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Updated: May 14, 2025
We must try to make this point clear, in order to show by what invisible threads our mechanistic philosophy remains bound to the ancient philosophy of Ideas, and how also it responds to the requirements, above all practical, of our understanding. Modern, like ancient, science proceeds according to the cinematographical method. It cannot do otherwise; all science is subject to this law.
I dissent from his statement that only the mechanistic conception of life can throw light on the source of ethics. Is there any room for the moral law in a world of mechanical determinism? There is no ethics in the physical order, and if humanity is entirely in the grip of that order, where do moral obligations come in?
But the most austere courtesy and the most authentically dispassionate division of benefits will not meet the underbred exigencies of a war conducted on the mechanistic lines of the modern state of the industrial arts.
One virtue it would have, apart from those already noted, is the variation it would permit in curricula, text books, personnel and scholastic life as between one school and another. There is no more fatal error in education than that standardization which has recently become a fad and which finds its most mechanistic manifestation in France.
In other words, that there is a difference of kind, and not merely of degree, between a stone and a sparrow. Hence the schools of thought called vitalistic and mechanistic. To most persons it has up to now seemed impossible that there could be a third school; we appeared to be confronted with what the logicians call a Dichotomy.
There is the idea of a brain-soul, of a spot where the soul lives or where the brain thinks which we have not quite abandoned since Descartes named the pineal gland as the seat of the soul. Then there is the false idea that all causality is mechanistic and that there is nothing in the universe which is not mathematically calculable. There is the confusion of representations and of things.
Not that the adepts in this modern mechanistic system of knowledge and design may not also be very good patriots and devoted servants of the dynasty.
Latterly, gradually, but increasingly, the technology of war, too, has been shifting to the mechanistic plane; until in the latest phases of it, somewhere about the turn of the century, it is evident that the logic of warfare too has come to be the same mechanistic logic that makes the modern state of the industrial arts.
In this greatest phenomenon of life, then, the mechanistic theory is in harmony with the facts. Perhaps no more convincing proof of our thesis that the body is a mechanism developed and adapted to its purposes by environment can be secured than by a study of that most constant manifestation of consciousness pain.
Professor Loeb, with his "Mechanistic Conception of Life"; Professor Henderson, of Harvard, with his "Fitness of the Environment"; Professor Le Dantec, of the Sorbonne in Paris, with his volume on "The Nature and Origin of Life," published a few years since; Professor Schäfer, President of the British Association, Professor Verworn of Bonn, and many others find in the laws and properties of matter itself a sufficient explanation of all the phenomena of life.
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