The mechanistic conceptions of life : biological essays / by Jacques Loeb.

  • Loeb, Jacques, 1859-1924.
Date:
1912
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The mechanistic conceptions of life : biological essays / by Jacques Loeb. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by Royal College of Physicians, London. The original may be consulted at Royal College of Physicians, London.

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    I THE MECHANISTIC CONCEPTION OF LIFE1 I. INTRODUCTORY It is the object of this paper to discuss the question whether our present knowledge gives us any hope that ultimately life, i.e., the sum of all life phenomena, can be unequivocally explained in physico-chemical terms. If on the basis of a serious survey this question can be answered in the affirmative our social and ethical life will have to be put on a scientific basis and our rules of conduct must be brought into harmony with the results of scientific biology. It is seemingly often taken for granted by laymen that truth in biology, or science in general, is of the same order as truth in certain of the mental sciences; that is to say, that everything rests on argument or rhetoric and that what is regarded as true today may be expected with some proba- bility to be considered untrue tomorrow. It happens in sci- ence, especially in the descriptive sciences like paleontology or zoology, that hypotheses are forwarded, discussed, and then abandoned. It should, however, be remembered that modern biology is fundamentally an experimental and not a descrip- tive science; and that its results are not rhetorical, but always assume one of two forms: it is either possible to control a life phenomenon to such an extent that we can produce it at desire (as, e.g., the contraction of an excised muscle); or we succeed in finding the numerical relation between the con- ditions of the experiment and the biological result (e.g., 1 Address delivered at the First International Congress of Monists at Ham- burg, September 10, 1911; reprinted from Popular Science Monthly, January, 1912, by courtesy of Professor J. McKeen Cattell.