I] CHEMICAL EMBRYOLOGY 33 



stance, Sir Thomas Browne wrote to his son advising him to study- 

 Lucretius yet not to read too much in him, "there being divers 

 impieties in him". Perhaps the greatest figure in this line of descent 

 is the Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, who, in his book De Docta Ignorantia 

 of 1440, contended that the principle of contradiction was only valid 

 for our reason, and so foreshadowed Kant and Hegel (cf. Vansteen- 

 berghe) . But the starry heavens with their infinite spaces that terrified 

 Pascal and their mechanical order and metrical uniformity revealed 

 by Kepler and Copernicus, on the one hand, and the moral law 

 with its tremendous purposiveness and its theological implications, 

 on the other hand, were never really faced at one and the same 

 moment and taken seriously together until the time of Kant, who 

 first subjectivated what had before struggled in the external world, 

 and suggested that the contradictions of our thought might spring 

 from the constitution of our own intelligence. "It has always been 

 assumed", he said, "that all our knowledge must conform to objects. 

 The time has now come to ask, whether better progress may not be 

 made by supposing that objects must conform to our knowledge." 



Omnis enim longe nostris ab sensibus infra 

 primorum natura jacet. . . 



Lucretius had said, but Kant went farther, and suggested that our 

 intelHgence can help us no more than our senses in the attempt 

 to see things as they really are. 



This was the great service that Kant performed for philosophy, and 

 in the light of it the scientific mind was relieved of the burden of 

 having to believe finally in its own account of the world. But in the 

 scientific controversies of the last century, Kant was forgotten, and 

 the continual successes of the scientific method led to a naturaUstic 

 outlook, which was wholly unsatisfactory. It had been supported by 

 T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, W. K. CUfford, Tyndall, Ray 

 Lankester, and many others: it apparently still is by Chalmers 

 Mitchell. But, as a widely accepted attitude, it did not live long into 

 the present century, and from such blows as James Ward's Naturalism 

 and Agnosticism and Antonio Aliotta's The Idealistic Reaction against 

 Science, it never recovered. Physico-chemical biologists were thus left, 

 as it were, without visible means of support, and existed for some time 

 on a purely pragmatic basis, devoid of any epistemological comfort. 

 Gradually, however, a more satisfactory attitude came into being. 



