No. 552] AUTONOMY OF BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 713 



man may be friendly to-day and vicious to-morrow under 

 similar external circumstances. Irregularities such as 

 these, our informants tell us, should quench the ardor of 

 the dullest, and to convince us still further of the inade- 

 quacy of our materials for science they point to rational 

 mechanics, a domain free from ambush, and pervaded by 

 an order in which only the foreseen and predictable find a 

 place. 



The juxtaposition of these two disciplines is not only 

 unparliamentary, but unfortunate. Inasmuch as ra- 

 tional mechanics deals with abstractions and has only 

 the slightest objective basis, it can have no materials 

 comparable with the contents of any natural science. 

 On the contrary, it is a method of thinking. Thinking is 

 a phenomenon of consciousness; and consciousness, a 

 biological event. If, therefore, the mechanic produces an 

 orderly and coherent system in which one thing follows 

 with certainty from another, this shows nothing else 

 :han that certain biological events, to wit, mental proc- 

 esses, are among the most reliable phenomena in nature. 



The biologist readily concedes that he is not as weather- 

 wise as the rational mechanic, but he does not concede 

 that this is due either to the fundamental disorderliness 

 of his section of nature, or because his colleague's oracu- 

 lar powers differ in origin from his own where he happens 

 to possess them. As a whole man can not as yet be in- 

 ferred from the protozoa, yet from the study of oxida- 

 tion, secretion and digestion in unicellular organisms we 

 could readily foresee the existence of these processes 

 in higher forms. The conditions of the heliotropic re- 

 sponse are such that an organism must be neither neu- 

 tral nor alkaline to react positively, and one at variance 

 with expectation can be made to do the expected by 

 acidulation. Although half the children of brown-eyed 

 parents may have blue eyes, this, instead of being a 

 symptom of disorder, is in strict conformity with a law 

 which enables us to say that two grandparents, one ma- 

 ternal, the other paternal, had this eye-color. The same 



