60 The Higher Usefulness of Science 



sumptions and used language which imply that wholes 

 are produced by the coming together of the previously 

 existent completed parts, rather than by the formation 

 of these parts coincidentally and coordinately with the 

 formation of other parts and of the whole. The earth 

 is not an aggregation of continents, oceans, et cetera, 

 in the sense that these existed before the earth existed 

 and were then brought together, as to the formation of 

 a flock, in the meaning of the Latin ancestor of the word 

 "aggregation." I mention here, somewhat incidentally 

 but yet quite relevantly to our general thesis, that the 

 cell theory in biology is pickled through with this 

 fallacy. It would hardly be possible to get a falser 

 view of a multicellular organism than to conceive it as 

 an aggregation of cells, using "aggregation" in its 

 etymological or even its common meaning. A develop- 

 ing embryo is a living whole resolvmg itself into ceUs, 

 rather than a mass of cells coming together, or aggre- 

 gating. 



Returning now to our illustration, it remains to 

 notice that the American Continent and the Pacific 

 Ocean are two indubitable proofs of what generative 

 capacities the earth possessed before ever these partic- 

 ular parts existed. 



If, now, man really is a part of nature as genuinely 

 as the Pacific Ocean is a part of the earth, then man, 

 with his mind as well as his body, must have been 

 implicit in nature before ever actual man existed. The 

 existence of man's mind and the rest of his spiritual 



