THE SYSTEM 57 



It is, however, among writers on biological 

 subjects that we find the most salient instances 

 of this contraction. With extraordinary self- 

 abnegation they seem, in the contemplation of 

 the problem with which they are concerned, to 

 forget that they themselves are living things, 

 and, more than that, the living things of whom 

 they ought to know and could know most, how- 

 ever little that most may be. When the biologist 

 begins to philosophise as, after the manner of his 

 kind, he often does, he should leave his microscope 

 and look around him ; whereas he often forgets 

 even to change the high for the low power. Thus 

 he limits his field of vision and forgets, when 

 attempting his explanation, that it is only within 

 a system that he is working. Professor Ward, in 

 Naturalism and Agnosticism, says : 



" From the strict premisses of Positivism we 

 can never prove the existence of other minds or 

 find a place for such conceptions as cause and 

 substance ; for into these premisses the existence 

 of our own mind and its self-activity have not 

 entered. And accordingly we have seen Natural- 

 ism led on in perfect consistency to resolve man 

 into an automaton that goes of itself as part of a 

 still vaster automaton, Nature as mechanically 

 conceived, which goes of itself. True, this 

 mechanism goes of itself because it is going, and 

 being altogether inert, cannot stop or change. 

 How it ever started is indeed a question which 

 science cannot answer, but which, on the other 

 hand, it has no occasion to ask : time, its one 



