Smmnary of Contents xi 



tion — The story of the Earth is really the story of a develop- 

 ment, a continuous natural development in which ante- 

 cedents pass over into their consequents — Recoil from the 

 scientific position — The scientific outlook is not the only 

 one permissible and available, but we must not try to look 

 out of two windows at once — The aim of science as dis- 

 tinguished from that of philosophy — If the scientific in- 

 terpretation is sound, the cosmos was already implicit in 

 the "nebula," there never was any chaos at all, there is 

 nothing in the end that was not also in the beginning — 

 We are thus led to add to the scientific interpretation a 

 philosophical interpretation: "In the beginning was the 

 Logos." 



III. ORGANISMS AND THEIR ORIGIN 



The great variety of living creatures — What is charac- 

 teristic of them all as distinguished from inanimate systems 

 — Contrast of the quick and the dead — Puzzling phenom- 

 ena, such as latent life, local life, potential life — The living 

 organism looked at from the chemist's point of view — 

 Living matter probably a mixture (obviously no jumble!) 

 of proteids and other highly complex substances, owing 

 its virtue to their cooperative interaction — The living or- 

 ganism looked at from the physicist's point of view — An 

 engine? A self-stoking, self-repairing, self-preservative, 

 self-adjusting, self-increasing, self-reproducing engine I — 

 At present no vital phenomenon can be completely re- 

 described in physico-chemical terms — The living organism 

 looked at from the biologist's point of view — It is char- 

 acterized by its pov/er of growth at the expense of material 

 quite different from itself, by retaining its integrity in 

 spite of ceaseless metabolism, by its cyclical development, 

 by its power of effective response, by its unified behaviour — 

 The problem of the origin of organisms upon the Earth^ 



