Page:The Foundations of Science (1913).djvu/30

12 be welcome workers in modern laboratories; yet some sorts of transformation and of evolution of the elements are to-day matters which theory can find it convenient, upon occasion, to treat as more or less exactly definable possibilities; while some newly observed phenomena tend to indicate, not indeed that the ancient hopes of the alchemists were well founded, but that the ultimate constitution of matter is something more fluent, less invariant, than the theoretical orthodoxy of a recent period supposed. Again, regarding the foundations of biology, a theoretical orthodoxy grows less possible, less definable, less conceivable (even as a hope) the more knowledge advances. Once ‘mechanism’ and ‘vitalism’ were mutually contradictory theories regarding the ultimate constitution of living bodies. Now they are obviously becoming more and more ‘points of view,’ diverse but not necessarily conflicting. So far as you find it convenient to limit your study of vital processes to those phenomena which distinguish living matter from all other natural obects, you may assume, in the modern ‘pragmatic’ sense, the attitude of a ‘neo-vitalist.’ So far, however, as you are able to lay stress, with good results, upon the many ways in which the life processes can be assimilated to those studied in physics and in chemistry, you work as if you were a partisan of ‘mechanics.’ In any case, your special science prospers by reason of the empirical discoveries that you make. And your theories, whatever they are, must not run counter to any positive empirical results. But otherwise, scientific orthodoxy no longer predetermines what alone it is respectable for you to think about the nature of living substance.

This gain in the freedom of theory, coming, as it does, side by side with a constant increase of a positive knowledge of nature, lends itself to various interpretations, and raises various obvious questions.

One of the most natural of these interpretations, one of the most obvious of these questions, may be readily stated. Is not the lesson of all these recent discussions simply this, that general theories are simply vain, that a philosophy of nature is an idle