44 
NATURE 
lightning, earthquakes, and other potents are reduced 
to natural causes. No ultimate explanation is ever 
attained by science: proximate explanations only. 
They are what it exists for; and it is the business of 
scientific men to seek them. 
To attribute the rise of sap to vital force would be 
absurd, it would be giving up the problem and stating 
nothing at all. The way in which osmosis acts to 
produce the remarkable and surprising effect is dis- 
coverable and has been discovered. 
So it is always in science, and its progress began 
when unknown causes were eliminated and treated 
as non-existent. Those causes, so far as they exist, 
must establish their footing by direct investigation 
and research; carried on in the first instance apart 
from the long-recognised branches of science, until 
the time when they too have become sufficiently 
definite to be entitled to be called scientific. Out- 
landish territories may in time be incorporated as 
states, but they must make their claim good and 
become civilised first. 
It is well for people to understand this definite 
limitation of scope quite clearly, else they wrest the 
splendid work of biologists to their own confusion— 
helped it is true by a few of the more robust or less 
responsible theorisers, among those who should be 
better informed and more carefully critical in their 
philosophising utterances. 
But, as is well known, there are more than a few 
biologists who, when taking a broad survey of their 
subject, clearly perceive and teach that, before all the 
actions of live things are fully explained, some hitherto 
excluded causes must be postulated. Ever since the 
time of J. R. Mayer it has been becoming more and 
more certain that, as regards performance of work, 
a living thing obeys the laws of physics, like every- 
thing else; but undoubtedly it initiates processes and 
produces results that without it could not have oc- 
curred—from a bird’s nest to a' honeycomb, from a 
deal box to a warship. The behaviour of a ship firing 
shot and shell is explicable in terms of energy, but 
the discrimination which it exercises between friend 
and foe is not so explicable. There is plenty of 
physics‘ and chemistry and mechanics about every 
vital action, but for a complete understanding of it 
something beyond physics and chemistry is needed. 
And life introduces an incalculable element.. The 
vagaries of a fire or a cyclone could all be predicted 
by Laplace’s calculator, given the initial positions, 
velocities, and the law of acceleration of the mole- 
cules; but no mathematician could calculate the orbit 
of a common house-fly. A physicist into whose 
galvanometer a spider had crept would be liable to 
get phenomena of a kind quite inexplicable, until he 
discovered the supernatural, 7.e., literally super- 
physical, cause. I will risk the assertion that life 
introduces something incalculable and purposeful amid 
the laws of physics; it thus distinctly supplements 
those laws, though it leaves them otherwise precisely 
as they were and obeys them all. 
We see only its effect, we do not see life itself. 
Conversion of inorganic into organic is effected always 
by living organisms. The conversion under those con- 
ditions certainly occurs, and the process may be 
studied. Life appears necessary to the conversion; 
which clearly takes place under the guidance of life, 
though in itself it is a physical and chemical process. 
Many laboratory conversions take place under the 
guidance of life, and, but for the experimenter, would 
not have occurred. 
Again, putrefaction, and fermentation, and purifica- 
tion of rivers, and disease, are not purely and solely 
chemical processes. Chemical processes they are, but 
they are initiated and conducted by living organisms. 
Just when medicine is becoming biological, and when 
NO. 2289, VOL. 92] 
[SEPTEMBER II, 1913 
the hope of making the tropical belt of the earth 
healthily habitable by energetic races is attracting the 
attention of people of power, philosophising biologists 
should not attempt to give their science away to 
chemistry and physics. Sections D and H and 1 
and K are not really subservient to A and B. Biology 
is an independent science, and it is served, not domin- 
ated, by chemistry and physics. 
Scientific men are hostile to superstition, and rightly 
so, for a great many popular superstitions are both 
annoying and contemptible; yet occasionally the term 
may be wrongly applied to practices of which the 
theory is unknown. ‘To a superficial observer some 
of the practices of biologists themselves must appear 
grossly superstitious. To*combat malaria Sir Ronald 
Ross does not indeed erect an altar; no, he oils a 
pond—making libation to its presiding genii. What 
can be more ludicrous than the curious and evidently 
savage ritual, insisted on by United States officers, 
at that hygienically splendid achievement, the Panama 
Canal—the ritual of punching a hole in every dis- 
carded tin, with the object of keeping off disease! 
What more absurd, again—in superficial appearance 
—than the practice of burning or poisoning a soil to 
make it extra fertile! 
Biologists in their proper field are splendid, and 
their work arouses keen interest and enthusiasm in 
all whom they guideinto their domain. Most of them 
do their work by intense concentration, by narrow- 
ing down their scope, not by taking a wide survey 
or a comprehensive grasp. Suggestions of broader 
views and outlying fields of knowledge seem foreign 
to the intense worker, and he resents them. For his 
own purpose he wishes to ignore them, and practically 
he may be quite right. The folly of negation is not 
his, but belongs to those who misinterpret or mis- 
apply his utterances, and take him as a guide in a 
region where, for the time at least, he is a stranger. 
Not by such aid is the universe in its broader aspects 
to be apprehended. If people in general were better 
acquainted with science they would not make these 
mistakes. They would realise both the learning and 
the limitations, make use of the one and allow for 
the other, and not take the recipe of a practical 
worker for a formula wherewith to interpret the 
universe. 
What appears to be quite certain is that there can 
be no terrestrial manifestation of life without matter. 
Hence naturally they say, or they approve such sayings 
as, ‘‘I discern in matter the promise and potency of 
all forms of life.’ Of all terrestrial manifestations of 
life, certainly. How else could it manifest -itself save 
through matter? ‘I detect nothing in the organism 
but the laws of chemistry and physics,” it is said. 
Very well: naturally enough. That is what they are 
after; they are studying the physical and chemical 
aspects or manifestations of life. But life itself—life 
and mind and consciousness—they are not studying, 
and they exclude them from their purview. Matter 
is what appeals to our senses here and now; material- 
ism is appropriate to the material world; not as a 
philosophy but as a working creed, as a proximate 
and immediate formula for guiding research. Every- 
thing beyond that belongs to another region, and must 
be reached by other methods. To explain the psychical 
in terms of physics and chemistry is simply impos- 
sible; hence there is a tendency to deny its existence, 
save as an epiphenomenon. But all such philosophis- 
ing is unjustified, and is really bad metaphysics. 
So if ever in their enthusiasm scientific workers go 
too far and say that the things they exclude from 
study have no existence in the universe, we must 
appeal against them to direct experience. We our- 
selves are alive, we possess life and mind and con- 
' sciousness, we have first-hand experience of these 
