324 MAGNALIA NATURAE: OR THE GREATER 



' heredity, 5 or (like Delage himself) replace it more or less 

 completely by the effects of functional use and by chemical 

 stimulation from without and from within. Yet others, like 

 Felix Auerbach, still holding to a physical or quasi-physical 

 theory of life, believe that in the living body the dissipation 

 of energy is controlled by a guiding principle, as though by 

 Clerk Maxwell's demons; that for the living the Law of 

 Entropy is thereby reversed ; and that Life itself is that which 

 has been evolved to counteract and battle with the dissipa- 

 tion of Energy. Berthold, who first demonstrated the obedi- 

 ence to physical laws in the fundamental phenomena of the 

 dividing cell or segmenting egg, recognises, almost in the 

 words of John Hunter, a quality in the living protoplasm, 

 sui generis, whereby its maintenance, increase, and reproduc- 

 tion are achieved. Driesch, who began as a ' mechanist,' now, 

 as we have seen, harks back straight to Aristotle, to a twin 

 or triple doctrine of the soul. And Bergson, rising into 

 heights of metaphysics where the biologist, qud biologist, 

 cannot climb, tells us (like Duran) that life transcends tele- 

 ology, that the conceptions of mechanism and finality fail 

 to satisfy, and that only ' in the absolute do we live and 

 move and have our being.' 



We end but a little way from where we began. 



With all the growth of knowledge, with all the help of all 

 the sciences impinging on our own, it is yet manifest, I think, 

 that the biologists of to-day are in no self-satisfied and 

 exultant mood. The reasons that for a time contented a 

 past generation call for re-enquiry, and out of the old solu- 

 tions new questions emerge ; and the ultimate problems are 

 as inscrutable as of old. That which, above all things, we 

 would explain baffles explanation ; and that the living organ- 

 ism is a living organism tends to reassert itself as the biologist's 

 fundamental conception and fact. Nor will even this con- 

 cept serve us and suffice us when we approach the problems 



