5io EDUCATION 



sometimes appear in pure-bred individuals seems, according to the 

 mathematical conception of science, to furnish conclusive proof 

 that the Mendelian doctrine of segregation is erroneous. If, 

 however, we mention this test to a member of the experimental 

 school, we are sure to find that it carries no conviction. He will not 

 attempt to demonstrate that the supposed test is no test. He will 

 merely declare that the problems of heredity are not to be solved 

 in the arm-chair by essayists, logicians, or dialecticians, but only 

 by real men of science labouring in the laboratory or the 

 breeding pen. If we insist that the "dialectician" is utilizing 

 all the experimental facts and more besides, that it is needful 

 that even "real" men of science shall test their thinking, that 

 thinking can be carried on as well in an armchair as a breeding 

 pen, and that the experiments on which he relies prove, not 

 alternative inheritance, but only alternative reproduction, he will, 

 by way of retort, adduce similar experiments on rabbits. If 

 we raise the same objections to these, he will adduce like 

 experiments on fowls. And so on, and so on. Ultimately we 

 are left to wonder helplessly whether he is unaware of the true 

 nature of science, or whether every one who has both thought and 

 expressed himself clearly about it is unaware ; whether biology, 

 which, from the scientific standpoint of the mathematician and 

 physicist, seems so pregnant with great possibilities, so laden with 

 tremendous issues, is in truth so mean and narrow a thing, a 

 mere guessing about the abnormalities of sexual reproduction, or 

 at most no more than a study of the function of sex ; whether a 

 new and more accurate science is really being created by exclusive 

 devotion to experiments and abnormalities, or whether we are 

 spectators in a kind of confidence trick in which a display of 

 experiment is used to obtain a fictitious appearance of accuracy. 



831. Whoever is right some one must be wrong ; and a teach- 

 ing which results in such a babble of opinions must be wrong also. 

 A mathematician will seldom affirm contradictories, and any 

 statement by him is usually accepted or rejected by his fellows 

 on grounds of pure fact and reason. The same is true of 

 physicists, chemists, and astronomers. But a biologist as when 

 he upholds both the theory of recapitulation and the Law of 

 Ancestral Inheritance, both the theory of Natural Selection and 

 the notion that variations are caused by the direct action of the 

 environment, both the hypothesis that harmful conditions cause 

 races to decline and the hypothesis that such conditions cause 

 races to progress in the same characters at the same time often 



