THE BAFFLING PROBLEM 



from it, but they are by no means the whole story. 

 Professor Henderson repudiates the idea of any 

 extra-physical influence as being involved in the 

 processes of life, and yet concedes that the very 

 foundation of all living matter, yea, the whole living 

 universe in embryo — the cell — is beyond the pos- 

 sibilities of physics and chemistry alone. Mechan- 

 ism and chemism are adequate to account for astron- 

 omy and geology, and therefore, he thinks, are suffi- 

 cient to account for biology, without calling in the 

 aid of any Bergsonian life impulse. Still these forces 

 stand impotent before that microscopic world, the 

 cell, the foundation of all life. 



Our professor makes the provisional statement, 

 not in obedience to his science, but in obedience to 

 his philosophy, that something more than mechan- 

 ics and chemistry may have had a hand in shaping 

 the universe, some primordial tendency impressed 

 upon or working in matter "just before mechanism 

 begins to act" — "a necessary and pre established 

 associate of mechanism." So that if we start with 

 the universe, with life, and with this tendency, 

 mechanism will do all the rest. But this is not science, 

 of course, because it is not verifiable; it is practically 

 the philosophy of Bergson. 



The cast-iron conclusions of physical science do 

 pinch the Harvard professor a bit, and he pads 

 them with a little of the Bergsonian philosophy. 

 Bergson himself is not pinched at all by the con- 



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