Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 80.djvu/58

54 That biology has been forced, through its own advances, to recognize the struggle-survival doctrine, upon which she earlier staked so much as the cause of evolution, is really of very subordinate importance in this way, needs to be set forth to the general public far more emphatically and convincingly than it has been. Undoubtedly this strictly biological doctrine has been used to justify much cruel, destructive practise, particularly in the industrial world, and now that biology herself has found the doctrine to be so largely erroneous, it would seem the bounden duty of biology to rectify as far as may be the harm that has been done.

The conception of "the reign of law" in the organic world ought to be much more widely and concretely established than it is in the public mind. Under stress of the necessity of dethroning notions of supernaturalism from living nature, biologists have up to now been so occupied with explaining phenomena in terms of natural causation that the orderliness of organic phenomena has had to take a back seat both in research and in speculation.

The well-established truth that apparently all organic beings have in nearly, if not quite, all their parts and functions, capacities far beyond those needed for ordinary life, frequently far beyond what are ever used, except under very unusual circumstances, is of great significance for a general theory of life. But being a comparatively recent discovery, and standing in sharp contradiction to the widely prevalent views about the "economy of nature," and the utilitarianism of the Darwinian theory of natural selection, it has as yet found little place in either the learned or the popular theories of life. The general enlightenment needed on this matter might come partly from teachers, secular and religious, partly from psychologists, but most basally from biologists.

The conception of the organism as a whole that has been forcing itself into biology, particularly from the side of embryology, is destined to have a far-reaching, elevating influence on general beliefs, attitudes and practises. There is no likelihood that the idea will be brought into the full light of day unless biologists are the prime movers in bringing it there. Poets and poetical humanists in all ages have had much to say about "the whole man"; but the idea appears never to have germinated to the extent of greatly influencing the every-day lives of ordinary mortals. Biologists must be the original culturists here as they have been in so many other realms of things germinal.

The hypothesis that all phenomena of organic beings, including those pertaining to the very highest aspects of human nature, are correlated with chemico-physical phenomena, though not yet rigorously demonstrated in most of the subtler psychic and esthetic provinces, is securely established over so wide a range of life phenomena and has