BIOLOGY AMONG THE SCIENCES 1127 



continued into these spaces, they must also, of course, be similarly 

 applied in thought. It is an old saying that every man is either an 

 Aristotelian or a Platonist; and so far the ascending series of 

 sciences upon the diagram broadly presents the encyclopedic out- 

 line of the former school, and as followed and developed, e.g. by 

 Bacon, Comte, Spencer, etc. But when we recall how ethics is 

 especially concerned with the good, psychology with the true, and 

 esthetics with the beautiful, our diagram is now also Platonic, 

 when viewed in that perspective, in converse order to the former. 



The "materialisms" of the three initial preliminary sciences, 

 physical, organic, and social, are shown upon this graphic chart, 

 and they are each located strictly within its legitimate and necessary 

 field. Their corresponding "legitimate transcendentalisms" (or say 

 rather, higher contributions) may also be charted upon their six 

 upper left-hand squares, yet here so far only with arrows and inter- 

 rogation marks ; which thus express the stimulating value of graphics, 

 as literally "thinking machines". Towards starting these inquiries, 

 it will be seen that the three uppermost, leftward squares afford 

 space for outlining the way in which social life, with its practical 

 needs, and its studies also, has expressed their demand for each of 

 the other great sciences, from their beginnings. Next, the leftward 

 arrow from the square of biology indicates how^that has often stimu- 

 lated the physical sciences (and indeed even mathematics, though to 

 a less degree). The single arrow and square to the left of that of 

 physics, expresses the perpetual need and stimulus of the physical 

 sciences to arouse the mathematician to support and illuminate 

 physics by his potent methods. For a concrete instance of the last, 

 take Faraday's "lines of force" around his magnet, and Clerk 

 Maxwell's masterly mathematical interpretation of these, with 

 correlation of light with electro-magnetism accordingly. Instances 

 of the stimulus of biology to physical and chemical sciences abound. 

 As a simple instance, it was as a vegetable physiologist that Priestley 

 discovered oxygen; and for later and more complex instance, the 

 modem conceptions of ions, so important throughout chemistry, 

 was initiated from the plant-physiological studies of Pfeffer and 

 De Vries. And, as above said, the arrow leftwards, on the social 

 level, expresses its early and ever-renewing demand and impulse 

 to each and all the underlying and preliminary fields of knowledge. 

 That the sciences are thus becoming an organised unity — and not a 

 confused encyclopedia or historic conglomeration of books in a 

 library, nor of "subjects" in university and school — is thus clearly 

 manifest. And if it be asked — ^why introduce, into a treatise profes- 

 sedly biological, all these other sciences? — this diagram plainly 

 replies. For without the physical sciences, no adequate physiology; 

 without mathematics no biometrics; and without logic no science 

 of any kind at all! Again, without social science, no adequate 



