Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/188

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.