I once asked a friend who is a biologist whether he was interested

in modern poetry. He hesitated and replied that he quite liked

_Evangeline_. I am almost certain that he had not opened Longfellow’s

works since he was a schoolboy, unless he had received from an aunt

one of those editions which are bound in mauve suède and sold for

Christmas and birthday gifts. He was no less truthful than most of us.

He displayed a motor reaction which can be evoked from many people who

have been educated on the assumption that the teacher’s business is

to cultivate “good taste.” If one of our leading dailies were to make

favourite English poets the subject of a prize competition, it is safe

to predict that Wordsworth would receive many more votes than William

Blake. It would be interesting to ascertain the number of hours devoted

after school age to the perusal of the works of Wordsworth and Blake

by those who would vote for one or the other. I know of no one who has

undertaken this task as a thesis for the Ph.D. degree; but I would

hazard the surmise that the aggregate would favour Blake rather than

Wordsworth. The modern teacher has abandoned the exegetical method in

favour of the “play way.” But the advocate of the play way is no less

certain that if he likes Shakespeare, his pupils ought also to like

Shakespeare. If he is really interested in Shakespeare, and has an

engaging personality, he may succeed so long as they remain under his

influence. It does not follow that the pupil will carry into adult life

the means of enjoying his leisure in a way that will not be a nuisance

to his neighbours.

In discussing the æsthetic aspect of education, it is difficult to

exclude the intrusion of one’s private values. I am aware of this

difficulty. Anything which I proffer to the discussion is of a very

tentative nature. The cultivation of taste involves two separate

issues. Conventionally it signifies the existence of some fixed

standard of correct enjoyment. The cultivation of good taste in

this sense is only justifiable if we have satisfied ourselves that

philosophy can provide a rational sanction for the affirmations

of æsthetic experience. If we have reached the conviction that the

affirmations of æsthetic experience have no status in the Public World,

we have no justification for interfering with another person who

reads John Oxenham’s _Bees in Amber_ in preference to Conrad Aiken’s

_Punch the Immortal Liar_, or the works of Miss Ella Wheeler Willcocks

in preference to the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I think

experience would sustain the statement that people who habitually read

Coventry Patmore or Francis Thompson are temperamentally different from

people who prefer to read Osbert Sitwell or Carl Sandburg. I suspect

too that such temperamental differences exist even in early childhood.

They are therefore outside the realm of argument or education. On the

other hand, experience convinces me that many would read poetry in

adult life, if they had not been repelled in childhood by the sickly

romanticism or pedantic archaicism of those writers who are usually

exhibited as models of good taste. Possibly a number of people who read

Mr. Kipling would not do so if they had access to more sophisticated

forms of entertainment. Many others do not read poetry and rather

despise those who do, because they have never realized that the subject

matter of poetry is not necessarily circumscribed by a holistic view

of sex or confined to the domestic affairs of the minor Greek deities.

There is a legitimate sense in which taste can be cultivated. We may

go through life impoverished, because we have never been introduced to

sources of satisfaction which might enrich our experience. It is the

proper function of the educationist to acquaint us in early life with a

great variety of opportunities of socially agreeable behaviour. Having

done this, he or she must leave us to select what is most appropriate

to our temperamental peculiarities.

The technique of education in its æsthetic aspect has received

less thoughtful attention than its more practical problems. After

a succession of ludicrous experiments, educationists now realize

that the attendance of art galleries is not increased by forcing

children to draw one white cone, a pyramid and two cubes piled up on

a drawing-board. It is also recognized that a weekly period devoted

to the tonic sol-fa notation does not make a nation musical. I would

suggest that the disappointing results of æsthetic education are

pre-eminently due to the fact that educationists have never recognized

that æsthetic values do not belong to the public world. I would go

further and suggest that more positive results might be achieved, if

our educational practice were founded on a recognition that æsthetic

preferences come within the proper domain of what I have called

_privacy_. Education has too long been dominated by the æsthete

who regards his own values as having some final and transcendental

sanction. Because temperaments differ, æsthetic education can never

leave a permanent impress on the majority of people, so long as it

is dominated by a school of private opinion, whether that school is

Shakespearian or Shavian, Realist or Vorticist. The rising influence

of science, if it checks the influence of pontifical æstheticism is

calculated to reinforce rather than curtail the æsthetic aspect of

modern education.

In _Science and the Modern World_, Dr. Whitehead has maintained the

contrary view. He affirms that “in regard to the æsthetic needs

of civilized society the reactions of science have so far been

unfortunate.” I do not think that there is any historical justification

for this assertion. During the Renaissance there was a very intimate

connexion between the progress of biological science and the

development of painting and engraving. Human beings and horses had

been represented with some measure of biological fidelity in Greek

plastic art. But realistic treatment of animals and plants in general

was a late development of the Art of the Renaissance. Most of the

descriptive biology of Aristotle, of Theophrastus, and of the Arabs was

a dead letter when it filtered into modern Europe. The descriptions in

the Greek and Arabic herbals were too indefinite to be adequate for

purposes of identifying species without the aid of good illustrations.

Anyone who will take the trouble to refer to the originals of Conrad

Gesner’s _Natural History_ or Gerrard’s _Herbal_ will appreciate the

statement that Dürer initiated a new epoch in biology by depicting a

recognizable rabbit. It was no fortuitous circumstance that Leonardo da

Vinci was both a distinguished anatomist and a distinguished painter.

The naturalist of the Renaissance had to be an artist. There were no

cameras. The tradition of Realism in Art developed side by side with

the progress of medicine to meet a need which no longer exists.

To-day we have cameras, and Realism in Art is declining. I venture

to suggest that the invention of cinematography, though still in

its infancy, is unfolding new artistic horizons. It is still common

to find that educated people disregard its latent possibilities as

Puritan England despised the stage. It is unwise to assume that

Victorian ideas of Art have more finality than future generations will

in all probability ascribe to them. Silas Marner, who had never seen

a skyscraper or a dynamo, could not be expected to like the _Cabinet

of Dr. Caligari_ or Capek’s _R.U.R._ For the same reason we should

not expect Whitechapel school-children to enjoy Landseer and the

Lake poets. To the Victorian æsthete a machine and a factory were

necessarily ugly. The Immortal Stagyrite had settled the criteria of

beauty two thousand years before. It is worthy of note that American

industrialism rarely impresses the visitor with that drab monotony

which is so characteristic of the English town. This may be partly

because American education has been less dominated by the æsthetic

predilections of a pre-scientific era in human history. The increasing

importance of science in education need not react unfavourably on its

artistic function. If it has done so, it is not because science has at

any time dominated our conception of a cultural education. The cultural

value of science has hardly been recognized as yet.

§2

However defined, education includes fitting the individual for some

kind of productive activity. On this account the place of science

as a part of vocational training is now securely entrenched in our

educational system. The hard logic of economic necessity has forced us

to make more and more concessions to natural science. It is doubtful if

more than a handful of educationists see clearly that those changes in

the structure of civilization which have necessitated such concessions

have made scientific study of paramount importance in cultural

education. The terms cultural and vocational are, by many people,

still used coextensively with literary and scientific. It is true that

science is not directly concerned with the æsthetic side of education.

If in addition our definition of culture includes an intelligent

orientation to human society, ignorance of science is incompatible

with a cultured outlook in the present age. The special features of

modern civilization depend on the extent to which scientific knowledge

has been applied to the conquest of Nature by mankind. The picture of

the physical universe which science offers for our contemplation is

therefore the nucleus of what is socially most vital in our time.

The task of giving science a place in our conception of cultural

education presupposes a good deal more than the addition of obligatory

science subjects to the curriculum. Chemistry is usually taught in

universities so as to ensure that the student will be able to discharge

with competence the work of an analyst in the public service. It

is also possible to teach the same subject in such a way that the

student gets some glimpse of the adventure of scientific knowledge,

some insight into the method of science as a way of dealing with

human experience, some apprehension of the challenge which throughout

the ages science has issued to comfortable beliefs and established

traditions. This attitude to the study of science is still rare among

those who have been educated on exclusively scientific lines. The

classically educated person can at least be said to have something

which was once a culture. He has a more or less consistent attitude to

the world around him. In spite of all that is said about the menace

of scientific materialism, a consistent mental attitude is very rare

in scientific men. They usually have two attitudes, one for the

laboratory, one for Sundays and the domestic circle. This is partly

because scientific education has been almost entirely vocational in its

emphasis.

That it is still necessary to emphasize the place of science in

cultural education is a heritage of the humanistic revival. Until

comparatively recent times the leading educationists of western Europe

were agreed that the cultural side of education is satisfactorily

accommodated by a study of two dead languages. The founders of the

Grammar Schools were men who after a life-long devotion to Latin and

Greek had found in the classical authors a link with the living past

and a real source of æsthetic delight. Their pupils rarely progressed

sufficiently far with the rules of accidence and syntax to acquire

any genuine knowledge of classical literature or ancient history. The

number of modern Englishmen who enjoy Scandinavian drama or Russian

fiction through the medium of translated works is certainly greater

than the number who deliberately read the classical tragedians in the

original. Leaving out of account professional historians, the number

of people who have been inspired to learn more about ancient history

through dipping into Mr. Wells’ _Outline_ is probably greater than the

number of those who as schoolboys acquired a taste for history from

construing Xenophon, Thucydides, Cæsar and Quintus Curtius Rufus. The

grammarians, in the words of Mr. Wells, were fumbling with the keys of

the past to open the doors of a ransacked treasure chamber. It is now

widely recognized that the results of classical education have been

disappointing. In relation to the æsthetic side of education, it cannot

be said to have promoted the growth of what Dr. Whitehead calls “a

living art which moves on and yet leaves its permanent mark.” Socially

it started at the wrong end. An intelligent orientation towards

society presupposes a knowledge of the history of human society. It

also presupposes on the part of the individual a vital appreciation

of his own surroundings. Unfortunately, the obsolescence of classical

education is not the result of a reasoned conviction of its cultural

inadequacy. The influence of the grammarians declined because they

could not meet the practical requirements of our age.

Science came to occupy its present status in the school curriculum

as part of a comprehensive change in educational outlook associated

with the rise of the manufacturing class to political power. The

aristocratic tradition in education, with its humanistic bias towards

formal logic, Latin and Greek, sufficed so long as the Church and

Law were the principal professions which attracted the sons of the

well-to-do. The coming of the machine age opened up new horizons of

professional activity necessitating prolonged and highly specialized

training. With the development of new international communications

came a greater demand for acquaintance with the living languages of

a nation’s customers abroad. Initially the demand for science in

education was justified on purely vocational grounds, a fact which has

given scientific education on every step of the educational ladder a

fundamentally utilitarian tendency. In our own time the demand for

biological instruction as a school subject has been very largely

motivated by a utilitarian objective. The public is told how important

it is that our future citizens should realize that by studying the

domestic habits of the mosquito biologists have made it possible for

engineers to construct the Panama Canal. It is further argued that

if our future citizens were brought up to entertain a more lively

respect for them, in short, to give them a greater measure of financial

support, biologists would very shortly eradicate house-flies, idiot

children, bean-weevils and bed-bugs; make it possible for anxious

parents to have a family of twelve girls at will and keep the working

classes alive exclusively on tinned food.

The tremendous development of scientific knowledge which followed

the coming of the machine was a phenomenon whose social consequences

could hardly be envisaged by those who put forward the plea for

scientific instruction in the earlier part of the nineteenth century.

To-day we can look back over the last century and a half on the growth

of a form of civilization which owes its special characteristics to

the power over nature which scientific knowledge has conferred. It

is now possible to realize that an appreciation, not merely of the

conclusions of science, but of the experimental temper of scientific

reasoning, has become essential to the intelligent orientation of the

individual to an environment more and more determined by the creative

thought of science. The classical ideal which is compatible with the

view that a man may rightly be considered educated and remain ignorant

of man’s place in the physical universe, as depicted by science for

our imaginative reflection, is an arrogant and impertinent pretension

which thinking people will soon cease to countenance. Those who have

pressed the claims of scientific education have concerned themselves

very little with providing a substitute for what the advocates of

classical humanism honestly attempted to achieve. The influence of the

Utilitarian School of educationists has superseded what might be called

the School of Grammatical Paleontology. One result is that education

has been made accessible to a much greater proportion of people. There

has grown up a generation of educationists who recognize that heaven

does not necessarily lie about us in our infancy. On all sides we see

the determination that children shall enjoy school. We now have in

our midst the Aimiably Maternal School. There is a danger that the

Aimiably Maternal educationists will encourage children to regard

childhood as an end in itself; but it is to them that we must look for

the development of the æsthetic side of education. They are replacing

the cultivation of “good taste” by the aim of self-realization. They

are giving _privacy_ its proper place in the theory of education. The

domain of publicity--the task of emphasizing the cultural importance

of science--still lies with the future. There are, it seems to me,

two outstanding pre-requisites for the execution of this task, a

recognition of the importance of biological instruction in the school

and a closer relation between the teaching of science and of history in

the university.

§3

A broader conception of the human significance of science will never

be achieved until biology occupies a position of greater importance in

the school curriculum. Biology contains within its province a point of

contact with human life on the one hand, and the methods of an exact

and experimental science on the other. Fortunately the educational

value of biology is beginning to be recognized. The fact that biology

has so recently been added to the school curriculum and that, by no

means universally as yet, offers a singular opportunity for educational

experiment. It is an opportunity which physics and chemistry,

hampered by a heavy load of conservative tradition operating through

cut-and-dried syllabuses and stereotyped textbooks, cannot provide.

It is an opportunity which carries with it both responsibilities

and dangers. The teaching of biology is in one way, and here lies

the special opportunity, most fitted to initiate the pupil into the

implications of the scientific outlook in human life. Biology handles

the kind of matter, living matter, of which human beings are to us the

most fascinating, entertaining and familiar varieties. On the other

hand, and in this lies the chief source of danger, biology being a

young science with a far greater diversity and complexity of subject

matter, is less fitted to demonstrate the essentials of scientific

reasoning than a more firmly grounded, older and more exact branch

such as physics. We must face our task with a clear recognition of the

danger that biological teaching will be made an excuse for supplanting

the mental discipline of physics and chemistry by a miscellany of

easily memorizable facts which illustrate no conclusions that can

properly be dignified by the name of scientific principles. This is

certainly what will occur if the Utilitarian school, with its emphasis

on where house-flies go in winter, is given full scope in constructing

our school syllabuses.

In the early stages of the development of any branch of knowledge there

is a period when it is necessary to amass facts indiscriminately,

because the significance of particular classes of facts is not as yet

apparent. For the study of living organisms in particular an enormous

amount of detailed observation was essential before it was possible

to formulate the mechanical problems which living matter presents for

solution. In such an early stage it is a frequent and fruitful source

of misunderstanding to dignify by the name of laws and theories,

generalizations which are not scientific principles, but merely

mnemonics. Biological textbooks are to this day full of architectural

mnemonics. A pertinent instance is the germ layer theory. These have

no relation to the generalizations of an exact science such as the

Kinetic theory of gases or what is even more modestly called Avogadro’s

Hypothesis. Biology in our generation has ceased to be merely an

encyclopædia of descriptive information. It has to-day attained the

status of an exact and experimental science. As such it is a child

of the machine age. The realization of its new status is by no means

universal even among biologists. This fact renders the danger to which

I have alluded especially formidable.

The birth of the doctrine of organic evolution, before the growth of

the modern quantitative study of inheritance and variation, provided it

with an experimental basis as a scientific theory, set biologists to

the task of tracing hypothetical pedigrees. The amassing of an enormous

volume of purely descriptive information acquired the reflected

glory of those profound cosmological consequences which the concept

of evolution implied. In the latter half of the nineteenth century

the study of structure and activity became completely divorced. As a

separate subject, focused to a large extent on clinical aspects of

its subject matter, physiology branched off independently. Zoology

ceased to be the scientific study of living animals, and became the

architectural study of corpses and corpses malodorously mutilated in

formalin. This development was not without consequences of some purely

practical value. Increased knowledge of the life histories of many

pests and parasites demonstrated the economic value of biological study

to a parsimonious public. Without doubt such studies should continue

to receive the financial support that their immense economic utility

merits. They should be encouraged as technical developments of biology

in the university. Their value is culturally irrelevant to our attitude

towards the scope of biological teaching in the school. In the school

the scope of biological teaching should be based upon the candid

recognition that biology is primarily concerned with the Nature of Life.

This will affect our practice in several ways, which can only be

indicated here in very general terms. Elementary textbooks of zoology

are written in such a way as to conceal the fact that anatomy was

originally an experimental science. Galen had to ligate the ureters to

convince the disciples of Erasistratus that the kidneys are the source

of the urine. In textbooks of animal biology for beginners it is usual

to describe the path of nervous impulse from the skin to the spinal

cord and thence to the muscles, as if the reflex arc were something

which is evident to inspection. A century and a half of continuous

experimental enquiry elapsed between the work of Whyte, who first

located the spinal cord as the meeting-place of “sensory” and motor

impulses, and that of Waller, who completed the accepted schematization

of reflex activity. It is of no educational value to be familiar with a

textbook diagram of the reflex arc, unless the experimental evidence on

which it is based is clearly understood. The teaching of biology can be

as helpful as the teaching of chemistry to illustrate the methods of an

experimental science. This implies that the teaching of animal biology

must be emancipated from the shackles of the Darwinian tradition of

pure morphology. Practical work must include dissection and microscopic

observation; but dissection and microscopic observation must be

supplemented by ample demonstrations of an experimental kind.

To a very large extent the construction of our syllabuses will

determine the method of presentation. The cultural value of all science

teaching is at present hampered by a failure to emphasize the logical

development of its subject matter. In the teaching of biology the

facts of animal structure should only be presented in so far as they

illustrate, and are strictly relevant to, an understanding of the

characteristic properties of living matter. It is still customary

in universities to begin the study of the anatomy of the frog by

describing its external features. This is a purely architectural

attitude to adopt towards an animal. If we must start with the

external features of the frog, let us first study some characteristic

manifestations of its ever-changing reactivity, such as colour response

or mucus secretion, and having defined the experimental conditions

which determine these reactions, proceed to examine their structural

basis in as much detail as is relevant to our purpose. It is essential

that continuity of theme should be developed in relation to a

consideration of the organism as a dynamic system.

The teaching of biology for its cultural value also implies the need

for the fullest co-ordination with the teaching of chemistry and

physics. As every educationist will agree, this is desirable not only

from the cultural standpoint, but to get the best practical results.

Here there should be no difficulty for the scientifically trained

teacher. Such simple demonstrations as the experiments of Lavoisier

and Priestley on respiration, or of the action of a digestive ferment,

will reinforce the teaching of chemistry and may even quicken an

interest in chemistry and physics, where it had not existed before.

If an elementary introduction to Mendel’s laws illustrated on a

comparatively inexpensive scale with poultry be included in the later

stages of a school course, the teacher could take the opportunity of

experimentally demonstrating the elementary laws of probability. This

would provide a helpful introduction to a branch of algebra which in my

opinion is relegated to an unnecessarily and regrettably late stage in

mathematical education. Being the youngest born, biology in the schools

is the Cinderella of the sciences. Some of our headmasters appear

to think that anyone is good enough to teach it. It is obvious that

desirable results will not be accomplished, if biology is taught by

teachers with an exclusive training in descriptive biology unfortified

by the study of physics and chemistry.

The æsthetic satisfaction derived from contemplating Man’s place in

Nature will itself endow the study of biology with cultural value for

a few people. But as a school subject biology can make a more general

appeal to consideration as the basis of a new humanism. Few things in

human life, if any, are the source of more universal inconvenience

than sex. The difficulty of satisfying our appetite for food does not

present any special difficulty so long as society provides us with

the opportunity for work with adequate remuneration. In the domain of

sex the difficulty of accommodating physiological necessity to social

convenience extends to all ranks of society. In the nursery rhymes

of childhood, in the fiction on which our adolescence is fed we are

accustomed to romantic expectations which permanently unfit us for the

realities of sexual experience. In adult life religious teaching and

the legal code reinforce the magical view of sexual behaviour. Even

among educated people few possess a secular vocabulary with which to

discuss sex intelligently. It would be better for a child never to have

heard of Plato than to reach puberty without a scientific knowledge of

the nature of sex. If the introduction of biological instruction into

the school sweeps away the holistic idea of romantic love, and helps us

to envisage the difficult problem of congenial mating as a complex of

diverse and separable issues, it will achieve the greatest reform which

has hitherto been made in the educational process.

§4

Science will not occupy its proper place in cultural education so

long as the scientific man himself is a man of narrow intellectual

interests. In the university the task of educating a scientifically

trained student with a broader outlook than we are accustomed to expect

must begin in the way we teach science. To a minor extent this will be

encouraged by breaking up our existing -ologies into smaller units. A

biologist should not be prevented from studying physical chemistry to

an advanced stage because he has neither time nor inclination to devote

to a tedious routine of analysis devised for those who are going to

take positions in dye-works. A physicist should be permitted to know

something about the nature of biological enquiry without wasting half

a year cutting hand-razor sections of stems and learning the names

of pressed flowers, fish-bones and beetles. But the real romance of

science, the realization of scientific understanding as a great mental

adventure, will only be achieved when our teaching of science is

brought into much closer relation with the study of history.

There are several good reasons why the historical background of a

scientific problem should always be brought into sharp relief in

university and for that matter in school teaching. The student of

mathematics who in the course of a single introductory lecture on

the calculus completes the differentiation of the function _x^n_

might be encouraged by the knowledge that he has covered in an hour a

problem which took the generation of Barrow, Newton and Leibniz about

forty years to solve. I venture to think that the introduction of a

little history would make the first steps to algebraic symbolism more

interesting at the school stage. At present it is usual to teach one

subject algebra, in which certain conventions are laid down like the

rules of bridge, and another subject geometry, in which the pupil

learns at a comparatively advanced stage that the proposition

_a(b + c) = ab + ac_ physically corresponds to a statement about the

addition of areas of rectangular figures. The child is rarely, if

ever, told how, from the discussions of such geometrical problems, the

Hindu rhetorical algebraists of the first six centuries A.D. were led

to deduce certain rules governing the properties of numbers, and how

subsequently the Arabs simplified these rules by the development of a

symbolic shorthand. Most elementary textbooks of physics contain _ad

hoc_ proofs of certain verifiable consequences of the inverse square

law in electrostatics and magnetism. Why anyone should ever have

attempted to investigate the applicability of the inverse square law

to electrostatic and magnetic attractions is rarely divulged. A little

information about Newton’s interpretation of Kepler’s laws and the

development of the theory of gravitational attractions subsequent to

Newton’s work would suffice to show how natural it was that Cavendish,

Coulomb and Gauss should test out the inverse square law in electricity

and magnetism before exploring other possibilities.

Sometimes for an entirely different reason a knowledge of scientific

history will assist the teacher to a clearer exposition. The

logical technique initially employed in elaborating new scientific

generalizations is often capable of a much greater measure of

simplification. The teacher who understands the history of his own

branch of science will be more likely to realize this. It is generally

held that electricity is a suitable branch of science to teach at

the school stage. Electricity is much more directly related to the

interests of the average boy than any other branch of physical

science. In everyday life it is the phenomena of current electricity

which we encounter chiefly. Historically, current electricity was

not subjected to exact treatment till the phenomena of electrostatic

attraction and of magnetism had been considerably elaborated with the

aid of mathematical conventions drawn at first from the theory of

gravitational attraction and later from the study of hydrodynamics.

It thus happened that Ampere defined the unit of current in terms

of magnetic potential. For this reason textbooks of physics usually

introduce current electricity after a preliminary treatment of

frictional electricity and magnetism. To-day the international unit

of current is based on electrolysis. The chemical definition of

current involves nothing more than the use of simple proportion.

Given a generator and a chemical unit of current the definition of

resistance follows empirically from studying changes in the dimensions

and materials of the circuit. The idea of electromotive force can be

deduced by studying the effect of changing the generator or tapping

off current from different parts of a fixed circuit. Ohm’s law then

emerges self-evidently in the course of the enquiry. At no point is

it necessary to introduce difficult ideas imported from magnetism and

beyond the range of the pupil’s mathematical knowledge. In testing

out Ohm’s law, in measuring electromotive force or resistance,

the galvanometer is only used as a null-point instrument. For an

intelligent grasp of the meaning of current, potential and resistance

it is therefore only requisite to know that magnets exist and that

a suspended magnet is deflected in the neighbourhood of a current.

Examination syllabuses are customarily constructed on the assumption

that it is impossible to teach current electricity without first

teaching frictional electricity and magnetism. There is no good reason

why frictional electricity and magnetism should be introduced at an

early stage. The only reason why the fundamental ideas of current

electricity are made to appear so formidable is to be found in the

history of the subject. The teacher who knows the history of his

subject thoroughly will be more likely to realize this.

The teaching of current electricity illustrates the possibility of

co-ordination in science teaching in the school. Faraday’s laws of

electrolysis are generally demonstrated at a fairly early stage in the

teaching of chemistry. At this point the definition of the electric

current and its measurement is most appropriately introduced. In a

school where biology is taught a physical model will prove valuable

to demonstrate the effect of fluid friction on the flow of liquids in

explaining why blood spurts from an artery and trickles from a vein. By

what Dr. Wrinch calls the principle of true analogy the same mode may

be used to illustrate the ideas of potential, current and resistance.

But the fundamental importance of the historical method in science

teaching lies in the fact that no perspective of the relative

significance of different types of scientific hypothesis, and no

realization of the intellectual potentialities inherent in a scientific

generalization, can be obtained without a knowledge of the kind of

intellectual difficulties that new scientific ideas met with when they

were first formulated. Half-hearted attempts are made to introduce

historical information into scientific textbooks. They usually lay more

emphasis on the outstanding contributions of individual men of genius

than upon the development of ideas. If historical information is only

used as a means of promoting ancestor worship, it does more harm than

good. Histories of science are not invariably written by men who have

a clear perspective of the general intellectual, and it might be added

economic, tendencies of the periods with which they are dealing. For

that reason they fail to inspire a critical and enquiring attitude

in the reader. Scientific enquiry is essentially progressive. Yet

scientific study does not invariably produce a progressive intellectual

outlook. It is, I believe, because so few who study science attempt

to envisage the generalizations of their subject in their historical

perspective, that the product of a scientific type of education is

often a more conservative type than the historian or even the classical

humanist.

A knowledge of the historical background of science is a necessary

prerequisite to an apprehension of science as an intellectual adventure

and a challenge to traditional ideas. To possess such an historical

background necessitates a knowledge of human history as well as a

knowledge of science. The creation of a new humanism based on the

claims of natural science is a task which will require a reorientation

of historical and scientific studies throughout the educational system.

In the school this task is being simplified by the revolt against a

tradition which laid too much emphasis on purely national issues.

Teachers of history are ceasing to believe that children should be

taught to draw maps of the battles of Oudenarde and Malplaquet. The

history of ideas is beginning to assume more prominence than the

technicalities of military strategy.

In a few universities departments have been founded with the aim of

studying the history of science. There are at present all too few

scientists who like Dr. Singer are capable of promoting a deeper

knowledge of the progress of science. The history of science is

not a history of pure deduction. It is not a meaningless incident

that Leeuwenhoek, a Hollander, used pepper suspensions to make the

first cultures of micro-organisms. It is not a mere coincidence that

Leeuwenhoek and Hartsoeker simultaneously discovered the spermatozoon.

The first microscope was the signal of a new era in biological science.

The invention of the microscope followed shortly after Descartes

formulated the laws of refraction of light. It is a task for the

historian of science to place this sequence in its proper relation to

the interests stimulated by the great navigations, and the struggle

for sea-power. A great measure of encouragement to the study of the

history of science in the university would, I believe, infuse new ideas

into the study of both history and science. It would also re-establish

a vital relation between philosophy and science. Instruction in the

history of scientific thought could be a nucleus for the synthesis

of each fragment of the mosaic of natural knowledge into a coherent

picture of the public world as we know it through the medium of

scientific enquiry. The philosopher of the future may well be the

historian of science.

XII. THE PUBLICIST STANDPOINT AND HOLISM

“I am no coward who would seek in fear

A folk-lore solace or sweet Indian tales:

I know dead men are dead and cannot hear

The singing of a thousand nightingales...”

James Elroy Flecker

§1

The history of philosophy has witnessed a succession of makeshifts to

accommodate the utilitarian claims of science and the rival demands

of what Robert Briffault appropriately calls custom thought and power

thought. At every stage in the advance of scientific knowledge new

territories have been wrested from the domain of custom thought and

incorporated within the legitimate province of scientific method.

Each new annexation has called forth some new compromise to meet the

requirements of power thought. Scientific hypothesis is ethically

neutral. The politician insists that his theories of human conduct

must present an aspect of academic plausibility. Darwin’s doctrine

undermined the complacent dualism which had kept philosophy and

natural science in water-tight compartments for centuries. It produced

a vigorous revolt against supernatural beliefs. In our generation

unbelief has spread to all sections of the community with results that

are disquieting to those who pursue the study of philosophy in the

hope of rationalizing their social prejudices. It is high time for

make-believe to stem the tide of unbelief. Inevitably a new compromise

emerges to meet the new situation. Beneath its downy wing holism

takes all that mechanistic science can offer to industry and all that

statesmanship can cull from metaphysics.

“The time has now come,” writes Dr. Haldane, “for giving decent

burial to the mechanistic theory of life in the same grave with

the vitalistic theory.” I agree with Dr. Haldane in so far as many

questions which were contested thirty years ago by those who called

themselves mechanists and vitalists have ceased to be regarded as being

so fundamental as the contestants imagined or even as being amenable

to a final decision. Although the publicist standpoint is admittedly

a rehabilitation of the mechanistic theory in the light of those

biological developments which have brought into being the behaviourist

standpoint in psychology, I have myself preferred to use the term

_publicist_ for my own point of view. It is rather tiresome to be

forced to answer for every misdemeanour of somebody else who happens to

call himself a mechanist or a behaviourist. I can therefore sympathize

with Dr. Haldane’s disinclination to accept the vitalistic label for

his own beliefs. I differ from Dr. Haldane in thinking that we are any

nearer to a final reconciliation between a difference of philosophical

outlook that arises from the fact that philosophers have different

temperaments. If we have outgrown the differences of statement which

underlie the controversy between the older vitalistic and mechanistic

standpoints, we have not outgrown the differences of temperament which

underlie the existence of the two theories.

I have no disposition to state dogmatically the possibility

of explaining all the properties of living matter in whatever

physico-chemical terms will be employed two thousand years hence. Still

less am I willing to be responsible for the billiard ball theory of

matter which both Dr. Haldane and General Smuts have identified with

the mechanistic conception of life. I am content to foresee enormous

possibilities for the extension of physical interpretations of the

properties of living matter. I fail to see how human knowledge will

progress on any logical assumption but that implied by the principle

of mechanism in its most general terms. I am not able to accept Dr.

Haldane’s belief that the traditional methods of physiology are

useless in discovering the properties of conscious behaviour, though I

should hesitate to predict, except in a very tentative way, how far we

shall progress in this direction. If I have seemed to exaggerate the

possibilities inherent in the future of biological enquiry, my excuse

must be that my aim is to stimulate interest in a new philosophical

outlook. If there is such a person as the dogmatic mechanist, his views

are not what I imply by the publicist standpoint.

When all this has been said, there still exists a very radical

difference between the publicist standpoint and the holistic to

which Dr. Haldane subscribes. That difference lies in the fact that

the holist denies the possibility that a certain type of logical

procedure is capable of establishing relations between certain realms

of experience. Nobody denies that such relations remain at present

unascertained. Any dogmatism that comes into the discussion is implicit

in the holistic theory. Dr. Haldane’s position is not merely a

rejection of dogmatic materialism. “I am whole-heartedly in agreement,”

he writes, “with General Smuts in believing that anything which can

properly be called scientific physiology is impossible apart from the

assumption of what he has called holism.”

Of holism as a philosophy of biology enough has been said elsewhere.

It contains within it no promise of future progress. Dr. Haldane has

endeavoured to persuade us that this is not so. I am not able to

follow his argument. We have wasted time, he assures us, in trying to

understand the _mechanism_ of kidney secretion, when we should really

have been striving to find out how the kidneys... “engage in their

function of keeping normal the diffusion pressures of water and various

other non-colloid constituents of the blood.” A mechanist, even if we

grant that he is misguided and presumptuous in hoping to elucidate the

mechanism of secretion, is equally concerned with solving the problem

which interests Dr. Haldane. The physiologist who sets out to tackle

it will proceed in the same way as a mechanist, whether he calls

himself one or not. He will not first postulate a wholeness of the

non-colloidal constituents of the blood inexplicable in terms of the

individual constituents themselves.

The physiologist studies the properties of the muscle-nerve preparation

because he believes, rightly or wrongly, that by so doing he will be

guided to interpret how muscles and nerves play their respective parts

in the behaviour of a whole animal. Dr. Haldane himself has devoted

years of research to elucidating the properties of hæmoglobin. I

presume, he has done so in the hope of throwing light on the way in

which the supply of oxygen to the tissues is regulated. Most of his

brother physiologists would agree that Dr. Haldane’s distinguished

researches on the physico-chemical properties of a respiratory pigment,

which is a very small part of the economy of an animal, do tell us a

good deal about what to expect in the behaviour of the organism as a

whole. Whatever Dr. Haldane may say on the platform he is as good a

mechanist as anyone else in the laboratory. Throughout a distinguished

career of research he has consistently concentrated his attention upon

certain limited parts of organisms. His statement that physiology is

impossible without holism must be taken as a _jeu d’esprit_. So long

as biology was dominated by the Aristotelian concept of individuality

it remained descriptive. Physiology began when biologists undertook

the task of interpreting the behaviour of the organism as a whole by

studying methodically the behaviour of its constituent parts. If it be

suggested that there is any other physiology, there is no trace of its

existence.

Perhaps the appeal of holism is partly due to the curious circumstance

that physiologists are notoriously mechanistic about the aspects of

physiology they study themselves, and hardly less often vitalistic

about aspects of physiology with which they are unfamiliar. The divorce

of morphology from experimental biology after the rise of the natural

selection theory tended to produce the zoologist who is exclusively

preoccupied with the anatomy of dead animals, and the physiologist

who is exclusively preoccupied with the casualties of the hospital.

In another place I have attempted to show that Dr. Haldane could

find in modern genetics the clearest evidence that the biologist

only progresses when he interprets his data in the same way as the

physicist or chemist interprets his. In another branch of physiology,

which like genetics lies outside the domain of the clinician on the

one hand and the physical chemist on the other, Dr. Haldane will not

find that the work of Sherrington and Pavlov provides abundant evidence

that the holistic attitude is less impotent to suggest new lines of

experimentation on reflex action or is more useful in promoting an

understanding of the process of learning.

Laying aside the purely biological aspect of the holistic attitude,

there are some more general issues which remain to be discussed. It

is never easy for a hostile party to do justice to the standpoint

of another school of opinion. I hope therefore that I shall not be

accused of drawing a caricature of the holistic theory. To avoid

doing so I shall quote freely from the writings of those who support

it. Holism, as I understand it, differs from the primitive animism

which sees a personal reality behind or within physical objects. It

differs from vitalism which sees an essential gulf between the living

and the non-living. It differs from the common-sense dualism which

invokes Mind as a separate and irreducible concept in dealing with the

characteristics of “conscious behaviour.” The difference lies in this,

that entirely new properties emerge at _various_ levels of existence.

_Between_ these levels we can operate successfully with the atomistic

logic of science, interpreting the properties of a complex system from

a study of the properties of its several constituents. _At_ these

levels we encounter new properties “which,” in the words of General

Smuts, “could never have been predicted from a knowledge merely of the

parts.” General Smuts mentions under the terms Matter, Life and Mind

three principal oases within this desert of uncertainty. Even these

do not constitute regions within which the continuous extension of

scientific method may be applied successfully. Within the territory

of matter “the molecules of water and carbon dioxide are real wholes

with new emergent properties.” Thus physics, chemistry, biology and

psychology are in Dr. Haldane’s terminology “independent sciences.”

As far as I am able to see, there is no room for disagreement about how

the scientist proceeds within these prescribed territories. Scientific

generalizations are attempts to show how the characteristics of complex

systems can be inferred from the properties of their constituent

parts. This means, more specifically, when the problem can be reduced

to mathematical symbolism, that an equation which defines the four

dimensional relations of any system will contain no terms that are

not present in some or other of the equations which determine the

space-time relations of the constituents of the system. This procedure,

admitted Forsyth (1929) in a recent paper delivered to the British

Association, “is very largely justified in principle and by results.”

He continued to remark, in conformity with the standpoint developed

in these essays, that “the question is not that of a division of

spheres or levels of existence, some of which are capable of complete

explanation on mechanistic principles, while others are incapable...

for there is no sphere which is not in any degree susceptible of the

application to it of the terms and categories of mechanism.”

“Nevertheless,” he contends, “it is gradually coming to be

recognized that this procedure gives only a partial explanation

of _any_ natural process. There is, in any complex process, a

principle of synthesis involved, such that, instead of the whole

being the mere sum of the parts and being explicable by the mere

composition or combination of the parts, it is rather the case that

the parts can only be explained by reference to the whole, since

they are modified by their relation to it. If so, mechanism must

be supplanted, or at least supplemented, by a mode of explanation

that gives due regard to this. This principle of wholeness or unity

is exemplified in many different spheres of fact, e.g. in atomic

structure, in chemical synthesis, in the life of an organism and

even in the character of the single life-cell, in the processes

of perception and volition, and also in so-called reflex action,

in the development of personality and the attainment of social

control. Holism, then, signifies that everything in the universe is

in some form or another, and in greater or less degree, potentially

or actually, an organic whole; that as anything develops to a

fuller realization of its potentialities or a fuller perfection

of its nature, it becomes more truly such a differentiated and

yet unified whole; and that, by implication, the universe itself

is an infinite organic whole.... This involves that nothing in

nature can be explained merely as the result of preceding processes

or anterior stages of development. The lower or simpler is the

condition without which the appearance of the higher or more

complex would be impossible; but the development to higher levels

is possible at all only through the impulse to organic unity or

synthesis under the controlling influence of the infinite whole.”

There exists no difference of opinion concerning the statement that

there emerge at different levels of complexity in natural phenomena

specific properties which cannot as yet be deduced from a knowledge

of simpler systems. Holism seems to imply the further qualification

that such properties will never be interpreted in this way. If I am

right in my understanding of the holistic standpoint, I am at liberty

to leave the onus of proving so dogmatic a conclusion on the shoulders

of those who assert it. I am prepared to go further and point out

certain difficulties in the way of proving it, difficulties which,

in the existing state of knowledge, appear to me to be insuperable.

The first is that of explaining why, if physics, chemistry, biology,

etc., are intrinsically independent types of enquiry, it happens that

there exist such extraordinary similarities in their procedure. The

use of the phrase “scientific method” implies that such similarities

do in fact exist. Dr. Haldane’s many distinguished contributions to

the advance of physiology might be cited to show how much biology has

in common with physics and chemistry. A second difficulty which arises

is of a different kind, and illustrates the fundamental similarity

of temperament which unites the vitalistic and holistic theories.

Scientific investigation is constantly shifting the levels at which

new irreducible concepts must be invoked. This permits us to entertain

the suspicion that _emergent_ properties are only properties about

which we are ignorant. We are under no necessity to regard the present

classification of the sciences as anything more than a convenience

for arranging time-tables in educational institutions. Before the

enunciation of the first law of thermodynamics by Mayer and Joule,

heat was a branch of physics quite as separate from mechanics as is

chemistry from physics to-day. Organic chemistry to Henry was not, as

it is to our generation, the chemistry of the carbon compounds. It was

a field in which emerged something “peculiar to animated bodies and

superior to and different from the cause which has been called chemical

affinity.” In the same year as that in which Henry expressed this view

Wöhler succeeded in synthesizing urea. Why should we be so certain that

our present classification of “independent” sciences will, like the

poor and the Roman Church, be always with us? To this question I can

see no appropriate reply from the holistic point of view. Unless holism

can provide us with a clue that will enable us to distinguish whether

an impasse in scientific enquiry is due to the imperfection of our

knowledge or to the emergence of new properties as “creative” entities,

its acceptance could only have the sinister effect of holding back

scientific investigation.

On its negative side the holist goes much further from what might

be called a centre programme than does the dogmatic mechanist. The

principle of mechanism or experimental determinism is compatible with

the recognition of different levels of complexity or wholes; for what

is analysable is complex, and what is complex consists of interrelated

parts which together constitute a whole. Holism on the other hand

provides us with no explanation of why the principle of mechanism is so

astonishingly successful. The logic of science is inadequate according

to General Smuts. Dr. Haldane asserts that the method of the biologist

is different from that of the physicist. We are not told how we can

proceed to invent a new and equally successful logic. We are not told

in what precise respect the method of the biologist does differ from

that of the physicist. On its positive side holism leaves us waiting

for a new revelation. Holism is sometimes referred to by its advocates

as a category, sometimes as a principle. What the _principle_ of holism

can do for us remains to be seen. Its popular appeal resides in its

promise to restore to ethical values a rational basis. I suspect that

this promise is a general election promise.

Though holism does not assume, like the cruder forms of vitalism, a

specific élan vital or entelechy, it differs from the less explicit

vitalistic theories in detail rather than essentials. In a similar

way, the alternative view which I have called publicism is a modern

development of the mechanistic conception of life. What I define as

the publicist standpoint in philosophy is distinguished from the

traditional mechanistic attitude in physiology by extending the limits

of verifiable knowledge. To a large extent traditional mechanistic

physiology investigated the behaviour of an organism in so far as

its behaviour can be predicted, when all synchronous conditions

are rigidly controlled. It adopted a frankly agnostic attitude to

those characteristics of behaviour in which the antecedent situation

is pre-eminently significant to the co-ordination of stimulus and

response. The Vitalist school recognized the existence of a definite

problem in claiming that a complete solution of the Nature of Life

must take into account the problem of consciousness. They failed to

indicate the precise requirements of the problem, and they therefore

failed to suggest the requisites for its solution. Their assault upon

the mechanistic position collapsed, because they did not state what

precise characteristics of the behaviour of living systems are defined

by the term consciousness. If the concept of consciousness is to be

made clear, it is first necessary to state what properties of the class

_living systems_ are denoted by its use. This necessitates a definition

of the characteristics of conscious behaviour, and an investigation of

the way in which it is possible to investigate them. Only when this

task is accomplished, can we claim to have undertaken a philosophical

exposition of the Nature of Life. Vitalism failed to define the concept

of consciousness, because it did not make the necessary distinction

between its public and private components. The characteristic of all

essentially private statements is the supposition that the means is

referable to the end. The characteristic of all essentially public

propositions is that the end is considered in connexion with the

means. Traditional mechanism disregarded the problem of consciousness.

Traditional vitalism assumed that it is impossible to discuss the

characteristics of conscious behaviour without introducing teleological

implications. The supreme philosophical importance of the work of

Pavlov’s school lies in the fact that it has inverted the traditional

way of looking at the problem of consciousness.

In stating the essential features of the publicist standpoint, I

shall indicate first its significance in current biological thought

and second its attitude to the scope of philosophy. In its purely

biological aspect the publicist standpoint recognizes the folly of

stating dogmatically the possibility of reducing all the properties

of living matter to physico-chemical terms. On the other hand it

recognizes that biology increasingly makes use of physico-chemical

concepts. It also recognizes that we can at present foresee no limit to

the successful application of physico-chemical concepts to its subject

matter. It recognizes the fact that there is no immediate prospect

of reducing the analysis of some of the properties of living matter

to the level of pure physics and chemistry. It also recognizes that

biology has advanced conspicuously in those regions where the biologist

adopts to the subject matter of his enquiry an attitude similar to

that of the physicist in approaching the realm of inanimate nature.

In particular it sees no necessity for the introduction of teleology

into the study of the evolution or behaviour of living beings. It goes

further than the older mechanistic outlook in explicitly renouncing

the traditional dualism of mind and matter, since it envisages the

possibility of indefinitely extending the study of behaviour in

terms of reflex action. The publicist standpoint does not assert the

possibility of disproving the validity of animistic concepts which have

dominated biology in the past, and still persist in a more or less

attenuated form. It relies on the increasing measure of success which

accompanies the application of quantitative and experimental methods of

investigating evolution and behaviour to supersede them. In biology as

in physics magical views fall into desuetude, because more profitable

ways of dealing with phenomena take their place.

Since philosophy itself is part of the behaviour of a particular

organism, the scope of philosophy must, from the publicist standpoint,

bear examination in the light of modern biological concepts. In the

external world of modern physics the distinction between _substance_

and _form_ has been superseded. In the public world of science, i.e.

the external world of physics enlarged to take in the subject matter

of biology, the distinction between mind and matter does not remain

fundamental. What is fundamental is behaviour. This public world is the

domain of socialized belief. Whatever cannot be incorporated in its

ever-widening territory must remain impenetrable through the medium

of discourse. Only propositions that deal with behaviour in its more

extended sense have the property of _publicity_ or social reality.

Reality as a goal of philosophical enquiry is equivocal, since inborn

temperament, digestive activity, erotic preoccupations and various

other factors decide whether to a given individual the constituents

of the public world or of his own private world are more real.

Propositions that have publicity are ethically neutral. The hope that

philosophy can find a sanction for values is therefore illusory.

§2

From the publicist standpoint the business of philosophy is to resolve

the problems of human thought into their public and private components.

The public component of the problem of consciousness is the analysis

of the characteristics of “conscious behaviour.” The private component

offers no profitable basis for discussion. Because traditional

physiology has failed to recognize that the concept of consciousness

has a public component, it has been natural to assume that a

mechanistic explanation of consciousness is pure nonsense. Biological

progress has annexed the study of conscious behaviour from the province

of the private worlds. To the private worlds belong values. Though

differences in values are exaggerated by differences in distribution

of wealth and opportunities of education, there is no prospect that we

shall reach any general agreement by attempting to rationalize them.

In this sense the publicist standpoint is pluralistic. On the other

hand the domain of the public world is always encroaching upon the many

private worlds. In that sense the publicist standpoint tends towards

monism as a limiting case. It offers no short cut to finality. It

recognizes the slow accumulation of scientific knowledge as the only

road to the gradual socialization of beliefs.

In providing no hope for a rationalization of ethical values, the

publicist standpoint comes within the category of the somewhat diverse

schools of opinion to which Bertrand Russell refers as the New

Realism. If it were possible to prove that a particular set of values

is the correct one, a great service could be rendered. People would

then be able to argue about human conduct and artistic productions

without losing their tempers. I fail to see that holism contains any

promise of achieving a consummation so devoutly to be wished. Ethical

systems, as Mr. Russell observes, are usually found to contain a _non

sequitur_. Ethical values represent the private component of social

behaviour. Whether the public component will ever come within the scope

of physiology remains to be seen. Many thoughtful people have been

antagonized towards the mechanistic conception of life, because they

associate it with rash and superficial views about human relationships.

This is an intelligible but not necessarily a logically justifiable

reaction to the naïve self-confidence with which some eugenists, the

“histriometers” and other schools of “intelligence” testers have drawn

pretentious conclusions from the resources of immature biological

theories and inadequately developed biometrical methods. With such

grotesque simplicity did Descartes apply to the physiology of Man

the embryo mechanics of his own time. In reality nothing inherent in

the most dogmatic assertion of the mechanistic conception of life is

logically inconsistent with recognizing the possibility that biology

has many new truths to unfold before sociology can securely build its

foundations on biological theory, the likelihood that sociology must

for long pursue its independent investigation of the natural history

of the human species before it is ready to draw extensively on the

resources of biology. Only during the first half of the nineteenth

century did the concept of Conservation of Energy initiate the era

of modern physiology. Only during the latter half of the nineteenth

century did physical chemistry begin to elucidate those phenomena of

osmosis, colloidal solution and membrane potential now regarded as

fundamental for a mechanistic analysis of the living cell. We have

therefore no reason to suppose that biologists have elucidated in

their own field all those principles which will assist the historian

and the anthropologist to advance further in their studies. Arrogant

and premature generalizations of individual biologists (not always,

or even, I suspect, generally, of the mechanistic persuasion) are

regrettable. They do not justify an attitude of distaste for the

mechanistic conception of life. I have usually observed that the

disposition to interpret the whole field of sociology in narrowly

conceived biological terms is associated with a strong antipathy to the

physico-chemical interpretation of vital phenomena.

In its inability to rationalize values many people will see a serious

limitation of the publicist standpoint. From the days of the

Schoolmen, philosophy has been the “divine science.” It has become

so customary to regard philosophy as the handmaid of theology and

politics, that Henry Sidgwick and others have refused the use of

the term philosophical for a point of view which does not meet this

requirement. We justify this by assuming that the fabric of society

would dissolve, if we believed that our ethical notions contained no

element of finality. It follows that the materialist is to be regarded

as a bad man, and scepticism is coupled with immorality, though there

is nothing in the root meaning of the word morality to suggest why

this should be so. In _Science and the Modern World_ Dr. Whitehead

censures the materialist philosophy of the nineteenth century,

because, he declares, it “emphasized the given quantity of material,

and thence derivatively the given nature of the environment. It thus

operated most unfortunately upon the social conscience of mankind.

For it directed almost exclusive attention to the aspect of struggle

for existence.”[10] I am unable to understand why the political and

ethical shortcomings of the nineteenth century should be attributed to

the influence of materialistic philosophy. The number of materialistic

philosophers was far less than the number of persons who responded

to the appeal of the Tractarian Movement. The Lancashire mill-owners

who were getting rich quickly were the type of men who attended their

Nonconformist conventicles with regularity and subscribed to the London

Missionary Society. Against the view that society must necessarily be

based on a struggle for the means of subsistence continental Socialism

appeared, rightly or wrongly, as a vigorous reaction; and continental

Socialism was the only political movement which can rightly be said to

have been explicitly dominated by a materialist philosophy. I cannot

discern that there has been a very close historical connexion between

people’s religious, philosophical and political views on the one hand

and their social conduct on the other. It is not easy to explain why

the French revolutionaries were anti-clerical and deistic, while the

first chartists and pioneers of trade unionism in England were in close

touch with the Evangelical Revival. Christianity, with its oriental

insistence on the enmity between flesh and spirit and the vanity of

worldly riches, would seem little fitted to provide a satisfactory

rationalization of the sentiment of western civilization. Yet for long

it has done so.

Educational and political institutions grow in response to the

exigencies of human demands which are not necessarily influenced by

any ethical considerations. This may be seen by considering the case

of Mr. X, who lives in Balham and has a passion for pineapples. Mr.

X, not being bothered about metaphysics, is no more disposed than

the majority of his fellow-citizens in Balham to assert any final or

transcendental sanction for his passion for pineapples. He accepts it

as part of his modest unassuming existence. This does not prevent his

writing a letter to _The Daily Mail_, when an import tax on pineapples

makes it impossible for him to indulge his predilection for the fruit

without forgoing other cultural amenities. Meanwhile Mr. Y, who lives

in Tooting and nevertheless cherishes an earnest desire for more and

better pineapples, has written to _The Daily Herald_. Mr. X and Mr.

Y are now joined by Mr. Z of Whitby, whose letter appears in _The

Yorkshire Post_. By this time the Press cannot resist the social

pressure that is brought to bear on the pineapple policy of the party

in power. The evening papers announce in headlines “Nation-wide

movement against Pineapple Protection.” Mrs. J of Houndsditch is

pestering Carmelite House with correspondence on the potato shortage,

and Miss C of Cheltenham is writing to the Chancellor of the Exchequer

about the rising price of prunes. In official circles the determination

to do something which will distract attention from prunes, pineapples

and potatoes takes shape. If the pressure is firm enough the tax

on pineapples and prunes goes, and a promise to give the fullest

consideration to the potato shortage is extracted. Alternatively a

popular film-star is knighted, and the Press, equipped with better

copy, announces that this correspondence must cease forthwith.

There is a difference between a predilection for pineapples and the

pursuit of those amenities which are referred to by more abstract terms

such as _justice_. Pineapples are less frequently a matter of life and

death to those who eat them. Men and women rarely go to the stake or

march to battle for the sake of more and better pineapples. They will

fight for bread, and a roof over their heads and an eight-hour day.

Concerning those forms of social activity which bring us most into

conflict with our fellow-beings we are prone to demand some final or

transcendental sanction for action. Social co-operation is perfectly

realizable without recourse to any such extravagant claims. It is

permissible for a professional philosopher to doubt whether there would

really be more misery in the world if the ethical convictions of human

beings were more lax.

In stating this possibility, I am not endeavouring to give the

impression that I wish to be regarded as a “rational” person. If I

aspire to a more rational outlook than that of some of the writers

whose standpoint I have criticized, it is not because I have no

private world of my own, but because I hope that I am more successful

in separating my public beliefs from my private sentiments. I do not

pretend that I have no ethical prejudices. My ethical prejudices are

as strong as those of most vitalistic philosophers with whom I am

acquainted. Often it happens that my prejudices about conduct are not

the same as theirs. Where we differ I see absolutely no prospect of

arriving at agreement through the medium of argument. I doubt whether

I could ever agree with Dr. Haldane about a just remuneration for

the miner. I accept without hesitation Dr. Haldane’s authoritative

views on miner’s silicosis. There is a world of private values which

I do not and can never share with Dr. Haldane. I have no awareness

of anything in the universe which is anything like the Deity of Dr.

Haldane’s Gifford Lectures. His arguments leave me as unconvinced as I

was before I read them. Dr. Haldane’s Deity is part of Dr. Haldane’s

private world. In general I agree with Dr. Haldane’s interpretation of

the Dissociation Curve of hæmoglobin. If in any points I do not follow

his reasoning, I should probably agree with him on closer examination

of his evidence and inferences. Alternatively I might be able to point

out objections to some of his conclusions. I believe that he would then

examine my objections sympathetically, and, if he could not dispose of

them, modify his views. Dr. Haldane’s Dissociation Curve for hæmoglobin

is not, like Dr. Haldane’s Deity, part of Dr. Haldane’s private world.

It has become part of the public world.

In my own private world the pursuit of intellectual honesty is a matter

to which I attach a good deal of importance. I cannot reconcile with

my notion of intellectual honesty a confusion between the ethically

neutral constituents of the public world and my private convictions

about conduct. When I contend that a rational philosophy must be

ethically neutral, I do not pretend that I have no private world of

my own. I leave open the possibility that the way in which people

come to adopt different philosophical views may one day be made the

subject of public discussion as a problem of human behaviour. In my own

private world a sense of responsibility to other human beings impels

me to refuse to let people think that I am speaking in my capacity as

an expert, when I am really giving vent to my sentiments as a private

citizen. I do not regard my own private world as unimportant to myself.

I choose my immediate friends mainly on the basis of preferences which

belong to it. I am unable to understand the disposition to confuse the

two issues. It is quite possible to separate them in practice. Sir

Charles Sherrington has written an authoritative work on the central

nervous system, the importance of which is a public issue. He has also

published a volume of verse. In my private capacity I happen to like

it very much. I will go further and express the opinion that highly

creative work in science, such as Sherrington’s, is not unusually

associated with an intense system of private values. I admire Professor

Sherrington because of the versatility that makes him both a scientist

and a poet. But I admire him still more because he has not enclosed the

_Integrative Action of the Central Nervous System_ and the _Assaying

of Brabantius_ in one cover as a volume of Gifford Lectures. In

publishing them separately, he seems to me to set an example of honesty

and modesty which some of his contemporaries might well be persuaded

to emulate. William Bateson was a great scientist with very strong

political prejudices with which I have no private sympathy. Bateson’s

intellectual honesty was of so fine a calibre that he consistently and

publicly refused to associate with Eugenic Reform, lest, he explained,

his eminence as a geneticist should appear to give sanction to views

in forming which his personal sympathies were likely to override his

judgment.

More than a century ago David Hume concluded his essay on _The

Academical or Sceptical Philosophy_ by contending that “morals and

criticism are not so properly objects of the understanding as of taste

and sentiment.” If philosophy has advanced at all since the time of

Hume, I am inclined to think that there is less immediate prospect of

making politics a science and more definite information to warrant

the hope that the study of morals may one day become part of an

experimental analysis of how human beings behave. I can see no reason

to suppose that in any other sense will it ever be possible to bring

the affirmations of æsthetic and ethical experience into line with

scientific beliefs. “If we reason concerning beauty,” as Hume observed,

“we regard a new fact, to wit the general taste of mankind or some

such fact which may be the object of reasoning and enquiry.” The rise

of anthropology suggests that there are matters of fact which Hume did

not actually specify. The substance of his argument remains valid.

Science has advanced only when observation has emancipated itself from

the affirmations of æsthetic and ethical experience. To set before us

the goal which Dr. Whitehead proposes may result in hampering science

without fertilizing philosophy. Ethics and æsthetics, like politics and

religion, are, in Trotter’s words, “still too important for knowledge

and remain subjects for certitude, that is to say, in them we still

prefer the comfort of instinctive belief, because we have not learnt

adequately to value the capacity to foretell.” If it was evident to

David Hume, it is still more evident to-day that a “rational and

modest” philosophy will aim less at providing a formula for complete

agreement than at reaching a sensible understanding about matters on

which we should be content to differ.

In undertaking to refute Hume’s arguments Kant assumed the validity

of his conclusions in the method which he adopted. He employed _a

priori_ principles to establish the existence of a “faculty of pure

_a priori_ cognition.” There were at that time no available materials

for a _public_ discussion of the problem which he propounded. In

our generation a new epoch has been initiated by the physiology of

the conditioned reflex. We can now see the correct form in which

Kant’s problem must be stated, if we are to emerge from the dilemma

which arises from the fact that by temperament some philosophers

are extroverts and others introverts. It is no longer a question of

deciding how we come to know, but how we _learn_. If we are too eager

to await the solution of this problem on a purely physiological basis,

we have no need to turn, like Kant, to introspective philosophy for an

answer. The educational practice of Madame Montessori can throw more

light on the origin of the concept of _number_ than Kant’s discussion

of the proposition that seven and five make twelve.

The influence of Christianity in the western world has tended to make

the impersonal detachment of science repugnant to most people. We

are taught that knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth. This, of

course, in its own language, expresses the ecclesiastical conviction

that human nature is fundamentally sinful. Whatever we choose to

regard as good or bad, from the biological standpoint human nature

is neither the one nor the other. Man is a very teachable animal. For

that reason it is through intelligent understanding of the springs of

human action that the elimination of social discord is most likely

to proceed. Those who advocate the religious appeal as the basis of

social education have to provide us with an explanation of why the

practical implications of revealed dogma rarely receive any recognition

before the exigencies of economic necessity compel people to act in

conformity to them. No one would deny that religious leaders took a

prominent part in the movement for the abolition of chattel slavery. It

is also a singular fact that the Protestant Churches entered no protest

against the slave-trading activities of Frobisher, Drake and their

fellow-heroes of sea warfare. Nor did they disturb themselves with the

problem until the rise of the factory system had created conditions

which promoted the growth of a different form of labour contract. If

war as a means of settling international disputes is abolished in

our generation, it is not unlikely that religious apologists will be

telling our grandchildren about the prominent part which churchmen

took in founding Peace Societies. They will probably be right. War as

an institution is becoming so menacing a scourge to civilization that

even religious bodies are making themselves active in denouncing it.

But if war is to be denounced on the basis of some revealed and final

view of human conduct, how are we to explain the fact that a negligible

minority of esoteric sects have discovered so significant a conclusion

during the past two thousand years of church history? Should we not

rather say that the urgency of the modern problem has created a new

rationalization? Must we believe that war exists because by nature

human beings are sinful and delight in slaughtering one another? Can

we believe that men are so constructed that they can be induced by

religious conviction to love their neighbours as themselves? Is it not

rather a fact that men are on the whole stupid and indifferent, and

that thoughtful people regard war as an intolerable nuisance, but are

not as yet clear about how it can be avoided? Is it not to patient

study of the ways and means of organizing international government

rather than to ethical dogma or religious fervour that we must look for

the creation of permanent peace?

From a social point of view I do not think it is a demerit of any

philosophy of Life that it provides no pleasant rationalizations as a

guide to polite conduct. One would be more interested in discovering

some way of ensuring how people can be induced to act consistently

with their professions. No religious organization in recent times

has succeeded in achieving this result on a large scale. Theology is

not entitled to criticize a philosophy because it supplies no basis

for ethical values. Theology has failed to show how human beings can

be induced to behave in conformity with the ethical values which it

imposes on them. For the present I shall eat pineapples in preference

to prunes, whether philosophy provides me with a good reason for

doing so or not. Men will not be prevented from demanding a living

wage because philosophy fails to evolve an ethical theory of the

state. A man may be a gourmand without first becoming an Epicurean

or a masochist without embracing asceticism as a moral creed. Ethics

only lie within the scope of the publicist standpoint in so far as

philosophy may indicate the lines along which it is profitable to

investigate how people come to articulate certain combinations of

speech symbols, and how what they say about their actions is related

to other manifestations of motor activity which they display.

§3

I am not unaware of a criticism of the newer mechanistic outlook which

has already been made by an anonymous contributor to _Nature_ in

discussing a symposium at the 1929 meeting of the British Association:

“The extreme behaviourists or biomechanists, perhaps represented at

the conference to judge from reports by Professor Hogben, will of

course refuse to take account of any process which does not admit

of physico-chemical analysis or description--a position that does

not work out well in our daily life and conversation where we have

to allow at every turn for intelligent or even rational purpose.”

The objection implied in these words is closely akin to a fallacy which

is reiterated in most theories of the vitalistic or holistic type. The

publicist standpoint does not imply that we do know everything about

human behaviour. On the contrary it urges that we know in part and we

prophesy in part. I suppose that even the most pessimistic exponent

of the vitalistic school would admit the possibility that science

will in the course of time modify our habits of conversation in many

directions. Everyday conversation always lags behind the advance of

scientific knowledge. It would not be difficult to illustrate how

frequently our habits of conversation in moments of intellectual laxity

are saturated with pre-Copernican and pre-Darwinian views about the

universe. It is in no way remarkable that our habits of conversation

have as yet failed to accommodate themselves to the advances in

biological knowledge that are opening up new fields of investigation

into the characteristics of “conscious behaviour.” I am prepared to be

told that I have repeatedly implied traditional views about thought,

memory, consciousness and the like in writing these essays. As I bring

them to a close I will frankly admit the truth of the charge. The

common language which I was brought up to use does not contain the

words which would be suitable to a thoroughly consistent development of

my present views. I give expression to them, knowing that much which I

have written will appear very foolish to those who enjoy the advantage

of living two thousand years after I am dead. Had I the ingenuity and

astuteness to invent a completely consistent symbolism for the views I

have advocated, I could entertain no likelihood that anyone now living

would read what I have to say. My own inconsistencies and imperfections

do not lead me to infer that human beings will always be forced in

their everyday conversation to discuss the problems of human existence

with all the limitations to which I am subject.

We are told by Professor Eddington and Dr. Haldane that the

abstractions of physical science have taken us further and further away

from Man, the starting-point of our enquiries. Experimental biology in

probing into the traditional distinction between reflex and voluntary

activity permits us to recognize that science is in process of taking

within the scope of its method fields of intimate human interest.

Mechanists of a past generation could not conceive them as capable

of annexation. In bringing us back to our starting-point biology has

strictly adhered to the method of enquiry which has proved successful

in constructing the fruitful abstractions of physics and chemistry.

We can thus look forward to a time when the method of science will

claim for its field everything which comes within the scope of what

people will agree to call knowledge. Because social activity lies

within the realm of what Dr. Haldane calls “conscious behaviour” the

older mechanistic outlook failed to provide the foundations of a

comprehensive interpretation of the Nature of Life. It left Man as the

peculiar province of that diffuse type of discussion which draws its

sustenance from the abstract noun and comes to fruition as magical

gesture. It should occasion no surprise that the new horizon revealed

by the growth of biological enquiry now seems contrary to common

sense and inconsistent with the language we are accustomed to use in

everyday life. Man has existed on this planet for perhaps a matter

of five hundred thousand years. During that period little more than

five thousand years have been occupied by the building of civilized

society. Of that fraction the main development of the essentially

social language of science has been compressed to a very large extent

within the last five hundred years. We are still the creatures of a

tradition of fear, of superstition and of misunderstanding, of childish

self-assertion and savage self-submissiveness to magical prohibitions

handed down to us from what Professor Levy has aptly called the

unsavoury past.

The majority of men are impatient towards the discipline which science

imposes upon us. That impatience is a bulwark of magical beliefs. It

has been well said by Trotter: “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.” Because science

does not flatter our self-importance, because science makes stringent

demands on our willingness to face uncomfortable views about the

universe, because patience with the slow advance of science requires

the effort of intellectual self-renunciation, human nature, deeply

rooted in its unsavoury past, is on the side of vitalistic theories.

Social privilege is repelled by the mechanistic outlook because of its

ethical impartiality. Age brings its impressive authority to reinforce

both human nature and social privilege. When the spirit of intellectual

adventure dies and with it the courage to face the austere neutrality

of a universe which mocks the self-importance of our individual lives,

when the ruthlessness of death and decay threatens to rob us of the

few circumstances propitious to personal comfort, when the limitations

of our greatest achievements are no longer assuaged by the prospect

of renewed opportunities, it becomes all too easy to find the formula

which provides a compromise for the conflicting claims of magic and

science. Perhaps the time will come when our knowledge of the Nature of

Life will provide an explanation of this circumstance.

FOOTNOTES

[1] An examination of the precise significance of this adjective is

undertaken in the essay on the Nature of Life, p. 80 et seq.

[2] That a volley of afferent nerve impulses passes along the vagus

nerve to the brain at each heart beat is a fact which can be physically

demonstrated with the Einthoven galvanometer.

[3] British Association 1929, Section D.

[4] Professor Wildon Carr, in defending the vitalistic standpoint,

explicitly states this, as quoted in a later essay.

[5] I refer to the Uniformitarian doctrine.

[6] This objection does not apply to the use of the word mutation in

its strictly etymological connotation as a process in contradistinction

to a type.

[7] Two quotations from his writings may be added to justify the

foregoing criticism of Weismann. Concerning the essentially creative

rôle of Natural Selection he wrote, “The transformation of a species

as well as the preservation of its constancy are based upon natural

selection, and this is incessantly at work, never ceasing for a

moment.” (_Germ Plasm_, p. 414.)

Elsewhere he states that heredity and variation are coextensive. “We

have seen that this transmission affects the whole organism, and

extends to the most trifling details, and we also know that it is never

complete, and that the offspring and parent are never identical, but

that the former always differs more or less from the latter. These

differences give rise to the phenomenon of _variation, which thus

forms an integral part of heredity, for the latter always includes the

former_.” (_The Germ Plasm_, p. 410.)

[8] _The Bases of Modern Science_, pp. 234-5.

[9] _The Bases of Modern Science_, pp. 234-5.

[10] _Science and the Modern World_, pp. 255-6.

Transcriber’s Note: “{sic}” in the text is the transcriber’s. Simple

cases of typographical error have been silently corrected. Some sections

numbered “§1” were not present at chapter beginnings in the original,

and have been added in order to standardize the hierarchy of headings.

The book cover image that accompanies some ebook formats is original

and placed in the public domain.