April 17, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



555 



a divine pattern — this process constitutes 

 the life of the natural world. 



The designs which nature expresses are 

 therefore for Greek vitalism not the con- 

 scious designs of anybody — either God or 

 man. They are the creative tendencies 

 which embody themselves in the material 

 world, by a process which we can best com- 

 pare with the workings of instinct or of 

 genius. 



Now modem vitalism is far away from 

 its Greek forerunners, but whenever, for 

 any reason, vitalism becomes afresh inter- 

 esting to any group either of philosophers 

 or of scientific workers, it is well to re- 

 member that the contrast and the conflict 

 between a mechanical view of nature and 

 a vitalistic view has hardly ever been lim- 

 ited to the decidedly special and artificial 

 antithesis between blind mechanism, on the 

 one hand, and conscious or deliberative de- 

 sign, on the other hand. For even our hu- 

 man art is, as Aristotle remarks, partly 

 guided by a skill which is not conscious 

 and is not deliberate. That which, in re- 

 cent years, Bergson has called elan vital — ■ 

 the creative vital power, was well known, 

 in their own way, to the Greeks. 



Different as Bergson 's vitalism is from 

 that of Aristotle, the ancient view and 

 Bergson 's vitalism have in common the be- 

 lief that life means a process of which the 

 instinctive skill and the artistic genius of 

 man give examples. The problem of vital- 

 ism is always the problem as to how such 

 unconscious skill, such undeliberative art, 

 is made possible. 



And so, even in this sketch of the varieties 

 of scientific method, I shall in passing name 

 to you one way in which some of the newest 

 hypotheses may enable us to face, and per- 

 haps in some measure to clarify, the prob- 

 lem as to how this stimulation of conscious 

 designs by processes which are themselves 



unconsciously or, so to speak, blindly wise, 

 is a possibility in the natural world. 



V. THREE TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE: THE HIS- 

 TORICAL, THE MECHANICAL AND 

 THE STATISTICAL 



So much must suffice as an introductory 

 word regarding those problems about vital- 

 ism and mechanism which have recently 

 been revived, and have brought us together. 

 Herewith we are ready to proceed to our 

 classification of the conceptions and the 

 methods which have been and which may 

 be used in dealing with such a range of 

 problems as is this. 



The attempt to sketch in a preliminary 

 way what these conceptions and methods 

 are can be preserved, I think, from vague- 

 ness, if I begin by using the guidance of a 

 man of whom you all are accustomed to 

 think as a true natural philosopher — one 

 who was possessed of a very exact sort 

 of scientific knowledge, and who was a 

 great scientific discoverer. He was also 

 very fond of a comparative study whereby 

 he lighted up his own researches through 

 thoughts that came to him from far-off 

 fields. I refer to Clerk Maxwell. In a 

 paper whereof some fragments are printed 

 in his biography, as well as in various re- 

 marks in his published writings. Clerk 

 Maxwell more than once used the classifi- 

 cation of scientific knowledge which I shall 

 here employ for our present purpose. Nat- 

 ural science, in so far as it studies the proc- 

 esses of the natural world, has three kinds 

 of objects with which it deals. And it ad- 

 justs itself to these three kinds of objects 

 by methods which, in each of the three 

 fields thus defined, vary widely from one 

 another; while in each of the three fields 

 both the conceptions and the methods used 

 have much in common, and much too 

 whereby each of the three fields differs 

 from the others. The three sorts of ob- 



