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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LI. No. 1309 



cage and yells " eugeuics," wMe his mate in 

 the corner faintly lisps " euthenics." Some 

 particularly active youngsters jump into a re- 

 volving wheel, and every time it makes a com- 

 plete revolution shout " chromosomes, chromo- 

 somes, chromosomes." A few old-moss-backs, 

 a rare variety, mournfully harp on " morphol- 

 ogy." And one majestic megatherium com- 

 prising all in one, coughs up an " energy com- 

 plex," followed by a prolonged roar, in several 

 volumes, in which one can distinguish the 

 words " action, reaction, and interaction." 

 The clergymen, senators, and Bolsheviki, with 

 their retinues of lady friends, exclaim " How 

 wonderful, and so true." Life indeed is com- 

 plex, energetic, and full of actions, reactions, 

 and interactions! And all of them deeply 

 impressed, go back to their deadly work, and 

 act, and believe, if at all, just as they did 

 before. 



After they are gone, all the animals agree 

 that no one has any right to bother real, 

 simon-pure scientists with such fool questions. 

 Let them go to — well, "Where? To Germany? 

 To Nietsche, Bernhardi, and Treitsche? To 

 the militant philosophy of dominion, to a 

 half-witted selfishness, in politics, commerce, 

 and kultur, frankly upbuilt on the doctrine 

 of the survival of the fittest, the fittest uni- 

 versally acknowledged, by themselves, to be 

 the Germans and their system? 



Or to the spiritualists, anthropomorphists, 

 and sentimentalists, who see nothing clearly 

 in the mirror of nature but a distorted image 

 of themselves? 



Or to Huxley and his " I don't know " fol- 

 lowers, who can discover no ethics or morality 

 in nature-action; neither warning nor invita- 

 tion, nor directive discipline, but merely a 

 drab, unoriented neutrality of " unmorality," 

 leaving man nothing but himself with which 

 to orient himself; leaving him to create his 

 own system of ethics and morality out of his 

 own inner consciousness? 



The biologist has fotmd no evidence for the 

 broad assimiptions of these philosophers. In 

 nature, he sees no one-sided dominion of the 

 strong over the weak, or the weak over the 

 strong; no special privileges; and no freedom 

 from obligations. Ifeither does he see any 



warrant for puling sentimentality, nor any 

 expectation of an unaggressive neutrality in 

 nature-action. 



Nature, so far as we have been able to dis- 

 cover, is an enduring, self- constructive system, 

 gaining and preserving her gains, in a definite 

 way, according to her own system of ethics 

 and morality. In so far as nature-growth is 

 manifest in evolution, we can not deny that 

 at least to that extent her ethics are con- 

 structive and her morals saving. 



Man's constructive and saving principles 

 can not be otherwise, without severing all his 

 bonds with nature-action in a futile attempt, 

 like that suggested by Hioxley, to set up an 

 anarchistic " imperium in imperio," or a Bol- 

 shevistic " microcosm within the macrocosm." 



I can not believe we have reached that 

 parting of the ways, for man's highest activi- 

 ties are all too clearly but extensions of na- 

 ture's ways and means of creating and pre- 

 serving her products, in which man uses 

 whatever intelligence he may have, and the 

 cultural implements he has constructed, as 

 special instruments to attain his ends. 



The specific gravity of the western variety 

 of biologists will not let him fioat in a vacuum 

 of cosmic mysteries with the Hindoo; and he 

 does not care to wallow in a quagmire of 

 metaphysics with the Greek. He gladly 

 plants his substantial mental feet on the first 

 firm substratum he can reach. And even 

 though that substratiun be nothing more than 

 the molecular quicksands of physics and 

 chemistry, it safely leads him to the rising 

 shores of hard realities. 



But now that we biologists, as evolutionists, 

 feel reasonably safe in our storm-proof 

 shelters of established facts, the spirit of ad- 

 ventm-e again leads us forth to wider excur- 

 sions, and we ask ourselves whether it is 

 possible to reduce all the constructive proc- 

 esses of nature to a simple formula, which can 

 be expressed in familiar terms of tmiversal 

 human significance? This is a venture 

 doomed apparently beforehand to defeat, for 

 it takes us back again to the most ancient 

 beaches of human controversy, strewn with 

 the wreckage of all man's early and late 



