Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/235

Rh But is the oneness of the world with its demonstrably underlying few substances and forces, whether these be held to be material or spiritual, more real than the diversity of it? Surely it is not so far as the every-day lives of every-day people are concerned. And, the view that science is common sense refined and systematized withstands all objection. The fisherman's Albacore endures whatever test of reality may be applied to the biologist's sea urchin eggs or anything contained in them. It is impossible to define any given specimen of living substance so as to ascribe to it ultimateness without ascribing ultimateness to the living animal itself to which the specimen pertains if the same rules of defining be adhered to throughout. But if every part of the living world is as real and as ultimate as any other part, it is futile to expect to fully understand some portions of it by knowing other portions of it. The theory that any amount of understanding, even complete understanding, of a flower or a sea urchin would give complete understanding of man, to say nothing of God, is contrary to the fundamental nature of things and of knowledge. Nor, speaking chemico-physically, can any amount of understanding of the substances of which an organism is composed give complete understanding of the organism itself.

Vastly contributory to the understanding of organic beings as are chemico-physical investigations upon them, indeed impossible though it is to gain exhaustive knowledge of them in any aspect of their lives without such investigations, every truly vital chemico-physical problem of organisms is two phased: how do the chemico-physical attributes of the constituent substances act upon and so explain the organisms; and what particular structures and activities are the chemical substances caused to manifest by being constituents of and used by the particular organisms?

And so it is revealed that the familiar dictum "all life is one" must not be understood to mean that living nature has only one life; but rather that there is some thing in common among all the myriad things that live, namely, the half dozen, less or more, chemical simples now known to compose a living being. The diversities of living nature are, consequently, as "ultimate problems" as are its uniformities; and the biological institution which should set for its goal final solution of the. problems of the organic world would be vast and complex and costly beyond any thing yet created or likely to be.

The administrative body of a research foundation in biology which should so understand biology would always have before it this compound question: what particular subject or group of related subjects at this particular time, in this particular locality, and under existing limitations of resources would best be investigated?

The Scripps Institution conceives its purposes in this way, at least while its present director stands as spokesman of its purposes. Just