August 11, 1905.] 



SCIENCE. 



165 



physics, chemistry, had intrenched itself 

 in them and dowered them with generality, 

 uniformity, universality, it went over 

 gradually with scientific investigators by 

 habit so to say into flesh and blood, and 

 began to penetrate and dominate in physi- 

 ology, in psychology, in sociology, in biol- 

 ogy. 



Darwin's attempt to found the law of 

 the evolutionary origin of species is an 

 outcome of the continuity world-scheme, 

 permeated, saturated with its basal idea, 

 continuity. 



Just so strengthens itself more and more 

 the persuasion of the continuous growth 

 and continuous perfection of all the ele- 

 ments of human society in its natural ad- 

 vance. 



The evolutionary development of social 

 life permeates always more and more the 

 view of the historian. Many writers are 

 so habituated to this continuity world- 

 scheme, that, without sufficiently critical 

 consideration, they apply it where it is es- 

 sentially inapplicable and inappropriate. 



So we have the doctrine of a fatalist 

 causality, denial of efficient freedom of the 

 will, belittling of the idealistic endeavor of 

 mankind, hence the pessimistic attitude 

 toward the whole of human existence. 



Paraphrasing a Russian poet: 



Nature thus speaks to man: 



" Thou mayst be head of creation, 



But who gives thee any crown? 



Dost thou believe, poor fool, in blind delusion. 



That I am slave to thee, and thou my lord and 



master ? 

 Of the thick veil lift I a corner tip 

 And Pygmy, then presumst thou 

 All through me that thou seest? 

 Seeing thine own small law and plan, art then 



deluded 

 Into the holy of holies to have pushed ? 

 Oh fool! 1 do but nod and wretchedly thou'llt 



shudder. 

 Cower like timid dog on the sod. The earth 

 I shake and suddenly is dust 

 Thy pride and might, the greatest of thy cities. 



War I send and pestilence its sister, 



The blooming fields transform I into deserts, 



The sea I drink up and the sun shroud I in 



darkness. 

 And thou, brute-like, wilt howl with pain, with 



anguish. 

 What you strive for and hope, to me that is in- 

 different. 

 Pity know I none, and my law of the number 

 KnoAvs neither weal nor woe, knows neither praise 



nor blaming. 

 To unknown lands I stride in war, in whirlwind. 

 I know no aim, no end and no beginning. 

 I beget and I destroy, not prating, never angry, 

 The elephant and the worm, the wise man and the 



foolish. 

 So live as all live. Float out on the flood eternal 

 One instant brief, and vanish then forever. 

 Presume not stupid-bold with me to wage a con- 

 test. 

 With me eternal mother of all living and all 



dead." 

 So thunders nature with a million voices 

 In hail, in surge, in storm-wind and the lightning. 



So much for the continuity world-scheme 

 in biology. 



But the latest advances in mathematics 

 have rendered unnecessary for biology the 

 wearing of this misfit garment. 



The new mathematics gives now a stand- 

 point for the explanation and treatment of 

 natural phenomena from which the indi- 

 viduality of the biologic elements need not 

 be suppressed. 



It has triumphed for its own domain in 

 cases where the continuity methods were 

 wholly inapplicable, where arithmology, 

 discrete mathematics, was called for and 

 victorious. 



Such are the problems which relate to 

 the properties of whole numbers, solved so 

 brilliantly in number-theory. 



Such again are the questions relating to 

 the enumeration of the geometric forms 

 with n parameters which satisfy n given 

 conditions. These even in the simplest 

 cases showed themselves insoluble until 

 finally between 1860 and 1870 the French 

 mathematicians created special discrete 



