March 28, 1902.] 



SCIENCE. 



485 



All I know about the trilobites aud the 

 moons of Jupiter is relative to me ; yet the 

 trilobites were real millions of years before 

 any natiiralist knew them, and the moons 

 of Jupiter would, no doubt, still be real, 

 even if all life should come to an end upon 

 earth. 



8. Our bodies are real, but their reality 

 is in their interrelations ivith our environ- 

 ment. 



The cliild's discovery that its body is of 

 peculiar interest and importance to it, and 

 peculiarly within its control, is a real sci- 

 entific discovery. Living things are real 

 things, and we can never know too much 

 about them; but their reality is in their 

 interrelations with the rest of nature, and 

 not in themselves, nor in their relations to 

 us. Surely this is good sense and good 

 science. No physiologist who studies the 

 waste and repair of living bodies, no nat- 

 uralist who knows living beings in their 

 homes, no embryologist who studies the 

 influence of external conditions upon 

 development, can, for an instant, admit 

 that living beings are self-suiScient or self- 

 sustaining, or that their being is in them- 

 selves; for the line we draw, for better 

 study, between living beings and the exter- 

 nal world, is not one that we find in 

 nature, but one that we make for our own 

 purposes. 



The external Avorld of a living thing is 

 as much a part of it as its histological 

 structure. If the environment of its body, 

 or of any cell wathin its body, were differ- 

 ent, neither cell nor body would be what 

 it is, and if they had no environment they 

 woidd not be at all, for neither eggs nor 

 seeds nor desiccated rotifers exist ab- 

 stractly. A self-sufficient and self-con- 

 tained living thing is as fabulous as a 

 griffm or a centaur, but no naturalist 

 thinks for an instant that this truth casts 

 any doubt upon the real existence of living 

 things. 



If the being of a living thing is in its 

 interrelations with the world around it, 

 as Berkeley tells us it is, and not in its 

 interrelations with us, as the philosophers 

 tell us it is, is it not clear that we can 

 never hope to know aU there is to know 

 about it? But is it not equally clear that, 

 so far as we do laiow it, we know it as it 

 is? 



Does the responsibility for the notion 

 that we can never know a living being as it 

 really is rest upon the shoulders of the 

 naturalist who knows that its being is 

 dependent and relative? Is it not rather 

 to be laid to the charge of the philosopher 

 who believes in its abstract or independent 

 existence, and is led to doubt its reality by 

 the discovery that abstractions have no 

 independent existence? 



Locke reminds us that ' ' we see and 

 perceive some of the motions and grosser 

 operations of things here about us, but 

 vi'hence the streams come that keep all 

 these curious machines in motion and 

 repair, how conveyed and modified, is 

 beyond our notice and apprehension; and 

 the great parts and wheels, as I may say, 

 of this stupendous fabric of the universe 

 may, for aught we know, have such a con- 

 nection and dependence in their influences 

 and operations one upon another, that per- 

 haps things in this our mansion would put 

 on quite another face, and cease to be what 

 they are, if some one of the stars or great 

 bodies, incomprehensibly remote from us, 

 should cease to be, or to move, as it does. 

 This is certain: tilings, however absolute 

 and entire they seem in themselves, are but 

 retainers to other parts of nature, for that 

 which they are most taken notice of by us. 

 Their observable qualities, actions and 

 powers are owing to something without 

 them; and there is not so complete and 

 perfect a part that we know of nature, 

 which does not owe the being it has, and 

 the excellencies of it, to its neighbours ; and 



