190 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



itself; must have, for example, some measure of persistence or con- 

 stancy in time. I am unable to imagine an organism existing but for 

 a single instant. 



The moment a living being appeared on earth that could respond 

 more than once in the same way to the same stimulus, at that moment 

 appeared simultaneously the germs of all human knowledge and faith. 

 The moment a human being comes to know that his experiential knowl- 

 edge must be incomplete knowledge, from the very conditions of its 

 being knowledge at all, at that moment does he touch the highest level 

 of knowledge and faith attainable by living beings. Agnosticism, mere 

 disclaimer of absolute knowledge, can not be the loftiest attainable 

 mental attitude. This must consist in knowing, partly at least, how 

 and why your highest knowledge is limited and seemingly must ever 

 remain so. 



In conclusion, life from the biologist's standpoint is the sum total 

 of the phenomena exhibited by myriads of natural objects called living 

 because they present these phenomena. To understand any organism 

 it must be studied as a whole and in all its relations. Taking man 

 :as a type, his life must be studied throughout the whole cycle of its 

 existence on earth and in its relations to all other lives and things. 

 Not only must the germ-cells, the chromosomes and all the rest be 

 subjected to investigation as to their forms, vital activities and chemico- 

 physical composition, but the whole gamut of his experiences, physical, 

 intellectual and spiritual, must be likewise searched out, so far as it is 

 possible for human minds to search. 



No biologist can do much by working at the whole of biology thus 

 viewed. But — and here is one of the centers of our position — he can 

 toil in his particular corner with a mind full-illumined by the recogni- 

 tion that someone else must do the things he can not do because all 

 must be done. He does not need to suppose the thing he is not doing 

 is hardly worth doing. 



of science as Lord Kelvin and Professor Arrhenius, that life like matter and 

 force is eternal, must be taken hold of seriously as the best working hypothesis 

 that can be made on the basis of the biological data available. This hypothesis 

 will surely involve enormous difficulties, but some of the most difficult, one can 

 foresee, will at least have the merit of being open to observational inquiry. 

 Among the great difficulties will be that by " life " we must understand 

 " organisms." We have no observational ground for postulating " organic 

 substance " as anything else than the substance of which living beings are 

 constituted. 



This being so, the hypothesis would have to face at once the question, How 

 numerous must the primal, eternally existent organisms be conceived to have 

 been? But I am hot adopting the hypothesis, not now, at any rate. I merely 

 want to point out what seems a clearly possible alternative for the hypothesis 

 of an actual beginning of life in time, which hypothesis seems to be growing less 

 and less fruitful with the advance of experiential knowledge. 



