II PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM 83 



there, for a sluggard ? We have not the presump- 

 tion to deny the possibility of anything you affirm ; 

 only, as our brethren are particular about evidence, 

 do give us as much to go upon as may save us from 

 being roared down by their inextinguishable 

 laughter. 



Enough of the realism which clings about " laws." 

 There are plenty of other exemplifications of its 

 vitality in modern science, but I will cite only one 

 of them. 



This is the conception of " vital force " which 

 comes straight from the philosophy of Aristotle. 

 It is a fundamental proposition of that philosophy 

 that a natural object is composed of two constitu- 

 entsthe one its matter, conceived as inert or 

 even, to a certain extent, opposed to orderly and 

 purposive motion ; the other its form, conceived as 

 a quasi-spiritual something, containing or con- 

 ditioning the actual activities of the body and the 

 potentiality of its possible activities. 



I am disposed to think that the prominence of 

 this conception in Aristotle's theory of things 

 arose from the circumstance that he was, to begin 

 with and throughout his life, devoted to biological 

 studies. In fact it is a notion which must force 

 itself upon the mind of any one who studies 

 biological phenomena, without reference to general 

 physics, as they now stand. Everybody who 

 observes the obvious phenomena of the develop- 

 ment of a seed into a tree, or of an egg into an 



