6li THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



author's subjectivism culminates in the above-quoted saying that there is no 

 such thing as objective science; all interest is centred upon the personalities 

 figuring in the history of science. This may to a certain extent be justified, 

 when it is a question of giving expression to the purely ideal strivings of 

 humanity, but when it is a question of nature, our knowledge rests undeni- 

 ably upon certain facts that reveal themselves equally to all. He who refuses 

 to admit this had best turn his back upon exact natural science for ever. 

 Radl has in fact done so; he is now professor of natural philosophy at Prague. 



Uexkull on the life-process 

 On the whole, little is to be gained from the biological point of view by 

 becoming too deeply engrossed in the works of the modern vitalists. Some 

 of them have gone in for speculations about the theory of knowledge, as, 

 for instance, Jacob von Uexkull, who holds that only a part of the life- 

 process is mechanically comprehensible, while that part of it which gives 

 to the mechanical phenomena their " Zielsfrebigkeit" is super-mechanical and 

 must be referred to impulses produced by an organized natural force; me- 

 chanical biology is concerned with the fitting-in of every being into certain 

 given conditions, which give to the organism its limitations; in the world 

 of dew-worms tjiere exist only dew-worm conditions, while man can ob- 

 serve only human things. To analyse the different conditions of life and to 

 work out the laws governing this reciprocal action between individual and 

 environment is, to his way of thinking, the aim of biology. Other vitalists 

 have reverted to downright mysticism, and, finally, the neo-Lamarckian 

 school previously referred to, which is represented by Pauly and his pupils, 

 has tried to see in the phenomena of life, especially in evolution, expressions 

 for consciously operating psychical forces in the living substance. What is 

 common to all these different aims is the attempt to discover the difference 

 between animate and inanimate matter and what it is that produces the pe- 

 culiar character of the phenomena of life. For this purpose the methods of 

 physics and chemistry have proved ineffective, with the result that other 

 means have been sought to attain the end in view. We have already seen 

 that these means have proved fruitless. In such circumstances obviously the 

 wisest course would be: neither mechanism nor vitalism, but resignation in 

 face of the inexplicable. But science has not yet struck into that path, nor 

 is it likely to do so in the future. And fortunately too, we may well say, for 

 had not humanity possessed a belief in the possibility of solving the insoluble 

 riddles of life, there would never have been any science at all. Every delusion 

 that has involved an honest striving after truth has at any rate contributed 

 something to human knowledge, even if it is only negative, and the specu- 

 lations that have just been described are in this respect by no means valueless. 



