December 11, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



845 



ture througliout. Such a view, if well estab- 

 lished, would refute the contention that scien- 

 tific methods, being intellectual in their char- 

 acter, necessarily involve a falsification; and 

 would dispose of attempts to discredit physio- 

 logical analysis on the ground that life trans- 

 cends intellect and hence is properly to be in- 

 vestigated by other than scientific methods. 



The attempt to find in organisms evidence 

 of special agencies not operative in the rest of 

 nature seems to the reviewer to show less and 

 less promise of success as physico-chemical and 

 physiological science advances. Thus the au- 

 thor's attempt to limit the applicability of 

 the second law of energetics to the non-living 

 part of nature is quite unjustified by the evi- 

 dence which he presents. The interception 

 and accumulation of a portion of the radiant 

 energy received by the green plant, in the form 

 of chemical compounds of high potential, is 

 in no sense an infringement of the second 

 law; as well might one hold that the partial 

 transformation of radiant energy into poten- 

 tial energy of position, as seen, e. g., in the 

 accumulation of glaciers, is an instance of this 

 kind. The partial transformation of energy 

 at low potential into energy at high potential 

 is in fact a frequent occurrence ; thus the tem- 

 perature of an electric arc far exceeds that of 

 the furnace which generates the current; sim- 

 ilarly the animal organism utilizes energy de- 

 rived from oxidation of carbohydrates and 

 proteins to build up compounds of much 

 higher chemical potential, viz., the fats. If 

 living organisms — systems which are specially 

 characterized by utilizing chemical energy as 

 the main source of their activity — exhibit such 

 tendencies, there is in this fact nothing anom- 

 alous from the point of view of physical sci- 

 ence. To say on the basis of this kind of evi- 

 dence that " life appears as a tendency which 

 IS opposed to that which we see to be charac- 

 teristic of inorganic processes " (page 314) is 

 surely unwarranted from any point of view. 



This review is not necessarily an attack on 

 vitalism, but only on certain current forms of 

 vitalism. It can scarcely be denied that there 

 is something distinctive about life; but at the 

 present advanced stage of physical science it 



seems futile to argue that the vital process is 

 the expression of an agency which is absent, 

 from non-living material systems. Viewed 

 temporarily or historically, the vital is seen to 

 develop out of the non-vital; many of the 

 steps in this process are still obscure ; but with 

 the progress of science it becomes more and 

 more evident that the development is continu- 

 ous in character. Hence, if we are to account 

 for life, we must equally account for non-liv- 

 ing nature. Now since nature exhibits itself 

 as coherent throughout, we must conclude that 

 in its inception^ it held latent or potential 

 within itself the possibility of life. This is not 

 entirely an unbased speculation; even in the 

 character of the chemical elements life is fore- 

 shadowed in a sense, as shown in Henderson's 

 recent interesting book.* In a recent discus- 

 sion,^ in some respects related to the present, 

 the reviewer has called attention to one impli- 

 cation of the scientific view of nature and the 

 cosmic process. If we assume constancy of 

 the elementary natural processes, and con- 

 stancy in the modes of connection between 

 them — as exact observation forces us to do — 

 there seems no avoiding the conclusion that 

 ■ — given an undifferentiated universe at the 

 outset — only one course of evolution can ever 

 have been possible. Laplace long ago per- 

 ceived this consequence of the mechanistic 

 view of nature, and the inevitability of his 

 conclusion has never been seriously disputed 

 by scientific men. ISTevertheless, this is a very 

 strange result, and to many has seemed a re- 

 ductio ad absurdum of the scientific view as 

 applied to the whole of nature. The di- 

 lemma can be avoided only if we recognize that 

 the question of ultimate origins is not, 

 strictly speaking, a scientific question at all; 

 and in saying this there is implied no dis- 

 paragement of scientific method. As an ob- 

 ject of scientific investigation nature has to 



3 I do not use this term necessarily in a histor- 

 ical sense, but rather in the sense of ultimate 

 origin of whatever kind, — which it may well be 

 necessary to conceive as extra-temporal. 



* ' ' The Fitness of the Environment, ' ' Mac- 

 millans, 1913. 



5 Science, N. S., 1913, page 337. 



