language--not a mere repertory of sounds or signs associated with
different states of mind, as in some higher organisms, but a language
comprising special symbols for particular external objects, and
thus making it possible to have a much more detailed knowledge and
classification of the outer world. In the second place, he can frame
abstract ideas or concepts, and is thus enabled to extract the general
kernel from the husk of innumerable separate and different particulars.
As a result of these two faculties, he possesses what we may call a
new, accessory form of inheritance. True biological inheritance takes
place by means of the reproductive cells. In some birds and mammals,
the behaviour of the young is modified by what they learn from their
parents, so that they profit by the experience of their elders;
however, this profiting by experience is not cumulative, but must be
repeated afresh in each generation. In man, on the other hand, speech
and writing make it possible to construct a continuous tradition, by
means of which experience may be actually accumulated from generation
to generation. There are thus two forms of inheritance in man, two
hereditary streams--biological inheritance, by means of germ-cells or
detached portions of the organism, in which favourable mutations may
be accumulated by selection, and “experience-inheritance,” by means
of tradition, in which useful experience may be accumulated by the
activity of mind. By means of tradition-inheritance, man is virtually
enabled to “inherit acquired characters”; thus the environment in
which the latter stages of his development are passed through, and
consequently his adult self, the end-product of that development, can
be altered far more rapidly than in any other organism. Finally, it
is possible, as is being increasingly realized, thus to accumulate
experience relating to the alteration of biological inheritance, and so
eventually to substitute conscious purpose for blind natural selection
in man’s future evolution.
Next point: by means of speech, tradition, and invention, man has
been enabled to extend his biological environment--in other words,
that part of the cosmos with which he stands in relation--till it has
reached an enormously greater size than that of any other organism.
He is learning ever more facts about the celestial bodies, studying
stars that are at an inconceivable distance from him. He is able to
travel at will to all parts of the globe. He can penetrate by means of
tradition to remote periods of the past: as Mr. Wells has forcibly put
it, a modern Englishman can know more of the world in the Classical
Epoch than could the most learned Greek or Roman. And even when he can
no more get into contact with ideas, he can still unravel facts: flint
implements help him to the history of man, fossils to that of life,
rocks to that of the globe, stars to that of the solar system. In time,
as well as in space, his environment enlarges to a size that is for
practical purposes infinite, whereas no other organism can penetrate
beyond its own memories, or, at most, do more than profit by those
of the generation immediately before it. Professor Keyser,[20] in a
suggestive article, has characterized this unique attribute of man by
calling him “the time-binder.”
Speech and reasoning, with all their consequences, have only been
rendered possible through another important qualitative change in the
human brain, which in its turn has led to other new potentialities of
life being realized in man and in man alone--its flexibility.
In some of the lowest forms of life, such as Paramecium, there are but
one or two possible modes of reaction--reactions which it attempts in
response to any one of the myriad changes that may occur in the outer
world. As we ascend the scale, we find two chief types of alterations:
in the first place an increase in the number of hereditarily-given
modes of reaction, and in the second an increased power of “learning,”
of altering behaviour in adjustment to experience. In the insects, the
first is chiefly in evidence. Although many insects undoubtedly can
profit by experience to a limited degree, yet most of their behaviour
is instinctive, in the sense that it unrolls itself automatically and
efficiently in the absence of previous experience or of any possible
instruction. In the vertebrates, on the other hand, we see as we pass
from the lower to the higher groups a definite, steady increase in the
power of learning by experience, from the fish that takes weeks to
associate a given colour with a given event such as feeding-time, to
the dog or monkey capable of learning elaborate tricks after a couple
of trials. But even in the most “intelligent” of birds or mammals, the
power of image-formation is very probably absent,[21] and the power
of concept-formation, of generalizing, certainly so. This fact (quite
apart from the absence of tradition, although this too operates in the
same direction) means that the associations of animals can only be
arbitrary and individual: a rook in one country (to choose a somewhat
far-fetched example) may happen to associate danger with fire-arms, one
in another with bows and arrows. Life, for the animals, is a cinema,
different for each individual, in which one event may be associated
with another in the most diverse and haphazard ways. With the advent
of the human type of brain, however, experience can be sorted out and
properly docketed; the mere cinematographic record is converted into a
drama full of significance, the diary into a card-index. By this means,
and by tradition, it is possible for man to obtain a much more accurate
and more complete grasp of the relationships of the objects that
compose the outer world than is possible for any other animal. Through
knowledge, as ever, comes power: and as a result, man has been enabled
to invent tools and machinery, and so to enlarge enormously his control
over his environment. Just as his “range,” in the zoogeographical
sense, is extended to an unprecedented degree both in space and time,
so tools represent, biologically speaking, an extension of himself
as an operator. While man is using a tool, he and the tool together
constitute but a single unit in the struggle for existence. As various
writers have put it, tools and machines are temporary organs of man,
which have the additional merit of being replaceable if lost or damaged.
But this is not all: the great power of association possessed by man,
together with his faculty of generalization and of speech, makes it
possible for him to _learn_ his rôle in the community, instead of being
born with it as are the bee and the ant. Great educability instead of
differentiated instinct, infinite possibility, at the expense of the
pains of learning, instead of an effortless but limited stock of inborn
modes of behaviour--in this again man represents a qualitatively new
organic type.
By this means he can escape what has always been a necessity with lower
forms: by means of education and machinery he can play a specialized
part in the community life, and so build up a community with a high
degree of division of labour, without being born specialized. He could
not thus learn his rôle if he were not educable, nor if he could not
manufacture tools. An ant or a duck or a dog possesses admirable tools
for its particular job: but they are living parts of the organism’s
own body. A worker ant cannot lay down its serviceable carpentering
mandibles and become a soldier by picking up a large and warlike
pair:--once a worker, always a worker; once a soldier, always a
soldier--that is the rule for ants, but not for men.
The efficiency and biological success of communities depends on the
degree and accuracy of the division of labour and co-ordination between
the units of which they are built up. This is true of cell-communities
and the second-grade individuals or metazoa or multicellular animals
and plants to which they give rise,[22] and also of the communities
of metazoa and the third-grade individuals to which they give rise,
whether the members of such communities of higher grade are physically
bound together, as in a Hydroid or a Portuguese Man-o’-War, or
united only by mental bonds, as are the communities of ants and bees
and termites. As we have seen, the individuals are differentiated
structurally for the different functions which they have to perform.
This is not so in human species: a man is not born cross-legged to
be a tailor, or broad-thumbed to be a miller, or big-armed to be a
blacksmith. Even in the hereditary castes of India, the trade or
profession is determined by tradition, and not by inborn structural
adaptations.
Still another consequence flows from this educability, this flexible
and elastic mental organization. A man can pass from one occupation
to another. He can be specialized for several, or combine a high
degree of professional skill in one with the generalized knowledge of
an amateur in another. It is this obvious but fundamental fact which
is at the bottom of many of the failures to apply biological ideas to
sociology.
Another human distinction is the increase of the part played by
environment in man as opposed to animals (in determining his
biologically effective nature). Environment plays not merely a large
part, but a preponderating one, in his development after the first
year or so of his life. Tradition provides a special environment,
made by man for man’s own development; and men brought up in markedly
different traditions arrive at different end-results just as surely and
obviously as do men of markedly different hereditary tendencies arrive
at different end-results even though exposed to similar traditions.
Traditions are infinitely complex things: there are world traditions,
national traditions broad and narrow, class traditions and traditions
of profession and trade, traditions of predilection, of art, of
religion: and men may be exposed in their development to the combined
influence of a number of these. But the net result of the diversity of
tradition is an extraordinary diversity of end-result. “_Nihil humanum
alienum a me puto_”--Terence could only say this with truth in the
sense that there are certain fundamental emotions and instincts found
in all men, and also certain aspects of environment shared by all
humanity--the sun and moon, earth, water, and fire, space and time,
parents and society, and so on and so forth.
I make no apologies for the length of this preliminary analysis,
since it is precisely by the neglect of preliminary analysis that
most attempts to correlate biology and sociology have failed. The
salient fact emerges that with man there has been a radical change in
evolutionary method.
As space is limited, I am here only proposing to consider three of the
chief contributions which biology can make to sociology--on the idea of
progress, on the relation between individual and community, and on the
applicability of the doctrine of the struggle for existence to man.
As regards the idea of progress, biology can make a clear and
unequivocal contribution: whereas man is biologically so young, his
evolution is yet so chaotic and divergently directed, that it is very
hard to arrive at definite conclusions from the study of his history
alone. It has been a source of constant surprise to me that more use
has not been made of biological data in the controversy over this
question. In the little book recently edited by Mr. Marvin on various
aspects of the concept of Progress, there was no article dealing with
biological progress; and even in Professor Bury’s notable book, _The
Idea of Progress_, biology was as little and as unsatisfactorily drawn
upon as in Dean Inge’s writings on the subject.
We have already seen that a certain direction obtains in organic
evolution. Into the details of this process I have not here the time
to go; we must be content with the brief enumeration which has already
been given of the qualities of organisms whose maximum level, and to a
lesser degree whose average, have increased during evolution.
So far so good. But a process may be going in a definite direction and
yet not be satisfactory.
This road leads to London; this other to Puddlington Parva. We all know
people who are obviously headed for success, while it is on record that
Mr. Mantalini’s direction was towards “the demnition bow-wows.”
But we know that we ourselves consciously find _value_ in things, in
objects and aims, in directions and processes. In this we are unique
among organisms, and as a matter of fact a large part of our life is
determined by the relative values we set on objects. On the whole,
however, there is a reasonable amount of agreement among different
individuals, at any rate in one country at one epoch, as to what they
call good and what they call bad. There are very few western Europeans
who find dirt or untruthfulness good, knowledge or bravery bad.
When we look into the trend of biological evolution, we find as a
matter of fact that it has operated to produce on the whole what we
find good, to bring into being more and more things on which we can set
positive value. This is not to say that progress is an inevitable “law
of nature,” but that it has actually occurred, and that its occurrence
provides an external sanction for many of our subjective human hopes
and ideals.
True that we are ourselves a product of the evolutionary process and
might therefore be thought biased. None the less, it is clear that if a
degenerate animal like a tapeworm, or one inevitably specialized like
a hermit-crab, could possess and enunciate values, they would be of a
very different nature from our own. But we should further find that
the direction of the evolutionary process which led to the former was
directly opposed to the main trend, that of the latter more or less
at right angles to it. The general coincidence of the main observable
trend and of our own concepts of value warrants us in calling the one
progressive, and in feeling that the other is no mere isolated flicker
in an alien or hostile world, but finds a sanction and a resting-place
in being part of something vastly bigger than itself. The remarkable
and important fact for man is to find, in spite of all the apparently
fundamental differences between his organization and his evolutionary
methods and those of lower organisms, in spite of the widespread
degeneration and “blind-alleyism” to be seen in evolution, that the
direction in which he desires to go coincides with the resultant, the
main direction of organic evolution. There are no ideals, there is no
purpose, in fish or ant or tree: but man’s ideals and purposes are the
outcome of the blind interplay of forces in which fish and ant and
tree play their unwitting rôles. True again that further analysis shows
that the methods of evolutionary progress are often crude, wasteful,
and slow: that some of our values are unreal or artificial: but this
does not destroy the main fact, and only means that each side can here
learn something from the other.
The main fact abides--that progress is an evolutionary reality, and
that an analysis of the modes of biological progress may often help us
in our quest for human progress.
The next great problem on which biology has something to say to
sociology is that eternal one of the relation between individual
and community. As it is sometimes put, Does the individual exist
for the State, or the State for the individual? In all non-human
biological aggregates--cell-colonies, second-grade aggregates or
metazoan organisms, third-grade aggregates like Siphonophora and
insect communities--the very existence of the aggregate as a unit, its
biological efficiency and success, depend upon a permanent division of
labour between its members, upon their thoroughgoing specialization.
This always and inevitably involves a sacrifice of certain of their
potentialities to greater efficiency in one of a few actual functions,
and in evolution a progressive subordination of the smaller unit to the
aggregate.
At first sight, biological principles seem to contradict themselves
on this subject. On the one hand, the human individual is, or, we had
better say, has the potentiality of being the highest type of organism
in existence--far higher, biologically speaking, not only than any
human community now in existence, but than any which we could possibly
imagine as coming into existence in the future. When we remember the
general agreement of biological progress with our human values, it is
clear that to degrade the individual for the benefit of the community
is wrong--a biological crime.
On the other hand, human progress depends and will always depend to an
extent scarcely to be overrated upon the proper organization of the
community. So long as present competition continues, the very survival
of a nation may easily depend upon the efficiency of its organization
as a community. Biological as well as human experience makes it
perfectly plain that such success, in a unit which is itself an
aggregate of smaller units, depends upon the degree of specialization
of these constituent units and the division of labour and co-operation
between them.
Biology here then lays down that human individuals should become
more and more specialized if progress is to continue; but since
specialization implies the sacrifice of many potentialities for the
good of the whole, this apparently contradicts what we have just
inculcated above.
This is where our human flexibility comes in. Man should neither live
whole-heartedly for himself, nor throw his individuality, ant-like,
beneath the wheels of the community Juggernaut. He can escape from the
dilemma by passing from one state to the other. For part of his time,
he can apply his energies as a specialized unit--for the rest, he can
be a complete individual, realizing the various potentialities of his
many-sided nature, with the community contributing to his development,
not he to the community’s. And not only can he, but he should act thus.
Be it noted, to avoid misapprehension, that I have here been using the
community to denote the single aggregate unit which from the beginning
has played such an important part biologically in human evolution, not
merely as denoting the sum of individuals considered separately.
Thus biology gives a definite answer to this question too. Pure
individualism is condemned, and so is what we may call ant-and-bee
socialism. Some form of the “dual day,” to use a current phrase, or at
least of the “dual life,” is the method which seems to be in accord
with the enduring principles of biology, although the precise details
are not and cannot be the biologist’s concern, and particular lives,
such as that of the creative artist, who moves on a different plane of
reality, escape his analysis.
I have reserved to the close that biological principle which has been
most often and most seriously misapplied in sociology and politics--the
struggle for existence. Never was the proverb about the Devil’s quoting
Scripture better exemplified than in this matter. This fundamental
idea of Darwin’s has been used as justification for three totally
different and indeed incompatible political doctrines. In England, it
has served chiefly to bolster up _laissez-faire_ individualism and
free competition. In Germany in the years immediately succeeding the
publication of the _Origin of Species_, it was seized upon by the
Socialists as implying equal opportunity for all as against feudalism
or hereditary aristocracy. Later in the same country (and to a certain
extent elsewhere) it was abundantly employed as a theoretical support
for militarism.
As a matter of fact, the use of it as sole principle governing the
interrelation of biological units is wholly unjustified. As has been
shown by a number of writers, among whom may especially be mentioned
Darwin himself, Ritchie in his _Darwinism and Politics_, and Kropotkin
in his _Mutual Aid_, the struggle for existence is only _one_ of two
possibilities in this relationship: the other is that of co-operation,
of mutual aid, which is especially well marked in the building up of
higher-grade units from a multiplicity of smaller lower-grade ones. Two
of the most important steps in the whole evolutionary process have been
based on the co-operation of units--the origin of multicellular from
unicellular organisms, and the development of true man, with his social
life, from his pre-human ancestor. It is also prominent in the lives
of many species of the highest groups--insects, mammals, and birds:
witness the ants and bees, the rook, the wild dog, the elephant, the
baboon. In fact, once the bodily specialization of units has reached
a certain pitch, progress, as we have seen, is only possible through
mental development, and this in the great majority of cases brings
about aggregation into some sort of community, held together by mental
bonds.
Besides aggregation of similar units, there has frequently been
co-operation between units of unlike character and origin--witness
symbiosis, as in lichens; the relation between many insects and
flowers; the formation of flocks consisting of two or more species, as
with jackdaws and rooks, and many other cases.
Competition and co-operation both occur throughout the whole of
evolution: but co-operation comes to play an ever more considerable
part in higher forms. In lower organisms enormous overproduction is
of no great consequence; their organization is simple, and, given
favourable conditions, they can turn inorganic matter into their own
specific substance at a great rate. But higher forms are more complex,
more delicately balanced, and longer lived. Accordingly, waste of life
is of greater consequence to them, and methods by which a struggle on
the grand scale can be minimized tend to be more and more adopted. We
find regularly, for instance, a reduction of the number of offspring in
higher groups together with greater parental care.
Thus co-operation, for still fresh reasons, is biologically important
for the higher groups. The problem is becoming increasingly pressing
for the human race, since the time is in sight when the whole habitable
area of the globe will be colonized, up to a certain level of density
and efficiency, by members of the more advanced races. Biologically
speaking, it is perfectly clear that some co-operative system,
involving federation in one form or another, is the proper system to
adopt; and that the “world-state”--not necessarily organized after
the plan of our present highly specialized nationalist-industrialist
states, which appear happily to represent only a temporary phase
of evolution, but none the less an organic reality, a co-operative
unit--that the “world-state” is not merely a figment of unpractical
dreamers, but an obviously desirable aim for humanity. Kant, a century
and a half ago even, had seen clearly enough that some universal
society was a necessity for the unfolding of human possibility; and had
gone further and pointed out that there were indications of a movement
of civilization in that direction. In our time, this movement has been
retarded by the extraordinary and mushroom growth of Nationalism, in
which to the average man his “Country” (really _Nation_) has become
his most real God. In the last hundred years, Nationalism has usurped
the place of Religion as the most important super-individual interest
of individuals--has indeed in some sense become a religion. It is
leading the world into an impasse, as do all incomplete and partial
conceptions; but, in the Hague Court and the League of Nations, has
already generated the seeds of what will in time devour it.[23]