Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/33

 be its changes of environment. So far as modern physics is concerned, such characteristics may, or may not, effect changes in the genes, changes which are important in certain respects, though not in others. Thus, no a priori argument as to the inheritance of characters can be drawn from the mere doctrine of genes. In fact, recently, physiologists have found that genes are modified in some respects by their environment. The presuppositions of the old common-sense view survive, even when the view itself has been abandoned as a fundamental description.

This survival of fragments of older doctrines is also exemplified in the modern use of the term space-time. The nation of space with its geometry is strictly co-ordinated to the notion of material bodies with simple location in space. A bit of matter is then conceived as self-sufficient with the simple location of the region which it occupies. It