Those who love and understand animals cannot be made to believe that animals are devoid of sense and feeling, or act blindly in response to stimuli. Why then should we listen only to those who know nothing of animals and care less? Lovers of flowers will even go so far as to attribute a sort of sentience to vegetation. Are they necessarily wrong because their opinions are contradicted by teachers in flowerless school-rooms? J. C. Bose, the great Hindu scientist, has lately intrigued the whole world by writing a book in which he shows that trees have eyes, nerves, veins, something which corresponds to a heart; are capable of pain; of fatigue; can be poisoned; and to a certain extent seem to remember what has happened to them. What is the result? Why, our mechanists have hurried to invert the Bose philosophy and to describe it with its heels in the air. It is “_la fin du mythe de la force vitale_,” cries Pierre Guitet-Vauquelin.[103] Bose, according to this ingenious writer, has discovered “_l’unité de la matière vivante et non vivante_,” and the conclusion is drawn that said unity has been arrived at by making the _non vivante_ universal. The Idol of the Tribe, the economy of hypotheses, has become a Procrustean bed, to which everything must be stretched or cut to fit. But unfortunately this particular bed was made by chemists and physicists in Newton’s time to fit certain facts and approximations to truth in which they were dealing for the moment. It was then a convenient bit of furniture. Now it is very awkward. We cling to it only for old time’s sake. The modern experimental method as at first developed has proven woefully inadequate when universally applied. Even the study of outward behavior is very difficult, especially if the subject be human, for we cannot duplicate in the laboratory the exact circumstances of real life--and every variation is fatal to accuracy, especially as its influence is often unsuspected and totally unknown. We cannot control our own species, because we are not placed above it--though many of us would like to be. This entails another difficulty. As we are not above it in power, so we are not above it in intelligence. The mind in attempting to study itself has the disadvantage of being both the eye and the picture. No wonder the so-called social sciences have failed to duplicate the triumphs of physical science. They have tried to steal a prestige which they have not earned, to work with borrowed tools instead of developing proper tools of their own. But since it is the habit of the age to look below for its sanctions, let us look a little more intently--at the findings of the new science. 4. THE NEW PHYSICS