field. We make, without realizing it, the unwarranted assumption that there is no difference between the living and the inert, and assume that life is a mechanism like the artificially isolated systems and objects which physics studies.

Strictly regarded, this is not a scientific mode of procedure. It is an a priori acceptance of a mechanistic view of life, an uncritical assumption of the adequacy for biology and psychology of thought-frames formed to deal with the inorganic world. The method of true science, when it seeks to understand an object, is to study that object directly. It ought to do the same with life. And if life is observed at first hand, without a priori theories brought over from physical investigations, it will be found to possess the qualities which Bergson describes, of freedom, creativeness, novelty, incalculability and irreversibility. The philosopher in this case is an empirical observer, and in stating what he finds, and refusing to do violence to facts or to deny them on the ground that they do not fit into a theory, he is a truer representative of science than the mechanical biologists who denounce his perceptions of truth as illusions. There actually is a difference between life and the lifeless, and when we try to force the former into the concepts or frames developed to deal

with the latter, we "feel these frames cracking." We are arbitrary in our procedure, and are doing violence to the truth.

To understand life, we must study it directly, as biologists and psychologists, and not as physicists agreeing to look only at its external aspects and excluding consciousness by definition. This truth has social consequences of the first importance. The human individual is something more than a machine, and unless the individuality of his life is regarded, he suffers injury. The progress of pedagogy reveals, with increasing clearness, the uniqueness of each life. The adoption of a graded system in the schools was a step forward in educational progress. It was an advance for the reason that, when great numbers of children are to be dealt with, some such plan is a necessity. Still, it is a system, a mechanism, and it was soon found that it rarely is perfectly suited to any child. Many children can hardly be included in the scheme, and some of them are greatly injured by the attempts of parents and teachers to conform their lives to an alien and rigid school machine. As systems are essentially inelastic, efforts are now being made to overcome the difficulty by increasing the number of the grades, so as to take account of differences between children that were formerly ignored. Special schools are also being established in the larger

cities for special groups, and other devices are being employed, all of which tend in the direction of the recognition of the uniqueness and individuality of each human life.

It is because of this that all our classifications of men are more or less unjust. Laws are cruel in their operation when no provision is made taking into account the special circumstances of the individual against whom they are enforced. It is for this reason, that the probation officer, the suspended sentence, the indeterminate sentence, the parole, etc., are being adopted by enlightened peoples in their dealings with their delinquent members. There is no way to be just to anybody except to treat him as an individual, as a person. Tolstoi's powerful story, "The

Resurrection," which contains so much that is painful and revolting, describes, in some of the most vivid pages of all literature, the inevitable consequences of dealing with men in an impersonal way. He shows how many meet their death in tragic ways, not because they are treated with intentional cruelty, but because they are regarded abstractly, as so many units, and are dealt with by the state without regard to individuality and special needs. He says: "If a psychological problem were set to find means of making men of our time Christian, humane, simple, kind people - perform the most horrible crimes without feeling guilty, only one

solution could be devised: simply to go on doing what is being done now. It is only necessary that these people should be . . . convinced that there is a kind of business . . . which allows men to treat other men as things, without having human brotherly relations with them. . . . It all lies in the fact that men think there are circumstances when one may deal with human beings without love. But there are no such circumstances. We may deal with things without love we cut down trees, make bricks, hammer iron without love—but we cannot deal with men without it. . . . Mutual love is the fundamental law of human life.”

CHAPTER VIII

LIGHT FROM BERGSON'S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE UPON BIOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

The puzzles of evolution, its apparently insoluble difficulties, are largely due to the fact that we are studying life, not as biologists, but as physicists and chemists and philosophers with the mathematical ideal of knowledge. We voluntarily renounce all categories except the physical, and assume that the development of the structures of organic beings must be explained on purely mechanical principles. This is as if a man should tie up one hand that he might work better. The result is what it was bound to be, if life not only has physical aspects, but is something more besides. For many years now we have been trying to regard living creatures as machines and the infinite variety of their structures as due to the accumulation of small differences or variations, more or less accidental in origin, and preserved by natural selection. But the difficulties are too numerous and too great. Outer conditions can eliminate variations, but how can they produce