SEPTEMBER II, 1913] 
detecting the existence of non-planetary immaterial 
dwellers, and that unless they have some link or bond 
with the material they must always be physically 
beyond our ken. We may therefore for practical 
purposes legitimately treat them as non-existent until 
such link is discovered, but we should not dogmatise 
about them. True agnosticism is legitimate, but not 
the dogmatic and positive and gnostic variety. 
But I hold that science is incompetent to make com- 
prehensive denials, even about the ether, and that it 
goes wrong when it makes the attempt. Science 
should not deal in negations: it is strong in affirma- 
tions, but nothing based on abstraction ought to pre- 
sume to deny outside its own region. It often 
happens that things abstracted from and ignored by 
one branch of science may be taken into consideration 
by another :— 
Thus, chemists ignore the ether. 
Mathematicians may ignore experimental difficul- 
ties. 
Physicists ignore and exclude live things. 
Biologists exclude mind and design. 
Psychologists may ignore human origin and human 
destiny. 
Folk-lore students and comparative mythologists 
need not trouble about what modicum of truth there 
may be in the legends which they are collecting and 
systematising. 
And microscopists may ignore the stars. 
Yet none of these ignored things should be denied. 
Denial is no more infallible than assertion. There 
are cheap and easy kinds of scepticism, just as there 
are cheap and easy kinds of dogmatism; in fact, 
scepticism can become viciously dogmatic, and science 
has to be as much on its guard against personal pre- 
dilection in the negative as in the positive direction. 
An attitude of universal denial may be very superficial. 
“To doubt everything or to believe everything are 
two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with 
the necessity of reflection.” 
All intellectual processes are based on abstraction. 
For instance, history must ignore a great multitude 
of facts in order to treat any intelligently: it selects. 
So does art; and that is why a drawing is clearer 
than reality. Science makes a diagram of reality, 
displaying the works, like a _ skeleton clock. 
Anatomists dissect out the nervous system, the blood 
vessels, and the muscles, and depict them separately 
—there must be discrimination for intellectual grasp 
—but in life they are all-merged and co-operating 
together; they do not really work separately, though 
they may be studied separately. A scalpel dis- 
criminates: a dagger or a bullet crashes through 
everything. That is life—or rather death. The laws 
of nature are a diagrammatic framework, analysed or 
abstracted out of the full comprehensiveness of 
reality. “ 
Hence it is that science has no authority in denials. 
To deny effectively needs much more comprehensive 
knowledge than to assert. And abstraction is essenti- 
ally not comprehensive: one cannot have it both 
ways. Science employs the methods of abstraction, 
and thereby makes its discoveries. 
The reason why some physiologists insist so strenu- 
ously on the validity and self-sufficiency of the laws 
of physics and chemistry, and resist the temptation 
to appeal to unknown causes—even though. the 
guiding influence and spontaneity of living things 
are occasionally conspicuous as well as inexplicable— 
is that they are keen to do their proper work; and 
their proper work is to pursue the laws of ordinary 
physical énergy into the intricacies of ‘colloidal 
electrolytic structures of great chemical complexity” 
and to study its behaviour there. 
What we have clearly to grasp, on their testimony, 
NO. 2289, VOL. 92] 
NATURE 
may be looked for and discovered with patience. 
43 
is that for all the terrestrial manifestations of life 
the ordinary physical and chemical processes have to 
serve. There are not new laws for living matter, 
and old laws for non-living, the laws are the same; 
or if ever they differ, the burden of proof rests on 
him who sustains the difference. The conservation of 
energy, the laws of chemical combination, the laws 
of electric currents, of radiation, &c., &c.—all the 
laws of chemistry and physics—may be applied with- 
out hesitation in the organic domain. Whether they 
are sufficient is open to question, but as far as they 
go they are necessary; and it is the business of the 
physiologist to seek out and demonstrate the action 
of those laws in every vital action. 
This is clearly recognised by the leaders, and in 
the definition of physiology by Burdon Sanderson he 
definitely limited it to the study of ‘ascertainable 
characters of a chemical and physical type.” In his 
address to the Subsection of Anatomy and Physiology 
at York in 1881 he spoke as follows :— 
“Tt would give you a true idea of the nature of the 
great advance which took place about the middle of 
this century if I were to define it as the epoch of the 
death of ‘vitalism.’ Before that time, even the 
greatest biologists—e.g. J. Miiller—recognised that 
the knowledge biologists possessed both of vital and 
physical phenomena was insufficient to refer both to 
a common measure. The method, therefore, was to 
study the processes of life in relation to each other 
only. Since that time it has become fundamental in 
our science not to regard any vital process as under- 
stood at all unless it can be brought into relation 
with physical standards, and the methods of physio- 
logy have been based exclusively on this principle. 
The most efficient cause [conducing to the change] 
was the progress which had been made in physics and 
chemistry, and particularly those investigations which 
led to the establishment of the doctrine of the con- 
servation of energy. ... 
“Investigators who are now working with such 
earnestness in all parts of the world for the advance 
of physiology, have before them a definite and well- 
understood purpose, that purpose being to acquire an 
exact knowledge of the chemical and physical pro- 
cesses of animal life and of the self-acting machinery 
by which they are regulated for the general good of 
the organism. The more singly and straightforwardly 
we direct our efforts to these ends, the sooner we 
shall attain to the still higher purpose—the effectual 
application of our knowledge for the increase of 
human happiness.” 
Prof. Gotch, whose recent loss we have to deplore, 
puts it more strongly :— 
“Tt is essentially unscientific,’ he says, “to say that 
any physiological phenomenon is caused by vital 
force.” 
I observe that by some critics I have been called 
a vitalist, and in a sense I am; but I am not a vitalist 
if vitalism means an appeal to an undefined “vital 
force ’’ (an objectionable term I have never thought of 
using) as against the laws of chemistry and physics. 
Those laws must be supplemented, but need by no 
means be superseded. The business of science is to 
trace out their mode of action everywhere, as far and 
as fully as possible; and it is a true instinct which 
resents the medizval practice of freely introducing 
spiritual and unknown causes into working science. 
In science an appeal to occult qualities must be illegi- 
timate, and be a barrier to experiment and research 
generally; as, when anything is called an act of God 
—and when no more is said. The occurrence is left 
unexplained. As an ultimate statement such a phrase 
may be not only true but universal in its application. 
But there are always proximate explanations which 
So, 
