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He is a geometer, not a mechanician; or shall we say that he is a mechanician, and not a biologist concerned with the conditions of a living organism.
Can the nation digest them, to vary the metaphor assimilate them to its own substance? I once proposed to a biologist who flouted it that a definition of Life might be "the power of converting foreign elements, taken in as food, to one's own substance." Thus, a plant sucks up chemical elements and makes flowers; a man turns them to flesh.
"The whole evolutionary process, both cosmic and organic, is one, and the biologist may now rightly regard the universe in its very essence as biocentric." Another Harvard voice is less pronounced in favor of the mechanistic conception of life.
The houses adjoining on either side were empty, the windows were shuttered. One might have considered the middle house with the two, for its step was unscrubbed, and it presented unwashed windows. It was a heavy, deep-walled structure like a monument. Even the street in the vicinity was empty. If the biologist had been seeking an undisturbed quarter of London, he had, beyond doubt, found it here.
Kielland buried himself in the Administration shack, digging through the records, when the reign of confusion outside became too much to bear. He sent for Tarnier, the Installation physician, biologist, and erstwhile Venusian psychologist. Dr. Tarnier looked like the breathing soul of failure; Kielland had to steel himself to the wave of pity that swept through him at the sight of the man.
I seek, therefore, to press home the idea that just as the biologist must earn his generalisations through direct and first-hand acquaintance with nature, so now must the sociologist work for his generalisations through a period of kindred observation and analysis, both geographic and historical; his "general laws" thus appearing anew as the abstract of regional facts, after due comparison of these as between region and region.
There is no great biologist now living who does not accept the essentials of the doctrine of descent. Five lines of proof may be offered in support of Darwin's theories, and it may be well for us, as students of sociology, briefly to review these. The homologies or similarities of structure of different animals. There are very striking similarities of structure between all the higher animals.
The paper is, broadly speaking, an application of the view of a biologist to Sociology. It is not so much an application of Darwin's view as that of Von Baer. Prof. The paper does not quite bear out its title: "Civics: as Applied Sociology." The application has not begun.
Is man responsible save as the agent? Did he produce the complex animal chemistry that makes this cure possible? Did man make the horse, or the laws that control the physiology and pathology of that animal? Here, then, is faith cure in its largest and best sense. The biologist may not be willing to admit it, but his faith in these great laws of God have made possible the cure of a dread disease.
The standards of conduct are simple indeed; and whether or not it may seem best to separate the processes of social and ethical evolution culminating in human phenomena, the fact remains that these processes begin with elements discovered by the biologist among organisms of the lower levels in the scale.
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