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HE data of biology are living plants and animals. These are what nature presents. To these we must always go in order to make a beginning at any investigation. Is one interested in ganglionic cells, or germ cells, or liver secretions, or degenerate organs? He must find some kind of animal that has, or produces, or can yield such things. In making a successful quest for "material," it always turns out that a particular individual plant or animal, one or more, furnishes it. One may not be able to tell exactly what he means by an individual tree or man, but he must have one before he can study it or any part of it. Definitions of natural objects come at the end, rather than at the beginning, of our knowledge of them.

We biologists frequently speak of the principle of life, or the germs of life, and of many other particular manifestations of organisms, as though they were something really existent independently of particular organisms. Such questions as: Which came first, or is more fundamental, the chick or the egg; structure or function; life or organization? are frequently asked with more or less seriousness. Herbert Spencer devotes considerable space to the inquiry as to whether life or organization appeared first. He writes:

He continues:

If Life is shown by inner actions so adjusted as to balance outer actions


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Rh

. . .; then may we not say that the actions to be formed must come before that which forms them. . . that the continuous change which is the basis of function, must come before the structure that brings function into shape?

Greatly to Mr. Spencer's credit he tells us in another connection (p. 197), that "in truth this question is not determinable by any evidence now accessible." We must go a long way beyond this position and recognize that not only is the question not determinable "by any evidence now accessible," but that there is not the slightest indication that such evidence ever will be accessible. What we have to see is that all suck discussions are utterly futile for science; indeed, that they have no legitimate place in inductive science.

Has anybody ever seen an egg that was not produced by some organism; some function without structure, or vice versa; some life without organization, or organization independent of life? Surely not. Then equally surely you can make no assumption that involves the disjunction of either member of one of these couples from the other, without attempting to transcend experience—without becoming in so far an a priorist pure and simple.

Now you may perhaps have the privilege of being an a priorist pure and simple, if you want it, but in case you choose thus you can not have a seat in the temple of physical science for one instant. On the basis of experience science can-project itself far in advance of experience, but only on that basis can it thus project itself.

So much for the data, the starting places of biology. They are individual animals and plants, living in nature. It is wholesome for any domain of science to stop now and then and ask what its original data are. Such inquiry not only yields enlightenment, interesting and useful of itself, but it is further illuminating as to the way a science deals, and must deal, with its raw material—its "givens."

Notice the procedure in a special case. Observe how oceanography proceeds in studying the Pacific Ocean. Of what is that vast sea composed? First of all of water, H2O. No doubt about that. Dissolved in this are various mineral salts, chlorides of sodium and magnesium, particularly, and the gases O, N and CO2. These with perhaps a few other elements and the ocean is chemically accounted for. Yet how far have we gone toward a knowledge of the Pacific Ocean when we have found that it is thus constituted? Even though we should have ascertained the total quantity of water, salts and gases in the entire Pacific, we should have scarcely made a beginning on the oceanography of this body of water. Its form and boundaries; its connections with other oceans; the character of its bottom; its islands, continental and oceanic; its currents; its tides; the up-welling waters on its eastern margins; its temperature in general, and in particular parts, and dozens of other matters, are quite over and beyond anything

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176 that strict chemical knowledge can reach. Oceanography as now understood is quite impossible without chemistry, but it by no means follows that chemistry is the whole of oceanography. Physics is as essential as chemistry; and geology and astronomy are in turn as essential as physics.

So with the other inorganic sciences. Spectroscopy, a department of chemistry, has been largely the making of modern stellar astronomy. Yet is not such a problem as that of the variable stars, something over and above spectroscopy? Is it conceivable that spectroscopy alone would ever have discovered variable stars, and formulated the many interesting questions about them that astronomy is now asking?

Do not the same principles of constitution, and study of constitution, hold when we enter the domain of living objects? They surely do. Organisms have their own special qualities and so present their own problems, exactly as do oceans and stars. Biology depends upon, but at the same time transcends, chemistry and physics, in exactly the same way that astronomy rests upon but transcends chemistry and physics. We are here on the threshold of one of the oldest, in many of its aspects one of the most familiar scientific and philosophic puzzles; namely, that of the relation of a whole to the elements which compose it.

Alas for the proneness of humankind to go all awry with itself and nature from not duly heeding the commonest, most familiar things! Hear this dialogue that comes to us across a stretch of two thousand years:

Socrates—" Suppose one were to ask you a question about the first syllable in the name Socrates, and say 'Theætetus, tell me what SO is,' what would you answer?"

Theætetus—" That it is S and O."

S.—"Well, have you not there the reasoned statement of the syllable?"

T.—" Yes, certainly."

S.—" Proceed then and give me in the same way the reasoned statement of S."

T.—"But how can one give the elements of an element? For indeed, Socrates, S is one of the voiceless letters, a mere sound, as it were a whistling of the tongue. . . ."

S.—" But stay, I wonder if we are right in laying it down that while the element is not knowable the combination is?. . ."

T.—" That would be strange beyond all reason, Socrates. . . ."

S.—" Perhaps we ought to have taken the combination to be not the sum of the elements, but a single form resulting from them, with an individual shape of its own, and differing from the elements."

T.—" Certainly, very possibly this view is more correct than the other. . . ."

S.—" Then let the combination be, as we now put it, a single form, alike in letters and in everything else, resulting from the conjunction of harmonious elements in each case."


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Rh As long as the mind of the interpreter is human, the whole truth of a complex natural object or proposition can never be ascertained from knowledge of its components alone. Or varying this statement, you can never give a full account of any whole in terms of its elements.

In spite of the ocean and the 6tars as illustrating the truth thus formulated, the statement sounds dogmatic. We must examine it farther.

The presumption that biological phenomena may be adequately treated in terms of chemistry and physics takes care of itself so far as strict science is concerned, since its utter futility becomes apparent almost immediately it is put to rigid experimental test. For one thing, it results in constant effort to extend generalizations far beyond where later study will permit them to stand. It leads inevitably to a forcing of evidence, which process sooner or later comes to grief.

One aspect of this forcing is almost certain betrayal into an. illegitimate use of the analogical mode of reasoning. For instance, an analogy is often drawn between the so-called reversed actions in chemistry, and what is spoken of as a return of certain animals—certain worms—to the egg state. As a matter of fact the earlier speaker who drew this analogy might have used the "second-childhood" of the old man as well as the supposed second egg state of the worm. One has as much in common as the other with the chemical process for which correspondence was claimed.

You must not understand by this that I condemn, wholly, comparison and analogy in reasoning. On the contrary, I attach great importance to these, as would become clear were this discussion to be carried into regions where it is not possible for it to go now. In so far as there is resemblance between reversed chemical action and growing old, the fact is illuminating, and to have discovered it is good. My criticism is directed not against pointing out the resemblance, but against not pointing out the difference at the same time, thus leaving the inference that one process accounts for or explains the other. It is in its wider bearings, its bearings beyond strict specialties in science, that the influence of the theory of physical-chemical adequacy in the treatment of life phenomena is most unfortunate. Only when regarded from this larger standpoint does its withering effect on the scientific spirit and method generally, and on man's attitude toward nature, become apparent.

The subject is, according to my view, so vital that I must ask you to look into it more closely. This we can not do without running a little into what these walls are accustomed to hear about under the term theory of knowledge, or epistemology. Most of us would agree that we have to use both our senses and our minds in science. Most would agree too that that workman is the most efficient who uses his instruments the most intelligently—who is not a mere rule-of-thumb


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178 workman. How then do our minds and our senses work while we do science? Are there general principles of operation, to know which would enable us to use them more smoothly, more surely, more productively? Let us watch them while they work at some problem of chemistry, say. To be as objective as possible we will use common table salt. We began with a general acquaintance with the article. How do we become thus acquainted? Surely in no other way than by examining it. We touch our tongues to it, it dissolves readily and has a characteristic taste. Examining this dissolving propensity minutely, we find that in distilled water at a definite temperature, a definite quantity will be taken up. Its solubility is thus determined.

The moment we handle it in considerable amount we note that it is rather heavy. In water it sinks quickly. This property we examine more closely and find that a specific gravity characterizes it.

In a pulverized state it is pure white. If, however, we let it evaporate slowly, we get cubical crystals, not white but transparent.

We may suppose now we have examined all the physical properties of salt. But surely our knowledge is not yet complete. We know nothing of its composition. Before beginning on this chemical extension of our knowledge, let us take due note of the fact that table salt is a definite thing to us; we can use it in a hundred ways and rely implicitly upon it, on the basis of this physical knowledge alone. We do not have to know whether it is simple or compound in order to get its benefits ''as salt. Physical'' knowledge of it we must have before we can use it in any way. Chemical knowledge, understanding by this knowledge of constituents, we need not have.

But since we started out to know salt through and through, we must become salt chemists. We must decompose the substance, if it turns out to be compound, and examine its constituents as carefully as we examined the substance itself. To make the story short we get sodium and chlorine. But we must not so shorten the story as to fail to see what we do in examining these constituents. What is it that we do? We proceed exactly as we did in examining the salt. We determine their physical properties. The sodium is opaque, and bright metallic in color. Ordinarily it is amorphous and waxy. Instead of dissolving in water as does the salt, it decomposes water. Instead of sinking quickly, it floats. It melts at 95°. 6 C., while 776° of heat are required to melt salt.

The chlorine, a gas at any temperature we can readily command, is greenish-yellow in color. Its odor is characteristically disagreeable, and it irritates our noses and throats. Like the salt it is soluble in water, but while the salt is more soluble in hot water than cold, chlorine is more soluble in cold water. It is heavier than air, though much lighter than water.

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Rh salt? First and foremost an interesting lot of entirely new knowledge. Our understanding of salt has been broadened and deepened. Salt is a much more complex thing to us now than it was before. Instead of simplifying salt by reducing it to its elements, we have greatly complicated it. But notice this particularly: The new knowledge has not enhanced by one jot our knowledge of the physical properties of salt. There is nothing whatever in the properties of the sodium or the chlorine that gives us any clue to the properties of the salt. We might, so far as the best cunning in observation we now possess promises anything, examine the sodium and the chlorine till doomsday and never suspect that together they might produce salt, unless we happened to put them together and note that salt actually did result.

This is a threadbare, school-book story. Why revamp it here? Because it is part, though an essential part, of a much larger story, the whole of which is rarely if ever told. Before we can reach the heart of the matter we must stop a moment with another fact so familiar as likewise to seem stale. Our physical examination of the salt, the sodium and the chlorine, were applications of the general principle that the first step in all knowledge of external objects is the determination of their physical qualities. The familiar expression is, "we know an object only by its properties, or qualities." Let us take this statement from its pigeon-hole of mere habit, and look at it reflectively. Does it mean that there are no natural objects in all the universe about which we can get knowledge in no way other than through their physical properties? Those of you who say "yes, that is what it means," I agree with, and with you might go on at once with the discussion. But some will, I suspect, hesitate to reply thus. To you who hesitate, I say that if there be objects which we may know by other means than through their physical properties, they must be namable, otherwise you could not claim for them a place in the physical world; so I demand that you mention examples. You will probably name the atoms of the chemist and the ether of space. You are then, in so far as concerns the atoms, committed to the conception of propertyless atoms, are you not? I ask you to tell me then exactly what it was that John Dalton and the other founders of modern chemistry actually did. Certainly there were atomic theories of the constitution of matter long before these men lived. Democritus and Newton, to say nothing of others, made much of such atoms. Why did the pre-Daltonian atoms signify nothing, or almost nothing for physical science? Because they were propertyless atoms. To attach to these old purely speculative, and hence scientifically useless atoms, one property of the particular substance to which they belong, was exactly what these chemists did. The property so attached was that of combining with other substances in definite ways.

Analyze the atomic theory of modern chemistry and you will find


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180 that all that makes it significant for chemical practise is expressible in this way: If any two substances unite with each other chemically, they do so in such a manner that there are no particles of them so small as not to follow the same law of combination that holds for the substances in bulk.

Atoms in modern chemistry are small bodies imagined to constitute visible substances, and they are imagined for the purpose of incarnating, if you will, the observed trait that substances have of combining with one another according to known rules. As to most of the other properties of atoms, their shape, color, hardness, etc., if atoms are conceived to be anything else than little particles of the substances, science knows no more to-day than did Newton and Democritus.

The purpose of this little excursion into the atomic doctrine, that border-land of physical science, is to bring home something of the mighty power there is in the properties of things, and in sense experience. It is not too much to say that the modern science of chemistry was born then and there, when one property that substances have, viz., that of definite combination with other substances, was attached to the hitherto purely speculative, more or less mystical atoms of those substances.

I ask you now to recall what was said about the way we deal with the salt, sodium and chlorine. Substantially the statement was that we have to treat them all on exactly the same basis, so far as the process of knowing is concerned. That is, we have to treat each one on the basis of its own properties. We can not touch sodium with our knowledge of the properties of chlorine, nor vice versa. Similarly, we can not touch sodium with our knowledge of the properties of salt, nor salt with our knowledge of the properties of sodium, except, mark you, as we may say that one property of sodium is its power to unite with chlorine to produce salt. My familiar expression for this is that the external world and our minds are so constituted, are so articulated with each other, that every object in that world must be treated on its own merits. Now notice that since these substances must be treated, each on its own merits, and since the sodium and chlorine have the power of combining with each other in such a remarkable way that they wholly lose their original properties, at least temporarily, and merge into another substance, salt, with properties wholly its own, we must recognize that the properties of substances manifest something of transitoriness and relativity.

Thus are we led to the notion which I have ventured to speak of as the standardization of reality. The expression is suggested by the chemist's process of standardizing solutions; the process, that is, of using a solution of known composition and concentration as a unit of value to which to refer various reactions and processes. The meaning is that whatever criterion of reality you apply to any natural object,


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Rh that same criterion you must apply to all other natural objects, no matter whether some of these be constituents of others, or stand in some other relation to one another.

Making the statement specific for the case of objects that are composed of other objects or substances, it runs thus: Whatever criterion of reality you apply as the test of the elements of a complex body or substance, exactly that same criterion you must apply as a test of the reality of the complex body itself.

It follows from this, that with the question of a fundamental essence or substance behind properties, we are, as students of objective nature, in no wise concerned. As to whether there is or is not a real essence of sodium, or of salt, to which the sensible properties of these substances adhere, is no affair of ours. Physical science can not even raise the question of an absolute reality or realities behind the objects with which it deals.

Now let us carry these considerations of the nature of objects and of minds, and the relation existing between them, up into trre realm of objects that we call living. The formulary will run thus: In whatever sense you predicate reality, or fundamentality, or ultimateness to the germ or any part of an organism, in exactly the same sense you must predicate reality, or fundamentality, or ultimateness to the completed and whole organism.

If you have been accustomed to look upon living nature with the conception that somewhere deeply hidden in the plants and animals you daily meet there is something more real than the organisms themselves, something possessed of a potency wholly unique and mysterious as contrasted with that possessed by the visible beings; or, if you have regarded living beings as ejects of your own consciousness—if, I say, you have been wont to thus regard organisms, grasp fully this conception of reality and of measuring reality and you will find, I believe, that it will transform your world. It will increase your interest in every developed organism as contrasted with your interest in its germ, or any portion of the organism physical or psychical in almost direct proportion as the sensible complexity of the organism as a whole exceeds the sensible complexity of the germ or any part of the organism.

Here is the epistemological necessity for the conception of an "organism as a whole," the biological compulsion of which we speak later. The point is simply this: Every object in nature has some nature of its own. That is just what makes it belong to nature. Consequently there must be something about it which can not be fully accounted for by referring it to something else in nature. For if you could thus dispose of every natural object, nature would consume itself in explanation. You would have the case of the Kilkenny


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182 cats psychologized. We come here, I imagine, upon what virile truth there is in the "Ding an Sich," the "Thing in Itself." I can not restrain my interest from going where I believe reality, to be. Contrariwise, I can not send it where I believe reality is not. Interest and attention, like natural forces generally, take the direction of least resistance; and the places of greatest belief in reality are those of least resistance for attention. With this psychological basis to go on, illustration will carry us forward more surely and steadily than further argument.

The very heart of that school of biology known as materialistic, or mechanistic, is its effort to interpret living beings by ascribing to invisible substances or bodies, located somewhere within the germ-cells and other cells of the body, reality and essentiality of a sort quite unique as contrasted with the visible substances, and the organisms themselves. Examine the program of this school attentively and you will see that it proposes to "explain" or "express" those parts of animate nature about which we know most, observationally, in terms of those parts about which we know least, observationally. It is undoubtedly a quasi-inductive, semi-mystical program.

The chemical materialist conceives certain compounds, never well-known ones mark you, enzymes for example, to be thus supremely endowed. The biological materialist on the other hand, ascribes this exalted role to imaginary, invisible living bodies hidden deep within the germ and other cells. Biology of the last three decades has bestowed mighty powers upon such bodies under the designation "determinants." Only those familiar with the technical literature of the science during this time can have any notion of the influence these bodies have had. What have been, and what are the effects of such conceptions on biological theory and practise? I mention only a few of these.

Nothing is more characteristic of the biological thought in highest repute to-day than its disposition to look down upon all those kinds of research not aimed at the elements of organisms—at "ultimate problems," as the expression goes. Most of those who labor in the biological vineyard but are not elementalists of some sort, will appreciate what I mean, for they will have personally felt the ban placed upon them by the dominant school. A few years ago one of our best known American zoologists, speaking from a position of national preferment in his science, reviewed comprehensively the present range of zoology, and did not hesitate to pass upon the labors of description and classification of animals as hardly worth while. In other words, he pronounced as not worth doing, the very things which an examination of the nature of the knowledge-getting process shows to be absolutely fundamental steps toward an understanding of living nature.


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Rh This zoologist, it is hardly necessary to say, is an elementalist at heart. Plants and animals, as nature presents them, are for him real in a way. They are of course what our naked, crass senses come in contact with, but the real essence of them, the thing we want to get at, lies far away in the germ-cells, in the chromosomes, in protoplasm. There is reality. There is the pole-star by which our compass should be set, according to his views.

The consistent elementalist can not care much for description and classification, for these depend in the first instance on "mere qualities," while he is concerned with essences. The elementalist's problems, like the pure intellectualist's, are always ultimate problems. For both anything this side of the absolute is only appearance.

There is prevalent among many influential biologists, unfortunately for practical ends, a tendency to esteem what are called "gross" anatomy and physiology as of no great scientific value. To the elementalist this is bound to be so. The structures and the activities of your bodies, as the anatomist and physiologist of the ordinary kind sees them, are not their fundamentally real structures and activities. These are deep hidden in the uttermost recesses of your members. They are "probably" your proteid compounds, especially your enzymes.

One of the best characterization-marks of elementalist biology is the expression "nothing but." What is the human brain? It is "nothing but" a vast multitude of ganglionic cells (9,200,000,000 in the cortex alone), if the answer comes from a cellular elementalist; or it is "nothing but" a still greater number of chromosomes, if the elementalist be of the consistently orthodox chromosomal persuasion.

And what are the so-called emotions of the human breast? In last analysis they are "nothing but" chemical substances in unstable equilibrium, or in some other state.

Ernst Mach, that prince of modern elementalists, quotes Litchenberg approvingly as follows: "We should say It thinks, just as we say It lightens. It is going too far to say cogito if we translate cogito by I think. The assumption, or postulation, of the ego is a mere practical necessity." What sort of necessity, if not practical necessity, do these people believe in? Seemingly it is theoretical or impractical necessity, or both.

The answer to those who hold such views is obvious: If you want to call yourself "It" why, go ahead. But I propose to call myself "I" and no power in heaven or on earth can compel me to call myself "It." I may not be able fully to define my "I." Surely I am not, for full definition comes at the end and not at the beginning of experiential knowledge. But however incomplete my definition be, here I am. "The proof of the pudding is the eating."

Why do the elementalists pin their faith to the invisible constituents of things rather than to the things themselves? Can it be that they


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184 deliberately deceive themselves as to the place where reality is located? Surely this can not be so. Some misguiding agent or agents there must be, and they must be subtle, otherwise they could not succeed as well as they do with so many earnest people.

Let us see if we can detect any of these subtle misleaders. In order to walk sure footed, we must remain on the platform of objectivity. Let us go back to salt and its elements. If the properties of salt are not derived from the sodium and the chlorine, where do they come from? Does something wholly extraneous to the elements while they exist apart, come in at the instant of their union that bestows upon the salt its peculiar properties? In other words, is there a mystical somewhat in chemical affinity? Those of you who know anything of the histon r of biological theory will recognize that this brings us to the threshold of the vitalistic school. If the completed organism does not lie as potency and promise in the germ and its natural environment, then where does it abide? If the qualities of the organism are not thus derived, then indeed is there something in man not derived from nature, just as a time-honored school of philosophy asserts. But for biology this would be vitalism, and vitalism means a walled city with the gates locked and the keys lost beyond recovery.

Have we reached a city surrounded by such a wall? A wonderful city indeed we have come to, for in truth is it an eternal city. By no means, though, are its gates locked against us. We may enter with perfect freedom and wander through its streets and palaces as long as we live, even to the latest generations of those who follow us, always there to find that which is more interesting, more beautiful, more marvelous.

Being primarily a man of science and only incidentally an artist, I am privileged to be a bad artist, so may intepret my metaphor.

What I mean is, that while we can not see how the properties of the salt are potentially in the chlorine and the sodium; and how the qualities of the man are potentially in the germ-cells, we still have no grounds for supposing they are not there. If our knowledge of the chemical elements and of the germs were full enough, we should see how they produce the results which flow from them. Now here is the crucial point—if our knowledge were full enough we should see. But how full would "full enough" be? So far as the knowledge we now have enables us to answer, only unlimited knowledge would be full enough. If we are privileged to suppose we shall sometime be possessed of infinite knowledge; shall be, in other words, infinite beings, then but not till then, shall we understand how chlorine and sodium produce common salt, how the germ-cells produce a common man.


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Rh Nature is through and through infinite in her forms and processes, so it seems from the experiential knowledge thus far gained. In just what ways science is being driven to the conclusion that nature is thus constituted is too long and hard a story to tell here. We can only glance at a few of its specially striking features. The atomic theory of modern chemistry contains several of these. By modern chemistry is meant chemistry since Dalton, Lavoisier and Avogadro; and especially since Lorentz and the electron idea came into it.

The special thing about the atomic theory that I call your attention to in this connection is the conception of change of valence of atoms now being discussed by some of the foremost chemists. According to this conception, the same atom may have different combining values under different circumstances. Do you not see without further comment what this suggests as to unrevealed potentialities of atoms? If the known facts of carbon-chemistry are such as to drive the chemist to suppose the atom of carbon changes from bi valency to quadrivalency and vice versa, what sober chemist will venture to place any limitation on the possibilities for further change of like nature not only in this but in other atoms?

Since we know absolutely nothing about the relation of the atoms in living substance, would it not be a reasonable hypothesis to say that the nature of that marvelous process called metabolism is due to just the fact that the atoms of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, etc., are undergoing perpetual change of valence? I see no reason why we may not legitimately imagine even consciousness due to such a process. Were such a hypothesis to be seriously taken, it would seem to follow that consciousness would have its roots wherever metabolism is going on. What an excellent starting point this would make for dealing with the perennial puzzle of,how it is that the "mind influences the body"! The mind would then be part of the body.

Another fruitful idea recently introduced into chemistry, and significant for the present point, is what is known as mass action. The essence of this, as my colleague Professor F. W. Cottrell expresses it,


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186 is that the more opportunity for chemical action the particles of a substance have, the more they act; that is, the particles improve their opportunity, so to speak.

See again how pregnant of meaning this is for the potentialities of atoms. It means that they have capacities to act that are revealed only when conditions for them to act are presented. This reminds one strongly of the unused energies of men that Professor James has recently written about so luminously.

The one other phase of science to which allusion will be made under this head, belongs to the biological realm. It is the conception of the "organism as a whole" that for a number of years has been working its way into biology by sheer force of its own weight. The facts are such as to compel admission even though they are wholly inexplicable on the basis of current elementalist doctrines, and so are frequently ignored or scouted by biologists of that school.

An expression which, though extreme, still rightly presents the idea comes from the German botanist de Bary. He said "Die Pflanze bildet Zellen, nicht die Zelle bildet Pflanzen" (The plant produces cells, not the cells produce the plant). This is an over statement but is true in so far as it expresses the unescapable fact that the whole organism at any given moment, as well as its elements, is concerned in determining what it shall be in the next succeeding moment. A more exact expression of a particular phase of the idea is due to our foremost American student of the cell, Professor E. B. Wilson. He writes: "We can not comprehend the form of cleavage (cell-division) without reference do the end-result."

Let us look at an instance of the working of this principle in the realm of political organization, where it is more openly displayed. The original thirteen colonies of our pre-national period, united into a compact under what was known as the articles of confederation. A corner stone of the union was that each state should keep inviolate its original powers and privileges. Under the governmental fiction of this compact, the Congress, it has been said, could recommend everything but could enforce nothing. The experiment was naturally a failure. After a period of "Strang und Gang" our nation with the federal constitution as its basis was founded.

Now recall some of the striking things that happened in this transition time. First of all, the hitherto individual, sovereign states had to give up some of both their powers and their possessions. The "western lands" claimed by the states, had been one of the most serious obstacles in the way of a closer union. First New York, then Virginia, yielded their claims to congress for certain guarantees to them in return. The other states followed. Afterward the congress erected new states in the territory thus acquired, and the old states modified their organic laws to conform to the new conditions. Shall


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Rh we say that the new creation, the United States, contained something underived from the original states and their conditions? Shall we deny that our republic was contained potentially in the thirteen original states? Surely not. But the processes of gestation and parturition by which the nation came forth profoundly modified the elements, the states. Only a wisdom practically infinite could have foreseen exactly what those modifications would be. The criticism has been made that in using the origin of the United States as an illustration of the centripetal action of the developmental process, I am resorting to the analogical mode of reasoning, the very thing I have objected to in another connection. Attention must be called to the fact that it was not the use but the illegitimate use of this method to which objection was made. I am not pretending that the reciprocating action as it takes place in either the animal body or the nation explains the process in the other. My point is that in both cases the developmental process manifests this peculiarity. There is a common element in the two developments. That is all I am insisting on. But this must be taken in connection with the principle insisted on with equal emphasis elsewhere, that each natural object has its own qualities and properties. The man and the nation have something in common as to their mode of development, but they also have something of difference. To ascertain the differences and the traits-in-common all along the line is exactly what the business of developmental biology is.

Those biologists whose creed is that explanation of nature consists in reducing her to a few simple principles will make wry faces if nothing worse at this. But until such biologists can be more successful than they have been so far, in preventing organic chemists from finding new compounds day by day, and in suppressing systematic botanists and zoologists who persist in hunting up new kinds of plants and animals, and new characteristics and varieties of old ones, I see no prospect of these wry faces changing to expressions of good cheer.

It may be unfortunate that the living world is so complex, was not constructed on "a few simple principles." But one thing seems well established: Nature can not be made simple by treating her on the theory that she ought to be so when as a matter of fact she is not. To say that a few principles can be found that are common to very wide domains of nature, and to deny that there are numberless other principles not so widely prevalent are very different propositions.

Growth and organization everywhere in living nature work inward as well as outward. The processes turn back upon themselves and produce changes in the contributing elements. What the new creation will be, what modifications the elements will undergo, one can see beforehand partly, but never fully. Only infinite wisdom could see altogether. Notice under what conditions one's wisdom would enable him to predict the future absolutely. Would not these two conditions be essential: That his knowledge of the past should be absolute, and that the course of events, that is the laws of nature, should be absolutely trustworthy?

Observation with our senses, of law-abiding operations, perforated by objects cognizable only through their own properties, is one way of


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188 describing our knowledge of nature. But we should fall wofullywoefully [sic] short were we to be satisfied with such an account of it. We can reach the kernel of a more adequate account by way of that indispensable aid to scientific discovery known as hypothesis-making.

A few, only a few, men of science have proposed to eliminate hypotheses from science altogether. The best known of these eliminators is Wilhelm Ostwald. In the place of the hypothesis Ostwald would install what he calls the protothesis. And what is that? It is a "vorläufige Annahme." There you have it! A protothesis is a taking of something by running on ahead. Ostwald wants to get rid of hypotheses altogether and rely wholly on "Arbeit," on work, to make conquests in science. But see what his proposal comes to, taking his own words. He is going to do part of to-morrow's work to-day, even at this very instant. The mind forecasts. It outstrips its past and present experiences. That is the vital fact, and why quibble about how it shall be named?

All generalization is hypothesis, says M. Poincaré. Think about it and you will see the eminent Frenchman is right. Think about it further and you will see you can not move ahead in real science one inch without generalization. But for it you might possibly have coordinated experiences which by courtesy might he called knowledge. But such knowledge would be wholly without motive, and what rational being would care a snap for such knowledge!

We must not fail to notice how radically at variance this way of interpreting the mind's work is from Kant's way of interpreting it. Kantians speak of that which the "mind itself puts into nature." If something is really put into nature, that something must have been previously outside of nature. You can not put water into a dish that is already in the dish. What is that outside something? Where is the outside source whence it comes? Ask the unfortunate mortals of whom Laura Bridgman was an instance, who are deprived from tender infancy of their sense organs, whether they know of some source of knowledge wholly outside nature. These cases furnish indubitable evidence, so far as they go, that consciousness has no content till sense perception gives it some.

No, the mind does not put something into nature that was previously outside it. This however, it does do: It takes something from one part of nature and puts it into another part. We must allow that the mind really does put something into any particular situation that -was not in that situation before. But that is quite different from allowing that it puts something into nature as a whole that was not before somewhere in nature as a whole. This brings us back to our standardized, or tested, or relative reality.

If we ask how or by virtue of what quality or force the mind does this running ahead, this transferring of something from one part of


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Rh nature to another, no answer is forthcoming any more than there is to the question as to how or by virtue of what quality or force it senses at all; or to the question as to how or by virtue of what quality the properties of salt are produced by the sodium and the chlorine. It may be galling to find that we must accept many things as by free grace, so to speak; but this does not alter the fact.

It is the penalty we pay for belonging to nature at all. If one is galled by the fact and so tries to escape it, the course open to him is that taken by the oriental occultist who sees the natural order as a clog to the nobler but invisible real order and hence as a thing to be got rid of as soon as possible.

At a few places in this discussion it has seemed as though the course we were on would drag our physical science back to the primal chaos of mere sensations and facts from which it seems to have come. In truth, though, now that we can look at the whole situation as from a hilltop, how thoroughly familiar, how reassuring, how in accord with the best, most fruitful endeavor of all the ages of human history it is seen to be. "Nur in der Erfahrung ist Wahrheit" (only in experience is truth), said Kant. Modify this to the extent of making it say "Ohne Erfahrung ist keine Wahrheit" (without experience is no truth), and can any but a sophisticated mind doubt its truthfulness?

If nature is as true to herself and to man as she seems; if the body of evidence gathered by centuries of laborious science to the effect that law and order do prevail throughout the universe; and if the universe is as inexhaustible in variety and power as experience indicates, then how securely we stand on the truth that struggled to expression in Saint Paul's prophetic words: "Faith is the substance of things not seen"!

There seems to be no question about what experience alone can do since there is no such thing so far as we can see. Nor is there any question about what faith alone can do since there is no such thing. Experience appears to exist because of or through faith, and faith to exist because of or through experience. So far as production has reference to the fact that something exists now that did not exist previously, experience and faith must, it would seem, be said to be generative inter se. We have no ground whatever for saying that either preceded the other in time. Even the simplest sensation, the starting point of experience, can not be conceived in any intelligible terminology that does not recognize it as belonging to some organism. What sane person would talk of a sensation absolutely independent of an organism? But an organism of the simplest imaginable sort must still have some measure of fidelity, of faithfulness to


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190 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.


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The third stage of thermodynamics has for its point of departure Maxwell's observation that the second law is not a mathematical but an empirical or statistical truth, and his prediction that any attempt to deduce it from dynamic principles, such as Hamilton's principle, without introducing some element of probability, is foredoomed to failure. "We have reason to believe of the second law," says Maxwell, "that though true, its truth is not of the same order as that of the first law," being an empirical generalization from the facts of nature in the first instance, while the molecular theory shows it to be "of the nature of a strong probability which, though it falls short of certainty by less than any assignable quantity, is not an absolute certainty." This statement of Maxwell's not only resumes the knowledge of his time, but has not been improved upon by later investigators, whose work shows that the truth of the second law is. certain to the limit of human probability only. The theory of probabilities itself is exact as far as human observation goes. In 6,000 throws of dice, a particular facet will not necessarily turn up 1,000 times, but the probability of its doing so will be more nearly one sixth, the greater the number of throws. In the vital statistics of a great city the data of births, deaths, illegitimacy, etc., will be more nearly the same from week to week, the greater the population of the city; even the introduction of new dynamic factors, as seasonal change, epidemics, vaccination, antitoxin, etc., may alter particular effects but will not change the general tendency towards uniformity. Maxwell has observed that everything irregular, even the motion of a bit of paper falling to the ground, tends, in the long run, to become regular, and this is the rationale of testing the second law with respect to gases. In the kinetic theory of gases, the first scientific statement of which is due to Clausius, we assume a gas to be an assemblage of elastic spheres or molecules, flying in straight lines in all directions, with swift haphazard collisions and repulsions, like so many billiard balls. These, by Maxwell's calculations, will, if enclosed and left to themselves, gradually tend to an ultimate steady condition of perfectly equalized and permanently distributed velocities (i. e., uniform temperature or thermal equilibrium) called "Maxwell's state." "This possible form of the final partition of


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192 energies," Maxwell claims, "is also the only form." At this point the work of Boltzmann becomes of central importance, especially on account of its profound influence on the later works of Gibbs. In Boltzmann's application of probabilities to Maxwell's problem, the starting point or initial stage of any sequence of events is called a "highly improbable one," because its certainty decreases the more the events proceed to some final or "most probable" state. For example, the blowing up of the Maine is to us a moral or mathematical certainty, but it may not be so aeons hence, while its predisposing or exciting causes are even now "highly improbable" in that we know nothing positive about them. When a gas is brought into a new physical state, its initial stage is, in Boltzmann's argument, a highly improbable one from which the system of molecules will continually hasten towards successive states of greater probability until it finally attains the most probable one, or Maxwell's state of equilibrated partition of energy and thermal equilibrium. Maxwell's law of final distribution of velocities as determined by Boltzmann's probability coefficient is, therefore, a sufficient condition for thermal equilibrium, and Boltzmann found that the entropy of any state of gas molecules is proportional to the logarithm of the probability of its occurrence; or as Larmor puts it, the principle that the trend of an isolated system is towards states for which the entropy continually increases is analogous to the principle that the general trend of a system of molecules is through a succession of states whose intrinsic probability of occurrence continually increases. As a measure of the degree of variation of the gas molecules from Maxwell's state, Boltzmann introduces a function H such that, as the distribution of molecular velocities constantly tends toward the most probable distribution, H varies with the time and is found to be constantly diminishing in value. The necessary condition for thermal equilibrium is, therefore, that H should irreversibly attain a minimum value. Thus Boltzmann's "minimum theorem" becomes, like the Clausius doctrine of maximum entropy, a theorem of extreme probability, or to quote the aphorism of Gibbs which Boltzmann chose as a motto for his Gastheorie: "The impossibility of an uncompensated decrease of entropy seems to be reduced to an improbability." Applying similar reasoning to the material universe, Boltzmann finds that the following assumptions are possible: either the whole universe is in a highly improbable (i. e. initial) state, or, as the facts of physical astronomy would seem to indicate, the part of it known to us is in a state of thermal equilibrium, with certain districts, such as the earth we live


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Rh on, noticeably removed from this condition. The probability of the latter state of affairs is smaller, the further such a state is removed from thermal equilibrium, but it can be made as great as we please to assume the universe to be great. But there is necessary and sufficient probability that our earth as we know it is in its present state. By the second law (irreversible increase of entropy in natural processes) there is still greater probability that it tends to a final state of thermal equilibrium or death; and since the universe itself is so great, there is sufficient probability that other worlds than ours may deviate from thermal equilibrium. As a graphic exposition of this theory, which shows the vast scope of the second law of thermodynamics, a curve can be plotted with the variables H and the time as coordinates, to visualize what takes place in the universe. The H curve is shaped like a succession of inverted trees, the summits of which represent "the worlds where visible motion and life exist." Physicists have found that the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of velocities is satisfactory for gases whose molecules move independently and at random; but when the molecules are supposed to be subject to one another's influence, it does not account for certain facts of nature such as the measured specific heats of gases or individual peculiarities of their spectra. In monatomic gases like argon, helium and mercury, the ratio of the specific heats will account for the three degrees of molecular freedom ascribed to them by the mathematical theory, but in the case of diatomic gases, like hydrogen or oxygen, the theory calls for six degrees of freedom, while experiment will account for only five. Boltzmann met these objections with frank or ironical admissions as to the ultimate inadequacy of all human hypotheses, and although his theory is to some extent invalidated by facts like the above, his subtle handling of molecular thermodynamics gives the physicist deeper insight into


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194 such unusual phases of matter as radiation in rarefied gases, where the system has no temperature at all, because its internal motions have not settled down to a definite average. Helmholtz's dynamic proof of the second law assumes the existence of cyclic systems with reversible circular motions, like those of the gyroscope or the governor of a steam engine, in other words it assumes matter to be made of rotational or gyrostatic stresses in the ether. Gibbs's "Elementary Principles of Statical Mechanics" (1903) is based upon no assumptions whatever except that the systems involved are mechanical, obeying the equations of motion of Lagrange and Hamilton. "One is building on insecure foundations," he says, "who rests his work on hypotheses concerning the constitution of matter," and his statistics deal, not with the behavior of gas molecules in isolated systems, but with large averages of vast ensembles of systems of the same kind (solid, liquid or gas), "differing in the configurations and velocities which they have at any given instant, and differing not merely infinitesimally, but it may be so as to embrace every conceivable combination of configuration and velocities." The problem is, given the distribution of these ensembles in phase (i. e., in regard to configuration and velocities) at some one time, to find their distribution at any required time. To solve this problem Gibbs establishes a fundamental equation of statistical mechanics, which gives the rate of change of the systems in regard to distribution in phase. A particular case of this equation gives the condition for statistical equilibrium or permanent distribution in phase. Integration of the equation in the general case gives certain constants relating to the extent, density and probability of distribution of the systems in phase, which Gibbs interprets as the principles of conservation of "extension in phase," of "density in phase," and of "probability in phase." Boltzmann found that when the gas molecules have more than two degrees of freedom, the equations can not be integrated and further progress is impossible. He got around this difficulty by using Jacobi's "method of the last multiplier," which integrates the equations of motion. Gibbs found that the principle of "conservation of extension-inphase," supplies such a Jacobian multiplier, "if we have the skill or good fortune (he says) to perceive that the multiplier will make the first member of the equation an exact differential." Boltzmann's probability coefficient is used as the index of the canonical distribution of ensembles, and when the exponent of this coefficient is zero, the latter becomes unity, producing a distribution in phase called "microcanonical," in which all the systems in the ensemble have the same energy, as in Maxwell's "state." After demonstrating the possibility of irreversible phenomena in the various ensembles, and after a careful study of their behavior when isolated, subjected to external forces or to


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Rh the spheres of one another's influence, Gibbs finds that the processes of statistical mechanics are to all human perception analogous to those of thermodynamics, the familiar formulæ of which appear, as Bumstead puts it, "almost spontaneously, as it seems from the consideration of purely mechanical systems.". The differential equation relating to average values in the ensemble is found to correspond with the fundamental equation of thermodynamics; the modulus of distribution of ensembles turns out to be analogous to the temperature, while the average index of probability in phase is the analogue of the entropy with reversed sign, and being a minus quantity, is found to decrease just as entropy increases. Most of the objections filed against Gibbs's statistical demonstration, turn upon the fact that it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to apply the reversible dynamics of ideal, frictionless systems to the spontaneous irreversible phenomena of nature without making some physical assumptions. "Entropy," Burbury objects, "may, for all that appears, either increase or diminish in a system which is dynamically reversible. This then can not be strictly applied to an irreversible process." Gibbs has met these objections fairly. "Our mathematical fictions," he says, to quote Burbury's paraphrase of his argument, "give us no information whether the distribution of phases is towards uniformity or away from it. Our experience with the real world, however, teaches us that it is towards uniformity." All actual mechanical systems are, as Gibbs pointed out long before, in reality thermodynamic, and it seems odd that the critics who rejected Boltzmann's proof, because it did not agree with the facts of nature, should now, for a logical quibble, take exception to Gibbs's because it does. It has been predicted that future truth in physical science will often be found in the sixth place of decimals, for not everything in nature works out according to specifications. We can, if we choose, regard mathematics as a metaphysical diversion or employ it practically as a means of interpreting the physical facts of nature, empirically ascertained by man. In these matters, says Gibbs elsewhere, "Nature herself takes us by the hand and leads us along by easy steps as a mother teaches her child to walk," and he would have agreed with Langley that man may put questions to nature if he will, but is in no position to dictate her answers to them. Nature seems très femme in this respect, especially in regard to mathematical fictions, that is, ideal or limiting cases devised by the finite mind of man. Like any other human


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136 instrument of precision, our mathematical methods are but an approximation to the subtler aspects of nature, and it is only by eternal vigilance in regard to sources of human error that workers in physical science have put aside personal equation and infallibility and thus avoided what Rowland calls the "discontinuity" of the ordinary legal or cultivated mind. "Gibbs has: not sought to give a mechanical explanation of heat," says Professor Bumstead, "but has limited his task to demonstrating that such an explanation is possible. And this achievement forms a fitting culmination of his life's work."

The naturalist Haeckel has explicitly denied the doctrine of universal increase of entropy because, pointing as it does to the ultimate thermal death of different worlds, it conflicts with his monistic conception of the universe as a perpetuum mobile, consisting of infinite substance in eternal motion, without beginning and without end. Yet the cosmogony of Kant and Laplace, which Haeckel accepts, points to the same conclusion as well as to formative periods in the history of the solar and sidereal systems, in which entropy decreases, and energy, instead of dissipating; tends, after a maximum of degradation, to concentrate. Even possibilities of this kind put the second law on a lower plane of probability than the first as far as man is concerned, unless it be that the irreversible processes of nature are in reality cyclic, in which case we should have Nietzsche's "eternal return" of all things. But as Bumstead has so admirably said, "It is nearer the truth to base the doctrine of entropy upon the finite character of our perceptions than upon infinity of time."

In connection with the validity of the second law arises the important question of the extent of its application to animate nature and whether it is capable of reversal in vital processes. "The first law (conservation of energy) has been proven," says Ostwald, "with an exactness of 1: 1,000 even for physiological combustion (including mechanical and psychical work performed)." The second law, whether in the Clausius form of increase of entropy, the Kelvin form of


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Rh of available energy, or the Gibbs-Helmholtz form of decrease of free energy, is assumed by recent physiologists to be characteristic of all spontaneous or metabolic processes, but both Helmholtz and Kelvin have doubted whether it is either necessary or sufficient for their production, while Maxwell and Boltzmann have asserted, what Gibbs's statistical researches seem to prove, that it is sometimes possible for entropy to decrease, that is for small isolated temporary violations of the second law to occur in any real body. Has animal or vegetable protoplasm ever the power ascribed to Maxwell's demon of reversing the thermodynamic order of nature, and directing physicochemical forces? Such a demon, according to Lord Kelvin, might, through his superior intelligence or motor activity, render one half of a bar of metal glowing hot, while the other half remained icy cold. We have something analogous to this in certain diseases, as gangrene, aphasia, various forms of paralysis, the curious vasomotor and trophic disorders of the nervous system. Are these phenomena then of a thermodynamic nature? The animal body, Lord Kelvin thought, does not act like a thermodynamic engine, but "in a manner more nearly analogous to that of an electric motor working in virtue of energy supplied to it by a voltaic battery." Here, as Gibbs has shown in his theory of the chemical cells, the electromotive force would be identical with the free energy upon which the surface energies of the body must ultimately depend. Beyond these speculations we know nothing. Gibbs himself avowed his express disinclination to "explain the mysteries of nature," while Lord Kelvin, although affirming that physicists are bound "by the everlasting law of honor," to explain everything material upon physical principles, mystified friends and opponents alike by falling back upon a "vital principle" with "creative power" behind it as the causa causans of biological happenings. But the business of physics is with the material facts of the universe, and the invocation of creative power explains nothing and is subversive of determinism, or the relation of cause and effect in science. It may be that "man was born too late to ascertain final causes": he can only interpret the physical facts of his experience as he finds them and with the means at his disposal. An interesting attempt to explain the relation of life and mind to matter is found in the energetische Weltanschauung


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198 or energetic philosophy of Ostwald, which confessedly derives from the thermodynamic argument of Gibbs, but should not be confused with the latter. Gibbs was concerned only with applying the laws of mechanics to physical chemistry. Compared with the case of nature, he says, thermodynamic systems are "of an ideal simplicity." To Ostwald, however, mind and matter are but forms of energy, which is the only thing eternal and immortal. "We can deal with measurable things, never with the unknown heart of nature," says Ostwald, yet his basic principle, energy, is to all intents and purposes identical with the eternal infinite substance of Spinoza, Goethe and Haeckel, "sive Deus, sive Natura naturans, sive Anima mundi appelletur." Matter, in Ostwald's scheme, is a group of energies in space; thought becomes a mode of energy involving evolution of heat, and "the problem of the connection between body and spirit belongs to the same series as the connection between chemical and electrical energy, which is treated in the theoiy of voltaic chains." Falling in love, listening to a Beethoven symphony, identifying oneself with nature, are to Ostwald instances of dissipation of energy like any other. Philosophy of this kind does not clear up the mystery of the relation of mind and matter. Descartes assumed that mind and matter exist apart as parallels, having no causal connection with each other. Spinoza held that neither can exist apart; indeed, he sometimes asserts their practical identity as different modes of the same eternal substance. But however intimately they may be associated, no scientist or philosopher has yet proven, whether.in the body of man or in the origin of the universe, that one is either the cause or the effect of the other.

Assuming matter in mass to be ultimately made up of rotational, vortical or gyrostatic stresses or of energies, whether kinetic or potential, we encounter the formidable objection of Boltzmann, that it seems illogical, not to say unmechanical, to postulate motion as the primary idea with the moving thing as the derived one. Motion of what? we have a right to ask, since Ostwald disdains the ether of the physicists. Matter, in the words of Sir Oliver Lodge, may be physically resolved


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Rh "perhaps, into electricity, and that into some hitherto unimagined mode of motion of the ether," but no dynamic theory of the ether can resolve the ether into nothing. Assuming thought to be a mode of energy, the metaphysical argument that mind is at the bottom of motion seems more likely, in the last analysis, than that motion should be the cause of mind, for we can not conceive of a thing moving unless something moves it. Mind seems almost like an assemblage or complex of causes in itself, and is probably related to the brain as music to the violin. Destroy the violin and there will be an end of its music, but it needs other coefficients than the violin itself to get music out of it. Ostwald has himself admitted the force of Leibnitz's argument, that no mechanical explanation of cerebral action will ever account for the genesis of thought or the nature of consciousness: "Nihil in intellectu quod non prius in sensu, nisi intellectus ipse." Individual thinking may be the result of physico-chemical differences of structure or substance in the brain, but apart from the evidence of mind in the evolution and structure of the universe, different aspects of mind, as ideas, sensations and sentiments, seem to have an individual life of their own so far as man is concerned, and are "things" in the sense that, like external forces, they have profoundly influenced and determined the actions of individuals and of entire races. Human thought as a function of the human brain may disappear with man himself, but this does not annul the possibility of mind existing in manifold ways elsewhere in the universe. The electric waves of wireless telegraphy undoubtedly existed as motions in the air before man discovered and labeled them and may continue to exist and be apprehended in other spheres of thought when man is gone.

Man's capacity for error in these matters is determined by his anthropomorphic tendencies and by the fact that his intelligence is finite. Of the possibly infinite number of attributes of eternal substance postulated by Spinoza, the human mind can apprehend only two—thought and extension, and even here thought and sensation are the fundamental facts, while "all else is an inference and is probably essentially unlike what it appears to our senses." It seems impossible to break down the fact that there is no absolute causal connection between the two primary categories of Spinoza, who has anticipated most of modern psychology. For this reason such subjects as spiritualism, phrenology, faith-healing, telepathy have remained in the limbo of pseudo-science, although each has undoubtedly a shadowy reason for existence. It is as fair as any other hypothesis, then, to assume that man, in his higher mental or psychical activities, may, under certain conditions, be "freed from the galling yoke of space and time," or, in other words, released from the thraldom of the second law. Yet such an assumption, even if made by a Kelvin, would be, in our present state of knowledge, an expression of individual personal


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200 belief, a literary or humane analogy, a leaning in the direction of the "fair humanities of old religion," but not a scientific fact. To fix our ideas for the material world we may accept the expanded statement of the second law which Ostwald gave in his Ingersoll lecture in 1906: i(Every known physical fact leads to the conclusion that diffusion or a homogeneous distribution of energy is the general aim of all happenings. . . . A partial concentration may be brought in a system, but only at the expense of greater dissipation, and the sum total is always an increase in dissipation." Through the labors of Joule and Kelvin, Maxwell and Boltzmann, Gibbs and Helmholtz, Carnot's simple generalization about heat engines has been elevated to the dignity of an irrevocable law of nature, a principle of scientific determinism, giving one of the most complete and satisfactory answers that man can furnish to the great question: How does any event in the material universe come to pass? In Darwin's picture of nature the quiet woods and waters, so calm and peaceful on the surface, are in reality centers of "strange and cruel life," the struggle and turmoil of creatures continually preying upon each other, even trees and plants and the tiniest particles of animate bodies taking part in a definite, never-ending war for existence. But the stern law of life, whereby the strong war down the weak, loses all moral, or human significance when seen as due, in the last analysis, to an inevitable tendency to dissipation of energy or as the resultant of a play of complex forces, which, through some principle of "least action," must inexorably flow from higher to lower potentials. As Spinoza pointed out long ago, Nature could 'not change these laws which flow from its very being, without ceasing to be itself, and the conclusion of physics and biology that Nature is never on the side of the weak becomes, as far as man is related to the material universe, identical with Spinoza's denial of final causes.

Apart from his work in mathematical physics, Gibbs made several important contributions to pure mathematics, notably in his theory of "dyadics," a variety of the multiple or matricular algebras which Benjamin Peirce classified as "linear associative." The tendency of his mind was always toward broad, general views and the simplifications that go with such an outlook, and here mention should be made of his charming address on multiple algebra and his innovation of vector analysis, a calculus designed to give the student of physics a clearer


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Rh insight into such space relations as strains, twists, spins and rotational or irrotational movements in general. Maxwell, who once declared that he had been striving all his life to be freed from the yoke of the Cartesian coordinates, had already found such an instrument in the Hamiltonian quaternions, the application of which he brilliantly demonstrated in his great treatise on electricity and magnetism. Quaternions are elegant, consistent, concise and uniquely adapted to Euclidean space, but physicists have latterly found them artificial and unnatural to their science, because the square of the quaternionic vector becomes a negative quantity. The Gibbsian vectors obviate this difficulty, and while seemingly uncouth, furnish' a mode of attack more simple and direct and adaptable to space of any dimensions. Their capacity for interpreting space relations was amply tested by Gibbs in his five papers on the electromagnetic theory of light and his application of vectors to the calculation of orbits, since incorporated in recent German treatises on astronomy. The fact that vectors tend to displace the quaternionic analysis of Sir William Rowan Hamilton involved our author in a lengthy controversy with Hamilton's best interpreter, the ingenious and versatile Tait, who looked upon Gibbs as "one of the retarders of quaternionic progress," defining his system as "a sort of hermaphrodite monster compounded of the notations of Hamilton and Grassmann." But Gibbs did not regard his method as strictly original; he was only concerned with its application in the task of teaching students; and when, after testing it by twenty years' experience in the class-room, he reluctantly consented to the publication of his lectures in full, the task was confided to one of his pupils, our author declining, with a characteristic touch of conscience, to have the work appear under his name or even to read the proof. In the controversy with Tait there is, as in most controversies, an amusing element of human nature. The name of Hamilton is undoubtedly one of the most illustrious in the history of science, and Tait and his adherents seemed to regard it as an impertinence and a desecration of his memory that any other


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202 system than quaternions should be proposed. "The ideas which flashed into the mind of Hamilton at the classic Brougham Bridge "became the occasion of a joined battle between the perfervid clan-loyalty of the Celt and the cool individualism of the Saxon ; on one side,

 The broad Scots tongue that flatters, scolds defies, The thick Scots wit that fells you like a mace,"

and on the other, the overconscientious, ethical arguments of a super-sensitive spirit, obviously nettled at certain rough pleasantries which were understood but not appreciated. In 1893 Heaviside, an English vectorist, reports "confusion in the quaternionic citadel : alarms and excursions and hurling of stones and pouring of water upon the invading hosts." The vectorists were denounced as a "clique" and ridiculed especially for their lack of elegance, their alleged intellectual dishonesty and the fact that their pupils were "spoon-fed" upon mathematico-physical pap. But some of the notations held up to ridicule turned out to be things like Poisson's theorem or the difficult hydrodynamic problem "given the spin in a case of liquid motion to find the motion," which Helmholtz solved with one of his strokes of genius, and which Gibbs showed could be understood and interpreted by the average student without genius by a simple application of vectorial methods. The real point at issue in the controversy, the fundamental difference in the ideals of European and American education, lies here. Both have their relative advantages and defects, but the object of one has been to bring the best to the highest development, while the other is concerned with increasing the efficiency of the average man. One has been exclusive, aiming at the survival of the fittest; the other is democratic and inclusive, and aims, in Huxley's words, to make the greatest number fit to survive. The merits of the case are well summed up in Gibbs's final statement: "The notions which we use in vector analysis are those which he who reads between the lines will meet on every page of the greatest masters of analysis, or of those who have probed deepest the secrets of nature, the only difference being that the vector analyst, having regard for the weakness of the human intellect, does as the early painters who wrote beneath their pictures "This is a tree." "This is a horse." This view is in perfect accord with the recent trend of mathematical teaching, European or American, which is to emphasize the meaning and interpretation of equations and formulae rather than their demonstrations or manipulation; in short, to substitute visualizing methods, the art of thinking straight and seeing clear, for what is conventional and scholastic. A Harvard professor is said to have told his students that the demonstration of a theorem is no evidence that it is understood, but the intelligent use of it is; and the object of such teaching as Gibbs's was to enable the


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Rh student to see physical phenomena with the "clarity of vision" which Tait himself thought characteristic of the truly mathematical mind, and of which a good criterion is afforded in Helmholtz's unforgetable statement about Michael Faraday: "With wonderful sagacity and intellectual precision, Faraday performed on his brain the work of a great mathematician without using a single mathematical formula."

At Yale Gibbs was esteemed an ideal teacher of physics, cordial, quick, helpful, willing to devote unlimited time to assist plodders and giving his students ample opportunity to learn "what may be regarded as known, what is guessed at, what a proof is and how far it goes." Of the qualities that make for distinction of mind and character he had the impersonal gift, "le don d'être nè essentiellement impersonnel," which Renan thought highest of all, and which, fortunately for the advance of real knowledge, has been characteristic of most of the great leaders of science. He could build no wall of personal egotism between himself and the external facts, and "few could come in contact with this serene and impartial mind without feeling profoundly its influence in all his future studies of nature." We know little of his life beyond the fact that he was a man of stoic fiber, who lived and worked alone. The countenance in the portraits expresses the Puritan austerity with lines that tell of mental stress and struggles with illness, but the man himself was "unassuming in manner, genial and kindly in his intercourse with his fellow men." "In the minds of those who knew him," concludes his biographer, "the greatness of his intellectual achievements will never overshadow the beauty and dignity of his life."

American contributions to physics, from Franklin to Michelson, have been characterized by originality of invention and experiment. The work of Gibbs has a place apart as that of a mathematical theorist whose ideas have found wide application in the main current of modern thought, and his true position is best described in his own often-quoted estimate of his great predecessor, Clausius. "Such work as that of Clausius," he says, "is not measured by counting titles or pages. His true monument lies not on the shelves of libraries, but in the thoughts of men and the history of more than one science." The general scientific reputation of Gibbs is of this kind, while in his chosen field of activity, the austere region of physics in which Newton and Lagrange, Hamilton and Jacobi are the leaders, his is assuredly the most distinguished American name.


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have not had in America a great period of scientific productivity such as formed part of the Victorian era in Great Britain or followed the renaissance of the universities in Germany. Perhaps only in one science have we been in the position of leaders. In astronomy, thanks it may be to the endowment of observatories where research was not crowded by elementary teaching, we have done our share, or more than our share, for the advancement of science. Our great astronomer, who gave distinction to science in America, is now dead, and we mourn the loss of one whose place can not be filled.

Simon Newcomb was born on March 12, 1835, in a village of Nova Scotia, but was of New England descent from five generations of Simon Newcombs, as well as on the side of his mother. In his "Reminiscences of an Astronomer," published six years ago, there is an interesting account of his early life. His father was a school teacher who moved from village to village in accordance with the custom of the time. The child was apt at figures and had done arithmetic through cube root at the age of six and a half. He read with avidity the few books that came within reach, especially those concerned with science, but had no regular schooling or education in the ordinary sense. At the age of fourteen he was apprenticed as a boy of all work to an irregular practitioner in the hope that he might pick up some knowledge of medicine. This result not following, he ran away, worked his passage to Massachusetts in a sailing boat and found himself teaching in a country school in Maryland at the age of eighteen. A couple of years later, he became acquainted with Secretary Henry of the Smithsonian Institution, it may be through borrowing from the institution a copy of Laplace's "Mechanique Celeste," a knowledge of which he regarded as necessary for a computer. Such a position he soon afterwards obtained on the "Nautical Almanac," then conducted at Cambridge. He was at the same time able to enter Harvard University, where he studied under Professor Peirce and read in earnest the works of Laplace and La Grange.

Henceforth Newcomb's scientific career is a long record of sound and brilliant achievement. Beginning with work on the orbits of the asteroids he extended it to Uranus and Neptune and to other planets and to the moon. The mathematical genius required for work of this kind is of the highest type; many would regard Laplace as the greatest intellect that the world has produced, and in America he has had worthy successors in Newcomb and in Hill.

In 1861 Newcomb was appointed professor of mathematics in the navy, and in 1877 superintendent of the Nautical Almanac Office, a position which he held till he was relieved in 1897 at the age limit with the relative rank of rear-admiral. An appropriation to enable him to continue his work was made by the congress and later it was carried forward under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution to be ended only with his death. He declined the directorship of the Harvard Observatory, but accepted a professorship in the Johns Hopkins University in conjunction with his work at Washington. In addition to his great work in celestial mechanics, Newcomb performed important services for astronomy and for science in many directions. One of


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206 these was in administration, and the national government owes much to his skill and wisdom. Another is in his numerous popular works and textbooks. He was a master of clear thinking and good English—witness, for example, the series of papers on "The Stars," published in this journal in 1900. He was also the author of standard works on political economy and of a great number of articles, addresses and papers dealing with the problems of science over a very wide range.

It is needless to tell here of the honors conferred upon Newcomb. He was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at an early age. Honorary degrees and honorary membership in academies were heaped upon him. To be one of the eight foreign associates of the Paris Academy of Sciences is perhaps the highest recognition that can be given in the scientific world. It had not been awarded to an American since Franklin.

The centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of "The Origin of Species," has been adequately celebrated in the United States, as recounted in the April issue of this journal, which was itself a Darwin memorial number. It is, however, fitting that the principal commemoration should be held in Great Britain and at the University of Cambridge. Darwin, it is true, held no academic position and was not greatly influenced by his work as an undergraduate at Cambridge. He said later that his "time was wasted as far as his academic studies were concerned"; but he could also say: "the three years I spent at Cambridge were the most joyful of my happy life." The part often played by a college in the future life of a student through the friends and associations there formed is well illustrated in the case of Darwin. He became interested in collecting beetles through his cousin, W. Darwin Fox, also a student of Christ's College, and through Henslow, the eminent botanist, and it was through the latter that he was led to undertake the voyage on the Beagle. This was Darwin's true university course, and it is difficult to imagine just what he would have done in the world had it not been for the circumstances,


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Rh which may be regarded as accidental, leading to this voyage. When we remember that his contemporaries, Huxley, Wallace and Hooker, were also led to their scientific work by a voyage of exploration, we must regard it as more than a mere incident in their lives.

It is truly remarkable that Christ's College, smaller than the average of our six hundred colleges and with no higher standards as far as the requirements of the curriculum go, can celebrate the tercentenary of the birth of Milton as well as the centenary of the birth of Darwin; that Tennyson and Darwin should have been fellow students, and that Newton, perhaps Darwin's only rival for scientific preeminence, should have been a member of the same university. Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus, was also a Cambridge student, and three of his sons are intimately connected with the university. Cambridge may well be proud of its great men and England of its great university; and this feeling we may share, remembering the descent of our academic institutions from the new Cambridge in New England.

An English university is certainly the place where a ceremonial such as the Darwin centenary has the most fit setting. To it came delegates from all parts of the world, some 230 in number, leaders in all departments of science and especially in the biological and evolutionary sciences. Lord Rayleigh, formerly professor of physics and now chancellor of the university, welcomed the guests to the Fitzwilliam Museum on the evening of June 22. On the 'following day, there was a presentation of addresses by the delegates in the Senate House. After the address of the chancellor speeches were made by Professor Oscar Hertwig, of Berlin; Professor Elié Metchnikoff, of Paris; Dr. Henry F. Osborn, of New York, and Sir E. Ray Lankester, of London. In concluding his remarks Dr. Osborn said that they, the delegates, naturalists and friends, desired to present to I Christ's College, as a memorial of their j visit, a portrait of Charles Darwin in bronze, the work of their countryman, William Couper, "a portrait which they trusted would convey to this and future generations of Cambridge students, some impression of the rugged simplicity as well as of the intellectual grandeur of the man they revered and honored."

On Wednesday evening the delegates and guests were entertained at a banquet held in the New Examination Hall, which was used for the first time for a public purpose. Among the speakers were the Right Hon. A. J. Balfour, Dr. Svante Arrhenius, Professor E. B. Poulton and Mr. William Erasmus Darwin, eldest son of Charles Darwin. On Thursday, the Rede lecture was given by Sir Archibald Geikie, president of the Royal Society, and honorary degrees were conferred on a number of delegates, including from America Professor Jacques Loeb, of the University of California; Secretary Charles D. Walcott, of the Smithsonian Institution and Professor Edmund B. Wilson, of Columbia University. During the celebration there was an exhibition held in Christ's College of pictures, books, manuscripts and other objects connected with Darwin, ineluding the portraits by Richmand, Collier and Ouless, and the bronze bust by William Couper, of New York, I which the American delegates presented to Christ's College.

British Association for the AdvanCement of Science takes seriously its imperial functions. Four years ago it migrated to South Africa, and now. for the third time, it is about to hold a Canadian meeting and in the very center of the great dominion. The British Association has maintained its usefulness and prestige along the lines in which it was originally established. It is a great factor in the diffusion as well as in the advancement of science.


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208 Its meetings are attended by the leading professional men of science and at the same time by large numbers of amateurs. The local members at each meeting are likely to exceed a thousand, and excellent arrangements are made for their instruction and entertainment. The social features are emphasized, so that there is opportunity for forming personal acquaintances and for those who are only interested in science to meet those most actively engaged in its advancement.

The Winnipeg meeting, which opens on August 25, will be presided over by the eminent Cambridge physicist, Professor J. J. Thomson, who succeeds Mr. Francis Darwin. Addresses of general interest will be given by the president and the presidents of the sections, and by Professor Herdman, Professor Tutton, Professor Dixon, Professor Poynting and others, and the sectional meetings are certain to have attractive programs. There will also be the usual extensive arrangements for garden parties, receptions and excursions. A visit to the Pacific coast, including Alaska and the Seattle Exposition, should be of unusual interest.

The Canadian railways offer a single fare, so the return trip from Montreal or Quebec to Winnipeg costs only thirty-six dollars, the council of the British Association has courteously voted to admit all members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to membership for the meeting, waiving the entrance fee, and the American Association will hold no meeting this summer. A large number of Americans will doubtless take advantage of the generous invitation of their British colleagues and attend the Winnipeg meeting. It is a rare privilege that should be taken advantage of by all who find it possible.

record with regret the death of Professor J. D. Cunningham, the anatomist of the University of Edinburgh, and of Dr. M. A. Brezina, the mineralogist of Vienna.

the honors awarded on the birthday of King Edward are knighthoods to Mr. Francis Galton, Professor J. Larmor, Mr. R. H. I. Palgrave and Professor T. E. Thorpe.—Mr. Orville Wright and Mr. Wilbur Wright were presented on June 19 with the gold medal authorized by congress, a medal on behalf of the state of Ohio and a medal on behalf of the city of Dayton.

professor of pathology in the Johns Hopkins University, has been elected president of the American Medical Association.—Professor E. W. Morley has been elected honorary president and Dr. W. H. Nichols acting president of the Seventh International Congress of Applied Chemistry, which has accepted the invitation extended by the congress through the president and the secretary of state, to meet in this country in 1912.

has made a further gift of $10,000,000 to the General Education Board. Its endowment is now $53,000,000. Mr. Rockefeller has authorized the board to distribute the principal as well as the income for educational purposes, should this at any future time appear to be advisable.


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F any reader of these pages thinks, with a recent writer, that "population is a vast and wandering theme," we shall have no quarrel with him. No doubt the problem has a keener interest in such a country as Great Britain or France, where population approaches capacity or is perhaps beyond the permanent limit of resources. But we are maturing, the frontier stage is past, our land is filling and fertile quarter sections are no more free. We have thus our own social problems, sharpening their quest for solution, and, moreover, being Americans, we now and then become enthusiastic and break into prophecy.

We may well sober our inquiry with the preliminary question—is a great population desirable? Not so, surely, for us, from the military point of view. We have men enough to send to the front and men enough to keep in the shop and field, to meet any emergency of war which lies within the horizon of reasonable conjecture. Perhaps, in view of our general influence in the world, we might be glad to have several hundred millions of people, but only if we are so conditioned that our influence would be a boon to other lands. This indeed in itself implies a limit, for we must not be too many to live with freedom and with worthy standards.

We may take ourselves out of the ranks of the enthusiast with a second preliminary question—is a great population probable? Our list of prophets is distinguished. Mr. 0. P. Austin thinks there is no good reason for our failing of three hundred million people in the year 2000. Mr. James J. Hill expects an increase to two hundred million in less than fifty years, and Mr. Andrew Carnegie a few years ago thought five hundred million a proper figure. Mr. Justin Winsor allows two hundred million for the Mississippi Valley. Mr. F. A. Ogg raises the figure


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210 by fifty million, and Professor A. B. Hart does not hesitate to go up to three hundred and fifty million. We are by no means disposed to dispute all of these figures, but there are considerations which point in the other direction, as for example that the percentage of increase went down in the decades between 1860 and 1900.

We have also the check of advancing civilization. That voluntary restriction follows a higher scale of needs is shown in France, in lesser degree in Great Britain and probably in all lands of advancing culture. Thus there is color for the view that France with her disturbing birth rate has only arrived first at the condition to which all cultivated peoples are moving. Motives of economy and of opportunity for self and children press more strongly as standards rise, and it has recently been urged that even Ireland, with new land laws and with peasant proprietorship, will become more restrictive of population. It seems to be as true with man as in the general field of natural history, that the higher the type the fewer the progeny.

Perhaps also this tendency will fall in with the natural limit of food production. Indeed, the latter will have a controlling causal effect on the former, following the ever-operative law that higher prices or approaching scarcity is accompanied by restriction of population. That which is temporary in the latter case may well be found permanent in the other.

To the present time immigration has been one of the chief sources of our growth. We are already seeing a check of the inflowing current, and this may well become permanent in future years. The restrictive measures of the government count for something. The narrowing of opportunities, as for free land, is another and more powerful factor, and a further consideration of unknown significance is rising in our view, namely, the improvement of conditions and the triumphs of democratic aspiration in the lands from which the foreigner comes. In proportion as life in the old countries becomes endurable, not to say attractive, the fountains of immigration will begin to go dry.

On the other hand, there is a source of increase upon which we may look with full content, reasons, applicable alike to us, which a European authority has assigned, for the increase of European population during the last half century. These reasons are in relation to the lowering of the death rate by diminution of war, by the elimination of epidemics and by better hygiene. These advances would seem to mean more than a lower death rate. Not only are people kept alive, but they are made more productive workers and reasonably, it would seem, may become more prolific as well as better conditioned. Whatever our views of population or progress, it would hardly be prudent to disagree with Mr. Mackaye's proposition that it is not so important to get nitrogen into the soil and raise more food as to make right use of the food we have. We should, he thinks, avoid undue increase of our population,