370 THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 



civilisation and barbarism, is from the standpoint of 

 science the sole account we can give of the origin of 

 those purely human faculties of healthy activity, of 

 sympathy, of love, and of social action which men value 

 as their chief heritage. 



SUMMARY 



1. Owing to the metaphysical character of the language of much of modern 

 physics, metaphysics has found a foothold in biology. Peculiarly in the con- 

 ception of life as a mechanism do we find confusion reigning. The problem 

 ought to be expressed in words to the following effect : Can we describe the 

 changes in organic phenomena by the same conceptual shorthand of motion 

 as suffices to describe inorganic phenomena? There is difficulty in answering 

 this question because we are unable to assert what are the exact laws of 

 motion which would apply to the complex physical structure by which we 

 conceptualise the simplest organic germ. 



2. The distinction between living and lifeless is not capable of brief 

 definition, consciousness and self-determination give us no assistance, and we 

 are thrown back on special characteristics of structure and motion. 



3. Of the three hypotheses which have been invented to describe the 

 origin of life — its perpetuity, spontaneous generation, and origin from an 

 "ultra-scientific cause" — the second seems the most valuable. Like the 

 " spontaneous generation of consciousness," it is only a conceptual description, 

 and not an explanation of the sequence of phenomena. 



4. Biologists are called upon to define the limits within which they 

 suppose the formula of natural selection to be a valid description : in 

 particular, how it is related to that physical selection of more stable inorganic 

 compounds which we may conceive to have taken place during and after the 

 azoic period. At the other end of the scale we have again to ask how far 

 the survival of the fittest describes the sequences of human history. While 

 it seems probable that human history may be resumed in the brief formulae 

 of biology and physics, still several leading biologists who have examined 

 human progress from this standpoint do not appear to have paid sufficient 

 regard to the socialistic instinct, which, as much as the individualistic instinct, 

 is a factor of the principle of evolution. 



LITERATURE 



Claus and Sedgwick. — Elementary Text-Book of Zoology (General Part, 

 Chapter I.). London, 1884. 



Haeckel, E. — Natiirliche Schcipfungs-Geschichte (Zwolfter Vortrag, S. 

 250-310), 4th ed. Berlin, 1873. (History of Creation, revised by Ray 

 Lankester, London, 1883.) — On the Development of Life. Particles 

 and the Perigenesis of the Plastidule, 1875 (pp. 211-57 of The 



