1883. ] Editors’ Table, 95 
vi 
EDITORS’ TABLE. 
EDITORS: A. S. PACKARD, JR., AND E. D. COPE. 
Although the attempt is sometimes made in some quar- 
ters to look down upon the work of biologists and geologists, 
and to attempt to sever, in an artificial way, the pursuit of philos- 
ophy from that of pure science, we have always insisted that 
every thinking observer of nature in any department of science, 
is, in his way, a philosopher, and not a mere hod-carrier to the 
philosophic workman. Every monograph of a group of plants 
or animals, every life-history of an organized being, every detailed 
account of a fossiliferous bed is a brick, or at least straw for 
making bricks, for use by the generalizer in science, physical as 
well as natural. Physicists were formerly and very truly styled 
natural philosophers, but the term in these days is quite as appli- 
cable to the philosophic biologist in his quest for the origin of 
life-forms and his inquiries into the nature and origin of life 
itself. 
The vivifying effects of the study of facts and of experimenta- 
tion, as well as the debt owed by human culture to the inductive 
method, have been insisted on by M. E. Chevreul in an essay 
recently read before the French Academy. The author claimed 
that the experimental inductive method, as followed by Newton 
and his successors, is unquestionably the cause of the progress 
of the physico-chemical sciences, while the absolute @ priori 
method, as conceived by Leibnitz, barred the way to all further 
Progress. While Newton sought the proximate cause in order 
gradually to ascend to a possible first cause, Leibnitz started 
from the first cause, which for him was everything. “The study 
of the material world accessible to the senses, led, according to 
the German philosopher, to nothing real, while the spiritual 
World, without parts or dimensions, as represented by monads, 
numerical unities endowed from their creation with motion, was 
the object of pure knowledge, that is, of God himself.” 
The scientific mind is still in training; it is still in leading strings, 
and it will be long before it can let go of them and soar by a 
Priori methods to reach ultimate truths. This is a healthy con- 
dition, and a genuine agnosticism in so far as regards scientific 
a priori deductions or guesses is at present, at least, an encour- 
aging Symptom of modern science. 
VOL. XVIIL—wno. 1x, 64 
