It would be presumptive in the extreme for me to question Professor Loeb’s scientific conclusions; he is one of the most eminent of living experimental biologists.  I would only dissent from some of his philosophical conclusions.  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?  A gun, a steam-engine, knows no ethics, and to the extent that we are compelled to do things, are we in the same category.  Freedom of choice alone gives any validity to ethical consideration.  I dissent from the idea to which he apparently holds, that biology is only applied physics and chemistry.  Is not geology also applied physics and chemistry?  Is it any more or any less?  Yet what a world of difference between the two—­between a rock and a tree, between a man and the soil he cultivates.  Grant that the physical and the chemical forces are the same in both, yet they work to such different ends in each.  In one case they are tending always to a deadlock, to the slumber of a static equilibrium; in the other they are ceaselessly striving to reach a state of dynamic activity—­to build up a body that hangs forever between a state of integration and disintegration.  What is it that determines this new mode and end of their activities?

In all his biological experimentation, Professor Loeb starts with living matter and, finding its processes capable of physico-chemical analysis, he hastens to the conclusion that its genesis is to be accounted for by the action and interaction of these principles alone.

In the inorganic world, everything is in its place through the operation of blind physical forces; because the place of a dead thing, its relation to the whole, is a matter of indifference.  The rocks, the hills, the streams are in their place, but any other place would do as well.  But in the organic world we strike another order—­an order where the relation and subordination of parts is everything, and to speak of human existence as a “matter of chance” in the sense, let us say, that the forms and positions of inanimate bodies are matters of chance, is to confuse terms.

Organic evolution upon the earth shows steady and regular progression; as much so as the growth and development of a tree.  If the evolutionary impulse fails on one line, it picks itself up and tries on another, it experiments endlessly like an inventor, but always improves on its last attempts.  Chance would have kept things at a standstill; the principle of chance, give it time enough, must end where it began.  Chance is a man lost in the woods; he never arrives; he wanders aimlessly.  If evolution pursued a course equally fortuitous, would it not still be wandering in the wilderness of the chaotic nebulae?