420 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVin. No. 978 



stracted from and ignored by one brancli 

 of science may be taken into consideration 

 by another: Thus, chemists ignore the 

 ether; mathematicians may ignore experi- 

 mental difficulties; physicists ignore and 

 exclude live things ; biologists exclude mind 

 and design; psychologists may ignore hu- 

 man origin and hiiman destiny; folk-lore 

 students and comparative mythologists 

 need not trouble about what modicum of 

 truth there may be in the legends which 

 they are collecting and systematizing, and 

 microscopists may ignore the stars. Yet 

 none of these ignored things should be 

 denied. 



Denial is no more infallible than asser- 

 tion. There are cheap and easy kinds of 

 scepticism, just as there are cheap and easy 

 kinds of dogmatism ; in fact, scepticism can 

 become viciously dogmatic, and science has 

 to be as much on its guard against per- 

 sonal predilection in the negative as in the 

 positive direction. An attitude of univer- 

 sal denial may be very superficial. 



To doubt everything or to believe everything 

 are two equally convenient solutions; both dis- 

 pense with the necessity of reflection. 



All intellectual processes are based on 

 abstraction. For instance, history must 

 ignore a great multitude of facts in order 

 to treat any intelligently: it selects. So 

 does art; and that is why a drawing is 

 clearer than reality. Science makes a dia- 

 gram of reality, displaying the works, like 

 a skeleton clock. Anatomists dissect out 

 the nervous system, the blood vessels and 

 the muscles, and depict them separately — 

 there must be discrimination for intellec- 

 tual grasp — but in life they are all merged 

 and cooperating together; they do not 

 really work separately, though they may 

 be studied separately. A scalpel discrimi- 

 nates : a dagger or a bullet crashes through 

 everything. That is life — or rather death. 

 The laws of nature are a diagrammatic 



framework, analyzed or abstracted out of 

 the full comprehensiveness of reality. 



Hence it is that science has no authority 

 in denials. To deny effectively needs much 

 more comprehensive knowledge than to 

 assert. And abstraction is essentially not 

 comprehensive: one can not have it both 

 ways. Science employs the methods of 

 abstraction and thereby makes its dis- 

 coveries. 



The reason why some physiologists insist 

 so strenuously on the validity and self- 

 sufficiency of the laws of physics and chem- 

 istry, and resist the temptation to appeal 

 to unknown causes — even though the guid- 

 ing influence and spontaneity of living 

 things are occasionally conspicuous as well 

 as inexplicable — is that they are keen to do 

 their proper work; and their proper work 

 is to pursue the laws of ordinary physical 

 energy into the intricacies of "colloidal 

 electrolytic structures of great chemical 

 complexity" and to study its behavior 

 there. 



What we have clearly to grasp, on their 

 testimony, is that for all the terrestrial 

 manifestations of life the ordinary physical 

 and chemical processes have to serve. 

 There are not new laws for living matter, 

 and old laws for non-living, the laws are 

 the same ; or if ever they differ, the burden 

 of proof rests on him who sustains the dif- 

 ference. The conservation of energy, the 

 laws of chemical combination, the laws of 

 electric currents, of radiation, etc. — all the 

 laws of chemistry and physics — may be 

 applied without hesitation in the organic 

 domain. Whether they are sufficient is 

 open to question, but as far as they go they 

 are necessary ; and it is the business of the 

 physiologist to seek out and demonstrate 

 the action of those laws in every vital 

 action. 



This is clearly recognized by the leaders, 

 and in the definition of physiology by 



