ce, in the wheel of the railway carriage, or in
the blood of the thinker, and of analytic mechanics which may be applied
even to the problem of personal freedom.

The most comprehensive and detailed elaboration of the mechanical theory
of life is to be found in Herbert Spencer's "Principles of Biology."(72)
Friedrich Albert Lange's "History of Materialism" is a brilliant plea for
mechanical theories,(73) which he afterwards surpassed and neutralised by
his Kantian Criticism. Verworn, too, in his "Physiology"(74) gives a clear
example of the way in which the mechanical theory in its most consistent
form is sublimed, apparently in the idealism of Kant and Fichte, but in
reality in its opposite--the Berkeleyan psychology. A similar outcome is in
various ways indicated in the modern trend of things.

CHAPTER IX. CRITICISM OF MECHANICAL THEORIES.

In attempting to define our attitude to the mechanical theory of life, we
have first of all to make sure that we have a right to take up a definite
position at all. We should have less right, or perhaps none, if this
theory of life were really of a purely "biological" nature, built up
entirely from the expert knowledge and data which the biologist alone
possesses. But the principles, assumptions, supplementary ideas and modes
of expression along all the six lines we have discussed, the style and
method according to which the hypothesis is constructed, the multitude of
separate presuppositions with which it works, and indeed everything that
helps to build up and knit the biological details into a scientific
hypothesis, are the materials of rational synthesis in general, and as
such are subject to general as well as to biological criticism. What is
there, for instance, in Weismann's ingenious biophor-theory that can be
called specifically biological, and not borrowed from other parts of the
scientific system?

One advantage, indeed, the biologist always has in this matter, apart from
his special knowledge; that is, the technical instinct, the power of
scenting out, so to speak, and immediately feeling the importance of the
facts pertaining to his own discipline. It is this that gives every
specialist the advantage over the layman in dealing with the data of his
own subject. This power of instinctively appraising facts, which develops
in the course of all special work, can, for instance in hypotheses in the
domain of history, transform small details, which to the layman se