GREATER PROBLEMS OF BIOLOGY THOMPSON. 385 



comparatively simple and well-nigh solved, but are of the most 

 formidable complexity. And we would, most of us, confess, with 

 the learned author of The Cell in Development and Inheritance, that 

 we are utterly ignorant of the manner in which the substance of the 

 germ cell can so respond to the influence of the environment as to 

 call forth an adaptive variation; and again, that the gulf between 

 the lowest forms of life and the inorganic world is as wide, if not wider, 

 than it seemed a couple of generations ago. 1 



While we keep an open mind on this question of vitalism, or while 

 we lean, as so many of us now do, or even cling with a great yearning 

 to the belief that something other than the physical forces animates 

 and sustains the dust of winch we are made, it is rather the business 

 of the philosopher than of the biologist, or of the biologist only when 

 he has served Ins humble and severe apprenticeship to philosophy, 

 to deal with the ultimate problem. It is the plain bounden duty of 

 the biologist to pursue his course, unprejudiced by vitalistic hypoth- 

 eses, along the road of observation and experiment, according to 

 the accepted discipline of the natural and physical sciences; indeed 

 I might perhaps better say the physical sciences alone, for it is already 

 a breach of their discipline to invoke, until we feel we absolutely 

 must, that shadowy force of "heredity," to winch, as I have already 

 said, biologists have been accustomed to ascribe so much. In other 

 words, it is an elementary scientific duty, it is a rule that Kant 

 himself laid down, 1 that we should explain, just as far as we possibly 

 can, all that is capable of such explanation, in the light of the prop- 

 erties of matter and of the forms of energy with which we are 

 already acquainted. 



It is of the essence of physiological science to investigate the mani- 

 festations of energy in the body, and to refer them, for instance, to 

 the domains of heat, electricity, or chemical activity. By this means 

 a vast number of phenomena, of chemical and other actions of the 

 body, have been relegated to the domain of physical science, and 

 withdrawn from the mystery that still attends on life, and by this 

 means, continued, for generations, the physiologists, or certain of 

 them, now tell us that we begin again to descry the limitations of 

 physical inquiry, and the region where a very different hypothesis 

 insists on thrusting itself in. But the morphologist has not gone 

 nearly so far as the physiologist in the use of physical methods. He 

 sees so great a gulf between the crystal and the cell that the very 

 fact of the physicist and the mathematician being able to explain 

 the form of the one, by simple laws of spatial arrangement where 

 molecule fits into molecule, seems to deter, rather than to attract, ■ 



i Wilson, op. cit., 1906, p. 434. 2 i n his Critique of Teleological Judgment. 



38734°— sm 1911 25 



