BIOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 



loam, make their way imjnediately to the tree tops. But 

 they do not take this journey because their brains tell 

 them, in some mysterious intuitive way, that food is there. 

 They go because their optical outfit is so constituted that 

 they are driven toward the light. Desensitize their eyes, 

 and they starve to death, though a well-filled larder is 

 near at hand. 



As to there being true scientists whose tenets include 

 belief in the possibilities of attaining knowledge through 

 some mysterious insight which differs from all ordinary 

 percepts and their rational consideration, I simply deny 

 the allegation. It is a mistake to assume that when Milli- 

 kan, K. T. Compton, and Pupin issue preachments in terms 

 of theology and metaphysics, they are speaking as scien- 

 tists. They are merely demonstrating how difficult it is to 

 divest one's mind completely of the whams and whimseys 

 learned in early childhood. These men are competent physi- 

 cists who have done admirable work in their own bailiwick 

 by using the objective methods of science. This procedure 

 has worked well in the solution of the problems in which 

 they have been interested. Through it they have been 

 successful. By its means they have attained fame. Do they 

 give honor where honor is due? Oddly enough, they do not. 

 In their leisure hours they endeavor to show that the per- 

 plexing questions which concern man most intimately — 

 problems of emotion, of conduct, of thought — are unassail- 

 able by these time-tried methods. They speak vaguely of 

 man's higher nature, something above the rational, which 

 may attain to truth by mysterious inspiration. And they 

 are speaking of man, you understand, of that animal of the 

 family Hominidae, whose corporeal make-up is better known 

 than that of any other organism; whose functional activi- 

 ties have been the subject of experimentation for a century 

 and a half; whose hopes, whose desires, whose emotions, 

 whose mental peculiarities are objective problems about 



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