BOOKS BY 
WILLIAM EMERSON RITTER 
The Higher Usefulness of Science. 
The Probable Infinity of Nature 
and Life. 
The Unity of the Organism, or the 
Organismal Conception of Life. 
Illustrated. 
The Unity of the Organic Species, 
with Special Reference to the Hu- 
man Species. 
War, Science and Civilization. 
RICHARD G. BADGER, PUBLISHER, BOSTON the probable infinity 
of nature and life 
THREE ESSAYS 
BY 
William Emerson Ritter 
Director of the Scripps Institution for 
Biological Research of the University 
of California, La Jolla, 
California 
BOSTON 
RICHARD G. BADGER 
THE GORHAM PRESS Copyright, 1918, by Richard G. Badger 
All Rights Reserved 
Made in the United States of America 
The Gorham Press, Boston, U.S.A. TO 
THE MEMORY OF 
JOSEPH LeCOUTE 
Who more than any other teacher helped me 
to look with the eye of Reason upon 
the Beauty, the Wonder, the 
Majesty, and the Mystery 
of Nature FOREWORD 
THE essays constituting this booklet partake of 
the nature of ancient history in that all have 
been in manuscript several years. The oldest and long- 
est, that on the question of the infinity of nature, was 
mostly written in 1912, but some of it still earlier. But 
the mere matter of dates does not show the full meas- 
ure of the ancient history character of the ideas pre- 
sented. Were I to treat the same topics systematically 
now, almost certainly a product considerably different 
from that actually presented would be the outcome. 
However, the basal conceptions would be the same; and 
history, even ancient history, has its intrinsic worths, 
one of these being that quite over and above all that is 
said in the record, there is the fact of the place which 
the record holds in the time-series into which all simi- 
lar records necessarily fall. To illustrate, the various 
chroniclings and meditatings and generalizings on the 
life of a people produced by many writers and scat- 
tered through many years and centuries, constitute a 
history - a sort of super-history - of the writers. 
Indeed, to the student of evolution in the truly organic 
sense, this super-history may almost be said to be more 
important than the written record. The student of 
7 8 
Foreword 
man's efforts to interpret the organic world of which 
he is a part may well find more interest in the question 
of why and how Milton produced such a story as that 
of the Creation and Fall of Man than in anything 
actually contained in the story. From this standpoint 
the story may interest him as keenly, may mean as 
much to him, as does Darwin's attempt to account for 
man's origin. 
It is almost as much on account of the super-history 
furnished by these essays as on account of what is said 
in them that I am now publishing them. They were 
not written with any definite purpose of publication. 
The ones on spontaneous generation and multiple causes 
were prepared as addresses for scientific societies. 
That on the infinity of nature was written mainly to 
enable me to see where my biological development was 
tending as touching other domains of knowledge. To 
state more specifically why I now publish the essays 
essentially as they were written, I find on approaching 
the completion of the Unity of the Organism, that I 
need the essays in print, partly as record and partly 
as super-record. What I am writing now in the larger 
work, I want to attach directly to what I wrote earlier 
about the " origin of life " and to do so without rewrit- 
ing the old essay and incorporating it as a section in 
the later book. 
The chief present significance, as I now see, of the 
essays as super-record, lies in the stage of development 
exhibited of the organismal hypothesis of consciousness 
in which the Unity of the Organism culminates. If any Foreword 
9 
of my readers become seriously interested in that hy- 
pothesis, they will quite surely be interested to know' 
just how the conceptions of conscious psychic life set 
forth in the discussion of that hypothesis, are a growth 
and differentiation from conceptions set forth in the 
essay on the infinity of nature. And such readers may 
be approximately as much interested as I am in the fact 
that what is said in the older essay had lain unread and 
largely forgotten as to details from 1912 to 1918. CONTENTS 
CHAPTER PAGE 
I. Are We Obliged to Suppose That the 
Spontaneous Origin of Life Ever Oc- 
curred? 13 
II. Are There Sufficient Reasons for Belief 
in the Infinity of Nature? ... 39 
III. The Principle of Multiple Causes in Or- 
ganic Evolution 137 THE PROBABLE INFINITY OF 
NATURE AND LIFE 
ARE WE OBLIGED TO SUPPOSE THAT THE 
SPONTANEOUS ORIGIN OF LIFE 
EVER OCCURRED?1 
I HAVE no new facts to present on this much-be- 
labored subject. This admission may seem to 
disqualify me for a Sigma Xi address, the usual un- 
derstanding being that such an address should be based 
on experimental investigations by the speaker himself. 
So my venture raises an interesting question: May a 
scientific study be original and useful even though it 
deals entirely with old and well-known observations 
and experiments? Does scientific research consist in 
the discovery and announcement of concrete facts, and 
in that alone? 
The view expressed by Claude Bernard that " Science 
does not consist in facts, but in the conclusions which 
we draw from them," is, I think, held by all men of 
science. But the view carries an important implica- 
i Written as an address for the University of California scien- 
tific society, Sigma Xi, and read before the California chapter in 
1914, and the Texas chapter in 1916. 
13 14 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
tion which seems to be little noticed, namely, that if 
generalizations and conclusions are as essential to sci- 
ence as are facts, then they, as such, need critical exam- 
ination just as objective facts do. This means, stated 
briefly, that critical, consistent science must examine its 
own knowledge-getting processes no less carefully than 
it examines facts. It means that science needs theories 
of knowledge - at least of its own kind of knowledge - 
no less than it needs theories of nature. 
Failure by men of science to recognize clearly the 
distinction indicated is responsible, in my judgment, 
for much confused thinking in science. The problem 
in hand is a conspicuous example of this confusion. 
When biologists affirm that the spontaneous generation 
of life at some time somewhere is a logical necessity of 
the evolution theory, they appear not to see that the 
affirmation really concerns not a theory of nature, but 
a theory of the knowledge of nature. 
I believe, therefore, that an examination of prevail- 
ing views on the query which is our subject is as essen- 
tially scientific as an experimental research to the same 
end. And I feel the more justified in dealing with the 
problem thus, in that all who have discussed it during 
the last forty years, more or less, have really had to 
go on much the same observational basis. Objective 
discovery has contributed exceedingly little to the solu- 
tion of the problem since the great controversy of 
the Pasteur-Pouchet period, culminating in Tyndall's, 
memoir of 1875, ended in the complete overthrow of the The Spontaneous Origin of Life 
15 
theory of spontaneous generation as then held. It will 
be safe to assume that everybody admits that the dic- 
tum, Omne vivum ex vivo, stands on as secure an in- 
ductive foundation as do the doctrines of gravitation 
and of conservation of energy, so far as the life of 
today is concerned. Like these it has stood the severest 
of all tests, that of unlimited application in the affairs 
of civilized mankind. Every piece of canned food the 
preservation of which depends on hermetic closure after 
the expulsion or sterilization of air, and every aseptic 
surgical operation are confirmations of the dictum. 
These preliminaries lead to a closer formulation of 
the problem as we are to treat it: How comes it that 
a great number of scientific men believe that something 
has taken place in nature when there is not a particle 
of direct evidence that it has taken place, while on the 
contrary, there is a vast body of evidence tending to 
prove that it has not taken place? Exception may be 
taken to the statement that there is no direct evidence 
in support of the hypothesis that the living has ever 
originated genuinely de novo from the non-living. I 
must consequently justify the assertion. What I have 
to say will be assembled around a distinction between 
direct and indirect evidence. The direct evidence is 
derived from immediate observation upon, or experi- 
ence with the production of living beings. All the evi- 
dence we have of this sort, and I reiterate my refer- 
ence to its vastness, is that organisms always come into 
existence from preceding organisms of their own kind. 16 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
All the evidence of biology proper is to this purport. 
By indirect evidence I mean evidence derived from ob- 
servation and reasoning on certain aspects of organisms 
other than those of their mode of coming into existence. 
The most important kinds of indirect evidence are 
chemico-physical, and pertain chiefly to the chemical 
composition of organisms, the metabolic processes tak- 
ing place within them, and certain of their corporeal 
activities. 
It would be possible to show by several lines of con- 
sideration, that almost all chemico-physical studies on 
organisms bear only indirectly, so far as they bear at 
all, on the problem of the ultimate origin of life. But 
it will suffice to point out that such studies scarcely 
touch the central point of the problem. They ignore 
that attribute of organisms in virtue of which they give 
rise to others of the same kind. I say this with the 
whole round of such highly interesting researches as 
those on artificial parthenogenesis in mind. The ex- 
periments in this field always begin, bear in mind, with 
the ripe or nearly ripe germ-cells, and these, do not 
forget, are derived from some organism. As to how 
these germ-cells came into existence, the researches 
never so much as ask, nor do they throw the faintest 
direct light on the question. Their aim is to show not 
how the egg came to exist, but, once it does exist, what 
it may be made to do and how it does it. 
Of course investigators in this realm know well 
enough how distant and round-about and inferential The Spontaneous Origin of Life 
17 
is the road from observation on the reproductive cells 
of an animal, to conclusions touching the primal origin 
of animals generally; but from all we gather it is clear 
that the unschooled in the ways of nature and in the 
methods of science do not understand this. On behalf 
of health and sobriety in the general intelligence of the 
community relative to biological matters, teachers of 
science ought to show pupils the vast chasm that yawns 
between observations on development of a sea-urchin's 
eggs, to illustrate, and conclusions as to how sea-ur- 
chins, to say nothing about all other animals, arose in 
the first instance. There is a considerable body of 
indirect knowledge which is undoubtedly more or less 
favorable to the hypothesis of the origin of living be- 
ings at some time, somewhere, without the intermedia- 
tion of prior living beings. Let us look at some of this 
knowledge. 
Certain mixtures of inorganic ingredients, as heavy 
oil and pulverized salts, potassium bichromate for ex- 
ample, present structural features and movements both 
of locomotion and internal change closely resembling 
the structure and activities of such simple beings as the 
amoeba and the slime moulds. From this one is im- 
pelled to ask, may it not be possible by sufficient pa- 
tience in this mixing of non-living substances to finally 
hit upon a combination whose likeness to living sub- 
stance would be so close as to be wholly indistinguish- 
able from it - in a word, so close as to be really identi- 
cal with it? If such a combination could be found by 18 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
artifice, why not suppose that it might have been 
chanced upon by nature in the long and ceaseless course 
of the translocations and interactions that are so char- 
acteristic of nature? 
Again, great numbers of compounds, as urea, sugars, 
fats, even proteids, are now produced in the chemical 
laboratory by processes wholly unconnected with those 
taking place in the bodies of living beings. If then 
by such relatively simple inorganic means the processes 
of life may be so far duplicated, is it not reasonable 
to suppose that in nature, with its vastly greater re- 
sources and its heedlessness of time, similar inorganic 
operations might have accomplished much more,- 
might indeed have gone the whole way and produced not 
only various essential constituents of living beings, but 
the beings themselves? Such reasoning has plausibil- 
ity, even conclusive force with many minds, particularly 
with minds that are not over-critical and already in the 
possession of general theories to which the reasoning is 
congenial. 
Taking account of all the evidence bearing on the 
question of the origin of life, two quite different con- 
clusions are indicated: (1) that organisms have always 
originated from parents, (2) that somewhere and at 
some time, some organisms have originated without 
parents. 
Do not fail to notice at this point the real inward- 
ness of the familiar assertion that it is " logically 
necessary " to suppose life originated de novo some- The Spontaneous Origin of Life 
19 
time, and I wish this appeal to logic might reveal to us 
workers in objective science the peril in the habit of 
falling back on logic. It is logically necessary to sup- 
pose life originated in time if our reasoning starts from 
premises that makes it necessary, but not otherwise. 
Logic has to do primarily with the concatenation of 
ideas, that is, with creations of the mind; and only 
secondarily with the creations of nature. The attempt 
to make nature genuinely subject to a system of logic 
is the very essence of all subjectivistic philosophies, and 
for scientific men to pursue investigations on living 
beings under guidance of the belief that such beings 
originated in a specified way, because logic demands 
that they should so originate, is to cast inductive 
science out of the laboratory window and enthrone de- 
ductive science in its place. 
So far as logic is concerned, two courses are open 
as touching the question of the origin of life. (1) We 
may investigate the phenomena of living beings without 
making any formal hypothesis as to whether there was 
a time in the remote past when no such beings existed. 
(2) If we decide that an hypothesis is desirable, we 
have the choice between two hypotheses, (a) We can 
make an hypothesis that they actually did begin, in 
the fullest meaning of the word, at some time, or (b) 
that they have always arisen much as we see them aris- 
ing now. We may choose between these two hypothe- 
ses: Organisms began, truly, in time; or the time 
during which they have been coming into existence as 20 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
we now see them doing, is of endless length. Or stating 
the alternatives in language not involving the word 
" time," we have: (a) Some organisms have arisen with- 
out parents; or (b) the succession of organisms stand- 
ing in the relation of parent to offspring is of endless 
continuance. 
My views as to what biology had best do about the 
two courses above indicated is: Some hypothesis is 
desirable as a guide and stimulus to research. Indeed 
unreserved commitment to the evolution doctrine al- 
most necessitates this. As between the two hypotheses 
open to us, I believe that of the endless continuance in 
the past of the production of organisms by parents 
would better be adopted as our " working hypothesis." 
The superior claim of this hypothesis over the other is 
distinct enough when the usual tests are applied for 
determining the relative values of rival hypotheses. 
The endless-succession hypothesis is favored over the 
no-parent hypothesis by the positive evidence bearing 
on the case; by the nature of the difficulties in the way 
of establishing each; and by the relative usefulness of 
each. To show why the endless-succession hypothesis 
is more tenable and better is the main aim of this ad- 
dress. 
First as to the positive, observational evidence in 
the case. I have already called attention to the secure 
place in science of the dictum omne vivum ex vivo. 
The full weight of the evidence on which this rests is 
hardly appreciated even by biologists, and I am con- The Spontaneous Origin of Life 
21 
vinced that it cannot be justly appraised without a 
closer critique of the nature of observational evidence 
than we are wont to make. Into such a critique it is 
impossible to go at length now. I must be satisfied to 
assert in an apparently dogmatic way that if one sees 
clearly not only the difference, but also the relation 
between the inductive and the deductive methods in sci- 
ence, he will see that the simply enormous body of di- 
rect evidence to the effect that organisms come into 
existence from parents and in no other way, far out- 
weighs the indirect evidence that some may have arisen 
without parents, and that it also out-weighs the a priori 
difficulties presented by the fact that this positive evi- 
dence points to a literally endless succession of parents 
and offspring. 
I would like to call your attention to an historic 
aspect of the controversy not often attended to. All 
man's reasonings about nature, no matter how crude, 
contain an a priori, or hypothetical element, so that all 
real advance in knowledge of nature, in science, involves 
the testing and correcting of preconceptions. In 
earlier ages men's reasonings concerning the origin of 
living beings found no difficulty in the notion that 
plants and animals might arise without parents; so the 
effect of the whole course of investigation touching this 
aspect of organisms has been one of correcting earlier 
conceptions on this subject. The contemporaries of 
Virgil and Ovid had no difficulty in accepting the view 
that bees arise from the flesh of bullocks, frogs from 22 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and, Life 
slime, and mice from old rags. Harvey's declaration 
that all animals come from eggs, and Redi's denial that 
maggots are generated by decaying meat, were vigor- 
ously combatted. Historically as well as factually the 
" logical necessity " felt today that some living beings 
must have come from things not living, is a remnant of 
the earlier necessity felt by everybody for believing that 
almost all living beings must (or might) come from 
non-living things. 
The relative difficulties in the way of the two hypothe- 
ses we will now examine more closely. Consider the 
more general difficulty first. To many persons the con- 
ception of a truly endless succession of parents and 
offspring seems more difficult than that of a succession 
actually beginning at some time in the past, so the 
former is forthwith rejected in favor of the latter. 
Arrhenius has indicated the direction in which the an- 
swer to this question lies, though he has not, to my 
knowledge, considered it in detail. We can as well be- 
come accustomed, he says, to think of the eternity of 
life as of the eternity of matter. I would maintain that 
the supposed necessity of accepting the idea that mat- 
ter is eternal, but of rejecting the idea that life is eter- 
nal is a mere habit of thought - a kind of determina- 
tion which no scientific man would defend. There is un- 
questionably great difficulty in getting a clear concep- 
tion of a succession of organisms related to one an- 
other as parent to offspring, extending through infinite 
time; but the difficulty is not different in fundamentals The Spontaneous Origin of Life 
23 
from that of getting a clear, scientific conception of the 
infinity of nature in any of its aspects. Custom and a 
sort of intellectual laziness enable us to speak the words 
" eternity of matter " glibly enough. But as long as 
any mental alertness remains to us, we may jolt our- 
selves out of our thought-siesta on this subject by 
querying: Under what form has matter existed from 
all eternity? For example, have oxygen and iron and 
phosphorus existed from all eternity just as we see them 
today? I do not ask these questions with any expecta- 
tion, even with any desire that anybody will be ready 
with an absolute answer. All I am concerned about is 
that you shall reflect upon the relative difficulties in the 
conceptions that the oxide of iron, for instance, has 
existed forever while organic beings must have begun, 
actually de novo, sometime, somewhere. The difficulty 
in the case of the infinite series of organisms is surely 
different from that presented by the infinite series in 
inorganic nature, but the difference is only an exten- 
sion of the difference between the living and the non- 
living all along the line. To those who think on prob- 
lems of nature in a truly scientific way, the " greater 
difficulty " argument against the so-called " pan- 
sparma " hypothesis can have no weight. 
The second difficulty is that presented by the prob- 
lem, not of how life began anywhere whatever, but of 
how it began on our earth. A sharp distinction be- 
tween these two problems is necessitated by the present 
state of knowledge in the three fields of astronomy, 24 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
chemistry, and biology. There is, it would seem, ample 
ground on which to rest the hypothesis that living be- 
ings exist on many celestial bodies as well as on our 
own. But how strong is the evidence in support of the 
schoolbook pronouncement that " at some time in pre- 
historic ages the first living thing appeared from a 
source which was not living "? I believe that an impar- 
tial consideration of all facts does not warrant any 
such pronouncement. No really critical biologist would 
put it into an elementary text-book, nor teach it in any 
way, but least of all to beginners in biology. I would 
insist that the difficulties in the way of understanding 
how life began on earth have no more right to impose 
a limitation on our belief as to the origin of organisms 
from parents, than the difficulties in the way of under- 
standing how gravitation could act in an absolute 
vacuum have a right to impose a limitation on our be- 
lief of the universal attraction of bodies. The assump- 
tions that the spontaneous origin of life does not take 
place in nature now because the conditions of the earth 
are unfavorable for it, but that in some past time the 
conditions were favorable, so that the thing actually 
did occur, are not warranted by the facts. The limit- 
ing conditions for the maintenance and propagation of 
organic beings as we actually know them, justify to 
my mind, the supposition that if ever living things 
arose de novo from non-living things they may do so 
now. Consider the matter of temperature which is al- 
lowed to be one of the most important of all the environ- The Spontaneous Origin of Life 
25 
mental conditions of organisms. The average above 
which organisms are killed by heat is usually taken as 
about 40° C., and there seems no good ground for sup- 
posing that temperatures favorable for the mainte- 
nance of life should not also be favorable for the primal 
origination of life, if such be in any wise possible. The 
assumption frequently made that the higher general 
temperatures of the earth which are believed to have 
obtained in earlier geological ages would be more fa- 
vorable than the present temperature conditions for the 
original production of organic beings from inorganic 
substances, appears to be quite gratuitous. 
The basal chemico-physical processes of organisms 
such as photo-synthesis, enzymic action, protoplasmic 
movement, and cell-division, proceed most typically at 
temperatures ranging from 10° or 12° C. to 20° or 
25° C., and perhaps 30° or 35° C., these being ordi- 
nary temperatures on many parts of the earth. And 
what real reasons have we for supposing that conditions 
of light, oxygen, water, and salt, favorable for sup- 
porting life, should not also be favorable for the primal 
origination of it? So far as I can see, the only reason 
offered by the protagonists of the primal-favoring-con- 
ditions hypothesis is that the evidence at hand is not 
favorable for such origin now. If living beings have 
ever arisen from non-living substances, they may rea- 
sonably be supposed to be doing so at present. If this 
reasoning is correct, it would seem as though the natu- 
ral conditions favorable for such mode of origination 26 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
might be reproduced in the laboratory. 
Conceived in this way the problem of " spontaneous 
generation " is quite different from that which occu- 
pied the attention of Pouchet, Liebig, Pasteur, Tyndall, 
and others of their period. These investigators were 
aiming to determine whether living beings may appear 
in culture media containing organic substances of one 
kind and another, if sources of germ inoculation of these 
media be rigidly excluded. The experiments of that 
era were not, it must be recognized, devised for the pur- 
pose of testing the possibility of the origin of organic 
beings in solutions containing only the inorganic ele- 
ments essential to the constitution of the organisms. 
This is the problem that Dr. H. Charlton Bastian 
worked at for years; and however much or little re- 
liance may be placed on his manipulations and conclu- 
sions, it would seem that his main idea as to object and 
method is sound, and that if the problem is to be solved 
at all, it will have to be attacked in accordance with 
this general plan. Bastian made solutions in distilled 
water of sodium silicate (or more recently, of colloidal 
silica), ammonic phosphate, phosphoric acid and iron 
pernitrate. Small quantities of these he placed in 
glass tubes which he sealed and subjected to tempera- 
tures of from 100° C. to 135° C. Then he exposed the 
tubes to ordinary daylight or direct sunlight at room 
temperatures for varying periods of time, extending to 
several months. His results are altogether too re- 
markable to be accepted at once by any even half criti- The Spontaneous Origin of Life 
27 
cal biologist. The Royal Society refused to publish 
his later work, and if he never presented anything more 
convincing than what is contained in papers published 
elsewhere, he really had no ground for feeling himself 
unjustly treated. In the first place, he fell far short 
of proving that the objects he got were organisms. 
They were almost entirely motionless according to his 
own account. Although they are said to have " mul- 
tiplied," no detailed description of anything like cell- 
division is given. The photographic figures furnished 
in abundance show many things which resemble organ- 
isms, but structural details are almost wholly lacking. 
Finally, while he got what he called bacteria, torulae, 
and even fungi of familiar species, he supposed silicon 
to replace carbon in their chemical make-up, since, as it 
will be noticed, the compounds with which he starts 
make no provision for this element. Nevertheless, if 
one is going to prove the origin of organic beings from 
inorganic substances, he must start with inorganic sub- 
stances. This is so obviously sound that several Eng- 
lish bio-chemists are turning their attention to the mat- 
ter, and it is greatly to be hoped that the whole field 
will be worked over with the thoroughness which the 
importance and intricacy of the subject demands, and 
modern laboratory facilities and methods are able to 
furnish. 
Looking at the problem of the de novo origin of liv- 
ing beings from the standpoint of biology proper, that 
is, from the standpoint of living organisms, I do not 28 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
see how the methods of ordinary chemical manipulation 
can get solid basis even for making a start toward its 
solution. I have never understood how chemists could 
see in the fact of their ability to produce in the labora- 
tory some or all the compounds which they may get 
from organic beings, ground for hoping that by these 
methods they might prove that living beings could arise 
in nature from inorganic substances, or that it might 
be possible to produce living beings by similar means. 
To reason that because it is possible to produce in the 
laboratory the chemical compounds found in organic 
beings, it may be possible to produce the living organ- 
isms from which these compounds are derived, is not 
unlike reasoning that because it is possible to produce 
in the laboratory compounds taken from the earth, it 
may be possible to produce an earth in the laboratory. 
The similarity between these cases is by no means far- 
fetched. In order to produce any natural object you 
have to produce all its attributes. The attribute of 
the earth which makes the suggestion to produce an 
earth artificially seem ridiculous is its size. But really 
when you reflect, are not the difficulties in the way of 
producing the attributes of the organism in virtue of 
which it is alive about as insurmountable as are those 
in the way of producing the size of the earth? To 
make this query concrete, consider what would be in- 
volved in producing artificially the attribute by virtue 
of which organisms propagate their kind. The fact 
should never be neglected that heredity as a biological The Spontaneous Origin of Life 
29 
conception implies not merely that each individual or- 
ganism has the ability to produce, or participate in 
producing, another of its kind, but that it itself was 
produced by another of its kind. How are you going 
to produce artificially an object, one of the main attri- 
butes of which is that of being produced by another 
object of its own kind? Put in that form, the prob- 
lem manifestly involves an absurdity. As far as con- 
cerns practical solution it is much the same as that of 
producing perpetual motion; that is, of producing a 
machine capable of at the same time using up and keep- 
ing its own substance and energy; in other words, the 
familiar problem of lifting one's self by his boot straps. 
The way this difficulty is avoided by those who still 
cling to the spontaneous generation hypothesis is very 
instructive. Different writers pursue different courses. 
In the first place there are those who hold, as G. H. 
Lewes did, that " the link which unites all organisms is 
not always the common bond of heritage, but the uni- 
formity of organic laws acting under uniform condi- 
tions "; that heredity is, in other words, not an original 
and essential attribute of organisms, or at least of or- 
ganic matter, but something acquired in the course of 
evolution after the first organic compounds had arisen. 
This seems to be Bastian's view. It is also held by Pro- 
fessor Benjamin Moore and undoubtedly by many other 
biochemists and physiologists. It would be interesting 
to know how a biologist who holds this view would con- 
vince himself and his biological colleagues that a par- 30 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
ticular substance was genuinely living if it could not 
grow and reproduce. Is it not exactly here that Bas- 
tian's enterprise foundered? 
Again there are those, like Jacques Loeb, who while 
regarding heredity as a truly primal attribute of or- 
ganisms, still put it aside as presenting no great obsta- 
cle. In his book, The Mechanical Conception of Life, 
Loeb says that " fertilization and heredity . . . are 
specific for living organisms and without analogues in 
inanimate nature." The key inquiry concerning this 
view is: If heredity is specific for living organisms, is 
it also specific for the most fundamental of the living 
materials of organisms? It seems to me a great deal 
of confused thinking has resulted from the prevalent 
habit of speaking of " living matter," " organic sub- 
stance " and so on, as though these were something 
quite apart from or antecedent to organisms. The 
very conception of " living " or " organic " substance 
is, as I understand, substance found in living beings. 
To apply the term living to substances which had never 
been in any way dependent upon a living being would 
be to deprive the word of its most fundamental mean- 
ing. Suppose, for example, an inorganic colloid were 
to be produced so similar to some living colloid sub- 
stance as to be indistinguishable from it in any observ- 
able attribute. I fail to see how it could be pronounced 
living, until it should have proved ir',elf capable of co- 
operating and interacting with other substances to 
make a livin ' being. These are common-place, homely The Spontaneous Origin of Life 
31 
truths, but not to be denied or ignored because com- 
mon-place. 
It would seem as though we must either recast our 
conception of living beings by leaving out one of the 
group of attributes hitherto regarded as most funda- 
mental and definitive, that of reproduction and hered- 
ity, or give up all thought of a de novo origin of life 
by either natural or artificial means. I am far from 
denying that such a revision of the definition of organ- 
ism may be necessary; but I insist that we not only 
need not, but in strict fidelity to the inductive method 
of research, cannot so revise it at the behest of any 
amount of speculation on the spontaneous origin of liv- 
ing beings. We can do so only after objects have been 
produced from inorganic substances which are living 
beyond all cavil; that is, have stood the test of all the 
main criteria of such beings. 
Let us now examine briefly a great body of facts 
which seem to have a bearing on the questions of what 
shall be accounted as truly living substance, and of the 
relation of such substance to the attribute of heredity. 
I refer to the rapidly accumulating evidence that the 
individuality of each organism extends down to the 
details of its chemical make-up. We are still far from 
proof that every organism is through and through 
chemically different from every other organism. In- 
deed, we are sure th 't many organisms widely separated 
in the animal and plant kingdoms yield, upon chemical 
analysis, many identical or closely similar substances. 32 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
But there is a strong movement in several quite remote 
and distinct fields of biology favorable to the concep- 
tion that every organism is in some measure genuinely 
different from every other organism. To this, many, 
perhaps a majority, of biologists would agree. 
A final outcome of this must be, I believe, though 
in this view few present-day bio-chemists would concur, 
that biology will have to recognize that the living or- 
ganism literally uses, as common sense says it does, 
the substances which enter into it to produce the struc- 
tural elements and the energies it needs. In other 
words, the living organism presses into its own service, 
and impresses something of its own nature upon the 
material, organic and inorganic, which it takes in from 
the external world; so that the concept " living sub- 
stance," taken in its most essential sense, means a sub- 
stance produced not only by the living organism, but 
also by some individual organism. If the word cause 
be used consistently it will have to be recognized that 
the organism is a cause of its own living substance just 
as truly as the inorganic nutrient substances are causes 
of the organism. 
The indubitable natural history fact that organisms 
are not only manufacturers, but are originators, even 
original originators, as one may say, furnishes a base 
for another line of reflection on the problem of creating 
life artificially. The chemist can accomplish with his 
sex-glands and with various other internal glands and 
organs what he can not possibly accomplish with his The Spontaneous Origin of Life 
33 
hands or his brain, or both working together. The 
brain is the brain, the liver is the liver, the testicle is 
the testicle, and by no possibility can either fully sup- 
plant any of the others, for the good and sufficient rea- 
son that each one is real in exactly the same sense that 
every other one is; that the existence of each is just as 
ultimate, just as fundamental as is the existence of the 
others. Man can originate some things in nature but 
he cannot originate every thing in nature, for the rea- 
son that vast portions of nature are already originated. 
He cannot, for example, originate water in a final sense 
for water already exists. Once having water in his 
hands and having taken it to pieces, he can put the 
parts together and so by imitation, can in a secondary 
sense originate water. Exactly so with organic beings, 
or Life. To expect to originate Life in the deeper 
sense would be to expect to originate attributes of the 
relation of the inorganic constituents of organisms that 
have already been originated. What a chemist might 
reasonably strive to do, that is strive for in strict ac- 
cordance with the principles and methods of chemical 
synthesis, would be first to make a complete chemical 
analysis of some simple living being, say some bac- 
terium, and then to put the parts together again in 
such a way as to make either the identical bacterium, 
or one of different but closely similar kind or species. 
We may look upon Woehler's famous achievement of 
synthesizing urea as the first step toward effecting the 
chemical manufacture of living men; but I submit, suc- 34 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
cess in manufacturing one of the simplest constituents 
of one of the body's excretions is a rather long distance 
from success in manufacturing living beings. And here 
is the practical, one might say, the industrial aspect of 
this matter: Supposing organic chemistry should some 
day have advanced so far as to enable the manufac- 
turing chemist to manufacture men, what would chem- 
istry really have accomplished? The principle of sub- 
stitution and imitation by which synthetic chemistry is 
virtually limited would make it impossible to do more 
than produce men exactly like those already in exist- 
ence, or at best only a little different from these. This 
might be greatly important from a sociological stand- 
point; and it would be very interesting scientifically, 
but the achievement could hardly rank among the great 
scientific discoveries. It would be a remarkable feat of 
synthetic chemistry in the ordinary industrial sense, but 
nothing greater than that. It would not be creative 
chemistry in the sense of creating a new elementary 
substance or even new attributes of an old substance, 
to which, be it noticed, the views here expressed would 
make the " artificial production of life " comparable. 
We shall have to recognize, as previously remarked, 
that the problem of producing life artificially is very 
much like that of producing perpetual motion. Logi- 
cally both are possible or impossible depending on the 
conceptions and definitions with which one starts. 
Practically one seems just about as possible as the 
other. The Spontaneous Origin of Life 
35 
I come now to the part of the discussion which seems 
to me most important; that of the relative usefulness 
of the two possible hypotheses stated at the beginning 
concerning the origin of life. One is that occasionally 
and somewhere organisms have been, perhaps now are, 
produced without parents. The other says that all 
organisms always have been and still are produced 
by parents. I verily believe, as already stated, the last- 
mentioned hypothesis will soon be recognized as more 
useful than the other. The superior usefulness which 
I would claim for the no-beginning-no-ending hypothe- 
sis would be two fold. (1) It would serve the ends of 
biological research and biological thinking and teaching 
better than the alternative hypothesis ; and (2) it would 
tend to influence advantageously the sciences of inor- 
ganic nature. 
Concerning its salutary effect on biology I speak 
only in general terms. Speaking thus, its effect would 
be quite similar to that of reaching a perception of 
the order of inorganic nature that convinces one of the 
futility of searching for perpetual motion. In the same 
way that the physical and mechanical sciences were 
vitiated by false theories and harassed by futile enter- 
prises about energy and machines so long as false 
notions prevailed about the creation of matter and 
energy, so the organic sciences are even yet vitiated by 
sundry false theories and are harassed by futile re- 
search enterprises on account of the lingering belief 
in the spontaneous and possible artificial creation of 36 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
life. 
Several biologists seem to have a feeling of chagrin 
at the continued defeat of efforts to explain life, to 
say nothing of attempts to produce it. It seems to 
them that to be obliged to admit the impossibility of 
the origin of the living from the non-living, would be to 
admit that at this one point a break occurs in the 
continuity of nature which is wholly unlike that known 
to occur anywhere else. Obviously a clear grasp of the 
hypothesis of the endlessness of the series of organisms 
would do away with this feeling by establishing the con- 
ception of the continuity of origination, not as between 
the inorganic and the organic, but within the organic 
itself. Nor should anyone fail to remember that a 
continuity of another sort than that of origination is 
fully established between the inorganic and the organic 
by the dependence of all organisms, finally, on inorganic 
nature for nutriment. 
When we come to see that our dealings with objec- 
tive nature must be on the basis of the attributes of 
natural objects, we shall see that there is everywhere 
in nature a sort of discontinuity just as essential as is 
continuity. The discontinuity which would result from 
proof of the non-origin of the organic from the inor- 
ganic, would be no more than the recognition of one 
more of this class of discontinuities. I refer to the dis- 
continuities which pertain to the relation among the 
attributes of a body. We have no certain proof of the 
convertibility of certain attributes into any other at- The Spontaneous Origin of Life 
37 
tributes. The attributes of extension and color, for 
example, or shape and odor, while in a sense dependent 
on each other, are not in any sense derivable from each 
other. Now, if we can get no evidence of the origin of 
the living from the non-living, that fact will ipso facto, 
make the group of attributes of living bodies a group 
non-derivable from the attributes of inorganic bodies 
taken as such; exactly as the attribute of gravitation, 
which is common to all bodies, is non-derivable from any 
of the other attributes of these bodies. 
In so far as the mental need for the principle of con- 
tinuity in nature is legitimate, that is, in so far as that 
need is dependent upon the constitution of our minds, 
the need ought to be satisfied so far as organic nature 
is concerned by the continuity which manifests itself in 
the growth and development of the individual, and in 
nutrition and propagation. If we must indeed recog- 
nize that organisms possess some attributes which can 
not be derived in the usual sense from inorganic bodies, 
there is no more reason for being chagrined at the fact 
than there is for being chagrined at the fact that we 
cannot derive redness from weight, or iron from silver. 
I am trying to express quite dogmatically a view 
according to which it would come to pass that, were our 
mental attitude toward the limitableness or illimitable- 
ness of the system of nature to be determined by the 
usual methods of scientific induction instead of by habit 
of thought, the hypothesis of the infinitude of the vari- 
ous series would win the day. It would win because, 38 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
while we could never expect absolutely to prove its 
truth, we should see that its warrantableness as against 
that of its competitor, the finitude of the series, rests 
upon exactly the same foundations as does our confi- 
dence in the part of the series actually in our posses- 
sion. 
These last sentences remind us of the close and 
everywhere manifest kindred between the organic and 
inorganic worlds, if by any possibility we have become 
unmindful of the relation. The next essay in this vol- 
ume will show how the conception of the illimitableness 
of living nature has affected the thinking of at least 
one biologist as touching the limitableness, or other- 
wise, of non-living nature. ARE THERE SUFFICIENT REASONS FOR BE- 
LIEF IN THE INFINITY OF NATURE? 
I 
IN his interesting lecture, " The Fundamental Prop- 
erties of the Elements," 1 Professor T. W. Richards 
said: " They, the atomic weights of the chemical ele- 
ments, are the mute witnesses of the first beginnings of 
the cosmos out of the chaos." Such a setting-over as 
this of the cosmos against the chaos by a foremost stu- 
dent in a realm of nature particularly calculated to 
elicit the most careful thought and expression on such 
matters, somewdiat startled me by its Miltonian sound. 
In recent years Milton's mighty poem has afforded me 
greater pleasure than at any other period of my life; 
but concomitantly with my growing appreciation of 
the daring flights of poetic imagination there shown, 
as a student of nature the conception of a chaos in 
the far-distant past, out of which a cosmos emerged 
after a while, has gradually and at last entirely faded 
from my mind, and I had presumed such to be the case 
with men of science generally. 
I do not suppose Professor Richards would, if 
pressed to elucidate his words, affirm his belief in a time 
when the " earth was waste and void " in the Mosaic 
i Nature, July 6, 1911, p. 29. 
39 40 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
sense and when there existed, ". . . a dark Illimitable 
ocean, without bound, without dimension, where length, 
breadth, and height, and time and place are lost; where 
eldest night and Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold 
Eternal anarchy." Even the less exuberantly fanciful 
Chaos of Hesoid held to be a " yawning abyss composed 
of Void,2 Mass, and Darkness," could hardly appeal to 
the curbed and guided imagination of present-day 
science. 
I had supposed the view of students who think into 
these problems as far as our present scientific knowl- 
edge enables us to go, is not that there was once a real 
orderless state of things, but that the kind of order 
with which physicists, chemists, biologists, and the rest 
are now dealing was rather fundamentally different 
long ago from what it is today. I had supposed that 
natural science at its best has now carried the analysis 
of the idea of chaos, or disorder so fai' as to recognize 
that, as Bergson remarks, it " represents nothing at 
all," and that " the problems that have been raised 
around it vanish." In a word, that a man of science, 
when on duty as such, would have no such word as 
chaos in his vocabulary. But having recently come 
upon expressions by a number of excellent scientific men 
2 This very early attempt to make Nothing do positive service 
in explaining the origin of Something, ought to interest those who 
at the present day pin faith to an " Absence " that can " domi- 
nate " a " Presence " as solid ground on which to base an explana- 
tion of certain facts on heredity. Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
41 
similar in import to this by Richards, I am led to ques- 
tion whether science has, after all, fully extricated itself 
from imaginings akin to those set forth by Milton. If 
the question be raised whether it is worth while for 
sober men of science to deal with such matters, we 
need do little more than remind ourselves that the ques- 
tion of worth-whileness is beside the point, since every 
science in common with all knowledge, taken as a whole 
does inevitably, sooner or later, run into the vast prob- 
lem of the beginnings of things. This is seen to be so 
whether the subject be viewed historically or oper- 
atively. Men guess as automatically and universally 
as they observe, or walk, or whistle. That is, the attri- 
bute of prevision - of trying to see on ahead - seems 
as primal in man as the attribute of vision - of seeing 
what is before one here and now. At least a few lead- 
ing men have been making hypotheses, or what is the 
same thing, thoughtful guesses, as long as there have 
been leaders, and as long as these leaders have been 
doing anything. The practical question is only as to 
how thoughtful and careful the guesses shall be - as 
to how wide a range of the germane facts shall be made 
the basis of the guesses. 
II 
Being a biologist, my approach to this vast problem 
of beginnings has naturally been from the domain of 
living beings. I am convinced that the hypothesis of 42 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
a once-for-all beginning of organisms, of the origin of 
the Living from the Not-living, though hallowed by ages 
of theological speculation and poetic imagination, and 
more recently, given the prestige of highly respectable 
scientific authority, is no longer a fruitful hypothesis 
either for science or common intelligence. Before the 
invincible march of observational inquiry it has gone, 
or is rapidly going, the way of such problems as that 
of perpetual motion. 
Omne vivum ex vivo has come to stand in biology 
along side of gravitation in the physical sciences gen- 
erally as one of the most securely established of the 
laws of nature. Tyndall wrote in the late seventies of 
last century, " I here affirm that no shred of trust- 
worthy experimental testimony exists to prove that life, 
in our day, has ever appeared independently of ante- 
cedent life." It looks as though we must cut the " in 
our day " from this pronouncement and take the rest 
as a negative way of stating our " working hypothe- 
sis " of the continuity of living beings. I have dealt 
with this problem in the first essay of this book, so do 
no more with it here. My purpose now is to present a 
few reflections on what would follow the serious adop- 
tion of the hypothesis that physical life is infinite as 
bearing on the question of a former state of universal 
chaos, i.e., of orderlessness. 
What do we mean by orderless? Surely the absence 
of order. It is perhaps safe to assume that among 
the more intelligent of our day, no form of sophistica- Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
43 
tion is so general as to need reckoning with, that will 
attempt to make anything else of it. The real ques- 
tion is, then, exactly what do we mean by order? Fol- 
lowed up rigorously the question plunges down to the 
deepest rootlets of our observational knowledge and so, 
in one aspect, of all knowledge whatever. Being in the 
biological realm and fixing attention on the somewhat 
special application of the term taxonomy, let us look a 
bit at what we really do when we taxonomize. Ac- 
cording to Huxley's well approved statement we sys- 
tematize and generalize the " facts of morphology in 
such a manner as to arrange living beings in groups 
according to their degrees of likeness." 
Most of the weight of this statement rests on three 
phrases, " living beings," " facts of Morphology," and 
" degrees of likeness." Notice what is implied in these 
phrases. " Living beings," that is, objects in nature 
distinguished from not-living objects - How? By the 
possession of properties, or qualities, or traits, or char- 
acteristics, or attributes, which non-living objects do 
not possess. For example, living objects have the at- 
tribute of metabolism (to select the one about which, 
perhaps, there would be least question as to distinctive- 
ness). Obviously here is implied a still deeper tax- 
onomic performance, one reaching outside the biological 
realm, and resting again on the same basis, as does 
taxonomizing within that realm, namely, on the prop- 
erties, or qualities, or attributes of objects generally. 
" Facts of Morphology " are what observation dis- 44 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
covers concerning the form-attributes of living beings; 
and if arranging is done as strictly on a morphological 
basis as the Huxleyan definition would have it (which 
is by no means necessary) the " degrees of likeness " 
are always recognized through a comparison of form- 
attributes of the organisms arranged. In a word, no 
matter where one turns in nature he finds that all the 
knowledge he has, rests upon, as a sine qua non, the 
qualities, or attributes of objects. And further, when 
one comes to compare all the objects thus recognized, 
there are found likenesses and differences enough to 
enable him to arrange them in numerous groups and 
sub-groups. The possibility of any knowledge what- 
ever of nature rests upon the attributes of objects. 
And it so turns out that of all the prodigious number 
of observations thus far made and fully verified, no 
object has yet been found that does not possess a con- 
siderable number of attributes common to all other ob- 
jects. All have shape of some sort; all have resistance 
to some extent; all, seemingly, affect light rays in one 
way and another; all have weight, and so on. In other 
words, a genuine chaos would seem to imply a genuine 
incorporealness; and a genuine incorporealness would 
be a genuine nothingness. 
It may be there are still a few chemists, or rather, at 
heart alchemists or pseudo-chemists, who speak seri- 
ously about propertiless atoms or substances. What 
we need to see more clearly than we usually do is that 
such atoms are not sufficiently disposed of by recogniz- Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
45 
ing them to be merely nothings; but that the conception 
of them implies a negation of all observational knowl- 
edge, and of all inductive science. 
Ill 
One can hardly notice too attentively the extent to 
which progress in the knowledge of nature, particularly 
in its minuter sub-divisions, has consisted in discover- 
ing attributes of bodies which w'ere not before knowm 
to belong to them; and which are of the same general 
piece as attributes well known because of being pos- 
sessed by other more easily observed bodies. And Dr. 
Richards' contention that the hypothesis of the com- 
pressibility of atoms is more in accord with all the rele- 
vant facts than the opposite hypothesis, seems to me to 
be a notable step in the general direction of such prog- 
ress. 
Assuming enough has been said to justify the adop- 
tion of the hypothesis that there is no real existence in 
the whole universe, that does not consist in, or depend 
directly upon bodies, which are in turn dependent upon 
their attributes; and recognizing the indubitable fact 
that the whole history and substance of science has al- 
ways involved and now involves the discovery of new 
bodies having various attributes of previously known 
bodies and new attributes of old bodies; and recogniz- 
ing ever more clearly and widely resemblances and dif- 
ferences between all known bodies both old and new, 
what follows as to the problem of the beginning in time 46 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
and the limitation in space of the order of things with 
which we are already so largely familiar, and beside 
which we have no trustworthy knowledge whatever? 
This is one of the most scientifically and philosophically 
interesting, because most practically important, ques- 
tions that can be raised. 
It seems to me that if we hold rigorously to two of 
the best credentialed departments of human activity, 
namely, observational science and pure mathematics, 
the hypothetical or tentative answer to which we are 
driven is that the order of the universe had no begin- 
ning in timeAnor has any limitation in space; and fur- 
ther that this order admits of no such thing as " vacant 
space." In other words the conclusion pointed to is 
that the Cosmos, or Universe, or total order of things 
is genuinely infinite. By genuinely I mean infinite, not 
in the sense of subjectivist metaphysics or theology, but 
of physical science and mathematics. A short descrip- 
tion or characterization of the Cosmos from this stand- 
point would be that it consists of an infinite number of 
bodies each belonging to an infinite series and that of 
all these bodies everyone has some attributes in com- 
mon with all the others, but not one is exactly alike 
any other.3 Undoubtedly such a conception is some- 
3 In a suggestive paper " The role of the concept of infinity 
in the work of Lucretius " (Bull. Amer. Math. Soc., April 1918, 
pp. 321) Professor C. J. Keyser has done a good service in empha- 
sizing the fact that the infinity which Lucretius strove to grasp 
was one " of infinite multitude and infinite magnitude." Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
47 
what difficult to domesticate, as one might say. That 
is, it is not easily established on a footing of harmony, 
in the household of common ideas and sentiments and 
feelings. But there are certain general reflections 
which help toward such establishment. One of these 
concerns the distinction between vastness, and illimit- 
ableness or infinity. We may, indeed constantly do, 
deal with tilings so vast in number or size that they 
quite baffle comprehension as this pertains to ordinary 
sensible objects. The earth, for instance, has a very 
different status in our understanding from a base-ball, 
even though we accept the one almost as fully as the 
other, not only as real but as a body of particular form 
and consistency; as, namely, a spherical, solid body. 
Taking the earth as such an object at once makes it 
limited - gives it boundaries - and no matter how 
large it may be, so long as all the information we have 
about it places it in the same genus with bodies easily 
compassed by our sense experiences, we take it with 
little or no cavil or intellectual jolt. It is merely some- 
thing like something else, only mu-ch larger. Our 
knowledge processes and our feelings are not fundamen- 
tally altered in passing from one very large, though 
limited, thing to another of the same type but still 
larger; or from one greatly numerous series to another 
still more numerous; or from one set of events reach- 
ing far back into the past and seemingly destined to 
extend into the distant future, to another similar set, 
extending still further backward and presumably reach- 48 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
ing still further forward. 
A very different mental state is experienced when 
we come upon something to which no limits can be as- 
signed. Put yourself to the test this way: Here you 
sit beside that vast body of water, the Pacific Ocean. 
How many drops are there in it? Meaning by drop, a 
definite amount of water, you do not hesitate to say 
that although the number is so great that the com- 
bined lifetimes of the whole present population of the 
earth would hardly suffice to count them, still it is a 
mere matter of repetition and so would surely end 
sometime, since the ocean itself is not unlimited. Again 
suppose for the sake of argument that each drop of 
water, no matter how small, could be halved, and each 
half again halved, and so on, to the very limit of your 
manipulative ability but without finding any indica- 
tion that you could not go on halving if only you had 
skill enough. All the positive evidence in your posses- 
sion would indicate that you were on a truly endless 
road, that you were dealing with an infinite series. Do 
you not, then, find yourself in a very different state of 
mind toward the Pacific Ocean from what you experi- 
enced in the other case? I think so, and think you can 
see wherein the difference lies. In the case of the in- 
comprehensibly large, though limited, number of drops 
of equal size no fundamentally contradictory or para- 
doxical situation was recognized. The other case, how- 
ever, lands you in just such a situation. The body of 
water with which you began is limited, yet within that Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
49 
body there exists potentially an unlimited number of 
parts. How can a limited thing contain an unlimited 
number of parts? Although the unresolvable contra- 
diction involved in this case is of itself distracting al- 
most to madness, if you dwell upon it intently, you still 
can, in fact you do accept the situation with more or 
less complacency. More or less, I say, because the 
degree of complacency depends on the degree of clear- 
ness with which you see that your accepting or not ac- 
cepting makes not the slightest difference for all prac- 
tical purposes. The ocean is exactly the same what- 
ever you do about it. Its waves keep coming ashore 
just the same; its blueness remains with no trace of 
change; its benign influence on the adjacent earth lying 
under the boiling August sun goes on without a hitch; 
it floats the ships and sustains its myriads of living 
creatures in exactly the same way whatever be your 
thoughts and sentiments about it. You may put the 
ocean to any use you care to, utterly regardless of in- 
tellectual muddles you get into by thinking about it. 
What more natural and rational course, then, than for 
you to accept the situation? 
But suppose, following your bent toward philosophiz- 
ing, you push your questioning still further. " Have 
I," you say, " done something cowardly or weak in 
turning my back on a difficulty? " " No," you assure 
yourself, " I certainly have not, because it was only 
when I was trying to handle the Pacific Ocean with one 
department of myself, namely, my reason, that I was 50 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
in trouble. The moment I went at it in a common- 
sense fashion, that is, with my whole self, with all my 
capabilities and at the behest of all my interest, my 
difficulties were found to be no longer serious." By 
the very act of passing to a larger standpoint the diffi- 
culties were set aside, not destroyed, but rendered 
innocuous. The totality of one's interests always fur- 
nishes a modus vivendi for conflicts between one's par- 
tial interests. Since we live with our whole selves, while 
we reason with only a part of ourselves, we have the 
same obligation and the same power to put the bit on 
reason when reason no longer works with effectiveness 
and to the good of the whole, that we had at the outset 
to start reason going. Otherwise expressed, in our 
feelings, and in our emotional nature, we are ready to 
accept the idea that nature is infinite even though our 
reason balks somewhat at it. Why this is so we need 
not now inquire.4 It must suffice for our present pur- 
4 The reader who would like to see these suggestions about the 
nature of our knowledge of the external world carried somewhat 
further may read my essay The Higher Usefulness of Knowledge 
in the book having that title; and the chapters on psychic inte- 
gration, particularly the one having the title Sketch of an Organ- 
ismal Theory of Consciousness in the Unity of the Organism. 
A theory of knowledge and of existence taking its cue from the 
fragmentaiy conceptions presented in these writings, is a task 
for the future and for some one having more time and a better 
equipment for it than I have. But it may be of some interest 
to state here in a short paragraph what, as it seems to me, the 
finished product of such a task would be like. It would be an 
account or a description of man's total reaction towards the 
totality of things, such reaction resulting from his being an in- Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
51 
pose to recognize the fact. But since reason has 
proved so useful in so many ways, may we not expect it 
to be of still farther service in this situation, even 
though it find itself balked so far as one particular line 
of its effort was concerned? Were the nature of water 
really found to be such that it could be thus divided 
into smaller parts ad infinitum, our general physical 
knowledge would warrant us in supposing that a body 
of water like the Pacific Ocean has qualities and powers 
latent in it, the full measure and meaning of which we 
mortals can not even guess. 
So much by way of introductory remarks on the 
questions of the infinity versus the finiteness of nature. 
Let us now inspect our actual knowledge of nature for 
the purpose of seeing what it indicates in this respect. 
tegrated and so essential element in that totality - whatever the 
size of it may be. The integration of man, physical and psychi- 
cal, with the whole system of the universe seems to be somewhat 
similar to the integration of the purely physical universe through 
the principle of gravitation. But since the integrating principle 
for man is physico-chemical quite as much as it is rational and 
so involves man's physical, instinctive and emotional quite as much 
as his rational nature, the account would be an emotionalized- 
rational or a rationalized-emotional one as you choose to char- 
acterize it. It would resemble considerably the better theologies 
of the past. It would, however, differ sharply from these in that 
the tentative or hypothetical parts of the account, to which many 
of the most powerful emotions and faiths would appertain would 
nevertheless still be recognized as tentative; that is, as subject 
to revision with the advance of experience and of discovery in 
objective knowledge. 52 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
IV 
Surely what we know about the portion of the Cosmos 
which we call living, when regarded in all its aspects - 
its paleontology, its morphology, its embryology, its 
biochemistry, its physiology, its psychology, its soci- 
ology - points considerably more strongly toward in- 
finity than toward finiteness. For example, let one put 
to himself the question, what do the observations so far 
made on the minute structure of organic beings while 
they are still organized, indicate as to there being parts 
of organisms so small that there are none still smaller; 
or in other words, as to there being truly unorganized 
living substance: Is it not true that all notions about 
ultimate organic particles and substances rest upon 
something else than actual observations on organic 
beings while they are still organized? In recent times, 
for instance, such notions, so far as they have been 
favored by biologists, have rested largely on inferences 
drawn from a science, chemistry, very closely inter- 
locked with, but by no means the same as biology. It 
cannot be too strongly emphasized that our knowledge 
of the chemistry of organic beings is derived almost en- 
tirely from observations on (a) the dead bodies of or- 
ganisms; (b) materials extraneous to living beings 
which may be taken up by them and worked over in one 
way and another to their needs; (c) waste and excre- 
mentitious material thrown off by living bodies. Our 
knowledge of the chemistry of living substance based on Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
53 
direct chemical studies of such substance is almost nil. 
To permit, therefore, inferences drawn from chemistry 
and physics to fix a minimal size for living particles, 
while biological knowledge proper furnishes no warrant 
for such limitation, would be to go head-on against one 
of the most cherished tenets of physical science - the 
trustworthiness of observational evidence. Now I wish 
to be very explicit in denying that my contention is 
that the observed biological facts prove the illimitable- 
ness in size of organic particles. What I say is, that 
those facts furnish no warrant for the hypothesis of 
minimal sized particles; and that consequently, if we 
are to make any hypothesis on the subject at all, that 
of illimitableness is far better grounded than its op- 
posite. 
Highly significant is the fact that observations, in the 
realm of minute organisms themselves, as contrasted 
with that on the particles of which organisms are com- 
posed, tend with equal persuasiveness toward denial of 
the necessity of supposing the existence, taking the 
whole cosmos together, of minimal sized organisms. 
The recent extension of knowledge in the field of 
pathogenic ultramicroscopic organisms, and in that 
of the so-called nanoplankton, is very suggestive. 
It seems that some of the most illuminating biolog- 
ical research in the not distant future may be 
in these realms. The facts are much the same in these 
two realms, but being more familiar with nanoplankton 
than w'ith pathogenic organisms, I leave the latter to< 54 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
one side. The case stated in a nutshell is this: one of 
the largest aspects of the history of research on the 
free floating and swimming life of the waters of the 
earth, particularly those of the oceans, has consisted in 
the making known of ever smaller and smaller organ- 
isms, occurring generally in greater and greater num- 
bers of individuals. And here is the significant thing: 
At any given time during this history, the minutest 
organisms known were determined solely by the degree 
of perfection of the means employed for capture and 
observation. Every step forward in the refinement of 
methods of collecting and studying has been rewarded 
by the discovery of still more minute beings. This has 
gone on until today any experienced investigator in this 
field who might be confronted with the question:- 
What is the smallest organism that lives in the sea? 
would, I believe, have to reply that there is no evidence 
in all the extensive knowledge now possessed concerning 
the living things of the waters of the earth, on which to 
base a positive answer to the question; in other words 
he would have to give an answer, the implication of 
which is that probably there is no such thing as a small- 
est organism in these w'aters. Undoubtedly the in- 
terrogated student might go on and show by a course 
of reasoning based on certain facts that there must be 
a minimal size somewhere. But the facts upon which 
that reasoning would be founded would not be derived 
from observation on the organisms of the waters, nor 
even on a study of phenomena of the same order as those Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
55 
essentially involved in the question. In a word, the 
" logical necessity " of belief in minimal-sized organ- 
isms would be an a priori necessity. It would be a logi- 
cal necessity if one were to choose premises to start 
with that would make it so, not otherwise. 
I must repeat what my position is. I do not for 
a moment contend that an infinite series of organic be- 
ings of diminishing size is proved by the evidence be- 
fore the court. My point is, that if we are to hold any 
hypothesis at all as to size limitation, the direct evi- 
dence for illimitableness is far stronger than that for 
limitation. Indeed, all the direct evidence points to 
this conclusion while only indirect evidence favors the 
hypothesis of limitation. 
As this communication has to do only with great 
problems in their baldest outlines, details cannot be en- 
tered into. 
Weighing of evidence bearing on either one or the 
other of the hypotheses here mentioned is consequently 
out of the question. Attention must nevertheless be 
called to one matter of detail that seems not to have re- 
ceived the attention it deserves in recent discussions of 
the so-called pan-spermia idea; namely, the importance 
of distinguishing between germinal, or reproductive 
elements of organisms, in the usual sense, and organic 
beings regardless of particular stages in the life cycle 
of organisms, as the means of interplanetary and inter- 
stellar migration. Putting the pan-spermia hypothe- 
sis squarely on this broader basis (which would at once 56 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
render the term pan-spermia too narrow as a designa- 
tion for the idea) would extend the boundaries of the 
problem by the frank recognition that our knowledge 
of the extent of adaptability of the organic world as 
a whole, and of the numerical abundance of organisms 
in organic nature as a whole, is still so imperfect as to 
warn us against dogmatic denials of possibilities in- 
volving questions of adaptiveness and abundance. If 
physics and astronomy will provide a means of trans- 
port of objects, organic or inorganic, across the in- 
tervals between heavenly bodies, genuine biology will 
be the last to assert the impossibility of the existence 
of organisms that can endure such transportation and 
the assumed colonization upon the various heavenly 
bodies. And biology will leave to men of other do- 
mains of science who get such biological knowledge as 
they have by " reading up," the task of disposing of the 
pan-spermia suggestion, for biology has more reason 
than perhaps any other science to take notice of the ex- 
tent to which modern civilization rests upon principles 
and truths that a few years earlier were a priori im- 
possible. 
V 
I now return to my original purpose - that of seek- 
ing information as to how verified knowledge and care- 
ful thinking on the main questions in the realm of the 
inorganic, really stand today. I will arrange my re- 
maining questions in a series beginning with the most Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
57 
general and ending with the most special, and will 
focus the inquiries as sharply as possible. 
A physicist 5 of high standing has lately said, " The 
universe must have begun by a process which lies out- 
side physical laws, and it seems to me no easier to grasp 
the conception of a creation which took place at one 
single time than a creation which continues through- 
out all ages." Is, I ask, the conception that " The 
universe must have begun by a process which lies outside 
physical laws " regarded by physicists generally as es- 
tablished beyond the possibility of overthrow or even 
of revision? Sir Oliver Lodge remarks immediately 
after quoting the above, that in this, as in a few other 
matters, he is unable to follow the author. What par- 
ticular items in the passage the reviewer dissents from 
he does not, unfortunately, tell us. 
Let it be supposed that all men's minds are so simi- 
lar to Professor Schuster's that theirs, like his, find it 
" no easier to grasp the conception of a creation which 
took place at one single time than a creation which con- 
tinues throughout all ages." Limitation here on the 
power of " grasping " in all probability refers to two 
hypotheses of creation having the common element of 
striving after a grand final of understanding; an un- 
derstanding, that is, that leaves nothing beyond to be 
sought or desired or imagined. Alternative hypothe- 
5 Arthur Schuster, F. R. S., The Progress of Physics during 
Thirty-three Years (1875-1908), reviewed and quoted by Sir Oli- 
ver Lodge, Nature, September 21, 1911. 58 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
ses into which are put this common element are cer- 
tainly equally hopeless, equally blank, and equally use- 
less at least so far as this element is concerned. But 
since hypotheses, that is, interrogative conceptions 
held about things, are of our own making, why put ele- 
ments into them that balk us at the very start? Why 
should one announce a foot race and make ready for 
it by attaching weights to his feet so heavy that he 
could not stir a foot, tug as hard as ever he might? 
If one does his questioning about creation more mod- 
estly but no less earnestly, he finds, especially if he be a 
biologist, that the way of " a creation which continues " 
is far more open and easy to travel, than that of a crea- 
tion " at one single time," for on the first way he sees 
every day creation actually going on even though he 
does not understand exactly how it goes. But the way 
of creation " at one single time," - well, indeed, what 
is it and where is it? We are not able to plant our 
feet securely on it anywhere. Surely this difficulty is 
very different from that noted about the first way, 
namely, that of the continuance of creation " through- 
out all ages." That the creation has continued and 
will continue forever we certainly do know. But the 
two indubitable facts (1) that it has gone on for a very 
long time and (2) that it shows no clear symptoms of 
termination, furnish no warrant for the supposition 
that it ever did begin absolutely or will ever end abso- 
lutely. 
Another physicist, M. Gustave Le Bon, who has at- Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
59 
tracted much attention among his fellow workers, in 
part favorable and in part unfavorable, heads one of 
the main sections of his recent volume, The Evolu- 
tion of Forces,-" The Dematerialization of Matter 
and the Problems of Electricity." My meager knowl- 
edge of physics is greatly perplexed not only by this 
expression, but by many others scattered through this 
book and also The Evolution of Matter by the same 
author. That my knowledge of physics is " meager " 
might be held to be a sufficient explanation of my being 
perplexed; and a pertinent suggestion would be that I 
either resolve the perplexities by getting more knowl- 
edge or saying nothing about my troubles, at least in 
print. I should accept the latter alternative were it 
not for the fact that in the troublesome expressions 
there is surely involved exceedingly important questions 
not merely of physics but of procedure in the acquire- 
ment of knowledge in any realm of nature whatever. 
On this ground I feel justified in appealing to physicists 
by direct inquiry, in this public way for the assistance 
which in spite of considerable effort, I have been un- 
able to get by reading. I can, perhaps, state my dif- 
ficulty clearly by asking, What, exactly, is the meaning 
to the physicist as such of the phrase, " the dematerial- 
ization of matter " ? To me, an observer in another 
realm of nature, who has tried hard to find just what 
he does when he observes and reasons on what he ob- 
serves, the " dematerialization of matter " means the 
de-sensibilization of sense and the de-intellectualiza- 60 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
tion of intelligence. 
Looking the whole situation over from my stand- 
point, I see it this way: We students of nature all 
find in actual practice that Matter is always " matter 
of " some very obvious, easily seen, and handled body. 
No laboratory or museum so far as I have seen or heard 
contains a specimen of raw, pure Matter. Judging 
from the constant occurrence of the word body in his 
writings, M. Le Bon would grant this without hesita- 
tion. Consequently if we never find any matter else- 
where than in bodies, and if we are never able to resolve 
a body into pure Matter, then, it would seem, pure 
Matter is non-existent so far as observational knowl- 
edge is concerned; and practically the phrase dema- 
terialized matter would be synonymous with debodified 
body. But all bodies are partly sensible, that is, rec- 
ognizable by our senses or would be if our senses were 
sharp enough. So I see no escape, psychological or 
logical, from the conclusion that the words " dema- 
terialization of matter " are, not sarcastically nor ironi- 
cally, but literally wow-sense. 
If physicists as physicists have a way out of this 
difficulty I wish it could be shown to me. But I 
strongly suspect they have none. This suspicion has 
been aroused not alone from confidence in my own 
starting point and reasoning, but by expressions which 
I have found in the writings of several physicists that 
seem to indicate a failure on their parts to distinguish 
between the dissociation of a body and the separation Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
61 
from it of some of its attributes. I am quite sure M. 
Le Bon has fallen into this logically bottomless pit. 
On page 110 of the Evolution of Forces, after speaking 
of efforts to interpret the cathode rays, radio-active 
emissions and so on, he says: " Whatever this inter- 
pretation may be worth, it was certain that simple bod- 
ies could be dissociated." And on the following page 
we find: " All these experiments, many of which showed 
us particles of electricity freed from their material sup- 
port," etc. And on page 106 we find the " cat let out 
of the bag " still more positively in the statement that 
" Charges of electricity and the manner in which they 
are distributed generate all the properties of bodies," 
etc. 
As already indicated, the exact strength of the ex- 
perimental evidence on which such statements rest, I 
am not at all competent to estimate. This however I 
am sure of: If it really does express the truth as to 
the way bodies and thus all nature is constituted, then 
the foundation of all our physical science is " thought 
waves " or " moon shine " or something else equally 
substantial, and the vast superstructure, magnificent 
and solid as we have supposed it to be, will collapse into 
a heap of chaotic nothingness sooner or later. 
I am not speaking with intent of irony or jocularity 
or to exaggerate. The mode of reasoning about na- 
ture employed by M. Le Bon, would, I am persuaded, 
if followed rigorously, destroy physical science and 
erect on its ruins some form of mysticism. It would 62 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
sooner or later convert every great seat of western 
learning into a Buddhist temple, or a home of some 
other type of occult philosophy. And no great acu- 
men is required to recognize tendencies of just this kind 
not only in the popular favor bestowed of late upon va- 
rious forms of Inner Wisdom, but even in the utter- 
ances of men high in scientific authority and sometimes 
in official place. One may hunt The Secret Doctrine 
of Mme. Blavatsky from cover to cover and find noth- 
ing more truly occult than these sentences from The 
Evolution of Matter: " In thus endeavoring to catch 
a glimpse of the origins of matter, of its evolution and 
of its end, we have step by step arrived at the extreme 
limits of those semi-certitudes to which science can at- 
tain, and beyond which there is nothing but the dark- 
ness of the unknown." The " origin " and the " end " 
here referred to are the emergence of matter from the 
" primitive ether " " in the far-off ages when the first 
traces of our universe were out-lined on the chaos," 
and its return again to the ether, this last represent- 
ing therefore " the final nirvana to which all things re- 
turn after a more or less ephemeral existence." Nor 
has M. Le Bon failed to show us by what knowledge- 
process he finds himself compelled to place the brand of 
" semi-certitude " on the science for which he stands. 
Hypothesis, he says, " is the magic wand which evokes 
the known from the unknown, the real from the unreal, 
and gives a body to the most shadowy chimeras." Al- 
though science he says, " is the daughter of experi- Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
63 
ment," still hypothesis comes first, " To make hypothe- 
ses, to verify them by experiments, then to attempt to 
connect by the aid of generalizations, the facts dis- 
covered represents the stages necessary for the build- 
ing up of all our knowledge." On what the hypotheses 
rest we are not told, but seemingly not on observations, 
for, he says, while science lives on facts, " it has always 
been great generalizations which have given them birth." 
It is a satisfaction to know that the great domain of 
physics is not wholly permeated by such a conception 
of its own knowledge-processes as that here indicated; 
to know, in other words, that not all physical theory is 
a sort of bottomless pit into which physical facts are 
thrown. The introduction to the volume on electric 
energy of the monumental Traite de Physique by O. D. 
Chwolson furnishes one piece of evidence to this effect. 
Speaking of the present state of electrical and mag- 
netic science, this author recognizes three ways of ap- 
proach to the field as a whole. The first of these, char- 
acterized as the first point of view, is that of the " ex- 
ternal structure," and the " description of the phenom- 
ena." Concerning this we read: "It is very impor- 
tant to note that the whole ' ensemble scientifique ' 
which characterizes this first point of view in the study 
of electrical and magnetic phenomena is entirely inde- 
pendent of the opinions which may prevail among sci- 
entists regarding the nature of the phenomena." 
The third point of view, the author says, is that of 
the " attempt to explain the phenomena." Then, con- 64 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
cerning the first and third points of view we find: 
" Without any exaggeration it can be said, after a 
rapid survey of the facts, that there does not exist at 
present in the part of this science which has for its ob- 
ject the explanation of phenomena, any single well es- 
tablished theory which can be depended upon to explain 
completely and with certainty all of the phenomena." 
Were physics to accept whole-heartedly, not only 
what is here said, but the logical consequences of it, I 
am quite sure it would find itself with a theory of its 
own knowledge not differing essentially from that ex- 
pressed and implied in my discussion. 
M. Le Bon seems to have failed completely to rec- 
ognize the fundamental, the essential, reciprocal rela- 
tion between fact and generalization; between obser- 
vation and hypothesis. Either he has never under- 
taken seriously to test the relative validity of obser- 
vational or inductive, and subjective or deductive 
knowledge, or if he has undertaken the task, he has 
made a sad failure of it. 
If physical science ( " so-called," we should need to 
remark) has proved beyond a per adventure that there 
is something in the world real in so peculiar a way as 
to make this table on which I now write and this rose 
perfume which now enters my nostrils, unreal or even 
" semi-certain," then indeed is the end of physical sci- 
ence in sight, for the reality thus discovered can be 
reached just as well by way of the temple of mystic 
religion or the closet of meditation as by way of the Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
65 
field, the mountain, the ocean, and the scientific labora- 
tory ; and mighty few mortal beings are going to en- 
dure the expense, the disagreeable odors, the perplexi- 
ties, and the disappointments of the chemical and the 
biological laboratory if they can reach the same end by 
the monetary cheapness, the savory incense, the monot- 
onous and often repeated formulary, the impassive 
meditation, and the inner assurance, of the mystic 
Temple. 
The quintessence of the thing, as illustrated by the 
problem of the nature of electricity, is this: What- 
ever else physical science may be it is verified sense ex- 
perience. From the days of Franklin and of Volta to 
our own an immeasurably vast amount of such expe- 
rience has been to the effect that magnetism and elec- 
tricity are attributes or properties of bodies. Slight 
as was my training in these provinces, and faded as are 
most of the facts and mathematical equations presented 
to me in my college days, very distinct pictures are still 
before my mind of sticks of sealing wax, chunks of am- 
ber, the skins of various small animals tanned with 
the hair on, pieces of flannel cloth, scraps of pith, bars 
of iron of various shapes and sizes, and so on, when- 
ever the subject of magnetism was up for treatment; 
and big, flat, thin, semitransparent wheels set in frames, 
like a grindstone and adjusted with reference to cer- 
tain bars and balls of brass, glass jars containing metal 
plates, smelly fluids, yards of copper wire and numer- 
ous other things, whenever we were to have a lesson in 66 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
electricity. 
From what I see all around, mammoth dynamos in 
the great " Power Plants," " dry cells " and " wet 
cells," little and big, some of glass, some seemingly of 
paper, some cylindrical, some rectangular, miles upon 
miles of big copper wire, and yards upon yards of little 
copper wire, I judge that in the overwhelming majority 
of instances it is still true that " no bodies, no elec- 
tricity." This, according to my understanding, is 
merely stating in more general terms Faraday's famous 
principle that the " quantity of electricity passing 
through a liquid is proportional to the matter depos- 
ited on the electrodes." But it appears that within 
the last ten or fifteen years several persons, perhaps a 
half dozen in each of the countries where science has 
reached its highest development, have had sense ex- 
periences, that is, have made observations, and have 
done some mathematical calculating which they think 
means electricity without " material support "; in other 
words, that electricity is not, after all, an attribute of 
material bodies, but virtually the reverse of this; 
namely, that the electricity generates the attributes of 
such bodies. We can not look at this situation too 
carefully. If electricity generates all the attributes 
of material bodies, it generates the bodies themselves so 
far as physical science is concerned; for these attributes 
are exactly the foundation upon which observational 
knowledge rests. It seems that these persons are not 
only putting the " cart before the horse " but are prov- Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
67 
ing that that is where the horse belongs. 
This is not primarily a question of whether Dr. 
Y or Dr. Z is the more skillful and trust- 
worthy as a deviser and maker and user of apparatus 
for testing hypotheses; that is to say, a question of 
which doctor is the better observer, pertinently as this 
must come in. Rather it is primarily a question of the 
nature and validity of any observational knowledge 
whatever. The fundamental proposition, surely im- 
plied though not definitely expressed, is that observa- 
tion no matter how many times confirmed is not after all 
a reliable and essential part of science. The concep- 
tion is undoubtedly implied that the water-falls, the 
dynamos, the copper wires, the transformers and all the 
rest, inseparably connected with electricity in practical 
life are not real in the sense that the electricity is real; 
that the water-falls, dynamos, copper wires, et cetera, 
are at bottom the electricity itself under a different 
form. The sense world of ordinary mortals is an illu- 
sion or a delusion - and the occultists are right: - 
Mental Science, not Physical Science, is the " Real 
Thing." 
From these and other considerations on the psvcho- 
logical-logical side of all this, I am led to suggest - 
though the suggestion is rather audacious - that there 
may be one or more " niggers in the fence " on the 
purely physical side. Is it possible that one of these is 
in the electro-magnetic theory of light? As I under- 
stand, the main support of this theory is the demon- 68 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
stration that the electric charge moves at nearly the 
same velocity that light does. The reasoning is cap- 
tivating and as a feat of " pure " reasoning, quite con- 
vincing: "The mass of an electric charge depends on 
the velocity and increases indefinitely as this velocity 
approaches that of light.- The material mass is there- 
fore nil," and " the electron must be looked upon as a 
simple electric charge devoid of matter." 6 
But what about light? There surely is an enormous 
amount of every day experience to the effect that it too 
is wholly dependent upon bodies; in a word that it is an 
attribute of bodies. True there have been reports 
from time to time of strange, mysterious lights - lights 
not connected with any material body. But such re- 
ports, less frequent now than formerly, have usually 
been based on observations which from the circum- 
stances under which they were made, did not appear 
trustworthy, and have never, I believe, been rigidly 
verified. To some readers it may seem that I am here 
being sarcastic. But assuredly I am not. Whatever 
suggestion of sarcasm there may be inheres in the sit- 
uation and is not put into it by me. According to my 
understanding of nature generally and the sensory and 
mental processes by which we know it, electricity with 
no material support has exactly the same status as has 
light with no material support. Neither one stands 
up under the test of common experience. So I must 
conclude that the few doctors of electricity and the few 
6 The New Physics by M. Lucian Poincare, p. 315. Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
69 
religious ascetics who have originated such ideas have 
both misqueued in some way. It is not alone for the 
physicist but equally for the logician of the natural 
sciences to point out the enormous difference there is 
between the question of how light gets across the inter- 
val between one body and another, and that of the ul- 
timate nature of light. I can go from La Jolla to San 
Diego with my automobile in the same time that the 
steam rail-road trains requires to run between those 
same places; so, taking the journey as a whole, the two 
vehicles have the same velocity. But this does not 
prove that the automobile and the train are the same 
thing, nor does it give any information about many 
matters connected with the journeys. For instance 
it tells nothing about the course followed by each ve- 
hicle, nor anything as to how many more times the 
train stopped on the way than did the automobile. 
The lately revised view's about physical " relativity " 
seem to greatly strengthen my general position. I have 
read a little of the extensive literature that is accu- 
mulating on this subject, and do not fully understand 
most of the experimental evidence and mathematical 
reasoning involved. The psychological and logical 
import of the results seem, however, fairly clear: We 
must accustom ourselves to regarding not only electri- 
city and light, but also time, as attributes of material 
bodies. No bodies, no electricity; no bodies, no light; 
and likewise, as the new discoveries clearly indicate, no 
bodies, no time. But we can not stop here. Kant was 70 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
entirely right in tying space and time inseparably to- 
gether however wide of the mark he came in his way of 
disposing of the pair after he had tied the knot. Ex- 
perimental demonstrations that require us to regard 
time as an attribute of material bodies, will, I am sat- 
isfied also require us to regard space as an attribute of 
material bodies. 
Even yet the end of the road is not reached. No- 
tice that it is not sufficient to say no body, no light, 
and no body, no time. There must always be bodies - 
two at the very least. So the next, and for the logician 
and philosopher, by far the most important step is this: 
No bodies, no reality; or, saying the same thing in an- 
other way, reality itself is an attribute of material 
bodies. 
The problem here raised, momentous not only for 
human intellect but for human conduct, can not be 
grasped by a few minutes' thinking. Nevertheless one 
of its wider bearings I am going to touch upon. Stu- 
dents of philosophy ought to be and many of them un- 
doubtedly are, greatly interested in what men of science 
are doing on the frontiers of the various provinces of 
natural knowledge. Windelband has remarked in the 
brief chapter of his History of Philosophy, " The Phil- 
osophy of the Nineteenth Century," that " the histori- 
cal and natural science modes of viewing the world seem 
to have drawn as near together as is possible without 
a new philosophical Idea that shall grasp them both." 
And he speaks of the " natural-science mode of cogni- Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
71 
tion." 
f VI 
I am not going to call up Philosophy on the tele- 
phone, and inform her that Science has at last dis- 
covered the long sought " Philosophical Idea," the pos- 
session of which will entirely remove the strained rela- 
tions which have existed for a century between the two 
earlier friends. Nor am I going to champion a " nat- 
ural-science mode of cognition " that is wholly unique, 
that has no counterpart in any realm other than that 
known to text-books as natural science. I would, how- 
ever, earnestly suggest not to professional scientists 
alone, but to all who profess to live rationally and ef- 
ficiently, that if they will give attention to the question 
of just what they do in the business of living, and just 
how they proceed in getting information and under- 
standing concerning the various things entering into 
the round of daily life, they will find themselves in 
possession of what may properly be called a philosoph- 
ical Idea that will grasp a very large part of both the 
historical and the natural science " modes of viewing 
the world." 
Some of the most basal constituents of this Idea will 
be found to be not the far-away, hard-to-manage, 
bloodless " postulates," " concepts," " axioms," " cate- 
gories " and the rest, that enter so largely into both 
the Philosophy and Science of the schools. Rather 
some of the simplest, commonest practices and expe- 72 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
riences of every day will be seen to be entitled to places 
of honor far higher than those now given them. Four 
only of these constituents do I mention. 
The first is the fact of recognizing ordinary sense 
objects, and calling them by their accepted names. In 
some of the sciences notably anthropology, zoology, 
botany, geography, geology, mineralogy, and, really, 
chemistry, these vulgar, more or less despised opera- 
tions have been refined until their original character is 
somewhat obscured by the technical terms description, 
definition, and classification. One of the most vital 
things to get hold of is that in all this business the at- 
tributes, or properties, or qualities of bodies are what 
every one is dealing with all the time. 
The second constituent is the fact, recognized more 
clearly by chemistry than by any other science, that all 
the attributes of bodies fall into two great groups, 
namely, those of individuation, or present identification ; 
and those of relation. Attributes of the first group 
are those by which we recognize a body here and now. 
For example, the form, color, size, and weight, etc., of a 
crystal of table salt, a piece of soap, a stick of wood, 
and a human being, are attributes of the first group. 
They have a considerable persistence and serve to in- 
dividuate the bodies. The solubility of the salt, the 
lather-producing power of the soap, the inflammability 
of the wood, and the capacity for romantic love of the 
human being, are attributes of the second group, since 
they are never revealed or operative until the bodies are Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
73 
brought into a particular relation with other bodies. 
The line of separation between the two groups is not 
hard and fast. Such lines never are in natural classifi- 
cation. The grouping is useful, especially in chemistry, 
but is applicable to nearly as great advantage in other 
sciences. For instance if applied carefully and rigor- 
ously in the sciences of human society it would lead to 
the recognition of the fact that philosophical anarchism, 
along with all the truth it contains, contains also the 
deadly mistake of fixing its eyes on man's attributes of 
identification and individuation almost exclusively. At 
the same time it would lead to recognition of the fact 
that philosophical socialism makes the diametrically 
opposite but equally deadly mistake of fixing its eyes 
almost exclusively on man's attributes of relation. 
The third constituent in this idea that might do so 
much for us, is the fact that seemingly no two in- 
dividual bodies ever have quite the same attributes. 
The biological sciences furnish the most striking illus- 
tration of this, the differences or " variations " among 
living beings having become enormously important es- 
pecially since Darwin used them in the foundation of 
his doctrine of natural selection. 
The fourth and last constituent of the Idea to be 
noticed is the incalculable extent to which actual ob- 
servation has proved natural bodies to be composed of 
other natural bodies, and the fact that these composing 
bodies always turn out on close examination to have 
their own attributes just as the composed bodies have. 74 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
Here again the biological sciences illustrate the fact 
perhaps the most strikingly, though geology, miner- 
alogy, and chemistry are almost as instructive. Chem- 
istry is particularly instructive since its " ultimate 
atoms " have been resolved into still smaller bodies, 
though the extreme minuteness of the small particles 
with which it deals, has made it impossible thus far to 
secure very definite observational knowledge of the con- 
stitutive attributes of these bodies. 
It is the fact that we biologists are forever finding 
more and more, and smaller and smaller particles enter- 
ing into the make-up of all the living bodies we know, 
that led me a few years ago to the conception of rela- 
tive, or standardized reality. The point, as I thought 
about it, is this: Surely if there is anything real in this 
world it is a living, healthy, human being. But such 
a being we undoubtedly know by its attributes, and, 
pushing the examination rigorously, in no other way. 
Now when such beings are studied in the way anatomists 
and physiologists study them, they are found to be made 
up of myriads of parts, some placed alongside one an- 
other in regular but complicated fashion, while others 
enter into the composition of other parts; all these 
parts being known to us by their attributes or proper- 
ties just as the original being itself was. In other 
words, I said to myself, every one of these myriads of 
composing parts has exactly the same claim to be 
counted as real as has the living being itself. Con- 
cerning the standardization of reality, " the expres- Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
75 
sion is suggested by the chemist's process in standard- 
izing solutions; the process, that is, of using a solu- 
tion of known composition and concentration as a unit 
of value to which to refer various reactions and proc- 
esses. The meaning is that whatever criterion of real- 
ity you apply to any natural object, that same criterion 
you must apply to all other natural objects, no matter 
whether some of these be constituents of others, or 
stand in some other relation to one another (p. 180)." 7 
According to this conception, one does not need nec- 
essarily to have any views about the ultimate meaning 
of real. All that is essential to the actual student is 
that he recognize that in whatever sense he ascribes 
reality to the living being taken as such, in exactly the 
same sense he must ascribe reality to the smallest ob- 
served or observable particle entering into the make-up 
of that being. 
So we unconsciously adopt for an enormous range 
of our observational experiences, a standard by which 
we estimate the reality of bodies and parts of bodies, 
that standard being the minimum number of the sensible 
attributes of any particular body that will enable any 
observer to recognize the body time after time, and 
will enable other observers to recognize it, it having 
been described, or defined, by observer number one. 
However far the student of nature - of living nature 
at least - pushes his observational inquiries, he finds 
" Life from the Biologist's Standpoint," Pop. Science Monthly, 
August, 1909, pp. 174-190. 76 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
nothing resembling, even remotely, either the ultimate 
Substance of scholastic metaphysics or the ultimate 
Atoms or Electrons of present-day physico-chemical 
metaphysics. And taking the whole situation, observa- 
tional and rational, into account, he becomes convinced 
that he is as likely to find the one as the other since there 
is not the least prospect of finding either. 
The burning question of today is, How far can we go 
in observation, in legitimate inference, and in con- 
trolled imagination ever finding more and more and 
smaller and smaller (or in the opposite direction, larger 
and larger) sensible bodies; bodies, that is, each pos- 
sessed of its own attributes and therefore real according 
to the standard by which so vast a part of the world 
is accepted as real? Every one knows that this is in 
essence a very, very old question. The main advan- 
tage we of today have in connection with it is that we 
can ask it with more definiteness than earlier genera- 
tions could because we have more data on which to base 
the query. 
VII 
This brings me to the last of my main questions about 
things physico-chemical. Exactly what meaning, I 
wish to know, do chemists generally attach to such 
formulations as that it would require an infinite time to 
absolutely purify water of mineral salt dissolved in it; 
and that the " life of a radio-active element is infinite " ? 
Some chemists, I am aware, hold the view that " in- Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
77 
finite " as here used, is an indefinite term signifying 
merely duration reaching beyond anything we can meas- 
ure. So we come to the most basal question of this 
part of our inquiry: If the chemist performs an ex- 
periment, that is, makes an observation, and couples 
with it a mathematical calculation that brings to light 
a series of phenomena to which he finds no limit, on 
what ground can he suppose it does have a limit? 
Surely not on the observations made in that particu- 
lar case. Accordingly if he holds that a termination 
would be found could he go far enough, he throws over- 
board the observations he has made in favor of a priori 
considerations received from some other source. 
It seems clear that some chemists and physicists are 
unwittingly reasoning in a fashion that would if con- 
sistently followed, lay the ax at the very roots of all 
chemistry and physics. For instance I was shocked a 
little time since, by reading in an article on Relativity, 
(excellent for the most part as it seemed to me), that 
the theory of the conservation of energy rests on nega- 
tive evidence I I submit that literally it is scientific 
homicide and suicide combined, to fix attention on the 
absolute form of statement often given to scientific 
hypotheses if the positive evidence on which they rest 
is ignored in favor of the lack of evidence of absolute 
universality, and if such fixing of attention goes so 
far as to lead one to assert that the inductions them- 
selves rest on negation. The idea of the conservation 
of energy is confirmed thousands of times every day 78 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
in practical life as well as in scientific investigation; 
and to say it rests on negative evidence simply because 
it has not been confirmed for all possible cases and for 
all future time, is to reveal lack of perception of the 
nature of any scientific evidence whatever, even of de- 
ductive evidence, finally. 
VIII 
Unquestionably it is very difficult, indeed it is prob- 
ably impossible, to form any kind of a mental picture 
of a succession of bodies growing smaller forever; that 
is, through endless time. However there are several 
reflections that help the situation. Of these the most 
concretely helpful, it seems to me, is that which may 
be drawn from noticing how exceedingly wide in na- 
ture processes run on for a while in a particular, uni- 
form fashion, then, more or less suddenly, undergo a 
quite radical change to another, as it proves, equally 
uniform though quite different fashion. The most fa- 
miliar illustration of what is here referred to is the met- 
amorphoses that occur in so many animals and plants. 
Undoubtedly the butterfly larva does come to an end 
in a sense when it undergoes transformation to the full- 
fledged insect; and the same may justly be said of the 
boy and girl when at the period of adolescence, they 
transform into the man and the woman. The physico- 
chemical realm presents a counterpart of this in the so- 
called critical stage of substances; water changes to 
vapor at a particular point in going up the tempera- Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
79 
ture scale, and to ice at a particular point in going 
down the scale. The now famous phase law of Gibbs 
has, as I understand, to do with phenomena of this 
sort in general, and I should suppose, may be found to 
have still greater importance than it now has, as knowl- 
edge advances in this realm of the apparent endless- 
ness of physico-chemical processes. In such cases as 
those referred to, namely, of the purification of water 
and the emissions of radio-active bodies, analogy would 
lead one to suppose that after the processes go on up 
to some particular point of temperature or degree of 
concentration or pressure,- presto, something else 
happens,- some rather radical change takes place in 
the course of things about which as yet we know 
nothing. 
So all in all, there would appear ample inductive 
ground on which to base a " working hypothesis " that 
the external world, the world of sense, is genuinely infi- 
nite; that is, is endless as to its forms, its causes, its 
powers and its " law and order." This would seem to 
mean that the outer world of sense is the counterpart 
of the inner world of imagination and of mathematics; 
that in whatever direction one may turn in nature for 
a problem, if he take hold of that problem by the imagi- 
natively qualitative and quantitative handles, he will 
find himself needing the infinite series of the geometer 
and the arithmetician. Far more significant for both 
science and philosophy than has yet been widely recog- 
nized is the fact that biologists are being driven, quite 80 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
against the taste and training of some of us, to appeal 
more and more to mathematics. Especially significant 
is the recognition by at least a few biologists that 
mathematics must be invoked as an aid to description? 
To describe a thing is always to make an inventory 
of a few or many of its attributes. Consequently to 
bring in mathematics to aid description is to treat the 
attributes of things quantitatively. In other words 
biologists are finding it necessary to appeal to mathe- 
matics to aid their senses. They have to deal to an 
enormous extent with differences between closely re- 
lated bodies; and these differences are found to grade 
down so fine in many, many cases, as to be not detect- 
able by the unaided senses. Up to this time the micro- 
scope has been the chief help, and there is not the slight- 
est prospect of its ever being displaced, but today we 
are made painfully aware at almost every turn, of the 
limitation of this, our most trusted instrument. In 
scores of places we are getting evidence, some of it dim 
to be sure, but none the less real, of bodies at the very 
limit, even beyond the limit, of vision of the best micro- 
scopes. Some assistance is being obtained from the 
ultramicroscope, but though promising, this instrument 
has not yet been developed far enough to help much 
toward ascertaining many of the attributes of these 
infinitesimal bodies. 
s See for example Raymond Pearl, " Brometric Ideas and Meth- 
ods in Biology, their Significance and Limitations." Scientia, 
Vol. 10, p. 101. Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
81 
While mathematics has not yet been applied with con- 
spicuous success to the solution of problems open to 
attack by the ultramicroscope, it may be applied to a 
vast range of other problems and accomplish exactly 
what a microscope of vastly increased field of vision and 
power of magnification would accomplish. I refer espe- 
cially to problems arising from such familiar biological 
phenomena as growth, where differences fall into regu- 
lar natural series and may be measured in sufficiently 
large numbers and with sufficient accuracy to make 
possible appeal to the principle of the frequency poly- 
gon for discovery and interpretation. The idea, in 
other words, is to deal quantitatively with the phe- 
nomena of the rhythm and periodicity noticed almost 
everywhere in the organic wrorld and which are as es- 
sentially qualitative as they are quantitative. By this 
means a simply enormous range of differences of both 
form and activity may be made visible to the mind's 
eve that otherwise would not be visible to any eye. 
An example of the way this may be done is furnished 
by an investigation lately carried out by Dr. Myrtle 
Johnson and myself.9 
The great question now is, how far may this com- 
bination of mathematics with physical measurement go, 
to the end of seeing things by the mind's eye which 
can not be seen by the physical eye? My suggestion is 
that there is no limit to it; that could the power of our 
9 " The Growth and Differentiation of the Chain of Cyclosalpa 
affinis Chamisso," The Journ. of Morphology, Vol. 22, p. 395. 82 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
minds and of our physical senses be increased without 
limit, that is to infinity, we should find bodies without 
limit either as to number or kind, having sensible attri- 
butes. We should find an infinity of such bodies and 
should see that these and these only constitute what we 
now call the World, or the Universe. 
It appears, as previously remarked, that modern re- 
search taken in those provinces that reach especially 
into the deeper nature of things; in mathematics, in 
physics, in biology, in psychology, and in metaphysics, 
is moving unmistakably toward some such conception. 
That this is so in biology I reaffirm and now expatiate 
upon somewhat further, for the special purpose of em- 
phasizing that I am referring to -factual rather than 
to speculative biology. It is not true that current 
speculative biology is faced this way, but the biological 
philosophy of the day is much at outs with the biologi- 
cal facts of the day. 
When I include psychology as I did just now among 
the sciences which furnish justification for such views, 
I have in mind researches in comparative psychology, 
in the psychology of the senses, in the psychology of 
feeling and emotion, and especially the region of the 
so-called subconscious. It is daily becoming more cer- 
tain that the senses, the feelings, and the emotions es- 
pecially, have powers enormously surpassing what a 
few years ago they were supposed to have. And has 
any one brought forward evidence that the end is being 
reached? Not so far as I know. In metaphysics, I Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
83 
am well aware, some of the most distinguished con- 
temporary work is opposed to the position here 
sketched. But I have come upon a few utterances 
which lead me to think that were I able to go thoroughly 
into the literature of this realm, I should find consider- 
able support for several of my basal contentions. The 
little essay by E. F. Jourdain, entitled " On the Theory 
of the Infinite in Modern Thought," may be mentioned 
as especially suggestive. 
IX 
Without doubt were my standpoint to prevail, its 
influence would reach far beyond the biological realm. 
For example, the death knell of the " ether of space " 
as this has been conceived by a number of physical 
philosophers in late years, would be sounded. So far 
as my knowledge of physics in the formal sense is con- 
cerned, nothing I can say on the ether question is en- 
titled to the least consideration. But if the assump- 
tion is warranted (I have been led by utterances of the 
highest authorities to wonder sometimes if it is war- 
ranted), that the principles of cognition and reason 
are the same in all departments of science, I may prop- 
erly claim a right to be heard on the question in so far 
as that question involves sensible and rational processes 
common to other domains of science and the one in 
which I have spent my life. I would point out that the 
history of biology furnishes at least one case which 
seems entirely parallel when viewed from the epistemo- 84 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
logical standpoint, with that of the conception of an 
immovable imponderable ether. Louis Agassiz was one 
of the most influential opponents of the doctrine of the 
natural origin of organic species, the counter hypothe- 
sis held by him being that species are the thoughts of 
God. Just where was Agassiz's fallacy? Why, in at- 
tributing to Deity the power of thinking sensible ob- 
jects into existence. Species of plants and animals, as 
the biologist actually deals with them, are groups of 
objects separated from one another by their sensible 
qualities, or attributes. With the human species, which 
is the originator, the maker, of all the knowledge we 
have of organic beings, including the systems of classi- 
fication, sensing is one basal attribute and thinking is 
another basal attribute and we have no fully verified 
experience to the effect that either attribute can wholly 
supplant the other. Each exists in its om right as 
well as a supplement to the other. Consequently to 
make an hypothesis that one particular being, namely 
God, accomplishes by one set of his attributes what all 
experience shows to be accomplished only by two sets of 
attributes, is through-and-through self contradictory. 
Such an hypothesis is in reality based on pure fancy or 
pure logic as the case may be, and so has no place in 
experiential science. 
By a parallel course of reasoning we are led to see 
that an hypothesis of an absolutely immovable ether 
is an hypothesis either of pure fancy or of pure logic, 
in this case the latter I suppose. Actual experience Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
85 
has found all bodies motile to some extent. And it 
can not be too strongly emphasized that probably the 
conception of movability has its very deepest roots in 
the movability of man himself; so that an hypothesis 
of absolute immovability of any thing in the universe 
is even more deeply self contradictory than an hypothe- 
sis that would wholly supplant sense by thought, for 
the former would, if rigorously carried out, deny con- 
sciousness itself. So a " theory of knowledge " based 
largely on facts and reflections lying quite within my 
own field of science, makes me very sympathetic with 
those physicists who are inclined to abandon the hy- 
pothesis of a stationary ether as one that " introduces 
more difficulties than it removes." 
Having asked the last of my questions about prob- 
lems in the non-living realm, I return to my own realm 
that of the living, for a " cap to the climax " of the 
somewhat startling list of hypotheses already proposed. 
Three years ago I ventured to write: " Since we know 
absolutely nothing about the relation of the atoms in 
living substance, would it not be a reasonable hypothe- 
sis to say that the nature of that marvelous process 
called metabolism is due to just the fact that the atoms 
of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, etc., are under- 
going perpetual change of valence? " 10 Although 
some of the ideas set forth in the essay containing this 
sentence have been favorably commented upon by sev- 
io Life from the Biologist's Standpoint, p. 185. 86 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
eral biologists, the question here raised has received no 
attention so far as I know. I am now going to state 
the suggestion somewhat differently and adopt it out- 
right as my " working hypothesis " as to the real na- 
ture of the material of which living beings are com- 
posed. 
Accepting the dictionary definition of valency as " a 
single unit of combining capacity," the hypothesis as 
now stated is that the combining units being the small- 
est particles of the various substances that act as units 
in any given compound, the compounds known to us as 
organic, as long as they are actually living have this 
attribute in virtue of the fact that the particles or 
units are perpetually undergoing, at minute intervals, 
dissolutions and re-combinations in slightly different 
form and on somewhat different energy-levels. I avoid 
the terms " atom," " molecule," and " chemical," in 
connection with the terms " substance," " compound," 
and " units," in order to emphasize the fact that al- 
though the hypothesis has chemical implications of a 
very fundamental character, it is not primarily a chemi- 
cal hypothesis.11 Not being a chemist, I would not be 
n Were the statement to be put into chemical language it 
would undoubtedly express the conception that the dissolution and 
recombination of particles is not limited by the atoms of the 
chemistry of a few years ago or even of the electrons or corpuscles 
of the chemistry of today. In other words the hypothesis is one 
of entire freedom from the conception of " ultimate units " either 
of matter or force, taking " ultimate " as usually understood in 
chemistry. Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
87 
so presumptions as to propose a chemical hypothesis. 
My standpoint is that of structural and functional 
biology, and I state my hypothesis in conformity with 
that standpoint. The particles of which I speak are 
composite bodies each with its own attributes, some 
of which are " attributes of individuation " and others, 
" attributes of relation," exactly as the individual plant 
or animal or leaf or bone or cell or nucleus or chromo- 
some each has its own attributes, some of individuation, 
and some of relation. 
If asked why I make this hypothesis - why a biolo- 
gist does so droll a thing as to advance a theory which 
he claims to be primarily morphological and physiologi- 
cal, but which obviously invades the domain of chemis- 
try - my answer must be even droller than the pro- 
posal. I appear to be driven to some such hypothesis 
by my principle of standardized reality. That is, I am 
driven by considerations which are not wholly either 
morphological or chemical, but are partly psychological 
and logical. In other words my standpoint involves an 
hypothesis of knowledge-getting, a " theory of knowl- 
edge," as well as a morphological hypothesis and a 
chemical hypothesis. I am performing the feat of the 
circus rider who rides three horses abreast at the same 
time - only I cannot rest a foot on each outside horse 
and straddle the middle one. I have to distribute my 
weight to all three. The results of my life-work in 
technical zoology is the morphological-physiological 
horse; so I need spend no time in explaining how I rest 88 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
on him. A few sentences further on I shall show how 
I manage the chemical horse. Just here I must add a 
few words to those of similar import found in other 
parts of this essay, setting forth the manner of riding 
the psychological steed. 
Although for several years (five or six) the principle 
of standardization has proved increasingly illuminating 
for my own observing and thinking on all sorts of phe- 
nomena, I have hesitated much about giving it the form 
of universality; that is, about extending it into the re- 
gions of nature lying beyond the reach of our present 
means of sense perception. The chief reason for fal- 
tering has been the haziness of my mind as to just what 
role mathematics plays in discovering and dealing with 
the phenomena of nature. However, in the last three 
years two things have gone far toward clearing away 
the haze. The first of these was my becoming aware 
chiefly through my own researches (particularly those 
on the developing salpa chain prosecuted in collabora- 
tion with Miss Johnson and already mentioned), that 
one of the great offices of the quantitative method ap- 
plied to nature is to enable us to " see by the mind's 
eye " things which are so minute as to be invisible to the 
physical eye. And Pearl's unreserved commitment to 
the conception of biometry as an aid to description, 
greatly strengthened and encouraged my still faltering 
views. The clear implication of all this is that the 
quantitative treatment of phenomena is a means of ex- 
tending and making more exact and truthworthy our Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
89 
knowledge of the qualities, or properties, or attributes 
of natural bodies. 
The second, more recent haze-removing event was my 
becoming acquainted with the demonstration, by Berg- 
son and also by Ladd and Wordworth, of the impossi- 
bility of reducing the qualitative element in sensation to 
an intensive, or quantitative basis, as psycho-physics 
has tried to do. I may remark that the following sen- 
tences by Bergson, expressing as they do the conclu- 
sions to which my own naive methods had led me, seem 
to contain the essential truth touching this matter. 
" The fact is," Bergson writes, " that there is no point 
of contact between the unextended and the extended, 
between quality and quantity. We can interpret the 
one by the other, set up the one as the equivalent of the 
other; but sooner or later, at the beginning or at the 
end, we shall have to recognize the conventional charac- 
ter of the assimilation." 12 
Since the only point with which I am here concerned 
is M. Bergson's contention for the essential uniqueness 
of both the qualitative and the quantitative in sense per- 
ception, nothing in my immediate purpose requires me 
to touch any other aspect of his utterance. However, 
being mindful of the fact that in another wholly dif- 
ferent case, by giving assent to certain views of Berg- 
son, I was supposed to assent to certain other views of 
his which in reality I do not accept, it seems prudent 
to be on guard against possible misunderstanding as to' 
12 Time and Free Will, by H. Bergson, p. 70. 90 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
the extent of my assent in this case also. If I rightly 
understand, and I believe I do, what is implied by the 
assumption in this quotation that the terms " the unex- 
tended " and " quality " are synonymous, just as are 
the terms " the extended " and " quantity," then my 
dissent from the eminent Frenchman at this point is 
elemental and far reaching. But this is no place to go 
into the matter. Suffice it to say that my allegiance 
is to those psychologists, seemingly quite in the minor- 
ity, who uphold the view that " spatial quantity is a 
valid category in psychology," 13 and that, on the 
whole, it is my down-right faith in a science of morphol- 
ogy that largely determines this allegiance. 
X 
I will now show how I manage to rest some of the 
weight of my hypothesis on the chemical horse. Being 
always conscious that my standpoint is not primarily 
that of chemistry, I shall express myself as far as pos- 
sible in language native to structural and functional 
biology, rather than in the distinctive terminology of 
chemistry. My discussion will proceed on the assump- 
tion that the doctrines of the conservation of energy 
and of matter hold strictly with organic beings as they 
do with the rest of nature. These doctrines applied to 
the biological realm mean, according to my under- 
standing, that there is no manifestation whatever of 
is Experimental Psychology and Culture, by G. M. Stratton, 
p. 53. Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
91 
any living being, either of structure or activity, that 
does not have its correlative, measure for measure, in 
the living body and the nutrient materials which that 
body consumes. 
The essence of my contention is this: Living beings 
manifest themselves to us as though they were finding 
in the materials which compose their bodies, and those 
which are taken in by them for nourishment, kinds and 
quantities of energy wholly unknown to the chemistry 
and physics of the inorganic laboratory. Or, stating 
the same proposition in another way, bodies which we 
know as living are those which bring to actuality ener- 
gies latent in natural substances and which can be 
brought to actuality in no other way than by just these 
bodies. Or, again and finally, expressing the concep- 
tion in the irreducible terminology of sense-perceptual 
knowledge, living bodies are bodies in which innumer- 
able attributes of relation of material substances are 
revealed, which attributes cannot be revealed by any 
other means. A complete enumeration of those mani- 
festations of living beings which involve these peculiari- 
ties would necessitate ranging over the entire gamut 
of biological phenomena. All I propose to do is to 
look at a few of them in the fields of nutrition, propa- 
gation, and psychical activity. 
The results of the alimentative processes which we 
call growth and individual development, when regarded 
in the light of the few elements known to work-shop 
chemistry, are so unique both in type and variety, and 92 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
in expansive force exerted in growth, as to compel the 
assumption that the organism " taps " or unlocks en- 
ergy attributes 14 of the elements that are in the great 
majority of cases wholly beyond the reach of laboratory 
chemistry and physics. Undoubtedly many familiar 
kinds of energy, as osmosis, capillary and surface ten- 
sion, and chemical affinity in any of its varieties known 
outside of organisms are in operation and contribute 
importantly to the results ; but it is certainly not merely 
undemonstrable but practically unimaginable how any 
one of these or all of them working together could so 
transform and arrange the particles of a frog's eggs 
and the food particles taken up by a tadpole as to 
produce a full-grown frog. Appeal to heredity for 
help is absolutely useless, for " heredity " is merely the 
term which has been chosen to designate the sum total 
of results of the operation of all these energies, what- 
ever they are. Nor is adaptation of any more avail, 
it having reference solely to the extent to which the 
14 It is obvious from this as it is from words used in several 
other connections, that I reject as inconclusive the contention of 
the " Energeticers " that the " concept of energy plays approxi- 
mately the same role in the physical sciences as the concept of 
thing does in the formal sciences" (Natural Philosophy by W. 
Ostwald, trans, by T. Seltzer, p. 128). I am quite sure that it 
is impossible to make such a hiatus between " energy " and 
" thing," and thus between the " physical sciences " and the " for- 
mal sciences " as is here implied except through a high degree of 
philosophical sophistication. Verified sense experience always 
finds both form and energy fundamentally involved in the concept 
of " thing " as applied to any part of the external world. Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
93 
living being fits in, after it is produced, to its particular 
environment. Heredity and adaptation are alike post 
hoc conceptions relative to the energies we are consider- 
ing. The elan vital, or vital impulsion, of Bergson, 
might in a very general sense, designate these collective 
energies; but the designation would be so general as to 
be of little or no use. Indeed it is doubtful if the mean- 
ing attached to the phrase by Bergson would permit its 
employment for our needs since the " vital impulsion " 
is a universal impulsion which, used in the interest of 
each individual, is adaptation. On the contrary, what 
I am suggesting is not a universal form of energy but 
an exceedingly special - a private form. A form, that 
is, which is revealed as an attribute of relation of the 
carbon and the oxygen and the nitrogen and the other 
food ingredients which formal chemistry regards as 
simple, when these materials are brought into the rela- 
tions peculiar to each individual organism, or even pe- 
culiar to different parts of the same organism. A spe- 
cial formative substance or substances in the sense that 
Sachs and some later biologists have assumed, has no 
place at all in my conception. I see no more need of 
assuming such a substance for organic beings than of 
assuming a special substance in water which gives ice 
crystals their form when water freezes. According to 
my view the problem of why the particles of living ma- 
terial get together as they do to make bodies of the 
shape we see everywhere among plants and animals, is 
a problem of the same class though of vastly greater 94 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
complexity, as that of why the particles of water get 
together to make crystals of the many shapes in which 
ice crystals occur. 
By being problems " of the same class," I mean that 
both problems are the one problem of why the particles 
of living material and why the particles of water have 
the particular attributes they do have. Or stated in 
still more general terms, the two problems are special 
forms of the one problem of why any natural body has 
the attributes it does have. Or, giving the problem a 
form of expression that shows how clearly and un- 
erringly common sense recognizes the folly of striving 
after a " final," and " ultimate " solution of it, it is the 
familiar question, " Why is a cat? " I wish to insist, 
though I can not go into the matter here, that the ques- 
tion, " Why is a cat? " is not mere facetiousness be- 
cause of its obvious unanswerableness, since as a matter 
of fact we actually have already arrived at much of the 
answer to the question, and shall undoubtedly keep on 
finding more of the answer as time goes along. In 
other words, whenever we learn a new fact about a cat, 
no matter how seemingly trivial that fact may be, we 
have advanced by just so much the solution of the 
problem. But it is exceedingly important to be ever 
mindful that judging from all we have so far learned 
about cats and about the nature of our knowledge of 
cats, there is not the slightest prospect of exhausting 
the possibility of more knowledge of cats. 
From the standpoint of chemistry these thoughts Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
95 
about water as the material of ice crystals, and of 
protoplasm as the material of living bodies falls far 
short of meeting the situation, since it does not come 
down to what chemistry holds to be the " ultimate ele- 
ments," the oxygen, the hydrogen, the carbon, the 
phosphorus, and other elements, the first two of which 
make up ice crystals, and all of which make up living 
beings. And it is when the problem is placed on this 
level that it also becomes most interesting to me as a 
biologist, for it is just here that the real test of my 
principle of standardization of reality comes in. If the 
principle holds universally, then, as already indicated, 
either oxygen and hydrogen and nitrogen and carbon 
and the others are not by any means " ultimate ele- 
ments " or they possess attributes about which we 
know nothing excepting as these attributes are revealed 
when the elements are brought together under the rela- 
tions and conditions peculiar to living beings; or, both 
of these possibilities may be true. 
This makes it clear why I am so much interested in 
Professor Richard's effort to show that " atoms " are 
compressible. Personally, I no longer try to think 
about the recondite processes going on in organisms in 
terms of atoms, it being so difficult to overcome the 
sheer habit of a lifetime of involving the word with 
fancies about an " ultimateness " of form, shape, con- 
stitution, and color, common to them all. I do not at- 
tempt to go farther than to think, for each particular 
case, of the particles into which the several constituent 96 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
materials must be divided, as having attributes of re- 
lation that enable them to make bodies of the particular 
shape, color, consistency, activity, of those I am 
actually looking at. 
I go about the matter mentally in some such way as 
the following: Before me on the table is a diamond, 
a glass of fresh soda water, a lump of sugar, a piece 
of butter, and a dish of water containing amoebae. Be- 
ing very curious about the make-up of these I take 
them to my laboratory to examine them with an imag- 
inary new invention, a powerful microscope consisting, 
in principle, of a combination of the ordinary com- 
pound miscroscope with the ultra-microscope. This 
enables me to observe objects smaller by several thou- 
sand diameters than the best ordinary compound micro- 
scope is able to reach. I begin the examination with 
the gas escaping from the soda water. I find in it in- 
numerable bodies, all alike so far as I can see (for my 
new microscope falls a long way short of revealing 
reality in the form of "Ultimate Atoms"), spherical 
in shape, smooth of surface, quite distant from one an- 
other, very active, and each recognizably composed of 
two pieces, the smaller, making one third of the whole, 
having the shape of a spherical pyramid; the larger 
having the shape essential for it to have to make the 
other two-thirds of the sphere. The smaller part I am 
able to recognize as carbon, the larger as oxygen. 
I then put a fragment of the butter under my micro- 
scope and am able to see constituent particles, smaller Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
97 
than those found in the gas, in general somewhat egg- 
shaped but clearly more or less compressible, much 
closer together than those of the gas, and each one 
recognized with difficulty as being composed of four 
different materials, which from information furnished 
by the chemist, I presume to be oxygen, carbon, hydro- 
gen, and nitrogen. Then a bit of the sugar comes in 
for examination. With some difficulty I am able to 
convince myself that there are particles here also, quite 
certainly more or less polyhedral in form, and with 
little or no space between the adjacent ones. The dia- 
mond is then taken up. No particles can be seen, the 
general effect of the optical field being that of finely but 
regularly interrupted light. And finally the amoeba's 
turn comes. Not an intimation of particles of uniform 
size and shape is found here. On the contrary what I 
see has the look of " protoplasm " (with which I was 
familiar from the days of the old Zeiss oil emersion 
lenses) only on a much grander scale in every way. 
There are more particles, of still greater variety as to 
size, shape, color, degree of constancy, and particularly 
as to rate and direction of activity. 
In drawing up such a picture as this I undoubtedly 
lay myself open to the charge of vulgarity and gross- 
ness that was made against John Dalton, when, it was 
said, he talked about the chemical elements as he would 
about the articles making up a shopkeeper's stock of 
goods. But I am perfectly willing, even glad, to be 
called vulgar and gross in the sense that the terms 98 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
would surely imply as thus used; for if the " goods," 
oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and the others as we ac- 
tually know them in our " shops," that is, in our labora- 
tories, possess latent properties which under the proper 
conditions enable them to give rise to such organic 
beings as Aristotle and Dante, Shakespeare, Sir Isaac 
Newton, and Abraham Lincoln, I am unable to see 
where in this world or any other world we should go to 
find any thing which would not have to be marked vul- 
gar and gross. Indeed is it not true that the very 
notions vulgar and gross are generated along with such 
terms of opposite meaning as refined, subtle, exalted, 
magnificent, wonderful, in large measure by the exist- 
ence past and present, of just such beings as those 
mentioned ? 
Here comes, according to the hypothesis I am sup- 
porting, a consideration of the utmost importance: 
If, as we shall see more specifically a little later, living 
beings are such by virtue of the fact that in them there 
comes to actuality, attributes of the constituent mate- 
rials of organisms which never come to actuality in any 
other way, and by virtue of the further fact that in 
them entirely new attributes are all the time coming to 
light, there is not the slightest observational ground 
for supposing, taking the whole universe together, an 
end of such revealing of new attributes will sometime 
be reached.15 
15 In my essay, "The Higher Usefulness of Science," I have 
tried to show in some detail how this idea of regarding the system Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
99 
But some chemist may come forward with the ques- 
tion, " What about all we have proved relative to com- 
bining ratios, constant and multiple, by weight and 
volume? Do you propose to ignore all these discov- 
eries? Would you brush aside thus lightly some of 
the very best achievements of the last hundred and fifty 
years' research in chemistry?" My answer is, "By 
no means do I wish to ignore or treat lightly these 
splendid achievements. On the contrary, had I the 
time, and were this the occasion, I believe I could show 
that the great work of Dalton and Lavoisier and Avo- 
gadro particularly, among the Fathers of modern chem- 
istry furnish some of the most solid stones in the 
foundation of my general standpoint. But," I go on to 
say, " being absolved by the very core of my position 
from any pretension, even any desire, for ' final expla- 
nations ' or ' ultimate solutions,' I am able to admit 
with the greatest frankness that I do not see clearly 
how my conceptions touching the shape of the particles 
of bodies that participate in chemical reactions, are to 
be harmonized or correlated with, for instance, the rule 
of Avogadro; that is with the seeming fact that equal 
volumes of all substances while in the gaseous state con- 
tain under the same conditions of temperature and 
pressure, the same number of particles of these sub- 
stances in their minimal combinations. I have the 
greatest confidence, however, that the advance of knowl- 
of nature as possessing illimitable latent capacities works when 
contemplated from the standpoint of the nature of man. 100 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
edge, particularly in such ways as Professor Richard's 
investigations are advancing it, and in the way psycho- 
logical processes arc involved in the sense-perceptual 
aspect of our ideas of form, will bring more and more 
light into this obscure realm." 
Meanwhile I insist that just as the needs of biology, 
particularly on the side of paleontology, has gradually 
compelled both theology and the sciences of the non- 
living world, to admit the extension of time for the 
organically habitable past of our earth, so is biology 
compelling these two sister realms of human interest 
to admit the existence of physical shapes and energies, 
that is to say, shape-attributes and energy-attributes 
of material bodies, far beyond what either theology or 
non-organic science is able to recognize or is willing to 
allow when each operates by itself. 
XI 
We now proceed with the task of looking even more 
closely at a few of the grounds upon which biology 
makes these demands and recall the fact that we are 
already in the midst of attending to a few of the facts 
of nutrition, or, using the somewhat less familiar but 
more specific term, metabolism. For the rest, we shall 
do well to concentrate attention upon a single aspect 
of the vast problem; namely, that of the shape-specificty 
resulting from the metabolic process. We may state 
the problem in terms at the same time familiar, vivid, 
and strictly accurate, by saying that it is the problem Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
101 
of the individual, or personal result; that is, the chemi- 
cal transformations which the nutriment of individual 
organisms undergoes. 
There is no more significant fruit of recent progress 
in biology than the fact that morphologico-taxonomic 
research is being driven to the conclusion that no two 
individual organisms are quite alike in any particular 
organ or part; and that biochemistry is being driven to 
the conclusion that for every structural difference there 
is a correlated chemical difference. Stating the con- 
clusion in the terminology of chemistry, every indi- 
vidual plant or animal which lives its full life period 
brings with it a certain amount of new chemical sub- 
stance - certain chemical compounds, that is, which 
have never in all time existed before. The working 
chemist who finds himself in the midst of the vast array 
of chemical facts which are forcing such a conception, is 
almost certain to miss the probable significance of the 
facts, and so fail to realize the mighty weight of that 
significance, unless he be keenly alive to the biological 
fact that individual organisms, even those produced by 
non-sexual propagation, are probably never the exact 
counterparts of their parents. Expressed in more gen- 
eral terms this is the idea that evolution probably never 
quite repeats itself. 
For the benefit of those who are not sufficiently ac- 
quainted with what modern chemico-physiological re- 
search has accomplished in these regions to make them 
feel the vast importance of the results, two widely sepa- 102 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
rated fields may be pointed out as particularly impres- 
sive and at the same time accessible to the generally edu- 
cated reader. 
The first, most familiar, is that of what happens to 
the food taken into the body on the synthetic or con- 
structive side of the metabolic process, particularly as 
regards the proteid foods and the construction of the 
proteid materials of the living body itself. Any up- 
to-date text-book of human physiology of the grade of 
fullness needed by medical students, presents the known 
facts and the alternative hypotheses justified by them. 
The point that is likely not to be sufficiently empha- 
sized, and for the purpose for which such books are 
written hardly can be so emphasized, is the specificity, 
the individuality, the personal nature of the materials 
produced. Mr. Simpson and his wife eat exactly the 
same kinds of food, in exactly the same actual and pro- 
portional amounts. Both first reduce the material by 
digestion to a much less complex condition than it was 
in at the beginning; and then from portions of the sim- 
plified material, construct by metabolic processes other 
materials at least as complex as the original, but having 
certain attributes wholly different from any possessed 
by the original; and from other portions, develop en- 
ergies genuinely different from any the original material 
seemed to possess, and so are able to perform work 
genuinely different from any the original energy could 
perform. But this is not all: Mr. Simpson gets ma- 
terial from his part of the food and performs work Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
103 
from it that by no possibility is Mrs. Simpson able to 
get and to perform from her part; and vice versa. Ell- 
ery plant and every animal that has ever existed has, 
like Mr. and Mrs. Simpson, had the capacity for, the 
attribute of gettimg material and work from its food 
that no other individual plant or animal could possibly 
get. I believe all thoughtful biological chemists will 
agree that this statement fairly represents the trend of 
knowledge touching this subject; and it may be doubted 
whether science has in all its history reached a stand- 
point of more momentous significance for human kind. 
(We are expressing here the scientific truth which, ap- 
proached from the side of traditional philosophy, Berg- 
son calls Creative Evolution.) 
The other set of facts which puts the chemical dif- 
ferences between organisms in striking light, comes 
more from medical science than from pure physiology; 
that is, from serum-therapy and phenomena grouped 
closely around it. The kernel of this whole matter is 
the fact that when foreign substances, at least such as 
are injurious, get into the blood of an animal, the or- 
ganism forthwith proceeds to generate some thing that 
tends to destroy, or at any rate to counteract the ef- 
fects of the foreign material. That these newly formed 
anti-bodies, as they are collectively called, are not mere 
conditions of the blood itself, but real bodies, is certain 
from the fact that they can be separated from the 
blood and after separation manifest their character- 
istic ; and in many cases, are quite stable and persistent 104 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
as regards temperature and various other environmen- 
tal influences. For our present purpose the points of 
chief interest about these bodies are (a) the enormous 
number and variety of them that have already been 
observed; (b) their specificity both as to the organisms 
which produce them and as to their adaptive end; and 
(c) the fact that their constitution or individuating 
attributes are so recondite as to have thus far remained 
almost wholly undetermined. 
Concerning their variety and specificity perhaps the 
most significant fact, as seen from the broadly biologi- 
cal standpoint, is that the blood of any given animal 
will, when small quantities of it are injected into the cir- 
culation of many other animals, cause the blood of 
these other animals to produce antibodies that are hos- 
tile to the blood (especially its red corpuscles) of the 
animal whose blood was injected, and that within rather 
narrow limits it is only animals of kinds that are zoo- 
logically close of kin between which the mingling of 
blood can take place without the production of these an- 
tibodies. In other words incontestiblc proof has al- 
ready been furnished that the blood of most species of 
animals is chemically different in some respects from 
the blood of other species. And the important ques- 
tion immediately arises, How far does this go? Bear- 
ing in mind the newness and strangeness and difficulty 
of this field of investigation, and also that thus far ef- 
forts have been confined almost entirely to testing the 
relations between the blood and the tissues of a very Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
105 
few abnormal growths, for example cancer; that the 
great majority of normal tissues have not yet been 
tested from this stand-point, any one widely acquainted 
with biological phenomena, and with the way scien- 
tific knowledge and ideas progress generally, will not 
hesitate to predict that in time the conception will be 
reached traveling from this direction alone, that not 
only all organic species, but all organic individuals are 
through and through different to some extent, chemi- 
cally as well as morphologically and physiologically. 
It will be worth while to notice one other instance, in 
a widely distant quarter, that supports this general 
view. More is probably known about the chemistry of 
the spermatozoon than about that of any other class 
of animal cells. This is so because advantage has been 
taken of the comparative ease with which these cells, 
especially of certain fishes, can be secured for exam- 
ination in large quantities and in " pure cultures." 
One result of such studies is the discovery that while 
the acid radicle of the proteins of the cell nuclei are 
much alike in different groups of fishes, the basic radi- 
cle is different for each genus, at least in the rather 
extended series of fishes studied. Thus the substance 
peculiar to the salmon has been named salmine, that of 
the herring, clupine, and so on. How far this finding of 
new chemical constituents in sperm cells or any other 
class of cells might be carried, regard being had to all 
organic beings, is not known; but according to these 
views the end would never be reached, for at any given 106 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
moment such discovery of new constituents would be 
strictly limited by the imperfection of the experimental 
methods employed. 
The second great group of phenomena, at which we 
are to glance for evidence that living beings are such 
just in virtue of the fact that they are making avail- 
able, or revealing, or bringing to actuality, natural 
shapes and forces that can be reached by no other 
means, is that of propagation. Of the well nigh in- 
numerable aspects of this vast subject, we will look at 
two only; namely that of what is known as " heat " and 
" rut," as seen among mammals and birds especially; 
and that of so-called secondary sexual characteristics, 
again for the most part among higher animals. Any 
one who from his own observation, or the reading of 
works on the natural history of the higher animals, 
becomes acquainted with the changes of many of them 
in shape, structure, and color of various bodily parts, 
and in habits and movements and dispositions, as the 
mating period comes on, can not fail to be impressed 
with the justifiability of my contention that if chem- 
istry is concerned at all in these remarkable phenomena, 
as every one w'ould assume it to be, it must be a chem- 
istry that can be touched only on its outermost fringes 
in chemical laboratory. Take for example such a case 
as that of the American buffalo or that of the Wapiti 
deer. 
Describing the behavior of the buffalo at the " run- 
ning season," Catlin, in his North American Indians Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
107 
writes thus: " It is no uncommon thing at this season, 
at these gatherings, to see several thousands in a mass, 
eddying and wheeling about under a cloud of dust, 
which is raised by the bulls as they are pawing in the 
dirt or engaged in desperate combats, as they con- 
stantly are, plunging and butting at each other in the 
most furious manner. In these scenes, the males are 
continually following the females, and the whole mass 
are in a constant motion; and all bellowing (or ' roar- 
ing ') in deep and hollow sounds which, mingled to- 
gether, seem, at the distance of a mile or two, like the 
noise of distant thunder." And this concerning the 
wapiti during rut, by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt: 
" The necks of the bulls swell and they challenge in- 
cessantly, for unlike the smaller deer they are very 
noisy. . . . The call may be given in a treble or in a 
bass, but usually consists of two or three bars, first 
rising and then falling, followed by a succession of 
grunts. . . . There can be no grander or more attrac- 
tive chorus than the challenging of a number of wapiti 
bulls when two great herds happen to approach one 
another under the moonlight or in the early dawn. The 
pealing notes echo through the dark valleys as if from 
silver bugles, and the air is filled with the wild music. 
. . . The bulls are incessantly challenging and fighting 
one another, and driving around the cows and calves. 
. . . During the rut the erotic manifestations of the 
bull are extraordinary." 
So much by way of illustration of the manifestation 108 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
of great and varied power in connection with the prop- 
agative attribute of organic beings. Glance now at 
the refinement with which this same attribute may mani- 
fest itself. Watch the bodily movement, the facial 
expression, the eagerness of eye, the modulation of 
voice, of a young man, " falling in love " with a young 
woman. And what must be the subtlety of the chemical 
processes that accompany the ecstatic emotion induced 
by mere hand contact between the two young people! 
When one considers in all its aspects and consequences, 
the relation between the sexes, especially in human be- 
ings, is he not compelled to recognize that there is no 
other phenomenon in all the world more marvelous than 
this ? 
In studying the life habits of the California newt 
Diemyctylus torous some fifteen years ago, nothing 
made a more lasting impression on my mind than the 
violent bodily spasm experienced by the male during one 
phase of the amour. It would appear that almost if 
not quite every member and tissue of the whole creature 
must be implicated to some extent in the agitation. 
That the culminating sexual act reaches more pro- 
foundly into the constitution of the organism than can 
be harmonized with such a biological theory as that of 
Weismann concerning the isolation of the " germ 
plasm " from the " somatic plasm," provides for is 
indicated by nearly all the exact knowledge we possess 
of the physiology of reproduction, and of the chem- 
istry of the reproductive elements. Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
109 
Let us now reflect a little on what is before us in 
connection with the male buffalo and wapiti. With 
the questions of why, to what end, the buffalo paws up 
the dirt and bellows " like distant thunder," and as to 
what purpose the wapiti is extraordinarily erotic, 
" drives the calves around," and " fills the air with wild 
music," we are in no wise concerned at present. Our 
problem is, What is the nature of the energy and where 
does it come from, that does all this work? We are 
agreed that in some way the creatures make use of the 
grass and other food they eat, the water they drink, 
and the air they breathe, in performing the work. Here 
are two animals, material objects, or bodies, or mech- 
anisms quite different from each other, and both dif- 
ferent as to kind from any others that have ever 
existed on this planet. At a particular season of the 
year each does certain things peculiar to its kind and 
which it does not do at other seasons of the year. Can 
we avoid concluding that at these times each one must 
have either in its own material makeup, or in the trans- 
formed material it has taken in, energy-yielding mate- 
rials that are unique among all the energy-yielding 
materials known to us in just the proportion that the 
work they perform is unique among all animals and 
among all other things in nature? Certainly grass and 
water and air cannot be made to do these things by 
any other mechanisms we know or seem in the least 
likely to know, much less to be able to construct in our 
laboratories and manufacturing establishments. To 110 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
repeat what I have said in substance several times be- 
fore, these two objects we call living just because they 
have the attribute of getting work out of grass and 
water and air that there is no possibility of getting 
from these materials in any other way, and which we 
could not by any possibility imagine to be latent in 
grass and water and air except for these objects. 
Two points only do I wish to make in connection with 
secondary sexual characters. The first is that the 
undoubted trend of investigation into the differences be- 
tween the two sexes, among the higher animals at least, 
is toward demonstration that these differences extend to 
every important structural feature and activity of the 
organisms. Otherwise expressed, the conception to 
which we are being led is that " secondary sexual char- 
acters " pertain not merely to a few organs and func- 
tions, as for instance stature, extent of hairiness, and 
voice in man, but to almost every structural and func- 
tional aspect. It is impossible to give details here. 
Suffice it to say that the evidence is coming from sev- 
eral distinct sources among which perhaps the most 
important are physical anthropology, psychology, (es- 
pecially as applied to problems of education) and va- 
rious departments of medicine. No one has done bet- 
ter service in bringing together and sifting informa- 
tion in this field than Havelock Ellis, his work Man and 
Woman being most directly to the purpose. 
The question of prime importance is, how widely 
and deeply into the constitution of the two sexes do Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
111 
these differences penetrate? Do they really extend 
to every part and activity; and do they reach clear 
down to the chemical composition of the organisms? 
I believe the reflectively conservative reply must be that 
probably the differences do reach that far. The other 
point to be touched upon is that of the physiological 
cause of secondary sexual characters. A great amount 
of evidence is at hand to the effect that especially in the 
male those parts of the body which exhibit sex struc- 
tures which are no part of the reproductive system, are 
still very intimately correlated with that system in some 
way. The familiar effects of castration illustrate this 
sufficiently for our present needs. The ordinary work 
ox and gelding are quite different from the bull and 
stallion. There is a rapidly growing mass of evidence 
that these correlations are partly due to internal se- 
cretions produced by the sex glands themselves. " In- 
ternal secretions," it may be remarked, are secretions 
that are elaborated by some gland or tissue and dis- 
charged into the blood or lymph instead of out upon 
the surface of the body or into some cavity like the 
digestive. 
While it is certain that these secretions from the sex 
glands do not account in all cases for the growth of the 
secondary sex structures, it is certain that in very 
many other cases, particularly among mammals and 
birds, they are largely responsible for such struc- 
tures. Before going farther it will be well to see in a 
particular case how these internal secretions work since 112 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
they appear to be of very great importance for adjust- 
ing the various parts of the organism to one another, 
that is, in securing and maintaining the proper unity 
and balance of the organism. Highly significant and 
interesting is the fact that this chemical method of ac- 
complishing for the organism what was formerly sup- 
posed to be one of the main prerogatives of the nervous 
system, particularly the " sympathetic " system, has 
been found so important in the economy of the organ- 
ism, that a special name, hormones, has been given to the 
substances concerned, the word chosen meaning an 
exciter, or arouser. 
The example I select though not relating primarily 
to secondary sexual structures illustrates the principle 
under consideration so strikingly, and is so important 
in another aspect of the reproductive process that I 
have not hesitated to make use of it. It has reference 
to the fixation of the ovum on the uterine wall after im- 
pregnation has taken place. Stated in briefest terms 
the case is this: Although the ovary is widely and very 
sharply separated, anatomically, from the uterus, and 
especially from its internal surface so that the ovum 
must travel a considerable distance after being dis- 
charged from the ovary, the ovary still plays an es- 
sential part in the later development of the ovum. This 
part consists in the ovary's participation, seemingly 
through an internal secretion, in the implantation of the 
ovum upon the epithelium of the wall of the uterus. 
There is a good deal of evidence though perhaps not Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
113 
enough to make the point certain, that the so-called 
corpus luteum of the ovum is the gland that produces 
this secretion. 
To the extent that internal secretions are the cause 
of the development of secondary sexual structures, our 
present interest in the phenomena leads us to ask two 
questions: What is the nature of these secretions, 
and how are they produced originally? In reply to the 
first question, information about the attributes of in- 
dividuation of the substances is exceedingly meager and 
dubious. A variously crystallizable, difficultly soluble 
body called spermine has been prepared from the testis. 
This is believed by a few chemists to be the " active 
principle " of the extract of testis which attained no- 
toriety a few years ago as a new " fountain of youth," 
and with which the name of the distinguished physiolo- 
gist Brown-Sequard was unpleasantly connected. Al- 
most all that is known about the substance is through 
observation in living animals on the effect of removing, 
grafting, and transplanting the sex glands and other 
sexual parts; and on disease of these members. In 
other words what knowledge we possess of these bodies 
is almost entirely of their attributes of relation. 
The reply so far as it can be made to the second 
query, that as to the origin of the bodies, is more in- 
teresting still. They are made, originally and ulti- 
mately, by the living organism, each species and each 
individual making a substance for itself that in all 
probability has some thing in common with, and some- 114 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
thing different from, the corresponding substances of 
other species and individuals. Here again we catch a 
glimpse of the fact, as we did in connection with the 
antibodies of the blood, that living bodies are not only 
manufacturers but are originators, even original orig- 
inators, of new chemical substances. 
XII 
With this we may turn to the last of the three ac- 
tivities of living bodies, namely the psychical, at which 
we proposed to look for the purpose of seeing the 
uniqueness both as to quality and quantity of the en- 
ergies such bodies possess and the work they do. We 
saw that the propagative attribute of the buffalo and 
the wapiti enable the males of those species to convert 
some of the energy latent in grass, air, and water, into 
remarkable kinds of work. But the marvelousness of 
the transformation of energy there presented sinks to 
the level of the commonplace beside the transformations 
we are now to consider. 
What happens when men take food and make good 
use of it? The marvel begins not merely the instant 
food is taken into the mouth but somewhat earlier. 
Everybody knows that through the intermediation of 
the sights and odors of the dinner table the digestive 
machinery makes ready for the meal. No one need be 
told about the " watering of the mouth," upon occa- 
sion when food comes in sight. Nowhere is the trust- 
worthiness of common sense, when sense is at its best, Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
115 
more fully demonstrated than right here; for common 
sense and uncommon sense, or science, confirm and sup- 
plement each other in the most complete and interesting 
way. 
It has been long known that sights and odors deter- 
mine to some degree not only the quantity but the qual- 
ity of the digestive secretions. But not until recent 
years has the great extent of this influence been recog- 
nized. The Russian physiologist Pawlow and his col- 
leagues have opened up for tillage a new, large, and 
very desirable tract lying between and contiguous to 
the two realms of physiology and psychology. I am 
referring to what are called by Pawlow " physchoi- 
cal secretions." The facts briefly stated are these: 
When the ducts of the digestive glands, the salivaries 
for instance, are so manipulated in the living, normal 
dog that the secretion can be watched as it flows, col- 
lected, and studied quantitatively and qualitatively, it 
is found that many stimulations as of sight, sound, and 
smell, have very definite though different effects on the 
secretion produced even when no food substance is 
present, providing the stimulations have previously 
been associated with the animal's food-taking. In a 
word the phenomena observed, that is, the sort of ex- 
traneous influences or activities that will be effective 
as stimuli, and the sort of results that will ensue in 
the way of responses, are largely dependent not only 
on the fact that the object under examination is living, 
but on the further fact that it possesses that peculiar 116 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
attribute which we call consciousness. " Sounds which 
differ from one another very little in pitch (the quality 
and intensity remaining constant) may become the 
stimuli for the secretion of saliva of different degrees 
of viscidity; some cause the flow of liquid saliva ; others, 
of viscid saliva." 16 
Pawlow himself seems to be averse to giving his re- 
sults any particular psychological significance. At 
any rate his practical interest in them is that of the 
physiologist. He lays stress on the fact that the stu- 
dent occupied with such investigations must form opin- 
ions that are " objective only." There can be no doubt 
about the importance of maintaining the objective 
standpoint while observations on natural phenomena 
like these or for that matter any others, are being 
made. Nor do I see any reason why this is more in- 
cumbent on the physiologist than on the psychologist or 
any one else. However the equal importance of the 
other side, the subjective, for anything like satisfactory 
knowledge on a more highly synthetic level is obvious. 
To the experimenter who is studying the effects on a 
dog of various of the forces in nature as these are 
manifested by the saliva produced, the objective point 
of view is wholly essential to sound conclusions, and 
may be all that the investigator chooses to be interested 
in. But surely the dog himself, had he somewhat more 
is " The Method of Pawlow in Animal Psychology," by R. M. 
Yerkes and Sergius Morgulis, Psychological Bulletin, Aug. 15, 
1909. Belief in the Inflnit y of Nature 
117 
intelligence and a language in which to express himself, 
would be interested in his part of the proceeding as well. 
He would want to know what goes on inside his make-up 
when the waves called sound hit upon his ear drums, 
that should cause his salivary glands to produce a 
fluid more or less viscid depending on differences in 
the pitch of the tones. Further he would want to know 
how the whole affair stands in relation to his own 
strength and health and comfort and happiness; and 
most of all, probably, he would be interested in the 
question of how far his desires and efforts of mind and 
his effective will, brought to bear either indirectly or 
directly, could modify the quantity or quality, or both, 
of the secretions. 
In other words the designation " psychical secre- 
tions," is well chosen and there would seem to be no 
scientifically possible way of preventing the methods 
introduced by Pawlow from running their natural 
course and revealing the exceedingly important impli- 
cations contained in the idea, as well for the psycholog- 
ical as for the physiological realm. The minds of men 
and at least the higher animals play a large and funda- 
mental part in such preeminently physiological and 
chemical work of the body as that of secretion, and the 
facts can not be made otherwise by applying to them 
such terms as salivary reflex paths, inhibitions, and so 
on, however useful these expressions may be for de- 
scriptive purposes. 
Nor do I see any great theoretical objection to speak- 118 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
ing of the organisms that exhibit these phenomena as 
mechanisms or machines. What I would insist on is 
that if we hold it desirable to call living bodies ma- 
chines we shall not allow the name to make us oblivious 
of the unique and remarkable work such machines do as 
contrasted with that performed by any machine de- 
vised by man's inventive genius and constructed by his 
hands. It seems to me the question of whether or not 
living beings should be regarded as machines is pri- 
marily a question of description and classification, that 
is, a taxonomic question. The classifier's problem al- 
ways contains, as a basal element, the question, How 
many attributes-in-common and how many not-in-com- 
mon, do the objects under consideration possess? If 
they have several common attributes, especially such as 
are of high importance to the existence of the object, 
these objects may justifiably be put together in a group 
of one grade or another. There can be no doubt that 
a dog and an automobile, for instance, have a consid- 
erable number of common attributes. Both have four 
locomotor appendages, both are able to go over the 
ground at a high rate of speed; and, above all, both are 
able to use for locomotor purposes the energy stored 
up in certain extraneous material which might in both 
cases be called their food. But for scientific purposes 
the differentiating attributes are so much more numer- 
ous and striking and fundamental, that putting the ob- 
jects together in one class, called machine, has very 
little value - less value by a good deal, than would be Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
119 
a class that should include stern-wheel steamboats and 
wheelbarrows. 
It is undoubtedly convenient in both ordinary and 
scientific language to speak of the mechanism of the 
human body or of some part or activity of it, and there 
cannot be the least objection to doing this. But to 
make the resemblances between the bodies of men and 
other animals, and artificially manufactured objects 
called machines, the basis of a mechanistic theory of 
living objects, has less scientific justification than would 
a wheel-barrowistic theory of steamships. 
XIII 
As already indicated, in no other particular, prob- 
ably, do living beings and manufactured machines re- 
semble each other so much as in the ability both have of 
getting work out of their own structural arrangements 
and out of materials entirely foreign to them. It is 
just here also that the most remarkable differences are 
found between them. We have considered one peculiar- 
ity of living beings on one of the lowest levels of the 
psychic attributes of higher animals. Let us consider 
for a moment the difference between living and non- 
living bodies when compared on the basis of the highest 
levels of the psychic attributes. Compare for example 
Richard Wagner and an automatic piano run by an 
electric motor especially constructed and adjusted for 
the purpose. Let us start the piano going on, say, a 
good " record " of the overture of Tannhauser. While 120 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
listening to the impressive strains of the main theme let 
us reflect on the problems of work and origination that 
are before us. The mechanical player converts the 
energy of electricity, itself generated by, perhaps, some 
waterfall in the mountains, into a combination of sounds 
most agreeable to the listener. The whole operation 
is certainly very wonderful. The piece of music is 
undoubtedly being produced by work. An origination 
of a sort - an imitative origination - is taking place. 
Now turn in thought to Wagner himself, the com- 
poser of Tannhauser. Compare the producing, the 
originating, the work, he did with what is done by the 
music machine! Let the whole situation, not only its 
scientific but as well its esthetic and emotional aspect 
permeate you freely and fully, and see if you find any 
inclination to call Wagner a machine; to speak of him 
as " nothing but " an aggregation and conformation 
of material parts not essentially different from ag- 
gregations and conformations of such parts well known 
to our laboratory methods. My main point has been 
so often stated that to repeat it may seem superfluous 
even tiresome. We assert of Wagner that he was a 
living object just because he was able to do work unique 
in all the universe, on the energy stored up in his food, 
and by his particular body structure. The extent of 
that uniqueness as compared with the uniqueness of the 
transformations of energy by other musical composers 
is the measure of Wagner's genius. 
It seems that bewilderment with reference to the mo- Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
121 
mentous problems being touched upon, is to a consid- 
erable extent due to the meaning attached to the term 
" work." Many chemists and physicists seem to have 
been led by their laudible desire to pin all physico- 
chemical conceptions down to something quantitatively 
precise, to consider the application of the word 
" work " to such phenomena as those of organic devel- 
opment and artistic or intellectual achievement as un- 
justifiable. " Anthropomorphic " is the opprobrious 
adjective which has been much used to designate this 
supposed misuse of the term. But, I ask, where did the 
idea of work come from in the first place if not from 
the fact that man himself could act, that is work? 
Undoubtedly the tendency of human beings to an- 
thropomorphize and personify inanimate objects is 
exceedingly strong and has done much harm, especially 
in the remoter past. Undoubtedly, too, one of the 
greatest services of physical science has been in coun- 
teracting, checking, and guiding, this tendency. But I 
insist that when physical science pushes its objective 
methods not only of observing but of theorizing to 
the extent of questioning the validity of any subjec- 
tivity at all, that is, of the reality of the most developed 
psychic attributes of living beings, it is undermining 
one of the very corner stones of science itself, and so is 
committed to a course not a whit less destructive than 
is the unbridled tendency to personification. We touch 
here on an exceedingly important chapter in the history 
of the human race, but can not now halt to notice more 122 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
than a single paragraph of it. 
Exactly how Wagner managed to get such wonder- 
ful work out of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, 
phosphorus, and so on, is undoubtedly one of the great- 
est, most pressing problems biochemistry now has on 
its hands. Were I an investigator in this field I should 
surely attack the problem on the hypothesis that the 
living being has some method, probably several methods 
of " tapping " the stores of energy latent in these ma- 
terials far more independent of the oxydative processes, 
at least as these are known to present day laboratories, 
than is usually assumed. As one possibility, take the 
relation of carbon and nitrogen, this question having 
received much attention by some chemists. Since we 
actually do have such energy manifestations as that 
of imagination, let us say, but have not, so far as I 
know, any ground for supposing oxygen more essential 
than is either carbon or nitrogen or hydrogen for this 
form of psychic work, why is it not as justifiable to 
conceive either carbon-energy or nitrogen-energy or a 
combination of the two to be specific for imagination as 
to suppose oxygen to be? My point is that given such 
vast and remarkable kinds of activity as we have in 
the psychic life of higher animals, why should not the 
chemist avail himself of many rather than a compara- 
tively few possible suppositions as to the source of the 
energy for these activities? But I do not wish to ap- 
pear in the role of a chemical speculator. My desire 
is to go just as far in this direction as the positive data Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
123 
of the natural history of man leads the naturalist who 
believes strongly that a much closer interdependence 
exists between conscious psychic life and the metabolic 
processes of the organism than biochemistry has yet 
discovered. 
XIV 
Standing by my position as a student of living be- 
ings taken as wholes as well as in detail, that is, taken 
on the basis of all their attributes with which I am ac- 
quainted, these psychic attributes in particular compel 
me to ask the question: having committed myself with- 
out qualification to the idea of conservation of energy, 
where are the limits to the ability such beings have of 
transforming the energies of oxygen, carbon, nitro- 
gen, and the rest into psychical activities, or work? 
Reasoning, so far as I am able, in the same general man- 
ner in which I have reasoned all my life on all sorts of 
matters easy and difficult, I see no escape from the con- 
clusion that there is no limit in an absolute sense. By 
way of illustration, making a combination of memory, 
thought, and imagination, I seem able to take in a 
strictly limitless universe. In the first place by making 
use of what I can myself see and what the astronomers 
and physicists tell us, I can go to the limits of the 
observed portions of the universe, and then by an act 
in which imagination and resolution or will, seem to be 
the chief factors, I say to myself, " If there is anything 
anywhere beyond these confines which is even possibly 124 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
cognizable by the senses, I will take them in too." So 
I seem to have performed a piece of work that has an 
aspect of special infinitude about it. Did I perform 
that work on energy latent in carbon, nitrogen, oxy- 
gen, and the rest? Any answer must be hypothetical. 
Having regard for all science now knows about the de- 
pendence of work on material, how can my hypothetical 
answer escape being affirmative? Then if I make any 
hypothesis as to the energy capacities of the chemical 
elements involved, how escape the hypothesis that these 
capacities are unlimited; that is, are infinite? 17 
The psychic activities of men, particularly the imagi- 
nation and the emotions, reveal the fact that carbon, 
oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and the others, are infinite 
as to their attributes of relation, exactly as water re- 
veals a few attributes of relation of oxygen and hydro- 
gen, and as table salt reveals a few attributes of rela- 
tion of sodium and chlorine. That is the way of stat- 
ing the chemical aspect of my central conception of 
organic beings. But what under the sun, some one is 
sure to ask, is the meaning of infinite as applied in 
this way to these familiar substances? Simply, I re- 
ply, that we have experiential evidence of their pos- 
sessing a vast amount and variety of energy, and no 
ground whatever excepting the limitations of our mo- 
mentary laboratory information about the substances, 
it These sentences, written six years ago, ought to be compared 
with the central hypothesis of my organismal theory of conscious- 
ness, presented in the last chapter of the Unity of the Organisms. 
Wherein I now consider the hypothesis here suggested as lacking 
definiteness will be seen by such comparison. Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
125 
that the number and measure of their energies is lim- 
ited. 
Those who have difficulty with the conceptions of 
infinite as applied to nature, I would urge to reflect 
that whatever theory of the Infinite one may hold, an 
essential element in that theory must be that infinite 
and finite are antithetic terms; that one necessarily 
implies the other. If he is convinced, as I am, that 
sense experience, that is, objectivity is ultimate to all 
knowledge no less than is mind or subjective expe- 
rience, then by thinking the matter over he will see 
that since experiential knowledge knows no such thing 
as the absolute annihilation of material bodies, but only 
their transformation into other bodies, he has precisely 
the same foothold for imagining or conceiving infinity 
that he has for imagining or conceiving finity in an 
ultimate sense. Indeed finity in an ultimate sense seems 
to be itself a sort of infinity, a sort of negative infinity. 
The absolute negation of something is no easier to man- 
age than the absolute extension of something. Conse- 
quently whether he accepts the one or the other as more 
difficult or more easy is largely a matter of custom, or 
habit. And he will see further that he can accustom 
himself to accepting both just as well as he can accept 
one to the exclusion of the other. Habit undoubtedly 
cuts an enormous figure in our thinking just as in every- 
thing else we do. 126 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
XV 
I bring the series of questions and reflections to a 
close with a few remarks on the relation of my general 
standpoint to materialism and vitalism. 
The asumption appears to be well nigh universal 
among present day biologists that the classification of 
themselves into Vitalists, and Materialists or Mechan- 
ists, exhausts the possibilities of classification as re- 
gards the views they hold touching the largest biological 
problems. A little consideration ought to convince 
any one that this assumption is unwarranted. I call 
attention to the circumstance that much of current 
discussion in this field uses the terms mechanistic and 
materialistic as though they were synonomous. But 
is this really so? How can it be? Machine from which 
mechanistic is derived is certainly very different from 
matter from which materialist comes. Obviously there 
is something of vagueness in the foundation terms on 
which this classification rests; and doubtless biologists 
have more reason than any other group of scientific 
men to be mindful that any classification is more or less 
unsatisfactory unless there be at least a provisional 
agreement as to the meaning of the basal words em- 
ployed. And recent discussions have particularly em- 
phasized the fact that the term 'vitalism is not in better 
case as to definition than is materialism. 
These remarks have the sole purpose of justifying 
what is obviously implied throughout this discussion; Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
127 
namely that from my standpoint the effort to classify 
biologists on this basis is, for all practical ends, futile 
and ought to be abandoned. Was William Harvey a 
mechanist or a vitalist? Probably no biologist has 
done more to advance the understanding of the animal 
organism as a mechanism than he, and this whether his 
methods of work or the results reached be considered. 
Yet unquestionably, judged by numerous of his utter- 
ances he would have to be classed as a vitalist. This 
statement would need but little change to make it apply 
equally to Cuvier, Sir Richard Owen and Pasteur. 
Were Dubois Raymond and Thomas Huxley mate- 
rialists or vitalists ? Surely no one would question that 
practically both these men were biological mechanists 
or materialists of splendid sort, yet as for Huxley at 
least, no biologist has shown with greater force and 
clearness the inadequacy, not to say the shallowness of 
both vitalism and materialism as philosophical doc- 
trines. These two distinguished biologists chose to 
classify themselves as agnostics rather than as either 
materialists or vitalists, and I do not see how we can 
avoid accepting their disposition of themselves as be- 
ing quite as philosophical or scientific or useful as 
would have been their classing themselves as either vi- 
talists or materialists. 
Professor W. K. Brooks would have to be classed as 
a biological idealist or subjectivist. Professor Haeckel 
while over-well accoutered and standing at attention 
against vitalism, still seems to wish to be known as a 128 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
monist rather than as a materialist when it comes to 
philosophizing on a large scale. If, therefore, I make 
myself an outcast so far as present day philosophical 
biology is concerned by refusing to be classified as 
either a mechanist or a vitalist, and by declaring that 
my standpoint traverses both mechanism and vitalism 
as I understand these, I certainly shall not be alone, 
regard being had to earlier as well as contemporaneous 
biologists. The fact is as both history and contem- 
porary practice clearly show, the moment a man of sci- 
ence, no matter in what department, makes a serious ef- 
fort at philosophizing, he finds it impossible to remain 
within the bounds of his specialized province. He can- 
not be much of a philosopher and be a shop philosopher. 
Vitalism is particularly objectionable as a philosophical 
label because of its shoppishness. Vitalism held to 
strictly as a philosophy, would not allow anybody not a 
professional biologist to be a philosopher. And in so 
far as mechanism succeeds in pairing itself off with 
vitalism it is open to the same objection. But being 
desirous of establishing a modus vivendi with both ma- 
terialism and vitalism I must state, briefly as possible, 
my attitude toward them. 
The severest indictment against them according to 
my view, is that they are both Absolutist or Finalist 
at heart. There is almost no choice to my mind be- 
tween absolutism which takes such occult, or as I have 
elsewhere called it, animistic form as psychoids and 
entelechics, and absolutism in such talismanic or magic Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
129 
form as has lately been bestowed on chromosomes, cer- 
tain obscure chemical substances like enzymes, and the 
like. It is more than anything else the desire to find 
some way of escape from the tyranny of this two-faced 
neo-Absolutism that led me to the conception of stand- 
ardized reality. The attentive reader will see that this 
principle does not compel me to deny absolute reality. 
On the contrary it leaves me free to hold very positive 
convictions that there is such reality. What it does 
is to establish for me a system of ratios, of relative 
values among the myriads of realities with which we 
deal. Almost at every turn, not only in science but 
in practical life, about the most subtly potent evil is 
lack of proportionality in the way things are prized. 
Confining attention to the realm of science, the indict- 
ment against mechanism and vitalism gets its particular 
severity from being practical and scientific more than 
from being theoretical and metaphysical. The more 
I read the writings of and converse with professed 
vitalists and professed materialists, the more am I im- 
pressed with the fact that their general attitude of 
mind makes scores upon scores of the commonest, often 
most highly significant facts about plants and animals, 
seem to them meaningless and uninteresting. So cer- 
tain are they that many great groups of phenomena 
are already " explained," or " cleared up " by discov- 
eries made years or decades ago; and so confident are 
they that certain phenomena upon which they happen 
to be occupied, presently will be cleared up, that they 130 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
work away with the greatest ardor and absorption, all 
the while actually though unconsciously picking out 
certain facts that seem agreeable to their theoretical 
views and discarding others that do not seem so. Be- 
ing certain that things are fully explained when in 
truth they are only partly explained, many of the 
larger discoveries and generalizations made by these 
students have the misfortune of appearing startlingly 
true until their startlingness is taken away by the la- 
bors of more critical students. I do not believe a man 
of science has ever lived or ever will live capable of dis- 
covering every few months real truths of nature so dif- 
ferent from those already known as to be sensational. 
It would be foreign to my present aims to dwell on 
this matter so vitally important to the health and prog- 
ress of science. A number of writers have touched upon 
it lately, as I have on several other occasions. I only 
refer to it now as one of the foremost reasons why ma- 
terialism and vitalism as philosophical standpoints are 
intolerable to me. Some years ago I supposed I must 
accept either one or the other and accordingly made 
brave efforts to do so. As I look back I see clearly that 
just so far as my efforts succeeded, my hands were 
shackled, my eyes were dimmed, my imagination was 
cramped, and my sympathies and interests were dead- 
ened. Both standpoints, taken as philosophies are to 
me forms of intellectual and spiritual bondage. 
But - and the other face of the shield is far more 
pleasing - great quantities of the raw material out of Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
131 
which mechanism builds itself, and out of which vitalism 
builds itself, I find very, very useful for the construction 
of my own philosophy. At such times as I seem most 
efficient and worth while in my particular sphere of ac- 
tivity ; at such times, that is, as I am most satisfactory 
to myself, the friendliness, the beauty, and the orderly 
vastness of nature grip me in a way that I can but im- 
perfectly express. The bit of earth upon which I 
press my feet here and now and the larger earth that 
yields me food and drink, this ocean with its relentless 
power when goaded by winter storms, and with its 
heavenly peace and calm in its middle stretches under 
the summer's tropical sun, the blue sky, the approach- 
ing night, and the night and the morning, the sun, the 
stars, the milky way, the grass, the trees, my animal 
companions, the wild birds, the barn-yard fowls, my 
dogs, the cattle, the horse, and above all my human 
friends, my colleagues in work, and my family - all 
these have for me a reality that no disorder or dimness 
of mind (unless indeed, these go to the point of swoon 
or delirium) or no speculative sophistication can strip 
them of. 
A Twoiz-istic, that is, an all-in-one-great " law of sub- 
stance " philosophy may suffice for some persons and 
may be of some use to all persons, but as for me, I must 
have as well a law of day, another law of water, another 
of stars, another of jelly fishes, another of seaweeds, 
another of pelicans, another of men, and so on ad in- 
finitum - yes, indeed ad infinitum. I have no dread of, 132 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
because no belief in, a chaos of laws even though the 
number of them be limitless. And I have no belief in, 
because I have no personal experience nor any satisfac- 
torily verified testimony of, laws " without material 
support." 
The discovery, as a junior college student, that, be- 
ginning with a well purified and accurately weighed 
chemical compound I could get it all back after putting 
it through various pulverizings, and dissolvings, and 
cookings, and precipitatings, and desiccatings, was 
seed sown in my mind that promptly germinated and 
has grown apace to this moment. The fact, in other 
words, of the conservation of matter and energy in the 
few instances in which I tested it with quantitative 
accuracy, I have never for an instant held to be " neg- 
ative evidence." The radicalness of the empiricism and 
the thoroughgoingness of the pluralism implied in all 
this will be recognized I hope, by readers familial' with 
the various kinds of formal philosophy. 
When this is said only half the truth is told. Noth- 
ing is more certain than that all the infinite number of 
sensible or external realities simply would not exist for 
me, but for that form of reality known as consciousness 
or subjectivity and which in the aggregate I name my 
psychic or spiritual life. Nor do I see any more reason 
for refusing to accept as real every attribute or piece 
of an attribute of my spiritual life, as for instance, 
the attribute of emotion, than for refusing to accept as 
real the attribute of stature or complexion. I men- Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
133 
tion emotion because so famous a biologist as Ernst 
Haeckel has coupled it with revelation and declared it 
to be a "dangerous error." He writes: "Yet the 
opinion still obtains in many quarters that, besides our 
godlike reason, we have two further (and even surer) 
methods of receiving knowledge - emotion and revela- 
tion. We must at once dispose of this dangerous 
error. Emotion has nothing whatever to do with the 
attainment of truth." 18 As to whether emotion is an 
error and has " nothing whatever to do with the attain- 
ment of truth " in Professor Haeckel's personal expe- 
rience, I have nothing more to remark than that if he 
asserts such to be the case I accept his word. But I 
can say with great positiveness that if true, his expe- 
rience is quite different from mine. And I call atten- 
tion to this further item: If he does not accept my 
testimony with the same unreservedness that I do his, 
he is placed in the somewhat embarrassing position of 
having to contend either that I do not know whereof I 
testify, or that I tell a willful untruth, or that all my 
striving after truth has been a failure. 
This case, selected almost at random from thousands 
scattered through the pages of scores of writers earlier 
and later, is illustrative and fundamental. Professor 
Haeckel does not mean seemingly that there is no such 
thing as emotion. He is too much of a German to 
stand for any such heresy as that. What he means, 
as we know from more detailed statements about emo- 
is The Riddle of the Universe, translated by Joseph McCabe. 134 
« The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
tion in other connections, is that it can be explained 
by reducing it to other things more elemental, as for 
example, reflex action and presentation, attraction and 
repulsion, and so on; and that, being less " godlike " 
than reason (according to his view) it stands in a 
wholly different relation to truth from what reason 
does; in other words that emotion is less exalted, less 
real in relation to truth than is reason. This is just 
what I deny, not only on grounds of personal experience 
but of observation and reflection on the workings of 
both emotion and reason. I say that no matter into 
how many or what elements either morphological or 
physical or psychological you reduce emotion, emotion 
is still just itself and nothing else exactly as water is 
itself and nothing else, even though the chemist can 
get oxygen and hydrogen out of it by destroying it. 
To set reason and emotion over against each other 
in that way is entirely like setting, for instance, oranges 
and old fashioned cannon shot over against each other. 
An orange and such a shot have some attributes-in- 
common; but at the same time they have many not in 
common, so there is no possibility of " reducing " one 
to the other in the economy of either nature or man. 
We come again upon the all-pervasive problem of de- 
scribing and naming and classifying; and with the 
great and successful experience Professor Haeckel has 
had in dealing with radiolarians and jelly-fishes from 
this standpoint, he ought to be a better describer and 
classifier of the higher attributes of man. We can Belief in the Infinity of Nature 
135 
never reduce anything in very truth to anything else. 
What we can do is to find other things in any given 
thing we choose to examine and analyse. Further- 
more, I insist that just because emotion is emotion and 
nothing else, we have no foot-hold on which to stand 
for making the assertion that it is less important or 
less exalted or less real in relation to truth than is 
reason. This does not imply that reason has not ac- 
cess to forms of truth which emotion has not. It 
merely means that if one takes this view of the case, 
emotion must be allowed to have its peculiar forms of 
truth also. Herein lies as I believe the great value of 
the James-Lange hypothesis of emotion. The theory 
in the form given it by James seems to me overstated; 
but any psychologist, occupied with human or animal 
psychology, who should leave off all dogmatizing and 
merely ask the question, Is there anything whatever 
that may properly be called an emotion with which some 
bodily manifestation cannot be correlated? would have 
at his disposal a very fruitful guide for investigation. 
My reason for returning to my hobby (if one chooses 
so to call it) of describing and naming and classifying 
even when speaking of these highest aspects of man's 
nature, is that this appears to me the most fitting way 
of closing the last section of this essay. As to just 
where I should be placed in the classification of those 
who occupy themselves with the largest questions con- 
cerning nature, I have not yet fully decided. This 
much however by way of description I can say with 136 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
confidence. When the taxonomic disposition of myself 
is finally made, these five unit-characters, to use a 
recently devised and useful biological term, will have 
to enter fundamentally into the settlement: (1) My con- 
tention that all the reliable knowledge we have of the 
universe either objective or subjective is in last analysis 
dependent upon the attributes of bodies. (2) My pro- 
posal to extend to all phenomena the well-established 
and very useful chemical practice of dividing the at- 
tributes of each body into two great fundamental 
groups, those of constitution or individuation, and those 
of relation. (3) My principle of the standardiza- 
tion of reality, which briefly characterized, is a method 
of valuating in knowledge the attributes of bodies. 
(4) My particular way of conceiving the object as a 
whole; and (5) My way of looking at, or my hypothe- 
sis concerning the infinity of the universe. 
These five conceptions or ideas or whatever they 
may be called might be used as a foundation on which 
it would be possible to erect a superstructure of phil- 
osophy of man and the world that apparently would be 
somewhat different from any structure of this sort 
that has been erected. THE PRINCIPLE OF MULTIPLE CAUSES IN 
ORGANIC EVOLUTION 1 
MY subject, that of plural, or multiple causes in 
the development of living nature does not re- 
quire me to enter upon a general discussion of the mean- 
ing of cause, even were I competent for such a task. 
I must, however, leave the least possible doubt as to 
what the words cause, causal, causality, and the like 
shall mean in this discussion. Those of you who heard 
my high appraisement, the other day, of description and 
classification in biology,2 may surmise that I have 
espoused the view of Kirchoff and a few others, that 
" the business of science is not to explore the causes sup- 
posed to lie at the back of observed phenomena . . . 
but merely to describe completely in the simplest man- 
ner, the motions which occur in nature." But no, con- 
siderable as my sympathies are for this doctrine, such 
examination of it as I have been able to make has con- 
vinced me of its inadequacy, for biology at least. As a 
mathematical physicist, Kirchoff seems to have been 
more interested in motion than in anything else; and he 
i A paper, somewhat altered, read before the Western Society 
of Naturalists, Stanford University meeting, August, 1915. 
2 The reference here is to my essay, " The meaning of descrip- 
tion, definition, and classification in philosophical biology," now 
published in my book The Higher Usefulness of Science. 
137 138 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
appears to have made his task that of treating the 
universe as a system of moving mathematical points. 
Description for him did not need to concern itself 
greatly with the size, shape, color, and so on, of bodies. 
In getting rid of the need for the concepts of cause and 
force, he seems to have thought himself rid also of most 
of the concepts belonging to the realm of description; 
but that sort of thing will never do for biology. 
Nor can I cast my lot with those biologists of whom 
Max Verwom is a forthstanding example, who would 
escape the difficulties which beset the use of the word 
cause, by substituting condition. Although Verworn 
thinks otherwise, I am quite sure that should scientists 
succeed in banishing cause and substituting condition, 
they would find that the retiring term had left behind 
all its troublesome vestments to be put on by the new 
term. For example, I do not at all believe that condi- 
tion would escape the set of troubles which cause labors 
under, and which Verworn stigmatizes by attaching to 
it the adjective anthropomorphic. 
According to my view, cause is too useful as itself a 
descriptive term, to be dispensed with in biology. 
When the forester declares that sheep are the cause of 
the stripped and forlorn appearance of a fertile tract 
of country on which the animals have been pastured; or 
when the physician says typhoid fever is caused by the 
bacillus of that malady, the speakers so obviously char- 
acterize, that is, describe, so far, the organisms impli- 
cated in producing the results, by fixing attention upon Multiple Causes in Organic Evolution 
139 
particular things the organisms do as part of their 
natures, that I can only look upon the proposal to 
adopt some device for avoiding the use of the familiar 
word, as an attempt to evade a really unescapable dif- 
ficulty. Causation, the capacity for producing effects 
in thousands of ways, is among the attributes of or- 
ganisms, and so among the most important elements in 
the description of organisms. 
I am quite willing to admit, provisionally, the view 
of Bertrand Russell, that " on examination, ' cause ' is 
merged in ' causal law,' and the definition of ' causal 
law,' is found to be far from simple," but am very du- 
bious about this author's further view that in a suffi- 
ciently advanced science, the word ' cause ' will not occur 
in any statement of invariable law." 3 
" Let it be observed," says W. S. Jevons, " that the 
utmost latitude is at present enjoyed in the use of 
the term ' cause.' Not only may a cause be an existent 
thing endowed with powers, as oxygen is the cause of 
combustion, and gunpowder the cause of explosion, but 
the very absence or removal of a thing may be a cause. 
It is quite correct to speak ... of the absence of 
moisture, as being the cause of the preservation of 
mummies and other remains of antiquity." And 
Jevons's further statement, " I see not why the prior 
existence of matter is not also a cause as regards its 
subsequent existence "; and that " when we analyze the 
meaning which we can attribute to the word cause, it 
3 Scientific Method of Philosophy, p. 220. 140 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
amounts to the existence of suitable portions of matter, 
endowed with suitable quantities of energy." 4 Up to 
this point, Russell, so far as I can make out, agrees with 
Jevons, though in some other respects he obviously does 
not agree with him. I see no necessary discordance 
between the characterization of cause by Jevons as just 
given, and that by Russell, which runs: " A cause is 
an event or group of events, of some known general 
character, and having a known relation to some other 
event, called the effect; the relation being of such a 
kind that only one event, or at any rate only one well- 
defined sort of event, can have the relation to a given 
cause." 
I believe we are justified in saying that from Hume 
down to this day, there is agreement among those who 
have attended to the question with special care, that 
the most fundamental element in the meaning of the 
word " cause " is a relation between perceptually in- 
disputable things, or events of such character that, as 
Hume put it, had not the one (the cause) existed, the 
other (the effect) had not existed. It is not to be un- 
derstood that this is an exhaustive definition of " cause." 
It is merely the irreducible minimum of definition. It 
is so much of the complete definition as should be indis- 
pensable to the mind of anyone who would use the word 
consistently with the fundamental constitution of oui' 
minds and of the system of nature. 
A further remark needed is that not only is the 
4 The Prinicples of Science, p. 225. Multiple Causes in Organic Evolution 
141 
cause-effect relation of the sort indicated, but that 
wherever such a relation exists, no matter how far 
apart the things or events so related may be, that re- 
lation will be regarded as the causal relation. In other 
words, I do not allow " factor" and terms of like im- 
port to rank as something wholly different from cause. 
I am sure the practises in this particular of much recent 
biological discussion can not be justified if critical re- 
gard be had to logic and the origin and history of 
words. 
My final remark about the meaning of cause concerns 
the idea of uniformity. For the doctrine of evolution, 
there can be no doubt about the very great importance 
of this matter. The very essence of the evolution hy- 
pothesis is that new things, as species, varieties, and 
variations, are produced. " Evolution never repeats 
itself " is one of our cherished aphorisms. What are 
we biologists to do with the idea of uniformity, or con- 
stancy in causal action, when one of the most character- 
istic things about the phenomena with which we deal is 
a certain departure from uniformity? 
Despite all our struggling over the causes, the " fac- 
tors " of evolution, obviously here is an aspect of the 
problem over which we have not struggled hard enough. 
Obviously, I say, for we shall have to recognize, I be- 
lieve, that it is just in this that Bergson has made his 
greatest hit. Here it is that he has found the most 
vulnerable spot in ex cathedra theories of evolution. 
Here, too, he is able to produce arguments which appeal 142 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
most strongly to the large class of mystical or semi- 
mystical, albeit eminently serious, intelligent, and 
thoughtful persons outside of science. And so here, as 
it seems to me, lies the greatest danger to biology. For 
my part, I feel there is real menace to science at this 
time, in the wide spread tendency to mysticism; and 
perhaps no manifestation of this tendency is more cal- 
culated to arouse solicitude than is the wide adherence 
given to the philosophy of Bergson. 
J. S. Mill called attention to the general fact that 
the uniformity of nature is consistent with infinite va- 
riety; and more recent writers have recognized the same 
fact, and dealt with it in more detail. " Were it indeed 
possible," says H. W. B. Joseph, " for the procession of 
events to bring back precisely the state of things which 
had existed at some moment in the past, then it must 
follow, from the principle of Uniformity of Nature, 
that the same procession would recur, and terminate 
again by reinstating the phase in which it had begun; 
so that the history of the world as a whole would really 
repeat itself indefinitely, like a recurring decimal; - 
and to a spectator who could watch it long enough, 
might seem as monotonous as the music of a musical 
box which, as it played, somehow wound itself up, to 
pass always from the conclusion to the recommence- 
ment of the stock of tunes. But," adds the author, 
" nothing of the kind occurs in nature." 5 
Russell's statement that " all causal laws are liable 
5 An Introduction to Logic, p. 373. Multiple Causes in Organic Evolution 
143 
to exceptions, if the cause is less than the whole state 
of the universe," will serve as the starting point for the 
essential part of my remarks; but before proceeding 
with these remarks, I want to mention a fact not care- 
fully enough considered by evolutionists, especially by 
those committed to natural selection as the sufficient 
cause of evolution. It was pointed out several years 
ago by D. G. Richie that in so far as Darwin relied 
upon the survival of the fittest as the causal explanation 
of organic evolution he " restores ' final causes ' to their 
proper places in science,- final causes in the Aris- 
totelian, not in the Stoic, or Bridgewater Treatise 
sense." 6 
Since the notion of " fittest " undoubtedly implies 
something of adaptation, of goodness in the sense of 
purpose,- it is impossible to escape admitting a cer- 
tain truth in what Richie says. And this is what has 
led many evolutionists, both within and outside of bi- 
ology, to contend that organic evolution is teleological. 
Now the point I want to make is not either for or 
against the idea of teleology. Personally, I have never 
become wildly excited over the question of whether or 
not evolution is teleological. Possibly this is because 
I have never been able to satisfy myself of the exact 
meaning of teleology. I should not dread admitting a 
teleological element into evolution, if I could be confi- 
dent that this element did not prevent evolution from 
being entirely natural. And this brings us right to the 
& Darwin and Hegel, p. 60. 144 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
point. If natural selection, resulting in the survival of 
the fittest, were to be regarded as a single cause, and as 
the sole cause of evolution, then would the cloud of 
super-naturalism which hangs over teleology be dis- 
quieting indeed. But if on the contrary, selection-and- 
survival could be taken as only one among numerous 
other causes, these others being unmistakably natural, 
much of the distrust of natural selection felt by many 
persons would disappear simply because natural selec- 
tion would be shorn of much of its power. 
Richie's contention about restoring " final causes " 
" to their proper place in science " through the intro- 
duction of natural selection is so important and has 
been so little heeded, that I must dwell upon it some- 
what. I discussed the point to some extent several 
years ago,7 but what I said has passed unnoticed as 
far as I know. Perhaps one reason why my discussion 
has attracted no attention is that I approached the sub- 
ject from a quite different direction from which Richie 
came to it, and so did not connect my views with his. 
In fact when I wrote the paper just referred to, I was 
not conscious of Richie's ideas even if I had come in 
contact with them. The point which I tried to make 
was that natural selection if regarded as the cause, one 
and all-sufficient, of evolution, would be a supernatural 
cause. But " supernatural " in my argument has no 
very important difference in meaning, I am now per- 
suaded, from " final " in Richie's argument. 
7 " Darwin's Probable Place in Future Biology," Pop. Science 
Monthly, Jan., 1910, p. 32. Multiple Causes in Organic Evolution 
145 
I feel justified, consequently, in quoting nearly ver- 
batim what I then wrote. We read: " It is the very 
essence of the human mind to inquire after the causes 
of whatever happens in this world of ours. It is the 
essence of science to hold that these causes are natural, 
not supernatural. Darwin became convinced that spe- 
cies arise naturally while yet the philosophy of living 
things in which he had been nurtured contained prac- 
tically nothing concerning any natural cause that could 
be assigned to species production. Special or super- 
natural causation was held as a dogma rather in de- 
fault of evidence of natural causes than from proof of 
supernatural ones. So religious superstition and dog- 
matism had a free field here. Darwin's naturalist in- 
stincts said: ' Since species arise naturally, natural 
causes sufficient therefor must exist. If they are natu- 
ral they are ascertainable. I will search for them.' 
So he set about the task with the result that all the 
world knows. He discovered the process called by him 
natural selection, and saw it to be a real cause in the 
generation of species. 
" Now comes the greatly important point. I have 
said Darwin carried the evolution idea into the second 
of three stages through which interpretations of the 
world usually run; the stage, namely, of qualitative, 
discursive demonstration. Not having yet reached the 
third stage, that of quantitative demonstration, he had 
no way of measuring in a mathematical sense the ef- 
ficiency of natural selection. He could establish no 146 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
quantitative relation between cause and effect. In fact 
he did not look at the problem from the quantitative 
standpoint in the proper sense at all. So it was almost 
inevitable that he should exaggerate the power of the 
cause he had discovered. And see the essential nature 
of this exaggeration: Before Darwin supernatural 
causes were held to account for the origin of species. 
But supernatural causes are always adequate, final. 
Supernaturalist doctrines are always absolutist doc- 
trines. Therefore effort to make natural selection sup- 
plant supernatural causation is effort to make it, too, 
adequate, final. Attempt to make natural selection the 
sole, the complete cause of evolution, and you become 
a finalist, an absolutist. In a word, you retain the es- 
sence of supernaturalism. Absolutist natural selection- 
ism is only a disguised form of supernaturalism. It is 
failure to recognize that by its essential nature physical 
science can deal with causation only piecemeal; that it 
can only grasp causes one by one and can never get 
them all. Absolutism is a disguised form of super- 
naturalism, and under whatever disguise is the seem- 
ingly everlasting and implacable foe, not merely of in- 
ductive science, but of rational conduct. . . . With 
what serenity some . . . men of science are themselves 
striving, and advising the neophytes in science to 
strive, for the solution of ultimate problems! So long 
as this is so there is necessity for, and will always be, 
theosophy, Christian science and the whole retinue of 
psychic absolutisms. The one brand of finality is but Multiple Causes in Organic Evolution 
147 
the counterpoise of the other. 
" Though still in the second stage of idea-develop- 
ment as regards natural selection, a few important 
truths about the process are being revealed to us that 
Darwin overlooked, or did not sufficiently emphasize. 
In the first place, while he soon saw that natural selec- 
tion could not be the sole cause of evolution, and while 
he recognized it to be a cause of a general nature, he 
never grasped in its full meaning the truth that there 
are not one, nor a few, nor even many, but literally an 
infinite number of causes at work in the production of 
species. 
" It is curious, once one comes to think of it, that 
Darwin and the rest of us should have talked so long 
and so absorbedly about one or a few ' factors ' of 
evolution when the demands of rigorous science are that 
there shall be at least as many causes as there are spe- 
cies. Were this not so the same cause would produce 
different effects, and that would make biology a hocus- 
pocus indeed. Supernatural causes would be quite as 
amenable to science as such natural ones. Trouble has 
befallen us here from not having listened with due atten- 
tion to what David Hume has told about causes. His 
definition of a cause as * an object followed by another, 
where, if the first had not been, the second never had 
existed,'' has not sunk deeply enough into our minds. 
" The course by which we have seemed to keep out of 
this limbo has been exactly one element in our dis- 
comfiture. We have said ' Why, to be sure natural se- 148 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
lection always takes variation and heredity for granted. 
Darwin made that clear enough.' But when we make 
the causes of evolution our problem, why not face the 
music squarely? Why not make sure of the causes first 
and classify and name them afterwards? That is the 
way we proceed in systematic botany and zoology. 
" The truth is, natural selection itself is a great 
bundle of causes, some of which are different in each 
particular case to which the bundle applies, so must be 
separately investigated for each particular species. 
" Does any Allmacht natural selectionist believe in 
his heart of hearts that even an approximate consensus 
of opinion among biologists will ever issue from such 
general discussion of ' the natural selection factor ' as 
has been carried on during the last half century? I do 
not think so." 
And so we are swung back into the main current with 
which we are sailing in this volume, that namely, of the 
probability that this universe, that revealed to our 
senses no less than that revealed to our feeling and 
imagination and reason, is infinite through and through 
- w'hich means that it is infinite in causes as well as in 
objective forms. Cause is not " less," recurring to 
Russell's phraseology, quoted a few pages back, " than 
the whole state of the universe." But as practical zool- 
ogists and botanists, are we warranted by the evidence 
in abandoning the idea that evolution is due to one 
cause, whether that be natural selection or any other, 
and adopting the idea of innumerable causes of the Multiple Causes in Organic Evolution 
149 
process? My answer is yes ; and to me this means much 
as to attitude toward practical questions of origin and 
development. For one thing, it means liberation from 
the belief that if one recognizes the " Darwinian fac- 
tor," he must of necessity refuse to recognize the 
" Lamarckian " or any other " factor." It means fur- 
ther that " search for The Unknown Factor " in evo- 
lution, which was a rather favorite enterprise a few 
years ago, is foredoomed to disappointment, so far as 
complete success is concerned, simply because no such 
one factor exists. The legitimate thing to search for is 
any and as many unknown factors as may exist. Pre- 
eminently at this late stage of progress when we have 
our eyes so definitely on a considerable number of 
causes, the real task is to seek light on how many and 
what known ones are operative in any given case. 
So it becomes necessary to be more definite as to the 
meaning of multiple causes as applied to evolution. 
The phrase does not mean merely that one cause is re- 
sponsible for one aspect of evolution, another cause for 
another aspect, another for another, and so on. It 
does not mean, to illustrate, that one species or group 
may be caused by natural selection, another by organic 
selection, another by the inheritance of acquired char- 
acters (should such a thing be finally proved possible), 
and another by isolation. It means that each species 
is produced by several, probably always, by very many 
causes. 
Why has our attitude toward the causes of species- 150 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
production been so different from that toward the 
causes of individual-production? The most careful 
evolutionists have said over and over that the evolution 
of the individual is typical of all evolution; and so far 
as I am aware no one questions the general truth of the 
statement. Undoubtedly the evolution of species pre- 
sents various problems not presented by the evolution 
of individuals. But certain it is, that since the species 
is composed of individuals, there can be no species evo- 
lution without individual evolution. But who thinks 
of attributing the evolution, the origin and growth, of 
the individual, to a single cause? Again, who would 
contend that biology has reached a complete causal ex- 
planation of the evolution of the individual? 
"The majority of our controversies," wrote Liebig 
in his old age, " arise from the fact that we are too 
much in the habit of attributing to one cause that which 
is produced by several." If this truth is brought home 
to a chemist by the experience of a lifetime, how much 
more ought it to be brought home to a biologist by a 
like experience! The food taken by an individual is 
one cause of its evolution; the atmospheric oxygen is 
another; the temperature under which it thrives an- 
other; the digestive process another; the nutriment- 
distributing process another; the germinal organization 
another; and so on. If then we take the evolution of 
the individual as typical of all evolution, and in so 
doing accept whole-heartedly the fact that in every case 
this is due to many causes, we shall be in position to Multiple Causes in Organic Evolution 
151 
accept the same conception about racial evolution. 
Before we can profitably go farther with the discus- 
sion of this part of the subject, we must give a little 
attention to the different kinds of cause - to the classi- 
fication of causes operative in organic production. The 
different classifications that have been proposed, like 
those of Aristotle and Bergson, are useful for many 
purposes; but for our needs, a binary grouping into 
those which lie within the organism itself, internal 
causes, and those which lie in the environment, external 
causes, is most useful. A fact familiar enough to have 
suffered the fate so common to familiar facts - that 
of becoming largely ignored - is forced back into no- 
tice by the idea of multiple causes in evolution, if the 
idea be coupled with this grouping of causes. Every 
conceivable evolutionary step must have at least two 
causes, since it must have at least one from each of 
these two groups. The very essence of organic exist- 
ence, to say nothing of evolution, implies this much. 
We cannot say that the reaction of the organism to its 
environment is a basal attribute of it without implying 
this much of multiplicity of causation. 
Time will permit us to touch systematically only two 
causal problems of racial evolution from the stand- 
point of multiple causes. These will be: (1) the prob- 
lem of so-called organic selection, and (2) that of de- 
terminate variations leading to determinate, or ortho- 
genic evolution. 
Recall what the idea of organic selection is. Tak- 152 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
ing C. Lloyd Morgan's form of statement of it, it is that 
while there may be no transmission of somatic modifi- 
cations, yet such modifications may afford the condi- 
tions under which germinal variations of like nature 
are given an opportunity of occurring and of making 
themselves felt in race progress. According to our 
standpoint, we must see two groups of cooperating 
causes in this conception, namely, a group of external 
causes producing " body " changes, and a group of in- 
ternal causes, no matter what their nature, producing 
after a while corresponding " germinal " changes. 
What is desirable to notice particularly is the favor- 
ableness for evolution on this principle presented by 
groups of organisms whose environments contain strong 
modifying causes which act persistently, uninterrupt- 
edly, and with special energy. Take for example a 
group of animals that has reached such a wonderful 
state of adaption as regards locomotion, as has the 
mackerel group of fishes. Imagine ancestors of this 
group in which the locomotor activities were no less 
strenuous than they now are, but in which bodily fitness 
had not reached such perfection as the modern group 
has attained. The point to be emphasized is that in 
the life of each and every individual fish, from birth 
to death, the influences tending to so dispose all struc- 
tures as to make the body offer the minimum resistance 
to progress through the water, act persistently, unin- 
terruptedly, and energetically. Were the group to be 
as variable with respect to the structures under con- Multiple Causes in Organic Evolution 
153 
sideration as many fishes are, it appears quite legiti- 
mate to suppose that in the course of the thousands of 
years during which the group has undoubtedly led 
much the same life as it leads now, congenital variations 
corresponding to every one of the functional and en- 
vironmental modifying tendencies might have taken 
place. One of the great advantages, it seems to me, of 
thinking in this fashion about the mode of origin of 
such a group, is the clear way we can conceive the 
transformatory influences as affecting a whole popu- 
lation all the time. 
I cannot let the opportunity pass of calling atten- 
tion to the resemblance of the human species under 
civilization to such a group of organisms so far as ex- 
ternal influences are concerned. The social environ- 
ment, the social medium, in which we live is as all- 
enveloping, ever-acting, and potent for moulding us, 
spiritually at least, as is the aqueous environment of a 
strenuous lot of pelagic fishes. Is it not possible, even 
probable, that the personally sustained modifications 
wrought upon us by these influences as the generations 
come and go, are being met by corresponding "ger- 
minal " variations ? 
If modern civilized man be biologically viewed from 
the social standpoint, or as I would express it, from 
the standpoint of organic integration, I believe it to be 
demonstrable that he has undergone change to some ex- 
tent during the last two thousand years, in some at least 
of his most fundamental instincts. 154 
The Probable Infiniti/ of Nature and Life 
The remaining minutes will be devoted to the causes 
of determinate variation and evolution. The special 
point to be brought out here is that all variations due 
primarily to internal causes are in a measure deter- 
minate, and that in this fact lies the possibility of re- 
futing Bergson's argument that the creativeness which 
is distinctive of the evolutionary process is wholly 
unique and requires the invocation of an impulsion 
from a source wholly beyond the realm of material 
things. Since it is this very peculiarity of evolution 
which, according to Bergson, thwarts intelligence, but 
lies open to intuition, it is rather presumptuous to un- 
dertake to treat the subject in a few brief sentences, 
Bergson having found that he could not handle it in 
less than a good-sized volume. But verily, I am con- 
vinced that this part of Bergson's imposing structure 
of evolutional philosophy rests on the drifting sands 
of inadequate description and classification. His illus- 
trations and arguments touching the sameness of struc- 
tures, as the eye, produced for the same purpose in 
widely separated groups of animals, and the " some- 
thing new " which we see always being produced by evo- 
lution, all reveal the toxic inattention to, or minimiza- 
tion of the importance of differences and taxonomic 
categories, so characteristic of much of the biological 
speculation of our day. 
If an " elan originel " must be assumed because some 
new thing - a seeing organ - has been created more 
than once, in a pecten and in a buzzard for example, Multiple Causes in Organic Evolution 
155 
then surely there is no need for such an elan, since, as 
every tyro in comparative morphology and comparative 
behavior knows, the pecten's eye and the buzzard's eye 
are not the same, by any means. They are the same as 
to genus, but not the same as to species (using the terms 
in the sense of the logician.) Of course Bergson knows 
this after a fashion; but that he does not know it in its 
full import is, I think, revealed by his reasoning about 
the " something new " of evolution. 
And this returns us to the problem of the determi- 
nateness of variations due to internal causes. Some 
remarks by Pycraft on the subject will help us on our 
way. In his History of Birds, this author points to 
the squamosal bone as an instance of determinate evo- 
lution, and writes: "One seems justified in conclud- 
ing that this evolution of the squamosal has taken place 
independently of any external factor, and by reason of 
some inherent peculiarity of growth." And further, 
". . . there seems very good reason for assuming that 
organs, like individuals, vary in their potentialities of 
growth; and that once started in a given direction, this 
growth will continue until and unless checked by natu- 
ral selection." 
The specially noteworthy point in this is that or- 
gans, like individuals, grow in particular directions, 
with varying potentialities. I believe that due con- 
sideration being given to the whole range of compara- 
tive morphology, including the morphology of extinct 
animals, such growth of organs is seen to be almost as 156 
The Probable Infinity of Nature and Life 
indubitable as is the growth of individuals. 
As to the causal explanation of such growths: 
There are innumerable causes, near and remote, of 
growth operating in every individual young bird. 
Some of these produce the skeleton, one bone of which 
is the squamosal. The causes of squamosal production 
taken in a strict sense, we know only by the fact that 
the squamosal is brought into being. The only evi- 
dence we have of squamosal-producing causes is the 
existence of the squamosal. Think now of the squa- 
mosal as it exists in the ostrich tribe and in the pas- 
serine or song-birds. The difference in shape is suf- 
ficient to make the passerine bone " something new " in 
Bergson's mode of expression, assuming that this group 
of birds is phylogenetically more recent than the ostrich 
group; and furthermore, having regard to the relation 
which the bone holds to the adj acent parts of the skull, 
we are justified in regarding the passerine squamosal 
as of higher type. So the " new thing " is an example 
of progressive evolution - just the sort necessitating, 
according to Bergson, an elan original. But notice the 
sense in which the passerine squamosal is something 
new. There are hundreds of thousands, ancient and 
modern, of individual avian squamosal bones in the 
world, of many, many kinds. The new passerine squa- 
mosal is new only as to kind. In the terminology of 
historic logic, it is new only as to species; it is not new 
as to genus. 
The unpredictableness of these new arrivals in evo- Multiple Causes in Organic Evolution 
157 
lution, of which Bergson makes so much, are unpre- 
dictable only as to species. They are predictable 
within the limitations of all predictableness in nature, 
as to genus. We have as great a measure of certainty 
that the squamosal bone will not change into the basi- 
occipital as that Neptune will not change into Mars, or 
that hydrochloric acid and calcium carbonate will not 
produce lead oxide; and there is not the least need of 
supposing that time is involved in the first mentioned 
type of phenomena in a way wholly different from that 
in which it is involved in the second; or that intelli- 
gence and intuition play different roles in our compre- 
hension of the two orders of phenomena. 
If we can admit the principle of multiple causes into' 
our theories of organic evolution, and give the multiple 
aspect of the principle complete freedom, as such mas- 
ters in physical science as Newton, and Fourrier, and 
Lord Kelvin gave it, our theoretical troubles over the 
" factors of Evolution " will be largely ended. INDEX 
Absolutism, disguised super- 
naturalism, 146 
Absolutist, 128 
Adaptation, 92 
Agassiz, L., 84 
Agnostics, 127 
Alchemists, 44 
Amoeba, 17 
Anarchism, 73 
Anarchy, eternal, 40 
Anthropology, 72 
Anthropomorphic, 138 
Antibodies, 103 
Aristotle, 98 
Arrhenius, S., 22 
Artificial parthenogenesis, 16 
Astronomy, 23 
Atoms, 85 
compressibility of, 95 
propertiless, 44 
Attributes, of bodies, 136 
of constitution, 136 
of individuation, 73, 113 
of objects, 28 36 
of relation, 87, 91, 113, 136 
Automobile, compared with dog, 
118 
Avogadro, 99 
Axioms, 71 
Bastian, H. C., 26 
Beginnings of things, 41 
Bergson, H., 40, 89, 141, 154 
Biochemists, 29 
Biologists, 79, 95, 126 
Birds, 155 
Blavatsky, Mme., 62 
Bodies, debodified, 60 
Bone, squamosal, 157 
Botany, 72, 148 
Brain, 33 
Buddhist, 62 
Buffalo, American, 106 
California newt, 108 
Carbon, 96 
Castration, effects of, 111 
Categories, 71 
Causation, as attribute of or 
ganisms, 138 
Cause, organism as a, 32 
Causes, multiple, 137 
in evolution, 149 
Cell-division, 25 
Chaos, 39, 44 
Chaos, laws of, 132 
Characteristics, 43 
Chemistry, 24, 52, 72, 77 
creative, 34 
of inorganic laboratory, 91 
Chemistry, research in, 99 
Chemical laboratory, 106 
synthesis, 33 
Christian Science, 146 
159 160 
Index 
Chromosomes, 127 
Chwolson, O. D., 63 
Classification, 135, 137, 154 
Cognition, 83 
Concepts, 71 
Condition, as substitute for 
cause, 138 
Conditions, for spontaneous 
generation of life, 24 
Consciousness, 116, 132 
organismal theory of, 124 
theory of, 50, 132 
Conservation of energy and 
matter, 15, 17, 132 
Cosmos, 39, 46 
Continuity of nature, 36 
Creations, of mind and nature, 
19 
Creative evolution, 103 
Dalton, John, 97 
Dante, 98 
Darwin, Chas., 143 
" Darwinian factor," 149 
Deductive science, 19, 21 
Definition, 137 
Dematerialization of matter, 59 
Description, 63, 135, 137, 154 
Discontinuity, 36 
Discoveries, 34 
Ellis, Havelock, 110 
Electricity, 59, 65 
without material support, 66 
Electro-magnetic theory of 
light, 67 
Electrons, 68 
Elements, fundamental proper- 
ties of, 39 
Elan original, 154 
Emotion, 124, 133 
James-Lange theory of, 135 
Empiricism, 132 
Energy, 109 
Energies, latent in substance, 
91, 114, 122 
Energetics, 92 
Entelechy, 128 
Enzymes, 25, 129 
Eternity of life and matter, 22 
Eternal anarchy, 40 
" Ether of space," 83 
Evidence, observational, 21 
negative, 77, 132 
Evolution, 20, 101, 141 
of forces, 59 
Eye, in evolution, 154 
Explained, 129 
" Factor," 141, 147 
Facts versus theory in biology, 
82 
" Falling in love," 108 
Fertilization, 30 
Finalist, 128 
Fish, 152 
Forces, evolution of, 59 
Formative substances, 93 
Genius, Wagner's, 119 
Genus, 156 
Geography, 72 
Geology, 72 
Germ-cells, 16 
Germ-plasm, 108 Index 
161 
Gibbs, J. W., 79 
Grass, latent energy in, 114 
Gravitation, 15, 24, 37, 42 
Habit in thinking, 22, 125 
Haeckel, E., 133 
Harvey, Wm., 22 
" Heat " in animals, 106 
Heredity, 28, 40, 92 
Hormones, 112 
Hume, David, 147 
Human species, 153 
Hydrogen, 97 
Hypothesis, 19, 62, 87 
as to origin of life, 19 
reciprocal relation with ob- 
servation, 64 
usefulness of, 35 
Idea, philosophical, 70 
Idealist, biological, 127 
Individuation, attributes of, 72 
Individuality, 31, 102, 150 
Inductive method, 19, 21, 45 
Infinite, in modern thought, 77, 
83, 142 
in theory, 125 
magnitude and multitude, 46, 
142 
Infinity of nature, 23, 136 
Integration, 51, 153 
Intelligence, 157 
Internal secretions, 111 
Intuition, 154, 157 
Iron, 23 
Jevons, W. S., 139 
Johnson, Dr. Myrtle, 81 
Joseph, H. W. B., 142 
Jourdain, E. F., 139 
Kant, 69 
Keyser, C. J., 47 
Kirchoff, 137 
Knowledge, observational, 45, 
67 
" Lamarckian factor," 149 
Law and order, 79 
" Law of substance," 131 
Laws, physical, 57 
Lavoisier, 99 
Le Bon, Gustave, 58 
Lewes, G. H., 29 
Liebig, 26 
Life, eternity of, 22 
maintenance and origin of, 25 
origin, two hypotheses con- 
cerning, 18 
Light, electro-magnetic theory 
of, 67 
Lincoln, A., 98 
Living beings as machines, 118 
Living matter, 30 
Lodge, Sir Oliver, 57 
Logic, 19, 84, 141, 156 
" Logical necessity," 22, 55 
Loeb, Jacques, 30 
Lucretius, 46 
Machines, living, 118 
Mackerel, 152 
Magnetism, 65 
Magnitude, infinite, 46 
Mathematics, 46 
as aid to description, 80 
Materialism, 126 162 
Index 
Matter, 59 
Mechanistic, 126 
Metabolism, 43, 85, 100 
Metamorphosis in animals and 
plants, 78 
Metaphysics, 46 
physico-chemical, 76 
scholastic, 76 
Microscope, imaginary power- 
ful, 96 
Mill, J. S., 142 
Milton, John, 39 
Mind, creations of, 19 
Minimal-sized organisms, 53 
Monist, 126, 128 
Moore, Benjamin, 29 
Morgan, C. Lloyd, 152 
Morphology, 43, 90 
Mosaic, 39 
Mysticism, 61, 142 
Mystic temple, 65 
Naming, 135 
Names, 72 
Natural, 143 
Natural science mode of cog- 
nition, 70 
selection, 73, 143 
a bundle of causes, 148 
selectionism disguised super- 
naturalism, 146 
Nature, continuity of, 36 
creations of, 19 
reasoning about, 21 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 98 
Nitrogen, 97 
Object as a whole, 136 
Objects, 44 
Observation, 63 
reciprocal relation with hy- 
pothesis, 64 
Observational evidence, 21 
knowledge, 45, 67 
science, 46 
Occult philosophy, 62 
Occultists, 67 
Odors of the dinner table, 114 
Offspring, 22 
Omne vivum ex vivo, 15, 20, 42 
Orderless, 40 
Organic selection, 151 
Organic substance, 30 
Organism, 16 
a cause, 32 
uses substances, 32 
Organisms without parents, 18 
minimal-sized, 53 
Origin of life, 18, 19 
Orthogenic evolution, 151 
Ostrich, 156 
Ovum, fixation on uterine wall, 
112 
Oxygen, 23, 96, 139 
Pacific Ocean, 48 
Panspermia, 23, 55 
Parents, endless succession of, 
22 
Parthenogenesis, artificial, 16 
Pasteur, L., 14, 26 
Pawlow, J. P., 115 
Pearl, R., 80 
Perpetual motion, 29, 35, 42 
Periodicity, 81 Index 
163 
Philosophy, 71 
of man and world, 136 
Phosphorus, 23 
Photo-synthesis, 25 
Physics, 58, 77 
of laboratory, 91 
Physicist, 57 
mathematical, 137 
Physical laws, 57 
science, 61 
Physiologists, 29 
Piano, automatic, 119 
Pluralism, 132 
Pouchet, 26 
Problems of electricity, 59, 77 
Properties, 43 
Propagation, 91, 106 
Propertiless substances, 44 
Proportionality, 129 
Proteids, laboratory production 
of, 18 
Psychoids, 128 
Psychology, 82 
Psycho-physics, 89 
Pycraft, W. P., 155 
Quantitative, 89 
Qualitative, 89 
Qualities, 43 
Reality, 129 
an attribute of material bod- 
ies, 70 
standardized, 74, 87, 129 
Reason, 83, 133 
Reasoning about nature, 21 
Redi, 22 
Relation, attributes of, 72 
Relativity, 69, 77 
Revelation, 133 
Richards, T. W., 39, 100 
Richie, D. G., 143 
Roosevelt, Theodore, 107 
Royal Society and Dr. Charlton 
Bastian, 26, 27 
Russell, Bertrand, 139 
"Rut" in animals, 106 
Rhythm, 81 
Saliva, cause of flow of, 116 
Salivary reflex paths, 117 
Salpa chain, 88 
Schuster, Arthur, 51 
Science, 71 
deductive, 19 
inductive, 19 
Secondary sexual characters, 
110 
Selection, organic, 152 
Sensational, 130 
Sense experience, 65 
objects, 72 
Sexes, 108 
Shakespeare, 98 
Shape, 138 
Shape-attributes, 100 
Shop-philosopher, 128 
Sights of the dinner table, 114 
Sigma Xi, 13 
Social environment, 153 
Socialism, 73 
Somatic plasm, 108 
" Something new," 155 
Song birds, 156 
Space, 46 164 
Index 
Space an attribute of material 
bodies, 70 
Species, 141, 156 
Specificity, 102 
Spiritual life, 132 
Spontaneous generation of life, 
14, 24 
Squamosal bone, evolution of, 
155 
Standardized reality, 74, 95, 129, 
136 
Steamships, wheel-barrowistic 
theory of, 119 
Subjectivity, 132 
Substances, propertiless, 44 
Supernaturalism, 144 
Survival of the fittest, 143 
Synthesis, chemical, 33 
Synthetic chemistry, 34 
Systematize, 43 
Tannhauser, 119 
Taxonomy, 43 
Teleology, 143 
Testicle, 33 
Theology, 46, 100 
Theory of consciousness, 50 
of nature, 14 
of knowledge, 85 
Theosophy, 146 
"Tiling," 92 
" Thought waves," 61 
Time, 20, 46, 157 
an attribute of material bod- 
ies, 70 
Traits, 43 ' 
Truth, 134 
Tyndall, J., 14, 26 
Ultimate, 33, 94 
atoms, 96 
Ultra-microscope, 96 
Uniformity, 141 
Unit-characters, 136 
Unity of the organism, 124 
Universe, 46, 82 
Unpredictableness, 156 
Urea, laboratory production of, 
18 
Usefulness of hypothesis as to 
origin of life, 35 
Valency, 85 
Variation, determinate, 154 
Varieties, 141 
Vastness, 47 
Verworn, Max, 138 
Vitalism, 126 
Vital impulsion, 93 
Wagner, Richard, 119 
Wapiti, 106 
"Watering of the mouth," 114 
Windelband, W., 70 
Work, origin of term, 120 
Working hypothesis, 20 
World, 82 
outer, inner, 79 
Zoology, 72, 87, 148