III - Life in Little

Summary

Recuerdo que una vez me past sobre el microseopio veinté horas seguidas, avizprando los gestos de un leucocito moroso, en sus hboriosos forcejecos para evadirse de un capilar sanguineo.

Santiago Ramon-y-Cajal, Recuerdos de mi Vida, ed. 3, ii, 171.

(I remember that once I spent twenty hours continuously at the microscope watching the movements of a sluggish leucocyte in its laborious efforts to escape from a blood capillary.

Trans, by E. Home Craigie, Toronto, 1937.)

the imagination represented by the words “accidental play of molecules and atoms” (K. Sapper, Philosophie des Organischen, 1928) corresponds to nothing in Nature.

Keith W. Monsarrat, Human Understanding and its World, p. 278.

We were looking at the mid-sixteenth century. It was a time we can regard as in ways not a few the opening of our own. We were enquiring what the student of Nature then interpreted Life to be. One thing we noted was that he, facing Nature, regarded man, in fine, himself and ourselves, as Nature's chief object and her special care. In his view Nature centred upon man. Said briefly, and therefore inadequately, for Aristotle man was the social animal, for Fernel, physician of the sixteenth century, man was the animal with the immortal soul.

All mankind in one or other of different ways studies Nature. Every man does so perforce in order to live. But down the ages in the civilized community there has been one class of observer of Nature who has given himself to its study more intimately than have the rest.