Greatly to Mr. Spencer's credit he tells us in another connection (p. 197), that "in truth this question is not determinable by any evidence now accessible." We must go a long way beyond this position and recognize that not only is the question not determinable "by any evidence now accessible," but that there is not the slightest indication that such evidence ever will be accessible. What we have to see is that all suck discussions are utterly futile for science; indeed, that they have no legitimate place in inductive science.
Has anybody ever seen an egg that was not produced by some organism; some function without structure, or vice versa; some life without organization, or organization independent of life? Surely not. Then equally surely you can make no assumption that involves the disjunction of either member of one of these couples from the other, without attempting to transcend experience—without becoming in so far an a priorist pure and simple.
Now you may perhaps have the privilege of being an a priorist pure and simple, if you want it, but in case you choose thus you can not have a seat in the temple of physical science for one instant. On the basis of experience science can-project itself far in advance of experience, but only on that basis can it thus project itself.
So much for the data, the starting places of biology. They are individual animals and plants, living in nature. It is wholesome for any domain of science to stop now and then and ask what its original data are. Such inquiry not only yields enlightenment, interesting and useful of itself, but it is further illuminating as to the way a science deals, and must deal, with its raw material—its "givens."
Notice the procedure in a special case. Observe how oceanography proceeds in studying the Pacific Ocean. Of what is that vast sea composed? First of all of water, H2O. No doubt about that. Dissolved in this are various mineral salts, chlorides of sodium and magnesium, particularly, and the gases O, N and CO2. These with perhaps a few other elements and the ocean is chemically accounted for. Yet how far have we gone toward a knowledge of the Pacific Ocean when we have found that it is thus constituted? Even though we should have ascertained the total quantity of water, salts and gases in the entire Pacific, we should have scarcely made a beginning on the oceanography of this body of water. Its form and boundaries; its connections with other oceans; the character of its bottom; its islands, continental and oceanic; its currents; its tides; the up-welling waters on its eastern margins; its temperature in general, and in particular parts, and dozens of other matters, are quite over and beyond anything
- ↑ "Principles of Biology," Vol. I., p. 210.
