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Within the premises of this modern mechanistic industry and science all the best values and verities of the dynastic order are simply "incompetent, irrelevant and impertinent." There is accordingly no unavoidable clash and no necessary friction between the two schemes of knowledge or the two habits of mind that characterise the two contrasted cultural eras.
The mechanistic theory of life the theory that all living things can be explained and fully accounted for on purely physico-chemical principles has many defenders in our day. The main aim of the foregoing chapters is to point out the inadequacy of this view. At the risk of wearying my reader I am going to collect under the above heading a few more considerations bearing on this point.
Criticisms of the Mechanistic Theory of Life. The course of the mechanistic theory of life has been surprisingly similar to that of its complement, the theory of the general evolution of the organic world.
"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.
After all, want of knowledge only proves want of knowledge; and Sir Oliver Lodge would warn Prof. Thomson of the extreme danger of resting an argument on the ignorance of science at any particular time. I note this statement of Professor Thomson's chiefly because it illustrates a very common method of dealing with the mechanistic or non-theistic view of the universe.
Of such methods, the exemplars are to be found only among those writers who today are worthily carrying forward the mechanistic traditions originated by Descartes.
Mayer actually had a picture directly contrary to the mechanistic conception. For him, the arising of heat represented a disappearance of mechanical energy. If this, then, was Mayer's belief, what was it that convinced him of the existence of a numerical balance between appearing and vanishing energy, even before he had any experimental proof?
In what follows it will be shown how wrong it is to see in Kepler a forerunner of the mechanistic conception of the world; how near, in reality, his world-picture is to the one to which we are led by working along Goetheanistic lines; and how right therefore Goethe was in his judgment on Kepler. Goethe possessed a sensitive organ for the historical appropriateness of human ideas.
No mechanistic explanation will serve to account for this order of clairvoyance since it is inextricably involved in the mystery of consciousness itself. Yet our already overworked analogy can perhaps cast a little light even here. To the flat-man, the third dimension of objects passing through his plane translates itself to his experience into time.
And will not the position of a mechanistic philosophy become still more difficult, when it is pointed out to it that the egg of a mollusc cannot have the same chemical composition as that of a vertebrate, that the organic substance which evolved toward the first of these two forms could not have been chemically identical with that of the substance which went in the other direction, and that, nevertheless, under the influence of light, the same organ has been constructed in the one case as in the other?
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