THE BREATH OF LIFE 



defies all attempts of chemical synthesis to repro- 

 duce it. 



It would be presumptive in the extreme for me to 

 question Professor Loeb's scientific conclusions; he 

 is one of the most eminent of living experimental 

 biologists. I would only dissent from some of his 

 philosophical conclusions. I dissent from his state- 

 ment that only the mechanistic conception of life 

 can throw light on the source of ethics. Is there any 

 room for the moral law in a world of mechanical 

 determinism ? There is no ethics in the physical or- 

 der, and if humanity is entirely in the grip of that 

 order, where do moral obligations come in? A gun, 

 a steam-engine, knows no ethics, and to the extent 

 that we are compelled to do things, are we in the 

 same category. Freedom of choice alone gives any 

 validity to ethical consideration. I dissent from the 

 idea to which he apparently holds, that biology is 

 only applied physics and chemistry. Is not geology 

 also applied physics and chemistry? Is it any more 

 or any less? Yet what a world of difference between 

 the two — between a rock and a tree, between a 

 man and the soil he cultivates. Grant that the phys- 

 ical and the chemical forces are the same in both, 

 yet they work to such different ends in each. In one 

 case they are tending always to a deadlock, to the 

 slumber of a static equilibrium; in the other they 

 are ceaselessly striving to reach a state of dynamic 

 activity — to build up a body that hangs forever 



12 



