Part 5

It is immaterial whether the human mind comes to have these values _because_ they make for progress in evolution, or whether things which make for evolutionary progress become significant _because_ they happen to be considered as valuable by human mind, for both are in their degree true. There is an interrelation which cannot be disentangled, for it is based on the fundamental uniformity and unity of the cosmos. What is important is that the human idea of _value_ finds its external counterpart in an actual historical _direction_ in phenomena, and that each becomes more important because of the relationship.

Much of what I have written will appear obvious. But if it has been obvious, it will be because I have here attempted to focus attention on some of the corollaries of a single fundamental truth--so obvious that it often escapes notice, but so fundamental that its results cannot but fail to obtrude themselves upon us. I mean the unity of phenomena--not merely the unity of life, put on a firm footing for all time by Darwin, though that is for my purpose the most important, but the unity of living and non-living, demanding a monistic conception of the universe. For the present, the stellar host (possibly, as recent astronomy seems to assert, assembled not in one system but in a multiplicity of universes, floating through space like a shoal of jelly-fishes in a Mediterranean bay)--the stars seem alien from our life, alien or at best neutral. All that links us to them is that we are built of the same stuff, the same elements.

But the last half-century has at least enlarged our view so that we can perceive that we, as living things, are not alien to the rest of life--that we march in the same direction, and that our hostility to and struggles with other organisms are in part but the continuation of the old struggle, in part the expression of the fact that we have acquired new methods for dealing with the problems of existence.

The origin of life itself, and its movement in time--both these are found to face in the same direction as ourselves. St. Paul wrote that all things work together for good. That is an exaggeration: but they work together so that the average level of the good is raised, the potentialities of life are bettered. In every time and every country, men have obscurely felt that, although so much of the world, taken singly, was evil, yet the clash of thing with thing, process with process, the working of the whole, somehow led to good.

This feeling is what I believe is clarified and put on a firm intellectual footing by biology. The problems of evil, of pain, of strife, of death, of insufficiency and imperfection--all these and a host of others remain to perplex and burden us. But the fact of progress emerging from pain and battle and imperfection--this is an intellectual prop which can support the distressed and questioning mind, and be incorporated into the common theology of the future.

Dean Inge, in his Romanes Lectures,[17] quotes Disraeli’s caustic words, “The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization,” and quotes them with approval. He bitterly criticizes what we may sum up as Millenarianism (although this after all is but a crude and popular aspiration after what the Christian would call the Kingdom of God on earth). And, after exalting Hope as a virtue, closes with the somewhat satirical statement, “It is safe to predict that we shall go on hoping.”

He has been so concerned to attack the dogma of inherent and inevitable progress in human affairs that he has denied the fact of progress--whether inevitable we know not, but indubitable and actual--in biological evolution: and in so doing he has cut off himself and his adherents from one of the ways in which that greatest need of man which we spoke of at the outset can be satisfied, from by far the greatest manifestation in external things of “something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness.”

One word more, and I have done. There remains in some ways the hardest problem of all. The greatest experiences of human life, those in which the mind appears to touch the Absolute and the Infinite--what of their relation to this notion of progress? They are realized in many forms--in love, in intellectual discovery, in art, in religion; but the salient fact about all is that they are felt as of intensest value, and that they seem to leave no more to be desired. Doubtless when we say that at such moment we touch the Infinite or the Absolute we mean only that we touch what is infinite and absolute in comparison with our ordinary selves. None the less, the sense of finality and utter reality attendant on them is difficult to bring into line with our idea of progress.

“I saw Eternity the other night Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright.”

The Dean too has felt this so strongly that he has made it the keystone of his argument. As he says, “Spiritual progress must be within the sphere of a reality which is not itself progressing, or for which in Milton’s grand words ‘progresses the dateless and irrevoluble circle of its own perfection, joining inseparable hands with joy and bliss in over-measure for ever.’”

I would only suggest that for many to attain to such experiences, which in truth seem to constitute the highest satisfaction at present conceivable for men on earth, it is necessary to organize the community and to plan out life in such a way that human beings, released from the unnecessary burdens of hunger, poverty, and strife, are not only free but helped and urged to attain to such Delectable Mountains. Spiritual progress is our one ultimate aim; it may be towards the dateless and irrevoluble; but it is inevitably dependent upon progress intellectual, moral, and physical--progress in this changing, revolving world of dated events.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

(It was felt that the citation of a few works bearing upon the subject-matter of the essays might help those desirous of pursuing the subject further; but to more than this the lists make no claim.)

Babcock and Clausen, ’18. “Genetics in Relation to Agriculture.” New York, 1918.

Bateson, ’22. “Science.” (N.S.) 1922.

Bergson, H., ’11. “Creative Evolution.” London, 1911.

Bury, J. B., ’20. “The Idea of Progress.” London, 1920.

Carr-Saunders, A. M., ’22. “The Population Problem.” Oxford, 1922.

Castle, _et al_, ’12. “Genetics and Eugenics.” Chicago, 1912.

Conklin, E. G. “Heredity and Environment in the Development of Man.” London, 1922.

Darwin, C. “The Origin of Species.”

---- ---- “The Descent of Man.”

Dendy, ’14. “Outlines of Evolutionary Biology.” London, 1914.

Hobhouse, L. T., ’19. “Development and Purpose.” London, 1919.

Huxley, J. S., ’12. “The Individual in the Animal Kingdom.” Cambridge, 1912.

---- T. H. “Evolution and Ethics.” Collected Essays, vol. ix. London, 1906.

Inge, W. R., ’20. “The Idea of Progress.” Romanes Lectures. Oxford, 1920.

James, W., ’02. “Varieties of Religious Experience.” London, 1902.

Köhler, W., ’21. “Intelligenzprüfungen an Menschenaffen.” Berlin, 1921.

Lloyd Morgan, C, ’20. “Animal Behaviour.” London, 1920.

Loeb, J., ’18. “Forced Movements, Tropisms, and Animal Conduct.” Philadelphia, 1918.

Lull, ’17. “Organic Evolution.” New York, 1917.

M’Dougall, W., ’11. “Body and Mind.” London, 1911.

Osborn, H. F., ’10. “The Age of Mammals.” New York, 1910.

Shipley and MacBride, ’20. “Zoology.” Cambridge, 1920.

Washburn, M. F., ’13. “The Animal Mind.” New York, 1913.

Weismann, A., ’04. “The Evolution Theory.” 2 vols. London, 1904.

Whetham, W. C. D., ’12. “Heredity and Society.” London, 1912.

Woodward, A. S., ’98. “Outlines of Vertebrate Paleontology.” Cambridge, 1898.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Wells, ’17.

[2] Bury, ’20.

[3] This holds good, naturally, for any given spot on the earth’s crust: once the contained fossils have been carefully examined from a number of series of strata, they enable us to correlate the ages of the members of the different series.

[4] Bateson, ’22.

[5] There is a certain school of biologists who object to describing Protozoa as cells. This to others appears pedantic. But, whether or no they are right in the matter of terminology, the fact which I am here emphasizing remains, viz., that Protozoa had to be aggregated before the Metazoa, or many-celled animals, could arise.

[6] See Lloyd Morgan, ’20; Washburn, ’13; Köhler, ’21.

[7] Huxley, ’12.

[8] See Babcock and Clausen, ’19.

[9] See Conklin, ’22.

[10] See Carr-Saunders, ’22.

[11] See Huxley, ’12.

[12] See Woodward, ’98; Osborn, ’10.

[13] See Carr-Saunders, ’22.

[14] See Köhler, ’21.

[15] See Whetham, ’21; Castle, ’12.

[16] See the second essay of this volume for fuller discussion of this point.

[17] Inge, ’20.

II

BIOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY

PROGRESS

The Crab to Cancer junior gave advice: “Know what you want, my son, and then proceed Directly sideways. God has thus decreed-- Progress is lateral; let that suffice.”

Darwinian Tapeworms on the other hand Agree that Progress is a loss of brain, And all that makes it hard for worms to attain The true Nirvana--peptic, pure, and grand.

Man too enjoys to omphaloscopize. Himself as Navel of the Universe Oft rivets him--until he asks his Nurse, Old Nature, for the truth; and she replies: “Look back, and find support; you march with Life’s main stream. Look on--be proud; her future lies within your dream.”

LONDON, _Feb. 1923_.

BIOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY

“Come out into the light of things; Let Nature be your teacher.” --W. WORDSWORTH.

“In matters that really interest him, man cannot support the suspense of judgment which science so often has to enjoin. He is too anxious to feel certain to have time to know. So that we see of the sciences, mathematics appearing first, then astronomy, then physics, then chemistry, then biology, then psychology, then sociology--but always the new field was grudged to the new method, and we still have the denial to sociology of the name of science.”--W. TROTTER, _Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War_.

There are many facile comparisons to be drawn between the facts of biology and of sociology. The most obvious is that between a whole civilized community and one of the higher animals. Shakespeare employed an age-old fable in Menenius Agrippa’s Tale of the Belly and the Members in _Coriolanus_. With Darwin, and the establishment of evolutionary biology on a sound footing, matters took a new turn. Man was now seen to be connected with the rest of life not merely by analogies of his own mind’s weaving, but by the living bonds of genetic descent; and it was at once perceived that a more rigid force than had hitherto been suspected might inhere in the comparisons between State and Organism. For, as Spencer argued, was not the State in a true sense an organism--a single biological unit composed of individual human beings just as a metazoan animal was a single biological unit composed, in the first instance, of individual cells? Further, the investigation of the evolutionary process seemed to reveal certain general laws of its march: beings of the same original constitution, exposed to the environmental forces of the same planet, had reacted in similar ways, developing along parallel lines, and arriving at similar types of organization as end-result. Thus it might reasonably be supposed that we should find the same general organization and mode of development in one type of organism as in another, in human society as in a vertebrate.

On these bases, Spencer and his followers drew elaborate comparisons of the two, and apparently believed that they were reaching the same degree of accuracy as that found in comparative anatomy when they compared the circulatory system of a mammal with the transport facilities of a State, or drew parallels between the brain and the cabinet.

It was speedily seen, however, that such generalizations were so broad and vague as not to be of much service: that the resemblances were in fact often no more than symbolical or metaphorical, instead of being based upon detailed similarity of constitution or of evolutionary development. With this, evolutionary theorizing on sociological matters fell somewhat into disrepute. The earlier jubilant certainty gave place to later doubt; and the half-century whose beginnings had roused Haeckel and Herbert Spencer to their imaginative flights closed suitably enough with that remarkable document, T. H. Huxley’s Romanes Lecture, in which the greatest protagonist of Darwinism confesses to seeing between man and the rest of the cosmic process, in spite of man’s genesis from that same cosmic process, an insuperable and essential opposition, a difference of aim or direction which had turned the original bridge into a barrier.[18]

As a result, not only did the particular comparison between society and an organism fall into disrepute, but also all attempts to draw far-reaching conclusions from biology to human affairs.

But the original contention still remains, and is logically unassailable. Man is an organism descended from lower organisms; his communities are composed of units bound together for mutual good in a division of labour in the same way as are the cells of a metazoan: he can no more escape the effects of his terrestrial environment than can other organisms. There _is_ therefore reason to suppose that the processes of evolution in man and man’s societies on the one hand, and in lower organisms on the other, must have something important and indeed fundamental in common, something which if we could but unravel would help us in the study of both.

The correlation of biology with sociology is important not only in itself, but also as part of a more general correlation of all the sciences. The correlation of the sciences is of particular importance to-day for a double set of reasons. The rise of evolutionary biology and of modern psychology have not only changed our outlook on specially human problems, but have altered the whole balance, if I may so put it, of science. There was a time when the basic studies of physics and chemistry seemed not only basic but somehow more essentially scientific than the sciences dealing with life. Distinctions were drawn between the experimental and the observational sciences--often half-consciously implying a distinction between accurate, scientific, self-respecting sciences and blundering, hit-or-miss, tolerated bodies of knowledge. Biological phenomena are now, however, seen to be every whit as susceptible of accurate and experimental analysis; and indeed to present so many problems to the physicist and chemist that in fifty years or so, I venture to prophesy, the wise virgins in those basic sciences will be those who have laid in a store of biological oil.

But the main point is this--the study of evolution, of animal behaviour and of human psychology makes it clear that in the higher forms of animals at least we are dealing with a category not touched on at all by the physicist and chemist--the category of mind and mental process. Sir Charles Sherrington, with admirable lucidity, drew for us, in his recent address to the British Association, the problem of the relation between mind and matter as it presents itself to the biologist.

The great change that has come over science in the last half century, or so it seems to me, is the recognition that mind is not to be explained away as a mere epiphenomenon, but is to be studied as a phenomenon. From this point of view, biology will always be the connecting link between physico-chemical science on the one hand, and psychology on the other. There is every reason to suppose and no reason to doubt that life, which we know to be composed of the same material elements and to work by the same energy as non-living matter, actually arose from it during the evolution of this planet. There is, in the behaviour of the lower organisms, nothing which by itself would make us postulate mind: but in the higher insects, molluscs, and vertebrates, the last in particular, mental process is not only clearly present, but clearly of great biological importance; and finally the mind of man, according to innumerable converging lines of evidence, has evolved from the mind of some non-human mammal.

The principle of continuity makes us postulate that this new category of phenomena has not sprung up during the course of evolution absolutely _de novo_, but that it is in some sense universally present in all phenomena. It is merely that we have not yet found a method for the direct detection of mental processes as we have, say, for electrical processes; but something of the same general nature, the same category as mind must, if we wish to preserve our scientific sanity, our belief in the orderliness of the world, be present in lower organisms and in the lifeless matter from which they originally sprang.

In the present state of our knowledge, the study of physics and chemistry can be pursued without any reference to mental processes. But the study of biology cannot: and that is one reason why the centre of gravity of science as a whole is shifting--it is shifting for exactly the same reason that the centre of gravity of a house shifts during its construction--because the foundations have to be built first.

Our second reason is as follows. Biology is once more the link between root and flower, between physics and chemistry and human affairs, in regard to evolution. I say evolution: it would be better to broaden the idea by saying the directional processes to be seen in the universe. So far as a main direction is to be observed in physics and chemistry, it is, as all authorities are agreed, towards the degradation of energy and a final state in which not only life but all activity whatsoever will be reduced to nothing, all the waters of energy run down into a single dead level of moveless ocean. Biology, on the other hand, presents us with the spectacle of an evolution in which the main direction is the raising of the maximum level of certain qualities of living beings, such as efficiency of organs, co-ordination, size, accuracy and range of senses, capacity for knowledge, memory and educability, emotional intensity,--qualities which in one way or another lead to a more efficient control by the organism over the external world, and to its greater independence.

A direction towards more mind is visible; and this development of greater mental powers has been in all the later stages the chief instrument of acquiring control and independence. More and more of matter is embodied in living organisms, more and more becomes subservient to life.

Thus, while in physics and chemistry we see a tendency towards the extinction of life and activity, in biology we see a tendency towards more life and more activity; and this latter tendency is accompanied and largely made possible by the evolution of greater intensity of mental process--of something, that is to say, of which we cannot as yet take account in physics and chemistry.

The biologist may well ask himself the question--“Is it not possible that this evolving mind, of whose achievements on its new level in man we are only seeing the beginning, may continue to find more and more ways of subordinating the inorganic to itself, and that it may eventually retard or even prevent the attainment of this complete degradation of energy prophesied by physico-chemical science? Is it not possible that this great generalization only applies to phenomena in their purely material aspect, and that when we learn to detect and measure the mental aspects of phenomena we may find reason to modify the universal applicability of this law of degradation?” We do not know the answer to that question: but it is clearly a legitimate and useful question to ask. In any event, we constatate two chief directions in the universe; that seen in biology is in many ways opposed to that seen in physics and chemistry; and both must be taken into account.

I have spent, I fear, a great deal of time on what will appear to many as very irrelevant prolegomena. But the complete breakdown of the older views about nature and man, of the philosophies and theologies based not on observation but on an authority which is no authority, on unverifiable speculation, on superstition, and on what we would like to be so rather than on what happens to be so--the breakdown of all the commonly accepted basis for man’s view of himself and the universe, has made it necessary to go back to fundamentals if we are to see where we stand. Secondly, the progress of the biological and psychological sciences, as I have already pointed out, has considerably altered the outlook of those who pin their faith to the newer or scientific view of nature, the view which attempts constantly to refer speculations to reality, and to build on foundations which have been tested by experiment.

The orthodox evolutionary view was that phenomena received in some degree an explanation if their origin from simpler phenomena could be demonstrated. As a matter of fact, reflection makes it clear that such an explanation is never complete. It is a very incomplete explanation of the properties of water to discover that it is composed of oxygen and hydrogen; or of those of humanity to discover that it is derived from lower forms of life. A precisely similar mistake is made by most psycho-analysts, who consider that an “explanation” of adult psychology is given by tracing in it effects of the events of childhood. In all such cases it is true that analysis is helped, but we are by no means exempted from further study of the later (and more complex) phenomena in and for themselves. Just as adult psychology is qualitatively different in various respects from childish psychology, so is man qualitatively different from lower organisms. Very few attempts have been made to carry over conceptions derived from sociology into biology.[19] But the converse, as we have seen, has often been true, and numerous writers--largely because purely biological are simpler than human phenomena--have been obsessed with the idea that the study of biology as such will teach us principles which can be applied directly and wholesale to human problems.

What we have just been saying shows us the correct path. Through psychology and biology, sociology can become attached to the general body of science; and in so doing it can both receive and give. Since man is but a single species of organism, and, biologically speaking, a very young one; since moreover he presents a peculiar type of organization, it is clear that the broad principles underlying physiology and evolution can best be studied on other organisms and later applied to man. On the other hand, man is the highest existing organism; thus a study of the causes to which he owes his pre-eminence will be important as adding to and crowning the principles derived from non-human biology. Furthermore, not only are man’s mental powers on a different level from those of other animals, but psychology can at present make by far its greatest contributions by a study of human mind, so that the psychological side of biology will for the present derive its chief information from man.

Our first affair, therefore, is to see in what important respects man is qualitatively unlike the rest of the organic world; then to investigate what general rules or principles apply equally to him and to the others; and finally to see what corrections, so to speak, must be made before these principles can be applied to the one or to the other.