Page:Nature and Life (1934).pdf/44

 stood? Suppose we agree that Nature discloses to the scientific scrutiny merely activities and process. What does this mean? These activities fade into each other. They atise and ther pass away. What is being enacted? What is effected? It cannot be that these are merely the formulae of the multiplication table — in the words of a great philosopher, merely a bloodless dance of categoties. Nature is full-blooded. Real facts ate happening. Physical Nature, as studied in science, is to be looked upon as a complex of the more stable interrelations between the real facts of the real universe.

This lecture has been confined to Natute under an abstraction in which all reference to life was suppressed, The efect of this abstraction has been that dynamics, physics, and chemistry were the sciences which guided our gradual transition from the full common-sense notions of the sixteenth cen-