HUMAN LIFE 



v special knowledge of the biologist. He 

 can guess about them and wonder about 

 them just as other people do, but he has 

 no right to claim that he knows about 

 them. If some biologists do make this 

 claim it is probably because they are 

 carried away by the interesting sensation 

 of knowing anything at all about what 

 has been so long called "the mystery of 

 life." A famous biologist of the mechan- 

 istic-conception-of-life school once said 

 to me, as he saw me find my way to a 

 certain corner seat in a restaurant with 

 bench seats along the walls, that the 

 reason why I tried to find a corner seat 

 was because I was positively thigmo- 

 tropic, that is, that I was irresistibly im- 

 pelled, as a sand flea is, to get my body into 

 as much contact as possible with solid sur- 

 roundings. The fact is that I had made, 

 several days before, an appointment with 

 a friend to meet him in that corner. 



The human being has such power of 

 dislocating his reactions to stimuli both as 

 regards time and space that his behavior 

 46 



