r to call it. And yet nothing is more clear than the
logical sequence that, if you have a law, someone must have made it,
and if you look upon something as "a phenomenon of arrangement," someone
must have arranged it. But for reasons not obvious nor confessed, there
is an objection to make any such admission. Perhaps it is the taint of
the monism of the latter half of the last century which still persists.
At any rate, as I have elsewhere pointed out, there is a most curious
passage in another paper by the same author in which he says: "With the
experimental proof that variation consists largely in the unpacking and
repacking of an original complexity, it is not so certain as we might
like to think that the order of these events is not pre-determined." The
writer hastens to denounce the horrid heresy on the brink of which he
finds himself hesitating, by adding that he sees "no ground whatever for
holding such a view," though "in the light of modern research it
scarcely looks so absurdly improbable as before."[9] It is curious that
the writer in question does not seem to have been in any way influenced
by the eliminative argument so potent in connection with the discussion
on Vitalism. We ask for an explanation of the occurrences--say of
regeneration. We find that no physical explanation in the least meets
the needs of the case, and we are consequently obliged to look for it in
something differing from the operations of chemistry and physics. Of
this argument Dr. Johnstone[10] says: "It is almost impossible to
overestimate the appeal which it makes to the investigator."
Now, this matter of "arrangement" or of "pre-determination," when put
forward as an explanation, even tentatively, necessitates a step
further. That step might possibly be in the direction of pantheism,
though, according to Driesch,[11] pantheism is the doctrine "that
reality is a something which makes itself ('_dieu se fait_,' in the
words of Bergson), whilst theism would be any theory according to which
the manifoldness of material reality is predetermined in an immaterial
way." And he concludes "that those who regard the thesis of the theory
of order as necessary for everything that is or can be, must accept
theism, and are not allowed to speak of '_dieu qui se fait_.'" It is
difficult to see how anyone who has studied the rigid order exhibited by
experiments on Mendelian lines can resist the logic of this argument
unless indeed he takes a place on P
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