PREFACE.
The educated and inquiring public of the present day addresses to the experts who have specialized in every imaginable subject the question that was asked in olden times of Euclid by King Ptolemy Philadelphus, Protector of Letters. Recoiling in dismay from the difficulties presented by the study of mathematics and annoyed at his slow progress, he inquired of the celebrated geometer if there was not some royal road, could he not learn geometry more easily than by studying the Elements. The learned Greek replied, “There is no royal road.” These royal roads making every branch of science accessible to the cultivated mind did not exist in the days of Ptolemy and Euclid. But they do exist to-day. These roads form what we call Scientific Philosophy.
Scientific philosophy opens a path through the hitherto inextricable medley of natural phenomena. It throws light on facts, it lays bare principles, it replaces contingent details by essential facts. And thus it makes science accessible and communicable. Intellectually it performs a very lofty function.
There is virtually a philosophy of every science.There is therefore a philosophy of the science which deals with the phenomena of life and death—i.e., of physiology. I have endeavoured to give a summary of this philosophy in this volume. I have had in view two classes of readers. In the first place there are readers of general culture who are desirous of knowing something of the trend of ideas in biology. They already form quite a large section of the great public.
These scholars and inquirers, with Bacon, believe that the only science is general science. What they want to know is not what instruments we use, our processes, our technique, and the thousand and one details of the experiments on which we spend our lives in the laboratory. What they are interested in are the general truths we have acquired, the problems we are trying to solve, the principles of our methods, the progress of our science in the past, its state in the present, its probable course in the future.
But I venture to think that this book is also addressed to another class of readers, to those whose professional study is physiology. To them it is dedicated. They have been initiated into the mysteries of the science. They are learning it by practice. That is the right method. Practice makes perfect. Claude Bernard used to say that in order to be an expert in experimental science you must first be “a laboratory rat.” And among us there are many such “laboratory rats.” They are guided inthe daily task of investigation by a dim instinct of the path and of the direction of contemporary physiology. Perhaps it may be of assistance to them to find their more or less unconscious ideas here expressed in an explicit form.
A. DASTRE.