Page:Blackwell 1898 Scientific method in biology.pdf/64

52 obtained. To my surprise, I found that the word 'science' was not included in the list of subjects. Searching further in this record of nineteenth-century thought, under the head of 'Biology'—that department which is ordinarily supposed to be the science of life, as distinguished from the consideration of non-living things—the following principle was found to be laid down, viz., that there was no essential difference between organized and unorganized Nature, for life was simply a property of matter.

It is well to weigh the argument for this doctrine, which necessarily destroys the essential idea of right and wrong, and removes the foundation of good and evil. It is set forth in the following manner:

'The abstract-concrete sciences are mechanics, physics, chemistry. . . . Whilst their subject-matter is found in a consideration of varied concrete phenomena, they do not aim at a determination of certain "abstract" quantitative relations and sequences known as "laws," which never are manifested in a pure form, but always are inferred, by observation and experiment upon complex phenomena, in which the abstract laws