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.
The qualitative difference between man and other organisms is a
cardinal fact with orthodox biology has tended to slur over or to
neglect, whereas philosophy has too often tried to magnify it unduly
so as to make man frankly incommensurable with his lower relatives, a
creature not only unique but disparate.
Man is obviously and undoubtedly an organism of the same general nature
as other organisms. He possesses the same general system of organs,
working in the same way as a dog, a horse, a bird, a crocodile, or
a frog; he passes through the same type of developmental cycle; he
is built on the same detailed plan as other mammals; and numerous
indications betray his descent from a particular branch of the
mammalian stock.
But in his mode of life and type of social organization he is unique.
All detailed comparisons between the communities of man and those of
bees and ants are as unprofitable in the working-out as they are easy
in the making. It is futile to direct the sluggard or any other human
being to the ant, since the whole physical and psychical construction
of ants is different from that of man, the whole organization of their
communities from that of his.
His mode of life is unique because his psycho-neural mechanism is built
on a new plan, new modes of connection between parts of the brain being
associated with new possibilities of mind. Let us briefly run over the
biologically most important points in which he differs from the lower
organisms.