l 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
wanderi