Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/194

190 itself; must have, for example, some measure of persistence or con- stancy in time. I am unable to imagine an organism existing but for a single instant.

The moment a living being appeared on earth that could respond more than once in the same way to the same stimulus, at that moment appeared simultaneously the germs of all human knowledge and faith. The moment a human being comes to know that his experiential knowl- edge must be incomplete knowledge, from the very conditions of its being knowledge at all, at that moment does he touch the highest level of knowledge and faith attainable by living beings. Agnosticism, mere disclaimer of absolute knowledge, can not be the loftiest attainable mental attitude. This must consist in knowing, partly at least, how and why your highest knowledge is limited and seemingly must ever remain so.

In conclusion, life from the biologist's standpoint is the sum total of the phenomena exhibited by myriads of natural objects called living because they present these phenomena. To understand any organism it must be studied as a whole and in all its relations. Taking man as a type, his life must be studied throughout the whole cycle of its existence on earth and in its relations to all other lives and things. Not only must the germ-cells, the chromosomes and all the rest be subjected to investigation as to their forms, vital activities and chemico- physical composition, but the whole gamut of his experiences, physical, intellectual and spiritual, must be likewise searched out, so far as it is possible for human minds to search.

No biologist can do much by working at the whole of biology thus viewed. But — and here is one of the centers of our position — he can toil in his particular corner with a mind full-illumined by the recogni- tion that someone else must do the things he can not do because all must be done. He does not need to suppose the thing he is not doing is hardly worth doing.