NA'TURE AND MAN 85 



pedoes, exploding only in some particular, often remote tissue, 

 and producing a needed result, only add to our amazed per- 

 plexity instead of relieving it. Mr. Darwin once said that 

 the sight of a peacock's tail made him sick. Most of us are 

 less sensitive. 



An army is far more than a mob of individuals; it is in- 

 dividuals plus, or in a very real sense multiplied by, discipline, 

 organization, command, authority. A republic is not merely 

 square miles of territory and millions of inhabitants; it is 

 these and organization through and by a central government. 

 The state may be an abstraction but it is very real one, 

 against which it is fatal to rebel. It can condemn the rebel; 

 say to him: go and be hanged, and he straightway mounts the 

 scaffold. Otherwise it is a poor contemptible state. Anal- 

 ogies may suggest, though they prove nothing. 



Said Whitman in a very interesting article on the '' Inade- 

 quacy of the Cell-Theory ": "That organization precedes cell- 

 formation and regulates it, rather than the reverse, is a con- 

 clusion that forces itself upon us from many sides." '^ Years 

 ago Huxley wrote in his vigorous English: ''They (the cells) 

 are no more the producers of the vital phenomena than the 

 shells scattered along the sea-beach are the instruments by 

 which the gravitative force of the moon acts upon the ocean. 

 Like these, the cells mark only where the vital tides have 

 been, and how they have acted " — possibly a somewhat ex- 

 treme statement of a truth demanding emphasis. 



The development of every fertilized germ-cell into an adult, 

 introduces the same problem of directivity. Says Wilson: 

 '' What Hes beyond our reach at present, as Driesch has very 

 ably urged, is to explain the orderly rhythm of development 

 — the coordinary power that guides development to its pre- 

 destined end. We are logically compelled to refer the power 

 to the inherent organization of the germ, but we neither know 

 nor can conceive what that organization is." ^ Again, " The 

 cells are local centers of a formative power pervading the 



* 103. 



^104:59. and 432. 



