I. The Problem of Living Matter 



It is usually considered in this present age of universal specialisa- 

 tion that the business of men is to speak only about their own 

 affairs, and, if they have any w^orld-outlook, to keep it to them- 

 selves. Particularly is this the case with the scientific worker ; 

 but he is not alone in his mental prison. There adjoins it another, 

 equally commodious but equally well bolted from outside, which 

 is inhabited by the theologian and the mystic. In fact, there is a 

 whole honeycomb of cells, each containing a section or two of 

 human thought and experience, and the prison is so- constructed 

 that whatever opinions the inmates may have about each other, 

 whenever they happen to open their mouths thereon they are 

 miraculously struck dumb. 



Yet this was not always so. Those were wonderful days 

 when it was possible for a single mind to run over the whole range 

 of knowledge and speculation. To read only the catalogue of 

 " Particular Histories," or " experiments to be done," which Lord 

 Bacon appended to the " Novum Organon" gives an idea of the 

 magnificent impartiality with which a virtuoso of the seventeenth 

 century could discuss Rainbows, Fiery Meteors, Fossils, Human 

 Faculties, the Art of Metallurgy, and the natures of Numbers. 

 Nothing came amiss to the learned of those days, nothing was out- 

 side their subject. From the Phoenix to the Mandrake, from the 

 laws of languages to the funerary rites of antiquity, everything 

 interested Sir Thomas Browne ; nothing need lack his learned 

 commentary. But however good those old days were, it is no use 

 regretting the past without facing the future. It is obvious enough 

 that if a seventeenth-century physician had had to learn for his 

 degree half the physiological knowledge that is expected of an 

 honours candidate at the present day, he would have had much less 

 time than he did to think of horoscopes and theological problems. 

 One is sometimes struck with horror at the thought of what human 

 beings will become if the process goes on at the rate at which it has 

 gone on in the last hundred years. Plato's shoemaker, in the 



