More Science from an Easy Chair

by Sir E. Ray Lankester

This kind of lamentation is not only (if I may use an expressive term) "twaddle," but is injurious misrepresentation, dangerous to the public welfare. The actual attitude of the investigators and makers of new knowledge of nature is stated in a few words which I wrote ten years ago: "The whole order of nature, including living and lifeless matter—from man to gas—is a network of mechanism, the main features and many details of which have been made more or less obvious to the wondering intelligence of mankind by the labour and ingenuity of scientific investigators. But no sane man has ever pretended, since science became a definite body of doctrine, that we know or ever can hope to know or conceive of the possibility of knowing, whence this mechanism has come, why it is there, whither it is going, and what there may or may not be beyond and beside it which our senses are incapable of appreciating. These things are not 'explained' by science and never can be."

So much for those who reproach science with the non-fulfilment of their own unwarranted and perfectly gratuitous expectations.

When, however, having created in their readers' minds an unreasonable sense of failure and a mistrust of science, such writers go on to make use of the want of confidence thus produced, in order to throw doubt upon the real conquests of science—the new knowledge actually made and established by the investigators of the last century—it becomes necessary to say a little more. The public is told by these false witnesses that science has "dogmas," and that men of science are less satisfied than they were with the "dogmas" of the last century. Science has no dogmas; all its conclusions are open to revision by experiment and demonstration, and are continually so revised. But science takes no heed of empty assertion unaccompanied by evidence which can be weighed and measured. "Nullius in verba" is the motto of one of the most famous Societies for the promotion of the knowledge of nature—the Royal Society of London.

It is especially in the area of biology—the knowledge of living things—that the enemies of science make their most audacious attempts to discredit well-ascertained facts and conclusions. They tell their readers that those greater problems of the science (as they erroneously term them), such as the nature of variation among individuals, the laws of heredity, the nature of growth and reproduction, the peculiarities of sex, the characteristics of habits, instinct, and intelligence, and the meaning of life itself, have advanced very little beyond the standpoint of the first and greatest biologist, Aristotle. This statement is vague and indefinite; the conclusion which it suggests is absolutely untrue. Aristotle knew next to nothing about the mechanism of the processes in living things above cited. At the present day we know an enormous amount about it in detail. But when men of science are told that they do not know the "nature" of this and the "meaning" of that, they frankly admit that they do not know the real "nature" (for the expression is capable of endless variety of significance) of anything nor the real "meaning" not only of life, but of the existence of the universe, and they say, moreover, that they have no intention or expectation of knowing the ultimate "nature" or the ultimate "meaning" (in a philosophical sense) of any such things. These are not problems of science—and it is misleading and injurious to pretend that they are.

I recently read an essay in which the writer is good enough to say that, owing to the work of Darwin, the fact that the differences which we see between organisms have been reached by a gradual evolution, is not now disputed. That, at any rate, seems to be a solid achievement. But he went on to declare that when we inquire by what method this evolution was brought about biologists can return no answer. That appears to me to be a most extraordinary perversion of the truth. The reason why the gradual evolution of the various kinds of organisms is not now disputed is that Darwin showed the method by which that evolution can and must be brought about. So far from "returning no answer," Darwin and succeeding generations of biologists do return a very full answer to the question, "By what method has organic evolution been brought about?" Our misleading writer proceeds as follows: "The Darwinian theory of natural selection acting on minute differences is generally considered nowadays to be inadequate, but no alternative theory has taken its place." This is an entirely erroneous statement. Though Darwin held that natural selection acted most widely and largely on minute differences, he did not suppose that its operation was confined to them, and he considered and gave importance to a number of other characteristics of organisms which have an important part in the process of organic evolution. The assertion that the theory of natural selection as left by Darwin "is now generally held to be inadequate" is fallacious. Darwin's conclusions on this matter are generally held to be essentially true. It is obvious that his argument is capable of further elaboration and development by additional knowledge, and always was regarded as being so by its author and by every other competent person. But that is a very different thing from holding Darwin's theory of natural selection to be "inadequate." It is adequate, because it furnishes the foundation on which we build, and it is so solid, complete and far-reaching that what has been added since Darwin's death is very small by comparison with his original structure.

Lastly, we are told by the anonymous writer already quoted that at the present time discussion is chiefly concentrated on the question as to whether life is dependent only on the physical and chemical properties of the living substance, protoplasm, or whether there is at work an independent vital principle which sharply separates living from non-living matter! And the obvious and common-place conclusion is announced that "the ultimate problems of biology are as inscrutable as of old." All ultimate problems are, I admit, inscrutable. It is, on the other hand, the business, and has been the glory and triumph, of science, to examine and solve problems which are scrutable! It is certainly not the case that, at the present time, discussion is concentrated on the question of the existence of a vital principle. There is absolutely no discussion in progress on the subject. No one even knows or attempts to state what is meant by "a vital principle." It is a phrase which belongs to "the dead past," when men of science had not discovered that you get no nearer to understanding a difficult subject by inventing a name to cover your ignorance. Thirty-five years ago the word "vitality" was used as some few philosophising writers are now using the term "vital principle." Huxley at that time attacked the views of Dr. Lionel Beale, who called in the aid of a mystical "principle," which he named "vitality," in order to "account for" some of the remarkable properties of protoplasm. As Huxley pointed out, this supposed principle "accounted for" nothing, since it was merely a name for the phenomena for which it was supposed to account. Huxley pointed out that many chemical compounds have remarkable properties—as assuredly have the chemical compounds which are present in protoplasm—but men of science have not found it to help them in investigating the mechanism of those properties to ascribe them to mystical intangible "principles" differing from the agencies at work in other less exceptional substances.

Thus, for instance, water, though a very common and abundant chemical compound formed by the union of two chemical elements, hydrogen and oxygen, which, at the temperature and pressure of the earth's surface, are gaseous, offers many strange properties to our consideration not shared by other compounds of gaseous elements. For instance, hydrogen, when it combines with gaseous elements other than oxygen, does not form a compound which is liquid at the temperature and pressure of the earth's surface. Its combinations with nitrogen, with chlorine, with fluorine, and even some with the solid element carbon, are under those conditions gaseous. What a special character, therefore, has water! Moreover, water, though a liquid, yet behaves in a most peculiar way when either cooled below ordinary temperatures or heated above them. It becomes solid when cooled, but expands at the same time, so that it is less dense when solid than when liquid—a most unusual proceeding! And when heated it is converted into vapour, but with a loss or "making latent" of heat, which, like its behaviour when solidifying, indicates that water is endowed with a very peculiar structure or mechanism in the putting together of its molecules. We might call these combined peculiarities of water "aquosity," and as we certainly cannot say why water should possess the lot of them, whilst other compounds of either hydrogen or of oxygen, or, in fact, of any other elements, do not possess this combination, we might say that their presence is due to "the aqueous principle," or "aquosity," which enters into water when it is formed, but does not exist in other natural bodies, and, indeed, "sharply separates aqueous from non-aqueous matter."

Happily, though such a view would have been considered high philosophy 200 years ago, no one is deluded at the present day into the belief that by calling the remarkable properties of water "aquosity" you have added anything to our knowledge of them. Yet those who invoke "a vital principle" or "vitality" in connection with protoplasm should, if they were consistent, apply their method to the mystery of water. Let us see how it would run. Though we may (the "vitalists" or "aquosists" would say) experiment with water, determine exactly the temperature and pressure at which these remarkable phenomena are exhibited, though we may determine its surface tension and its crystalline form, and even though we may weigh exactly the proportion of hydrogen to oxygen in its composition, yet when we look at a drop of water, there it is, a wonder of wonders, endowed with "aquosity," the ultimate nature of which is as inscrutable now as it was to Aristotle! It is perfectly true (we concede to the "aquosists") that the properties of water are not accounted for by science; that is to say that, though we can imagine the molecular and atomic mechanism necessary for their exhibition, we cannot offer any suggestion as to how it is that that particular mechanism is present in the chemical compound which the chemist denotes as H₂O, and is not present in other compounds, still less can we say "why" these remarkable properties are present—that is to say, for what purpose, although we know that if they were not present the whole history and economy of our globe would be utterly different from what it is. Nevertheless, in spite of their ignorance about the real nature of water, men of science do not invent an "aqueous principle" or "aquosity" with the notion of "explaining" water. And I have yet to hear of any duly trained and qualified biologist who is prepared at the present moment to maintain the existence of a "vital principle," or of a force to be called "vitality," supposed to be something different in character and quality from the recognised physical forces, and having its existence alongside, yet apart from, the manifestations of those forces.

Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton recently said: "The advance in science takes the workers in science more and more beyond the ken of the ordinary public, and their work grows to be a little understood and much misunderstood; and I have felt that, as in many other cases, the need would come for interpreters between those who are carrying on scientific research and the public, in order to explain and justify their work." Probably everyone will agree with the Lord Justice: but what are we to say of those responsible owners of great journals who not only abstain from providing such interpretation but allow anonymous and incompetent writers to mislead the public? Is the literary critic of a prosperous journal employed to write the City article?

There has been a repetition this year (1912) of the usual misrepresentation on the occasion of the meeting of the British Association. The President, Professor Schäfer, had let it be known that his address would be concerned with the chemistry of living processes, the gradual passage of chemical combinations into the condition which we call "living," and the possibility of bringing about this passage in the chemical laboratory without the use of materials already elaborated by previously existing "living" material. The announcement was immediately made in some "newspapers" that "startling revelations" were to be made by the President, that he was "to throw a bomb-shell" into the camp, etc. He did nothing of the kind. He gave an admirable and clear statement of the progress during recent years towards the realisation of the construction in the laboratory by chemical methods of the complex chemical combination which exhibits those "activities"—essentially movements, unions, disruptions and re-unions of extremely minute particles—which we call "living." The conclusion that such a gradual building up has taken place in past ages of the history of our earth was formulated more than forty years ago by Spencer, Tyndall, Huxley, Haeckel, and others, and has not been seriously attacked in the interval, but, on the contrary, generally accepted as a legitimate inference from the facts ascertained and the theory of the evolution or gradual development of what we call the material universe.