the process of development of the living world carries the end within 

 itself, or for the converse idea that the end can only be brought about 

 by means of some external force. I admit that spontaneous genera- 

 tion, in spite of all vain efforts to demonstrate it, remains for me a 

 logical necessity. We cannot regard organic and inorganic matter 

 as independent of each other and both eternal, for organic matter 

 is continually passing without residuum, into the inorganic. If 

 the eternal and indestructible are alone without beginning, then the 

 non-eternal and destructible must have had a beginning. But the 

 organic world is certainly not eternal and indestructible in that 

 absolute sense in which we apply these terms to matter itself. We 

 can, indeed, kill all organic beings and thus render them inorganic at 

 will. But these changes are not the same as those which we induce in 

 a piece of chalk by pouring sulphuric acid upon it ; in this case we only 

 change the form, and the inorganic matter remains. But when we 

 pour sulphuric acid upon a worm, or when we burn an oak-tree, these 

 organisms are not changed into some other animal and tree, but they 

 disappear entirely as organised beings and are resolved into inorganic 

 elements. But that which can be completely resolved into inorganic 

 matter must have also arisen from it, and must owe its ultimate founda- 

 tion to it. The organic might be considered eternal if we could only 

 destroy its form, but not its nature. It therefore follows that the 

 organic world must once have arisen, and further, that it will some 

 time come to an end.^ 



Now this passage is extremely instructive, for we have 



1 Weisniann : Essays on Heredity, p. 33. Oxford, 1S89. 



