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In this study, the poetical intuition of the ancient philosophers is interestingly linked with the experimental spirit and the analytical method of modern science. The latest biological and embryological theories are invoked to help in the comment on the hylozoism of the seven sages and the mysticism of the early Christians. Janicki and de Vries shake hands with Heraclitus and Saint Paul.
Mayo, made the earliest exploration of the Tanana River, ascending that stream in the summer of 1878 to about the present site of Fairbanks; and in a letter to E. W. Nelson, of the United States Biological Survey, then on the Alaskan coast, Harper wrote the following winter of the "great ice mountain to the south" as one of the most wonderful sights of the trip.
"No one will doubt that battles can be fought poetically who reads Plutarch or Las Casas." We are interested in the wild life around us because the lives of the wild creatures in a measure parallel our own; because they are the partakers of the same bounty of nature that we are; they are fruit of the same biological tree. We are interested in knowing how they get on in the world.
There is, therefore, scarcely any sanity in sociology without the biological point of view. For brief reading: FAIRBANKS, Introduction to Sociology, Chaps. I.-III. ELY, Evolution of Industrial Society. Part II, Chaps. For more extended reading: DARWIN, Descent of Man. FISKE, Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy. WALLACE, Darwinism. On the religious aspects of evolution: DRUMMOND, Ascent of Man.
Nearly all the work on morphology and much of that on physiology since his time might be treated as a commentary on the works of Darwin. These volumes of Theophrastus give the same impression. They represent the remains alas, almost the only biological remains of a school working under the impulse of a great idea and spurred by the memory of a great teacher.
This fundamental tendency, coupled with the development of biological research, was bound to incline it towards a doctrine of evolution; and hence the success of Spencer. But time, which is everywhere in modern science the chief variable, is only a time-length, indefinitely and arbitrarily divisible.
Unquestionably, also, it felt that this philosophy ought to establish itself in what we call concrete duration. The advent of the moral sciences, the progress of psychology, the growing importance of embryology among the biological sciences all this was bound to suggest the idea of a reality which endures inwardly, which is duration itself.
The layman in sociology too often concerns himself solely with the complexities of the human problems, and he remains unaware of the manifold products in the way of communal organisms far lower in the scale of life firmly established as primitive biological associations ages before the first human beings so advanced in mental stature that tribal unions were found good.
In the afternoon our party paid a visit to the aquarium again, extending it to the Biological Laboratory nearby; and took supper in the beautiful white casino, which fronts the beach, after they had had a refreshing plunge in the ocean's waters. Then Paul and Bob took up Mr. and Mrs. Choate for a short flight in the airplane.
The finite mind is certainly competent to trace out the development of the fowl within the egg; and I know not on what ground it should find more difficulty in unravelling the complexities of the development of the earth. In fact, as Kant has well remarked, the cosmical process is really simpler than the biological.
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