392 ANNUAL EEPOET SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1911. 



Stephane Leduc, to doubt or to deny that there is any gulf between 

 and to hold that spontaneous generation or the artificial creation of 

 the living is but a footstep away. Others, like Delage and many 

 more, see in the contents of the cell only a complicated chemistry 

 and in variation only a change in the nature and arrangement of the 

 chemical constituents. They either cling to a belief in M heredity" 

 or (like Delage himself) replace it more or less completely by the 

 effects of functional use and by chemical stimulation from without 

 and from within. Yet others, like Felix Auerbach, still holding to a 

 physical or quasi physical theory of life, believe that in the living 

 body the dissipation of energy is controlled by a guiding principle, as 

 though by Clerk Maxwell's demons; that for the living the law of 

 entropy is thereby reversed; and that life itself is that which has 

 been evolved to counteract and battle with the dissipation of energy. 

 Berthold, who first demonstrated the obedience to. physical laws in 

 the fundamental phenomena of the dividing cell or segmenting egg, 

 recognizes, almost in the words of John Hunter, a quality in the living 

 protoplasm, sui generis, whereby its maintenance, increase, and repro- 

 duction are achieved. Driesch, who began as a ''mechanist," now, 

 as we have seen, harks back straight to Aristotle, to a twin or triple 

 doctrine of the soul. And Bergson, rising into heights of metaphysics 

 where the biologist, qua biologist, can not climb, tells us (like Duran) 

 that life transcends teleology, that the conceptions of mechanism 

 and finality fail to satisfy, and that only "in the absolute do we live 

 and move and have our being." 



We end but a little way from where we began. 



With all the growth of knowledge, with all the help of all the sciences 

 impinging on our own, it is yet manifest, I think, that the biologists 

 of to-day are in no self-satisfied and exultant mood. The reasons 

 that for a time contented a past generation call for reinquiry, and out 

 of the old solutions new questions emerge, and the ultimate problems 

 are as inscrutable as of old. That which, above all things, we would 

 explain baffles explanation; and that the living organism is a living 

 organism tends to reassert itself as the biologist's fundamental con- 

 ception and fact. Nor will even this concept serve us and suffice us 

 when we approach the problems of consciousness and intelligence and 

 the mystery of the reasoning soul ; for these things are not for the 

 biologist at all, but constitute the psychologist's scientific domain. 



In wonderment, says Aristotle, does philosophy begin, 1 and more 

 than once he repeats the saying- and more than once he rings the 

 changes on the theme. Now, as in the beginning, wonderment and 

 admiration are the portion of the biologist, as of all those who con- 

 template the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that in them is. 



i Metaph., i, ii, 9826, 12, etc 



