314 MAGNALIA NATURAE: OR THE GREATER 



or while we lean, as so many of us now do, or even cling with 

 a great yearning, to the belief that something other than the 

 physical forces animates and sustains the dust of which we 

 are made, it is rather the business of the philosopher than 

 of the biologist, or of the biologist only when he has served 

 his humble and severe apprenticeship to philosophy, to deal 

 with the ultimate problem. It is the plain bounden duty of 

 the biologist to pursue his course, unprejudiced by vitalistic 

 hypotheses, along the road of observation and experiment, 

 according to the accepted discipline of the natural and physical 

 sciences ; indeed I might perhaps better say the physical 

 sciences alone, for it is already a breach of their discipline to 

 invoke, until we feel we absolutely must, that shadowy force 

 of ' heredity,' to which, as I have already said, biologists have 

 been accustomed to ascribe so much. In other words, it is 

 an elementary scientific duty, it is a rule that Kant himself 

 laid down, 1 that we should explain, just as far as we possibly 

 can, all that is capable of such explanation, in the light 

 of the properties of matter and of the forms of energy with 

 which we are already acquainted. 



It is of the essence of physiological science to investigate 

 the manifestations of Energy in the body, and to refer them, 

 for instance, to the domains of heat, electricity or chemical 

 activity. By this means a vast number of phenomena, of 

 chemical and other actions of the body, have been relegated 

 to the domain of physical science, and withdrawn from the 

 mystery that still attends on life : and by this means, con- 

 tinued for generations, the physiologists, or certain of them, 

 now tell us that we begin again to descry the limita- 

 tions of physical inquiry, and the region where a very 

 different hypothesis insists on thrusting itself in. But the 

 morphologist has not gone nearly so far as the physiologist in 

 the use of physical methods. He sees so great a gulf between 

 the crystal and the cell, that the very fact of the physicist 



1 In his Critique of Teleological Judgment. 



