Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/187

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