PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS. \\ 



The applicability of scientific procedure to life and mind has, 

 however, been called in question. M. Henri Bergson, in his 

 L'Evolution creatrice, reasons that science is powerless to in- 

 vestigate super-physical processes. His argument is based on 

 the contention that the object of the intellect is to promote 

 action, and that this action concerns itself with inanimate 

 matter. Hence, M. Bergson concludes, the triumphs of science 

 in physics, and its dismal failure in biology and sociology. In 

 criticism of this attitude the following doubts may be advanced. 

 If the object of the intellect were to promote action, action in 

 animals is in great measure, perhaps mainly, concerned with 

 themselves and with fellow animals; and, moreover, if science 

 has thus far accomplished much in physics and little in biology, 

 this is only to be anticipated considering the primitive sim- 

 plicity of the subject-matter in the first, and the staggering 

 complexity of the subject matter in the second, department of 

 knowledge. The alternative, to have recourse to intuition a 

 .very nebulous term in reaching the verities of life, is unsatis- 

 factory, in view of the fact that "intuition" has been so em- 

 ployed for ages, with fatuously trivial and contradictory results. 

 The unclouded intellect appears to us to have proved itself 

 equal to the study of any known subject, however complicated ; 

 only that we cannot hope to grasp the complex as rapidly as 

 the simple, nor to solve the most abstruse problems without 

 the aid of an advanced methodology. As an illustration of the 

 complexity of biological facts, consider the following case: 



"Take, for example, those small capsules which are found in the kidneys 

 at the very summit, so to speak, of the problem of renal secretion. These 

 small bodies each occupy a space of less than two-thousandths of a cubic 

 millimetre. Within their interior they contain different kinds of blood- 

 vessels that represent the structures of greatest mechanical interest when 

 dealing with the circulatory system, omitting, of course, the heart. This 

 almost complete sample of the circulatory mechanism, itself formed of a 

 congeries of parts and unitary mechanisms, is enclosed by two or three 

 thousand cells of specific glandular function. Every one of these cells 

 again is a complex of mechanisms about which we cannot rightly think 

 until we reduce our conceptions to the level of molecular dimensions. 

 Enclosed, then, in this minute space, within a mass that weighs two 

 thousandths of a milligramme, lie quite a series of the problems in which 

 physiology is interested." (Opening Address by Prof. J. S. Macdonald. 

 President of the Physiology Section of the British Association, 1911.) 



It is for this reason that, for instance, protein compounds 

 are exceedingly difficult to isolate and study, first, because of 

 their close resemblance to one another; secondly, because of 

 their complexity e.g., the approximate formula for hemo- 

 globin is CiisHuaNivjOtisFeS*; and thirdly, because they 



