Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/190

186 is that the more opportunity for chemical action the particles of a substance have, the more they act; that is, the particles improve their opportunity, so to speak.

See again how pregnant of meaning this is for the potentialities of atoms. It means that they have capacities to act that are revealed only when conditions for them to act are presented. This reminds one strongly of the unused energies of men that Professor James has recently written about so luminously.

The one other phase of science to which allusion will be made under this head, belongs to the biological realm. It is the conception of the "organism as a whole" that for a number of years has been working its way into biology by sheer force of its own weight. The facts are such as to compel admission even though they are wholly inexplicable on the basis of current elementalist doctrines, and so are frequently ignored or scouted by biologists of that school.

An expression which, though extreme, still rightly presents the idea comes from the German botanist de Bary. He said "Die Pflanze bildet Zellen, nicht die Zelle bildet Pflanzen" (The plant produces cells, not the cells produce the plant). This is an over statement but is true in so far as it expresses the unescapable fact that the whole organism at any given moment, as well as its elements, is concerned in determining what it shall be in the next succeeding moment. A more exact expression of a particular phase of the idea is due to our foremost American student of the cell, Professor E. B. Wilson. He writes: "We can not comprehend the form of cleavage (cell-division) without reference do the end-result."

Let us look at an instance of the working of this principle in the realm of political organization, where it is more openly displayed. The original thirteen colonies of our pre-national period, united into a compact under what was known as the articles of confederation. A corner stone of the union was that each state should keep inviolate its original powers and privileges. Under the governmental fiction of this compact, the Congress, it has been said, could recommend everything but could enforce nothing. The experiment was naturally a failure. After a period of "Strang und Gang" our nation with the federal constitution as its basis was founded.

Now recall some of the striking things that happened in this transition time. First of all, the hitherto individual, sovereign states had to give up some of both their powers and their possessions. The "western lands" claimed by the states, had been one of the most serious obstacles in the way of a closer union. First New York, then Virginia, yielded their claims to congress for certain guarantees to them in return. The other states followed. Afterward the congress erected new states in the territory thus acquired, and the old states modified their organic laws to conform to the new conditions. Shall