32 UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI BULLETIN 



upon the scene. Now, the significance of the contention that 

 the laws of the several sciences are discontinuous appears 

 chiefly when you thus regard the sciences as corresponding to 

 stages in the process of evolution. If those laws are in fact 

 discontinuous, that means that at certain points in the evolu- 

 tionary sequence matter begins to behave in essentially new 

 ways, develops novel properties and methods of action which 

 were in no true sense contained in or implied by its earlier 

 characteristics and performances. If, on the other hand, all 

 the laws of biology and chemistry are ultimately reducible to, 

 and deducible from, the laws of some fundamental branch of 

 physics, that means that, in a very thorough-going sense, the 

 first morning of creation wrote what the last dawn of reckon- 

 ing shall read. A sufficiently competent physicist, present at 

 the time when there was nothing but physics to be competent 

 in, could have read off from the unchanging properties of 

 the original atoms or corpuscles, and from their then existing 

 arrangement in space, all of their future vicissitudes ; and 

 could have foreseen that those atoms would really never at 

 bottom be doing anything more or other than they were doing 

 at that moment or have any powers or capacities greater or 

 more diverse than those which they then possessed. 



Thus, those who deny the possibility of the unification of 

 the sciences, even below the point where the conscious pur- 

 poses of animals and men come upon the stage, may be said 

 in reality to be contending for an especially radical form of 

 the doctrine of evolution; they imply (if I may put it so) that 

 the very 'laws' or uniformities of action of the physical world 

 themselves evolve, exhibit in the course of time discontinuous 

 mutations and genuine, not-wholly-predictable innovations. 

 Indeed, we are assured by an eminent and very influential 

 contemporary French philosopher that only those who take 

 such views as this have any right to be called evolutionists. 

 For all others, evolution does not reach down to the roots of 

 nature ; it is merely a surface appearance ; for the novelties 

 which it brings forth are such only in seeming. Our ignor- 



