APPENDIX 



every time it makes a complete revolution shout "chromosomes, chromosomes, 

 chromosomes." A few old moss-backs, a rare variety, mournfully harp on 

 "morphology." And one majestic megatherium comprising all in one, 

 coughs up an "energy complex," followed by a prolonged roar, in several 

 volumes, in which one can distinguish the words "action, reaction, and 

 interaction." The clergymen, senators, and Bolsheviki, with their retinues 

 of lady friends, exclaim "How wonderful, and so true." Life indeed is 

 complex, energetic, and full of actions, reactions, and interactions! And 

 all of them deeply impressed, go back to their deadly work, and act, and 

 believe, if at all, just as they did before. 



After they are gone, all the animals agree that no one has any right 

 to bother real, simon-pure scientists with such fool questions. Let them go 

 to well, Where? To Germany? To Nietsche, Bernhardi, and Treitschke? 

 To the militant philosophy of dominion; to a half-witted selfishness, in 

 politics, commerce, and kultur, frankly upbuilt on the doctrine of the survival 

 of the fittest; the fittest universally acknowledged, by themselves, to be the 

 Germans and their system? 



Or to the spiritualists, anthropomorphists, and sentimentalists, who see 

 nothing clearly in the mirror of nature but a distorted image of themselves? 



Or to Huxley and his "I don't know" followers, who can discover no 

 ethics or morality in nature-action; neither warning nor invitation, nor 

 directive discipline, but merely a drab, unoriented neutrality of "un- 

 morality," leaving man nothing but himself with which to orient himself; 

 leaving him to preate. his own system of ethics and morality out of his own 

 inner consciousness? 



The biologist has found no evidence for the broad assumptions of these 

 philosophers. In nature, he sees no one-sided dominion of the strong over 

 the weak, or the weak over the strong; no special privileges; and no 

 freedom from obligations. Neither does he see any warrant for puling 

 sentimentality, nor any expectation of an unaggressive neutrality in nature- 

 action. 



Nature, so far as we have been able to discover, is an enduring, self- 

 constructive system, gaining and preserving her gains in a definite way, 

 according to her own system of ethics and morality. In so far as nature- 

 growth is manifest in evolution, we can not deny that at least to that extent 

 her ethics are constructive and her morals saving. 



Man's constructive and saving principles can not be otherwise, without 

 severing all his bonds with nature-action in a futile attempt, like that sug- 

 gested by Huxley, to set up an anarchistic ^imperium in imperio," or a 

 Bolshevistic "microcosm within the macrocosm." 



I can not believe we have reached that parting of the ways, for man's 

 highest activities are all too clearly but extensions of nature's ways and 

 means of creating and preserving her products, in which man uses what- 

 ever intelligence he may have, and the cultural implements he has con- 

 structed, as special instruments to attain his ends. 



The specific gravity of the western variety of biologists will not let him 

 float in a vacuum of cosmic mysteries with the Hindoo; and he does not 

 care to wallow in a quagmire of metaphysics with the Greek. He gladly 

 plants his substantial mental feet on the first firm substratum he can reach. 

 And even though that substratum be nothing more than the molecular quick- 

 sands of physics and chemistry, it safely leads him to the rising shores of 

 hard realities. 



But now that we biologists, as evolutionists, feel reasonably safe in our 

 storm-proof shelters of established facts, the spirit of adventure again 

 leads us forth to wider excusions, and we ask ourselves whether it is possible 

 to reduce all the constructive processes of nature to a simple formula, which 

 can be expressed in familiar terms of universal human significance? This 



