■liididiMi

TIME:
THE REFRESHING RIVER

TIME:

THE REFRESHING

RIVER

(Essays and Addresses, 193 2-1 942)

by

JOSEPH NEEDHAM

Sc.D., F.R.S.

Sir JVilliam Dunn Reader in Biochemistry, University of Cambridge

London
George Allen & Unwin Ltd

FIRST PUBLISHED IN I943

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CONTENTS

PAGE

Metamorphoses of Scepticism (1941) 7

The Naturalness of the Spiritual World:
A Reappraisement of Henry Drummond
(1939) 28

Science^ Religion and Socialism (1935) 42

Laudj the Levellers^ and the Virtuosi (1935) 75

Pure Science and the Idea of the Holy (194O 92

Thoughts of a Young Scientist on the Testa-
ment of an Elder One (John Scott Haldane) (1936) 1 2 1

Limiting Factors in the History of Science^
observed in the History of Embryology 141

(Carmalt Lecture at Yale University, 1935)

The Biological Basis of Sociology (1936) 160

A Biologist's View of Whitehead' s Philosophy
(1941) 178

Evolution and Thermodynamics (1941) 207

Integrative Levels; A Revaluation of the Idea

of Progress (Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford
University, 1937) 233

Index 273

56687

To
CONRAD NOEL

Priest of Thaxted

and

Prophet of Christ's Kingdom

on Earth

"Urbs Sion unica, mansio mystica, condita caelo,
Nunc tibi gaudio, nunc tibi lugeo, tristor, anhelo;
Te, quia corpora non queo, pectore saepe penetro,
Sed caro terrea, terraque carnea, mox cado retro.
Nemo retexere, nemoque promere sustinet ore
Quo tua moenia, quo capitolia plena nitore.
Id queo dicere, quo modo tangere poliice coelum
Ut mare currere, sicut in aere, figere telum.
Opprimit omne cor ille tuus decor, O Sion, O Pax,
Urbs sine tempore, nulla potest fore, laus tibi, mendax;
O nova mansio, te pia concio, gens pia munit,
Provehit, excitat, auget, identitat, efficat, unit."

from the Rhythm of Bernard of Cluny.
"Hora novissima," 12th century.

"Somewhere beyond the railheads
Of Reason, soudi or north.
Lies a Magnetic Mountain,
Riveting sky to earth."

C. Day Lewis

Metamorphoses of Scepticism

Introductory Essay (1941)

"He says goodbye

To much, but not to love. For loving now shall be

The close handclasp of the waters about his trusting keel,

Buoyant they make his home, and lift his heart high.

Among their marching multitude he never shall feel lonely.

Love for him no longer a soft and garden sigh

Ruffling at evening the petalled composure of the senses;

But a wind all hours and everywhere he no wise can deny."

(Chorus from Noah and the Waters^ C. Day Lewis).

This book is the third of a series of collections of essays and addresses;
the first, The Sceptical Biologist^ appeared in 1929,^ and the second,
The Great Amphibium^ appeared in 1931.^ Even to-day there are many
professional scientists who look askance at the action of a colleague
who dares to speak out from time to time on general topics. In his
spare time, they feel, he should occupy himself with some innocent
and health-giving occupation such as golf or fishing, rather than with
dubious studies in the history of science or philosophy, the develop-
ment of economic structures, the ramifications of folk-lore or the
language of the Aztecs and the literature of Cathay. The overt
rationalisation of this feeling is that a scientific worker can hardly be
thought to have sufficient intellectual energy for his scientific work
unless he is careful to use none outside it — apart from the fact that
general inquiries have a strangely irritating quality on those who quite
honestly do prefer golf or bridge. But the real meaning of this feeling
is that to enquire too curiously into the structure of the world and
society and the history of society is potentially a menace to the
stability of society. The innocent scientist who harbours no "danger-
ous thoughts" is a far more wholesome member of the community
(from the point of view of its de facto rulers) than the scientist who
prefers to prowl. Like the various departments of some great industrial
plant, into which one must not penetrate without a special pass.
History and Philosophy would be presented as closed doors, if it
were possible, to the scientific investigator in the pay of the bourgeoisie.

''■ (Chatto & Windus, London, 1929: Norton, New York, 1930.)
^ (S.C.M. Press, London, 1931.)

time: the refreshing river

I am glad to confess that, like T. H. Huxley, du Bois Reymond,
Ernst Haeckel, and many another better man, I have always been a
prowler, an explorer, among ideas. The Sceptical Biologist and the
Great Amphibium}- represented a fairly systematic position in the
philosophy of science, but as would be expected in a prowler among
ideas, this position has during the past ten years undergone a con-
siderable reconstruction. The first necessity in introducing the present
book is to indicate how it links on with the two former ones.

The Differentiation of the Forms of Experience.

The task with which I was mainly occupied in SB and GA was
the distinctification and differentiation of the great forms of human
experience; science, philosophy, religion, history and art. During the
previous ten years I had often been nauseated at the confusion of
them all together which is so common among superficial thinkers in
pulpits and elsewhere, and I tried therefore to show how different each
of them was from the others. Each seemed to lead to a characteristic
world-view, incompatible with and sometimes frankly contradictory
to those of the others. The proper appreciation of the world by man
could not arise, I believed, from the pursuit of any one of diese
forms of experience by itself, but rather by the experience of all of
them, though there was little or no hope of uniting them into any
kind of "philosophia prima" or coherent view of the universe. The
use of the word "scepticism" in a title implied, therefore, two things;
■first that I was sceptical of any one of the forms of experience claiming
to be a royal road to our appreciation of the world in which we live,
and secondly that I was sceptical of the construction of any coherent
world-view which would reconcile the conflicting claims of the forms
of experience together. In this sense I deliberately use the word
"appreciation" instead of understanding or comprehension, for the
purely intellectual would at once cut out the contributions of religion
and art, forms of experience which have something in common with
being in love. A man who had never been in love might give us a
proposal for a world-view, but if we knew- this fact about him, we
should be right to think twice before accepting it. And the saying of
Sir Thomas Browne, "Thus is Man that great and true Amphibium,
whose nature is disposed to live, not only like other creatures in
divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds" again em-
phasised my scepticism as to the possibility of a coherent world-view.
^ Hereinafter referred to as SB and GA respectively.

8

METAMORPHOSES OF SCEPTICISM

I am still a sceptic, but certain processes of metamorphosis have taken
place.

We may pause for a moment to note the delineation of the forms
of experience. Science (as I then saw it) is abstract, dealing with
statistics and avoiding the individual, aiming at the establishment of
natural regularities ("scientific truth"), and quantitative, metrical,
mathematical and deterministic. It is essentially classificatory, mechani-
cal, analytical and orderly, generalising and impersonal. It has ethical
and aesthetic neutrality. It fights mystery and teleology, and it gives
a characteristic peace of mind, the Epicurean "ataraxia," drapa^la,
akin to the early Taoist conception of "cheng ching," ]£ ^. It is
both rational and empirical. Religion, on the other hand, is concrete
and individual, based on the sense of the holy, with which are con-
nected the sentiments of reverence and awe. It is qualitative in feeling,
opposed to measurement and analysis, "cornucopial" instead of
orderly, personal rather than impersonal, and essentially irrational and
alogical in spite of the cloak of rational thought based on uncertain
premises which rational theologians, such as the scholastics, have
sometimes succeeded in throwing about it. It naturally insists on
"free-will" as against determinism. As for Philosophy, it partakes of
the abstraction typical of science, but it is also interested in the indi-
vidual, the qualitative, and the teleological. Unlike science, it claims
to be normative, and it is not so vigorously opposed to mysteries
and paradoxes. History again partakes of many of the attributes of
science, but its criteria of evidence are not quite the same, and since,
like philosophy, it is debarred from the performance of any experi-
ments, its conclusions can never be tested in that way. Predictions are
ratlier in the province of science. Artistic experience finally approxi-
mates to the religious domain, in that it is sharply separated from the
rational and the expressible, but its importance to man is as great as
any of the others, and there is some connection between the appre-
ciation of beauty and the divination of the holy. Such contrasts will
be found at length in SB and GA.^

Looking back at my efforts ten to fifteen years ago to disentangle
the forms of experience, I think now that the description of science
was rather too narrow, and the description of religion certainly much

^ This kind of treatment, done far better than I, as a working scientist, could ever
have hoped to do it, was given in R. G. Collingwood's Speculum Mentis (Oxford,
1924); and it is interesting that the subsequent development of this philosopher, as hi?
Autobiography (Oxford, 1939) shows, has paralleled my own.

time: the refreshing river

too neo-Platonic, idealistic, pietistic and other-worldly. In my anxiety
to see the forms of human experience in sharpest antithesis to one
another, I almost welcomed characteristics which added to their
irreconcilability. I was determined to be a "divider," and if indeed
the work of previous "uniters" was insufficiently well-founded, this
was no mistake. "Dividing" and "uniting" may be looked upon as
dialectical opposites, like continuity and discontinuity, which run
through the whole history of philosophical and scientific thought,
imperfect unions being always doomed to destruction by later
"dividing" critics.

But much the most significant thing about my point of view at
that time, as I remember it, was that I was always uncomfortable
about the position of ethics. It was the one department of thought
which I could never allot to one or other of the forms of experience.
It seemed sometimes to belong to religion, but yet it was obviously
profoundly affected by science, and in some situations in time and
space, such as early Chinese Confucianism, it existed without any
connections with supernatural ism. Nor was it remote from aesthetic
experience, since good actions had something beautiful about them;
nor could it be considered apart from history, since systems of ethics
had changed with changing social conditions.

The explanation of this difficulty was at hand, however.

The Breaking in of Ethics and Politics.

During the past twenty years, the one form of experience which
in SB and GA was never taken into account,^ came and forced itself
more and more upon my attention, namely politics. Ethics and politics
both belong to the realm of man's social life, and my fundamental
limitation had been to envisage the experiencing human being as a
solitary unit, subject to the diverse forms of experience which I had
been classifying. Ethics are the rules whereby men may live together
in society with the utmost harmony and the best opportunities for
the development of their talents in the common good. Politics are
nothing but the attempt to objectify the most advanced ethics in the
structure of society, to enmesh the ideal ethical relations in the real
world. Hence the class struggles in every age since the origin of
private property, which, though at many stages a fundamentally pro-
gressive force, at other stages radically hinders the attainment of the
next step in social relations. Now so far as my thinking was concerned,

^ There were indications of it in GA, however, cf. p. 43.

10

METAMORPHOSES OF SCEPTICISM

ethics and politics proved to be the cement necessary for the unification
of the divergent forms of experience. The dividing process was
succeeded by a uniting one, and an integrated world-view emerged
from the differentiated dissected analysed system which I had made.
It was bound to follow the lead of the philosophy which most con-
sistently allows for the social background of our thought and being,
and explains what is happening, and has for centuries been happening,
to human society as the continuation of all biological evolution.

Perhaps it will not be a digression if at this point I lighten the way
by a few autobiographical notes. I tried to keep to my own field, but
politics would keep breaking in. I grew up in an extremely bourgeois
household, my father a physician (before my time, an anatomist and
pioneer in pathological histology) in private practice but later to be a
specialist in anaesthesia; my mother a musician and composer. My
father was, I believe, an extremely kind man in his practice, among
which there were many working-class people, but the atmosphere of
my home was saturated with every kind of bourgeois prejudice. I
remember with affection, however, an incident which was the first to
make me realise the community of flesh and blood which I had with
working-class people, who otherwise one might have been tempted to
suppose were an entirely different species of living organism. It was
at the little French town of Eu, where I (then about thirteen) was
travelling with my father on holiday, and as there was no "corre-
spondance" of trains, we had*to stay the night. The hotel was full, so
we were accommodated in a neighbouring railwayman's cottage, the
simple homely welcome of whose family I never forgot. Such little
incidents have untold consequences, and about 19 17 in walks with
my father I would always argue in favour of socialism against his
incurably pessimistic views of human nature, so well suited to the
retention of power and privilege by the class which at any given time
possesses it.

I remember, too, the first mention I ever heard of bolshevism. I
was on my bicycle, while my best school friend, F — . C — . (later
Professor of Architecture at M'Gill University) walked along beside
me. It was the summer of 19 18. We had roving minds; he did a good
deal of sculpture, and we corresponded in a variety of codes, in
Leonardo's mirror-writing, and so on. He was saying, "The point
about bolshevism is, that so far, every ruling class has oppressed
everybody else, so now the idea is to take the very dregs of the
population and make them the ruling class, so that they can take a

II

time: the refreshing river

turn at oppressing everybody else." I remember saying I thought it a
very peculiar theory. I still smile at this, but it was something to be
discussing it at all; I believe most of the boys with whom I was at
school did not begin to think about it till many years afterwards, if ever.

Later on, as an undergraduate, my interests were largely philo-
sophical and theological, and I was so unpolitical that I never joined
the Union Society, on account of a disinclination to be drawn into
political debates. But in so far as I was anything, I was vaguely pro-
gressive, and remember supporting with great enthusiasm (and owing
to my upbringing no small inside knowledge) the proposal for a
State Medical Service at a debate at the Junior Acton Club, an organi-
sation which united mostly Caius and Emmanuel men but now long
since defunct. An influence of considerable importance, after my
marriage, was that of our friend the biochemist L — . R — ., whose
eastern and central European outlook on political questions revolu-
tionised ours. We had got to know him during a period of work at
the Roscoff Marine Biological Station, and I remember discussions on
the roof, in 1925, while the sun sank over the He de Batz, and again
in our house in Cambridge later, which were very formative for us.

The process of socialisation of my outlook, however, really began
with the General Strike in 1926 and was completed by the rise to
power of Hitlerite fascism in 1933. In the general strike I was on the
wrong side, and helped in the running of the railway as a volunteer,
explaining my action to socialist friends as a straightforward support
of constitutionally elected government, a government which I had
certainly voted against in the preceding elections. I so far acted up to
my beliefs in this way that at the conclusion of the strike, when the
railway company wanted us to remain at our posts in order that their
oflicials could conduct a victimisation process against the returning
railwaymen, I spoke against this at a meeting of the volunteers,
pointing out that we had no quarrel with the railwaymen, and so
helped to ensure that most of the volunteers left without delay. There
can be no doubt that these events supplied the most powerful stimulus
I had ever had towards reading along sociological and political lines.
I carried a little old torn copy of the Tale of Two Cities on the foot-
plate, but in the evenings and afterwards I read Shaw's Guide to
Capitalism and Socialism and went on from that to heavier material.
In this way I came to the belief I now hold, that, in a sense, in any
doubtful case, "the people are never wrong"; through all the ages of
oppression since the first beginnings of private property men have

12

METAMORPHOSES OF SCEPTICISM

been struggling for political freedom, and everything which assists
this struggle is right. The later years of work in the Labour movement
of my wife and myself, including a long membership of the Cambridge
Trades Council, all originated from this time.

By 1933 the general movement among all kinds of intellectual
workers in England towards political activity was becoming v/ide-
spread. In the Universities it was evident in the much increased interest
of the undergraduate in political thought, and the concomitant decline
in organised large-scale jokes and similar amusing, if childish, exhibi-
tions. A certain loss of lightheartedness was unavoidable. Even in the
world of science, our witty periodical "Brighter Biochemistry,"
which in its day had had a wide reputation and had been very worth
while, died after some seven vears of life about this time. The situation
was, in fact, getting beyond a joke, and the shadow of the Second
World War was upon us.

The Creativeness of Contradictions.

I must now turn to sketch the general world-view at which I
arrived after I began to realise man as a social being, and in which
the various forms of experience which I had so carefully distinguished
found their place. Essentially what I had unearthed from these sharp
antitheses was a series of contradictions.^ Now contradictions and
deadlocks are far from being a calamity in practical thought; they are
only so in formal logic. In practice they find themselves overcome by
syntheses at higher levels. And the idea that "the principle of contra-
diction is only valid for our reason" is an ancient one; it is found in
the mystical writer Dionysius the Areopagite, and again when the
middle ages were giving place to the modern era, in Nicholas of Cusa,
and in Giordano Bruno.^ For example, in Master Eckhardt we find
the following, easily decipherable through its archaic German:^ "Waz
ist widersatzunge ? Lieb unde leit, wiz unde swarz, daz hat wider-
satzunge, unde die enblibet in wesenne niht. Swenne diu Seele kumt
in daz lieht der Vemiinftekeit, so weiz si niht widersatzunge."

All these thinkers placed the reconciliation of contradictions,
however, in the realm of the divine, and did not consider it as attain-
able by man in his earthly state. This was the position I too adopted
in my earlier thinking,* quoting Robert Boyle: "When we die God

^ Cf. p. 182.

^ See "The Cosmology of Giordano Bruno" by Dorothea W. Singer, Isis, 1941, 33,
187, and her forthcoming book on this remarkable man.
^ See Nicholas of Cusa by H. Bett (London, 1932), p. 127. * Cf. SB, p. 225.

13

time: the refreshing river

will enlarge our faculties so as to enable us to gaze without being
dazzled upon those sublime and radiant truths whose harmony as well
as splendour we shall then be qualified to discover, and consequently
with transports to admire." It was a thought not infrequendy met
with in the 17th century; thus Sir Thomas Browne said, "There is
yet another conceit that hath made me sometimes shut my books,
which tells me it is a vanity to waste our days in the blind pursuit
of knowledge; it is but attending a little longer, and we shall enjoy
that by instinct and infusion, which we endeavour at here by labour
and inquisition. It is better to sit down in a modest ignorance, and
rest contented with the natural blessing of our own reasons, than buy
the uncertain knowledge of this life with sweat and vexation^ which
Death gives every fool gratis, and is an accessory of our glorification."^

But it was left to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the last century,
building on the dialectic process of the idealist philosopher Hegel, but
profoundly influenced through Darwin^ by the new understanding
of evolution which was then dawning on men, to take the revolu-
tionary step of placing the resolution of contradictions within the
historical and pre-historical process itself. Contradictions are not
resolved only in heaven; they are resolved right here, some in the
past, some now, and some in time to come. This is the dialectical
materialist way of expounding cosmic development, biological evolu-
tion, and social evolution, including all history.

However fascists may laugh, there is something divine about a
committee.^ One member makes a proposal, another points out that
for one reason or another it will not do; there are further proposals
and counter-proposals, and out of this strife of theses and antitheses,
the synthesis, or final decision, is born, only to become itself in due
time another thesis, again unsatisfactory, and to be subsumed in
further higher syntheses by later meetings or higher committees. This
is the dialectical process.* Marx and Engels were bold enough to

^ Religio Medici, I. 9.

2 Marx wanted to dedicate part of Capital to Darwin (cf. Psyche, 193 1, 12, 7).

^ This is why I like that famous dictum of Conrad Noel's that the universe itself
is ruled by a committee. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity, "neither afore nor after
other," "without any difference or inequality," upheld by Athanasius, would thus have
been a democratic doctrine as against the totalitarian monotheism of the imperial and
Arian party. The same thought occurs in Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity (London,
1854, pp. 66 and 288). "The mystery of the Trinity," he says, "is the mystery of par-
ticipated, social, life, the mystery of I and You," and he gives patristic sources in
support of it.

* The best introduction to dialectical materialist philosophy known to me is tliat
of R. Maublanc; La Philosophie du Marxisme (Paris, 1935); it is a pity there is no English

14

METAMORPHOSES OF SCEPTICISM

assert that it happens actually in evolving nature itself, and that the
undoubted fact that it happens in our thought about nature is because
we and our thought are a part of nature. We cannot consider nature
otherwise than as a series of levels of organisation, a series of dialectical
syntheses. From ultimate physical particle to atom, from atom to
molecule, from molecule to colloidal aggregate, from aggregate to
living cell, from cell to organ, from organ to body, from animal body
to social association, the series of organisational levels is complete.
Nothing but energy (as we now call matter and motion) and the levels
of organisation (or the stabilised dialectical syntheses) at different
levels have been required for the building of our world. The conse-
quences of this point of view are boundless. Social evolution is con-
tinuous with biological evolution, and the higher stages of social
organisation, embodied in advanced ethics and in socialism, are not a
pious hope based on optimistic ideas about human nature, but the
necessary consequence of all foregoing evolution. We are in the midst
of the dialectical process, which is not likely to stop at the bidding of
those who sit, like Canute, with their feet in the water forbidding
the flood of the tide.

I shall not emphasise these consequences here, since in the other
essays in this book they are further dealt with. I shall only point
out that they fundamentally affect our attitude to time. Hence the
title of the present book. As Auden says : —

"And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper; 'Our day is our loss, O show us

History the operator, the
Organiser, Time the refreshing river!"

Sir Thomas Browne was wrong; "the great Mutations of the world"
are not all yet acted, and time will not be too short for the develop-
ment of human society that is to come. Contrary presentations, of
course, spring to the mind: —

"Time, like an ever-rolling stream
Bears all its sons away.
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day."

translation. M. J. Adler in his Dialectic (London, 1927, p. 10) makes the interesting
point that dialectical thinking is essentially social thinking within the one mind, since
it involves a conflict ofopposites, which deduction and induction do not. See also the
article of A. M. Dunham on the concept of "tension" in psychology and logic
(Psychiatry, 1938, 1, 79).

ft-

15

time: the refreshing river

as we used to sing as children. But now we have no further interest
in this over-individuaHstic type of Christianity; those who are pre-
pared to "work illegally, and be anonymous" that the Kingdom may
come, find that this attitude has no meaning for them. Nor will they
be depressed by the cultured hopelessness of T. S. Eliot in "East
Coker":—

"And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate — but there is no competition —
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."

Again, this is too individualist. Time is for all men a refreshing
river; not merely a perpetual recurrence of opportunities for individual
souls to scale the heights of mystical experience or to produce great
artistic achievement or to break free from the wheel of things or to
attain perfect nonactivity, or whatever metaphor of individual per-
fection you happen to like. The historical process is the organiser of
the City of God, and those who work at its building are (in the
ancient language) the ministers of the Most High. Of course there
have been setbacks innumerable, but the curve of the development of
human society pursues its way across the graph of history with
statistical certainty, heeding neither the many points which fall
beneath it, nor those many more hopeful ones which lie above its
average sweep.

Instances of dialectical development in scientific thought are so
numerous that a few moments' thought provides an embarrassingly
large selection. All science progresses by new hypotheses which
combine in a synthetic way, not by mere compromise, the truest
points in the preceding hypotheses. Deadlocks are thus overcome.
Thus in embryology we know now that both egg and sperm are
essential contributions to generation from the tvv^o parents, but in the
1 8th century and well into the 19th this was not understood. The

16

METAMORPHOSES OF SCEPTICISM

Ovists believed that mammals developed from the egg alone, and that
the spermatozoa were adventitious worm-like organisms, perhaps
parasites, as the termination "-zoa" of their modern name still indicates
to-day. The Animal culists, on the other hand, believed that the
animal originated from a spermatozoon only, and that the egg was if
anything only a kind of box in which it could develop. The phenomena
of inheritance alone should have sufficed to indicate that this deadlock
was an absurdity, but it took nearly two centuries before the functions
of egg and spermatozoon were understood, and the contradiction was
resolved. In the later history of embryology we find a similar contra-
diction. When the study of the fate of parts of the egg began, it was
at first believed that all development is mosaic, i.e. that any injury
to the egg at the beginning of development is reflected in a corre-
sponding injury in the finished embryo. Then came the discovery that
in some eggs, at any rate, regulative development can occur, i.e. that
from a half-egg, or even a quarter-egg, a normal embryo, though
small, can be formed. These facts were made the basis of vitalistic
theories, but the sharp contradiction was at length resolved by the
finding that the eggs of some species are mosaic and that those of
others are regulative, the only difiference between them being the
exact time at which the determination of the fates of the various
parts occurs.

The same syntheses of contradictions are going on in biochemistry.
Some thirty years ago lactic acid was thought to be the causative
agent in the contraction of muscle. After the discovery of phosphagen,
this substance in turn was regarded as the most important. We know
now that neither of these substances is connected with the final
process whereby energy is transferred from chemical processes to the
muscle fibre but another substance altogether, adenylpyrophosphate.
Phosphagen is one of the substances involved in the cycles of phos-
phorylation by which energy is transferred, while the lactic acid is
simply the waste-product of the breakdown of glycogen whereby
the chemical energy is provided. Or again, adrenalin has long been
known to contract blood-vessels and also raise the blood sugar by
mobilising liver glycogen. This latter action was thought to be due
to the constriction of the liver's small blood-vessels, with consequent
anoxaemia and asphyxia. But it was then found that even in well-
oxygenated liver cells, adrenalin causes a breakdown of glycogen. This
contradiction was subsequently resolved by the further finding that
adrenalin intervenes in the oxidative synthesis of glycogen in the cell.

17

B

time: the refreshing river

A particularly neat example of the resolution of a dialectical con-
tradiction is that of nucleic acid synthesis by developing eggs. It was
first found that during the development of sea-urchin eggs, a large
quantity of histologically recognisable nuclein is formed for the
increasing number of nuclei. But it was then found that there was
no change whatever in the nuclein phosphorus or the nucleic acid
nitrogen during development. Here was a flat contradiction, but it was
resolved by workers who showed that there are two kinds of nucleic
acid, and that during development one of them, situated in the
cytoplasm, is transformed into the other kind situated in the new
nuclei.

In the field of wider ideas, there is a convincing sense in which
one may say that the long-debated controversy between biological
mechanists and vitalists (much discussed in SB and GA) was a dialec-
tical deadlock which a judicious organicism has resolved.^ The
mechanists, enamoured of over-simplified physico-chemical explana-
tions of biological processes, which they regarded, quite rightly, as
heuristically valuable, maintained that all biological processes were
fully explicable in terms appropriate to the sciences of physics and
chemistry. The vitalists, always eager to safeguard objective com-
plexity (and at the same time to keep the world safe for animism),
maintained that vital phenomena would always escape physico-
chemical analysis. This deadlock, which in various forms had run
through the whole history of human thought, was overcome when it
was realised that every level of organisation has its own regularities and
principles, not reducible to those appropriate to lower levels of organi-
sation, nor applicable to higher levels, but at the same time in no way
inscrutable or immune from scientific analysis and comprehension.
Thus the rules which are followed in experimental morphology or
genetics are perfectly valid in their own right, but comprehension will
never be complete until what is going on at the other levels, both
above and below, is analysed and compared with the level in question.^
Biological organisation is the basic problem of biology; it is not an
axiom from which biology must start.

So in the same way, we may perhaps consider dialectical materialism
itself as the synthesis of the age-old contradiction between meta-

^ This idea was put forward in a paper of mine in 1928, Quart. Rev. Biol., 3, 80.

^ M. J. Adler {Dialectic, London, 1927, p. 164 ff.) suggests that the natural connection
between dialectical and organicistic thought is simply that entities in opposition are
likely to be parts (on one level) of which the whole, the synthesis, occupies the next
higher level.

18

METAMORPHOSES OF SCEPTICISM

physical idealism and materialism.^ Idealism did justice to the highest
manifestations of human social activity, but was absolutely incapable
of doing justice to that real objective world on which science must
insist. Materialism provided a w^orld congruent with scientific activity,
but, since it lacked the secondary qualities, a world so "grey and
Cimmerian" (in Goethe's phrase) that only the stoutest-hearted or the
thickest-headed could accept it as an account of that real world in
which some place had to be found for human values. By their fight
against both classical idealism and mechanical materialism, and by
their insistence on the successive dialectical levels in nature, the
highest of them including all man's highest experiences, Marx and
Engels overcame this contradiction for the first time in history.
Engels pointed out three limitations in former mechanical materialism;
first that it was mechanical "in the sense that it believed in the ex-
clusive application of the standards of mechanics to processes of a
chemical and organic nature"; second, that it was anti-dialectical, i.e.
that it did not allow for the ever-shifting boundaries in nature; and
third, that it admitted of the preservation of idealism "up above" in
the realm of the social sciences.^

In historical events the dialectical process is readily seen.^ The
English civil war in the 17th century provides a particularly striking
example. The whole feudal systems of ideas, represented by the King,
the aristocracy and the Anglican bishops came into sharp opposition
against the rising middle class led by the smaller country gentry, the
merchants and the City of London. Feudal royal ism found its anti-
thesis in the radical puritan republicanism of the Commonwealth
period. But the time was not ripe for the ideas of the Levellers and
Independents, and the Restoration was a dialectical synthesis in which
a constitutional monarchy, or one which was bound to end as such,
combined with a triumphant Parliament controlled by the middle
class whose interests the civil war had made secure. The protestant
coup d'etat of 1688 and the Reform Act of 1832 simply completed

^ Cf. Lenin On Dialectics in Works, 11, p. 84. Or one might say that Thomas
Aquinas made a dialectical synthesis of the points of view represented in earlier scholastic
thought by Abelard and William of Champeaux (M. J. Adler, Dialectics, London,
1927, p. 72). Clement of Alexandria actually did say, in the Stromata, that Christianity
was the synthesis of Greek and Jew.

^ Cf. Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism in Works, 11. p. 297.

^ As for example by the non-marxist historian H. Butterfield in his interesting book
The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931), where he combats the moralising
attitude to historical conflicts, showing that each side stood for some elements which
were embodied in the subsequent synthesis.

19

time: the refreshing river

the process. The French Revolution shows a very similar develop-
ment. The feudal monarchy was opposed by the revolutionary
Jacobins, but the eventual outcome was the rule of the post-Napoleonic
bourgeoisie. This dialectical process is the explanation of the feature
so characteristic of revolutions, that they move (in common parlance),
two steps forward and one step back.^

A Reconsideration of Beliefs.

In the light of what has now been said, it may be of interest to
reconsider some of the points of view in my two previous books of
essays. In the first place the attack on vitalism in all its forms^ was
abundantly justified; there is no ptace whatever in biology for traces
of animism, but we must seek to understand the biological level side
by side with the physico-chemical level and the psychological level.
In saying that living things differ from dead things in degree and not
in kind, and are, as it were, extrapolations from the inorganic,^ I was
explicitly adumbrating the scheme of successive levels of complexity
and organisation. The essay "Lucretius Redivivus"^ was sound in
that it emphasised a coming connection bet^^een chemical science
and mental science, and I look back with pleasure on my enthusiasm
for Epicurus and Lucretius, from which I have never seen any reason
to depart, and which has since been publicly shared by others in some
extremely valuable books. ^ My dislike of fixed boundary-lines in
nature^ was, I found, in agreement with what Engels says on the
question in that great but unfortimately named work the Anti-
Diihringy^ At that time, much influenced by Lotze, whom I still
consider a remarkable thinker, I emphasised that mechanism was to
be considered applicable everywhere, but final nowhere.^ This was
an inadequate way of saying that the scientific method is applicable
at all levels but that mechanical explanations are inadequate to deal
with the phenomena of organisms. There was a similar confusion
between "scientific naturalism" and "mechanical materialism"; I often
wrote the former when, as I think now, I should have written the

1 The examples given above show the dialectical process at work in the history
of human society and of scientific thought. But it is embodied also in non-human
evolution, see p. 190.

2 SB, pp. 89 ff.; GA, pp. 95 ff. 3 SB, p. 247. * SB, p. 133.
^ Such as B. Farrington's Science and Politics in the Ancient World (London, 1939).

^ SB, p. 16.

' Also in Dialectics of Nature (Gesamtausgabe edition, Moscow, 1935, p. 629).

^ SB, pp. 28, 136.

20

METAMORPHOSES OF SCEPTICISM

latter.^ But this was because I could at that time see no way of including
the highest phases of organisation within the realm of nature without
subjecting them to the distortion which mechanical materialism put
upon them, a distortion which involved the characteristic denial I
could never bring myself to make, the denial of the validity of one or
other of the forms of human experience. Religion and art, for instance,
are perfectly valid forms, though they certainly do not mean what
their interpreters and experiencers have often thought they meant.
Mechanism, then, according to my view, was applicable everywhere
but final nowhere, and in biology this led to a position of methodo-
logical mechanism for which, in opposition to the neo-vitalists, I used
the term neo-mechanism.^ This was a way of acknowledging the
complexity of the high organic levels without giving up the scientific
method. It was also a way of acknowledging the imperfection and
relativity of the scientific formulations so far attained. It went with,
though it did not necessitate, the idea that the other forms of experience,
such as religion, philosophy, history and art, were alternative, also
imperfect, ways of apprehending the world in which we live. Owing
to my ignorance of any form of naturalism other than mechanical
materialism, my discussion of biological organicism was somewhat
vitiated. While sympathetic to organicism, I assumed that biological
organisation could not be investigated scientifically, and must therefore
remain a concept of purely philosophical order.^ Later I was able to
revise this view thoroughly, and to show that on the contrary,
organising relations are open to investigation.* It is precisely the
organisation of the various levels that constitutes their special quality
and gives rise to their special forms of behaviour.

I think it is fair to say that my presentation of the main metaphysical
issue was never idealist.^ But I was much influenced by the trend of
thought originating with Ernst Mach, and agreed that the procedures
of science do not give us a picture of the external world as it really is.
While maintaining the real existence of the world (of matter) prior
to ourselves, I described many features of the scientific method which
suggest that our knowledge of it comes to us in distorted form.
However much one may think this distortion amounts to, as long as
one admits a knowable objective basis of our experience, one remains
a materialist. My ideas on this subject were not cleared up until I
read Lenin's book on the Machians, Materialism and Empirio-

^ SB, p. 242; GA, p. loi. 2 SB, p. 38. ^ SB, pp. 83, 84.

^ In my book Order and Life (Yale and Cambridge, 1936). ^ SB, p. 26.

21

time: the refreshing river

Criticism. Lenin showed that the Machians were really disguised
philosophical idealists, not merely affirming the existence of some
distortion in our apprehension of the external world, but tending to
deny its very existence or to make all science the purely subjective
study of an unknowable noumenon. He elucidated the confusion
which the Machians had introduced between the objective-subjective
antithesis on the one hand, and the absolute-relative antithesis on the
other. Scientific truth is certainly relative, since all formulations are
imperfect, though approaching, perhaps asymptotically, to the truest
possible account of the regularities of external nature; but it is equally
certainly objective, in that it deals with real external events, even
through the "optic glasses" of our human limitations.^ Relativity of
scientific truth is taken care of in dialectical materialism, since
it is constantly approximating dialectically to truth; but subjectiv-
ism, if it be pure, is nothing else than metaphysical idealism in
disguise.

The seemingly endless process of the improvement of human
knowledge was very much in my mind when the essays of SB and GA
were written.^ Because of my doubt whether any "philosophia prima'*
could ever be found to reconcile the different forms of human ex-
perience, I emphasised all the more the practice of activities themselves,
never doubting that each was undergoing progressive advance and
refinement. Hence the quotation from the Nicomachean Ethics of
Aristotle with which SB was headed: "The greatest good which man
can know is the active exercise of the spirit in conformity with virtue."
There is a parallel to this in the seemingly endless process of the
improvement of human society. Those whose conscious or unconscious
interest it is to minimise the achievements of social evolution generally
choose one of two ways of attack; saying either that the art and
thought of the ancients has had no equal since, or that no matter
what changes the further development of human society may bring,
it will never approach that perfection which has long been imaginable.
The first point of view is the product of a distorted time-scale. The
second is the most superficial of all pessimisms. Whether or not
human suffering will always exist, it is always our duty to work to
decrease it, and the course of social evolution hitherto gives us every
confidence for the future. Social, as well as scientific, ethos is summed
up in the words of G. E. Lessing (a favourite passage of the great

^ Cf. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, pp. 185, 199, 363.
2 SB, pp. 7, 33 ff.

22

»s-

METAMORPHOSES OF SCEPTICISM

physicist, Max Planck): "Not the possession of truth, but the effort
in struggHng to attain it, brings joy to the searcher."

The In^i'^^duaRst Fallacy,

All the worst deficiencies of SB and GA, as I now see it, were due
to thinking, of man solely as an individual, with various different
facets, or winSows, out of which, as in some observatory or conning-
tower, he could look. Immediately one begins to consider man under
his social aspect, the germs of a unified world-view appear.^ As I
have said, the position of ethics was, for this very reason, always
obscure to me. Ethics are the rules whereby man may live in social
harmony; Confucius discussed li |S and Jen ^ and i ^ in this
sense and without any supernaturalism thousands of year ago. They
are being discussed to-day in the same spirit.^ Such rules perhaps
correspond to the valency bonds and other forces which hold particles
together at the molecular and sub-molecular levels. Politics is only
practical mass ethics, some men seeking to perpetuate private posses-
sion of the goods of life, others seeking to distribute them as widely
as may be; some men seeking for reasons why nothing should ever
change, others seeking for true knowledge of the nature of man and
how the natural needs can be satisfied. Hence for civilised man, in
whom the numinous, the sense of the holy, is irrevocably attached
to ethical ideas, religion too becomes a bond playing its part in the
coherence of high social organisation. V/hen Society itself has been
sanctified by the full incorporation in it of the principles of justice,
love and comradeship, religion is destined to pass without loss into
social emotion as such. When oppression has been removed, religion
as the cry of the oppressed creature will cease to exist, but the sense
of the holy, one of man's most fundamental forms of experience, will
never disappear. We can already see a similar transformation taking
place in poetry, where the most moving implications can be conveyed

^ Long before, Feuerbach had passed through precisely the same intellectual process
{Works, pp. 343, 344). And cf. Bukharin's words, which I read long afterwards, "The
philosophical 'subject' is not an isolated human atom, but 'social' man." (Marx Memorial
Volume, Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 1933, Eng. tr. Marxism and Modern Thought,
London, 1936, p. 13.) But there is no need to go so far afield; no one appreciated these
things better than the great English psychologist, Henry Maudsley (cf. his Body and
Will, London, 1883, pp. 44 and 157).

^ See the discussion which followed a paper of C. H. Waddington's in Nature, 1941,
148, p. 270 ff. with contributions by E. \V. Barnes, W. R. Matthews, W. G. de Burgh,
A. D. Ritchie, Julian Huxley and others; see also Proc. Aristot. Soc. 1942, and Science
and Ethics (Allen & Unwin, London, 1942).

23

time: the refbeshing river

by the poets in the simplest common words. The religious mysticism
of a Donne or a Crashaw; the cosmic pantheism of a Wordsworth;
have given place to the social emotion of such poets as Auden,
Spender, Day Lewis, and such prose writers as Warner and Upward.
There is a story by that subtlest of writers, V. S. Pritchett, which
well exemplifies this.^ It is a love story and it concerns a commercial
traveller and an undertaker's daughter, but the plain ordinariness of
the conversation masks the deepest feeling and the most devastatingly
subtle irony. This mingling of profound emotion with surface banality
strikes an authentic note of what must come to be in future socialist
society.^ Auden has supplied a perfect allegory of it in his poem:

*'To settle in this village of the heart.
My darling, can you bear it? True, the hall
With its yews and famous dovecots is still there
Just as in childhood, but the grand old couple
Who loved us all so equally are dead;
And now it is a licensed house for tourists,
None too particular. One of the new
Trunk roads passes the very door already.
And the thin cafes spring up overnight.
The sham ornamentation, the strident swimming pool,
The identical and townee smartness.
Will you really see as home, and not depend
For comfort on the chance, the sly encounter
With the irresponsible beauty of the stranger ?
O can you see precisely in our gaucheness
The neighbour's strongest wish, to serve and love.^"

Pritchett and Auden and all our best writers are warning us not to
be put off by what we may feel are the vulgar externals of modern
life; not to retire into fantasies and escape-holes; the reality of human
comradeship is as powerful as ever. The lorry-drivers on those roads
have T.U. cards in their pockets and their talk in the thin cafes is
far from fantastic. Those young men and women in the strident
swimming pool are members, perhaps, of L.L.Y. or Y.C.L. The

^ "Sense of Humour" in New Writing, 1936, 2, 16, and in You make your own Life
(London, 1938).

^ Was this not the meaning of that great saying of Yeats — "Think the thoughts of a
wise man, but speak the common language of the people."

24

METAMORPHOSES OF SCEPTICISM

beauty of these people is not strange, not irresponsible, but pregnant
with the beauty of the new world-order.^

Perhaps a word about modem English poetry might be interjected
here. The writings coHected in the present book go to show how a
scientist deeply responded to the work of poets contemporary with
him during the period bet^'een the two world wars. He could not
refrain from quoting them because they embodied all the elements of
his own world view, the evolutionary background, the materialist
view of human history, the task of Eros in social progress, the revo-
lutionary belief in the future world of justice and comradeship.
W. B. Yeats,^ when discussing the achievements of the "New Country"
School and their successors, remarked that certain technical factors
such as assonance and sprung rhythm, had permitted at last the
inclusion of necessary scientific words into poetry. Scientific socialism
could then bring science and poetry together.

It is essential, therefore, to view all the forms of human experience
in a social context. But I was profoundly sceptical of the right of any
one of the forms of experience to have the last word about the world
in which we live. To-day I feel more confirmed in this scepticism
than ever. A concentration on scientific experience alone gives you
the individualistic researcher, inapt for team-work and bent on
priority, the easy prey of all the reactionary social forces tending to

^ Compare with this a notable passage from George Orwell:

"The place to look for the germs of the future England is in the light-industry
areas and along the arterial roads. In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth,
Hayes — everywhere indeed on the outskirts of great towns — the old pattern is gradu-
ally changing into something new. In diose vast new wildernesses of glass and brick
the sharp distinctions of the older kind of town, with its slums and mansions, or
the coimtry, with its manor houses and squalid cottages, no longer exist. There are
wide gradations of income, but it is the same kind of life that is being lived at
different le\'els, in labour-saving flats or council houses, along the concrete roads,
and in the naked democracy of the swimming pools. It is rather a restless, cultureless
life, centreing round tinned food. Picture Post, the radio and the internal com-
bustion engine. It is a civilisation in which children grow up with an intimate
knowledge of magnetos and in complete ignorance of the Bible. To that civilisation
belong the people who are most at home in, and most definitely of, the modern
world; the technicians and the higher-paid skilled workers, the airmen and their
mechanics, the radio experts, film producers, popular journalists and industrial
chemists. They are the indeterminate stratum at which the older class distinctions
are beginning to break down." — (The Lion and the Unicorn, London, 1941, p. 54.)

We are reminded of a great scholar venturing to stand up against one of Inge's
diatribes against modern Ufe — "I do not regard it as absurd," said Rashdall, "to
contend that there is value even in the life of East and West Ham" {Ideas & Ideals,
1928, p. 85).
" In his introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern English Poetry.

time; the refreshing river

make scientists the passive instruments of class domination. In looking
round among one's colleagues it has been consistently evident that
those with the narrowest specialist interests tend to be politically the
most reactionary. Without history, the scientist will know nothing of
social evolution, of the origin and progress of human society, of the
laws of change and of the direction in which further progress is
likely to take place. Without philosophy he can have no basic world-
view, and may fall into all kinds of fantasies — for successful scientific
work is compatible with anything from Roman Catholicism, as in the
case of Pasteur, co Sandemanism as in the case of Faraday. It would
be presumptuous in the case of such men to think that their scientific
work would have been better if they had had better philosophies,
but the majority of scientists are not of their calibre, and for these it
is surely true that the better their philosophy the better their scientific
work is likely to be. Without religion, the scientist will know little
of comradeship with the mass of men, he will remain isolated from
them in intellectual pride, and incapable of that humility which made
Huxley give of his best to working-class audiences in "Mechanics'
Institutes" or Timiriazev and Sechenov lecture illegally to Russian
working men. Only by recognising where the numinous really lies
will he be able to take his part in the great Labour movement. As for
the absence of aesthetic appreciation, one need not describe the kind
of person he will be without that. All the forms of experience are
necessary and no one of them has the last word.

It would be tedious to apply the same arguments to other sorts of
men. Thus the historian without science will become a donnish
"period-prisoner," and without philosophy a pedantic purveyor of
meaningless facts. The religious man, without political understanding,
will reduce ethics to relations between individuals and will sink into
the false and vicious religion of other-worldly pietism. But even
should he avoid this, he would become, without some admixture of
science and philosophy, a pure social revolutionary, a Utopian lacking
all solid background for his faith. Everyone can apply these principles
to their own cases. As old Comenius said;

"Can any man be a good Naturalist, that is not seene in the
Metaphysicks ? Or a good Moralist, who is not a Naturalist.^ Or
a Logician, who is ignorant of reall Sciences.^ Or a Divine, a
Lawyer, or a Physician, that is no Philosopher.^ Or an Oratour
or Poet, who is not accomplished with them all.^"

(^A Reformation of Schooles, 1642.)
26

METAMORPHOSES OF SCEPTICISM

And so I am a sceptic still. It was not by any means a useless task
to distinguish with all possible exactness the forms of experience from
one another. But the conclusion now is, not as before, that a man
should exercise his soul (in Aristotle's phrase) in conformity with
virtue, without the hope of unifying in any way the products of its
exercises.^ It is, to view the world as a whole and the place and course
of man and of humanity in it, and to know "what he must do while
still in his compounded body." The consideration of man and his
experiences as an individual led in the end to contemplation; the
consideration of social man and his experiences leads to action. No
more shall we take Gautama and Plato for our guide, but rather those
determined men who from Confucius to Marx were vehicles of the
evolutionary process, working through them to implement the
Promise occluded in the very beginning of our world.

^ When writing this introductory essay, I happened to be reading that great work
of scholarship, George Thomson's Aeschylus and Athens (London, 1941), in which he
describes the anthropological origins of Greek civilisation and folk-lore, and the rise
of Greek literature and culture from them. From a discussion of Ionian science, especially
in Anaximander (p. 83), and Orphic mystical theology (p. 156), he suggests that "the
tendency of aristocratic thought is to divide, to keep things apart" while "the tendency
of popular thought is to unite." In Orphism, Love implied the reunion of what had
been sundered. It would be interesting to investigate the social significance of philo-
sophical "dividers" and "uniters" in different historical times; certainly in my own
development, Thomson's correlation has been strikingly substantiated. I was unable
to find any unified world-view until I took man's social life into account, a thing no
aristocratic thinker would ever desire to do, unless as a reaction against democratic
thinkers for specifically polemical purposes.

27

The Naturalness of the Spiritual World

A B^eappraisement of Henry Drummond

(Based upon an Introduction to a new edition of Henry
Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual IForld, 1939)

Every age has its "dividers" and its "uniters." The dividers seek to
distinguish between things which they believe their predecessors have
confused. They are nauseated by the facile identification of ideas and
modes of experience which are by essence utterly different; they pull
apart in order to understand and to clarify. The uniters, on the other
hand, are always straining after some unifying hypothesis, some
"philosophia prima," some all-embracing world-view or some scien-
tific hypothesis bringing hitherto unrelated groups of facts or theories
into relation. The uniters fall into over-simplification; the dividers
expose their shallowness without, perhaps, being able to suggest
anything better. And so goes on the eternal swing between t^'O poles;
the world-view that is certainly wrong, or at least, incomplete; and
the critical scepticism that is certainly no world-view. Like the ideas
of continuity and discontinuity in fundamental physical theory, these
poles of philosophy and criticism provide perhaps the necessary
contradictions out of which the advances of human understanding
are for ever being born.

Henry Drummond was certainly one of the uniters. In his all too
short life of forty-six years he sought to come to some synthesis of
the evangelical Christianity of his Scottish upbringing and the evolu-
tionary naturalism of the great Victorian expounders of science,
Spencer, Huxley, Tyndall and the rest. This interest manifested itself
in the nature of the official post he held for a time — lecturer in natural
science at the Free Church College in Glasgow. Drummond was as
much at home with the aggressive missionaries of the time as with
the students of science; thus in 1879 in a visit to America he fitted
in a geological tour in the Rockies with Geikie as well as a visit to
the evangelical preacher Moody at Cleveland. Later he conducted
scientific exploration himself in the lake region of Nyasa and Tan-
ganyika. His writings attracted great attention when they appeared,
and some of them became best-sellers, but in his own time they were
certainly not understood.

28

THE NATURALNESS OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD

When Henry Drummond's most famous book Natural Law in the
Spiritual JForlci first appeared,^ in 1883, it had a mixed reception for
this reason. The scientific world was on the whole glad to see religious
doctrines discussed in scientific terms, or at any rate correlated with
scientific ideas, but it was puzzled too, for the treatment of religion
was often far from psychological or objective. The religious world was
inclined to think that Drummond had in some way or other found
support for traditional religious doctrines from the facts revealed by
science, but it was very uneasy at finding the "supernatural" treated
as a sort of continuation of the "natural." It is safe to say that this
famous book has not been much better comprehended at any time
since then, though it has been very widely read.

Natural Law in the Spiritual WorldP- is a naive book, but it has the
naivete of something fundamentally true, and something said a long
time before people were ready to appreciate it. To-day it must be
read with care, for it has many faults. There are far-fetched archaisms,
such as the discussion on gravitation^ or the extension of Spencer's
definition of life to "eternal life.""^ There are downright mistakes,
such as the too confident discussion of spontaneous generation^ due
to the absence of modem knowledge on the nature of the viruses and
similar forms on the borderline of the living and the dead; and again,
the persistent attribution of ethical values to the behaviour of the
lower animals,^ a level at which such values are not applicable. Then
there are dangerous passages, opening the way to deplorable social
activity, perhaps more recognisable in our day than they were in
Henry Drummond's. For example, the relations of "Nature" and
"Sin"' are insufhciendy safeguarded against the heresy of those who
would build human society purely upon a biological rather than
upon a sociological basis. Moreover, we must not be too hasty in
thinking that we can recognise either what constitutes sin or what is
natural to man. And the remarks on "love of life"^ err too much in
the direction of a grim and joyless puritanism.

But when all criticisms have been made. Natural Law in the Spiritual
World remains a great book. At first sight, it appears to be devoted
to the attempt to show that there are analogies between those natural

^ Abbreviations adopted in what follows:

NLSW Natural Law in the Spiritual World.

AOM The Ascent of Man.
2 Refs. to 47th edition. Hodder 8e: Stoughton, n.d. ^ NLSW, p. 43.

4 NLSW, p. 214. ' NLSW, p. 64. « NLSW, pp. 319, 344.

' NLSW, p. 105. 8 NLSW, p. 197.

29

time: the refreshing river

laws discovered by physicists, chemists and biologists, especially the
latter, and certain spiritual (or, as we might say to-day "psycho-
logical") laws, found to be valid in the realm of religious experience.
Drummond was indeed severely criticised for basing his case wholly
upon an argument from analogy. But this was a complete misunder-
standing of his work. He meant very much more. "The position we
have been led to take up," he writes,^ "is not that spiritual laws are
analogous to natural laws, but that they are the same laws. It is not a
question of analogy, but of identity. The natural laws are not the
shadows or images of the spiritual in the same sense as autumn is
emblematical of decay, or the falling leaf of death. The natural laws,
as the law of continuity might well warn us, do not stop with the
visible and then give place to a new set of laws bearing a strong
similitude to them. The laws of the invisible are the same laws, pro-
jections of the natural, not supernatural."

The implications of this position are indeed far-reaching. Basic to
Drummond's ideas was the conception of continuing evolution. This
was what he meant by the "law of continuity." The universe consists
of a series of levels of complexity and organisation, hierarchical in
thought and successive in time, for the simpler preceded the more
complicated. First came an evolution of the chemical elements (the
"immortal families" of electrons), and the preparation of the stage
for the drama of life as the solar systems were formed. In Auden's
words :

"The universe of pure extension where
Nothing except the universe was lonely,
For Promise was occluded in its womb
Where the immortal families had only
To fall to pieces and accept repair.
Their nursery, their commonplace, their tomb.
All acts accessory to their position
Died when the first plant made its apparition."

Then came the whole long course of biological evolution, leading
from the single-celled organism to the primates and man. But still
the onward course of organisation did not cease, and man's great and
complex brain permitted the development of psychological and above
all, of social, organisation. Sexual units united into tribes, tribes into
peoples, peoples into nations, and the end of this process is not yet,

iNLSW, p. II.
30

THE NATURALNESS OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD

for the rationally organised world-state of humanity lies still in the
future.

"Through a long adolescence, then, the One
Slept in the sadness of its disconnected
Aggressive creatures, as a latent wish
The local genius of the rose protected.
Or an unconscious irony within

The independent structure of the fish; ^

But flesh grew weaker, stronger grew the Word,
Until on earth the Great Exchange occurred."

Now in emphasising all this Drummond was doing nothing so
very original. Herbert Spencer and other sociologists had laid great
stress on the continuity of biological with social evolution. Karl Marx
and Frederick Engels had adumbrated the idea of levels of organisation
in setting the Hegelian dialectic actually within evolving nature. But
from inside the christian tradition Drummond was working towards
these thinkers. His conviction that the "supernatural" of the theo-
logians was, in a sense, supremely "natural," echoed one of the best
ideas of the dialectical materialists, namely that materialism had for
too long been "misanthropic" or "asceiic" (as Marx had said) and if
it were to play its rightful part in future human thought, must do
full justice to all the highest aims and strivings of man.

For Marx, materialism, in becoming dialectical, would include all
that the christians had meant by the spiritual world. For Drummond,
the spiritual world ought to take its place as the highest, but fully
natural, level in the evolutionary series. The sublimities of human
altruism must thus be thought of, not as something supernatural or
mystical, but as characteristic of the highest grades of natural organisa-
tion known to us. From this point of view the gulf which so many
have imagined to exist between an atheist labour organiser who gives
his life for the people, and a christian saint and martyr is so narrowed
as almost to disappear. Mediaeval scholasticism had contained some
premonitions of Drummond's line of thought. "Gratia non tollit
natura," said Thomas Aquinas, "sed supplet et perficit defectum
naturae" — Grace does not abrogate nature, but extends and perfects
it. Exactly so does the higher level of organisation supersede the
lower. And thus we can understand Drummond's phrase "the natural-
ness of the supernatural."^ When that is disclosed, and not till then,

1 NLSW, p. xxii.

31

time: the refreshing river

"will men see how true it is that to be loyal to all of nature, they
must be loyal to that part described as spiritual." If he ever knew of
it, he must have approved of the verse ascribed to Thomas Aquinas'
contemporary, the Persian Sufi poet Jalal'ud-Din Rumi, who has
been called the Thomas a Kempis of Islam; —

"I died from mineral and plant became
Died from the plant and took a sentient frame
Died from the beast and donned a human dress
When by my dying did I e'er grow less?"

Though referring to the ancient Aristotelian doctrine of the succession
of souls (vegetative, sensitive, and rational) in the scale of nature and
the development of individual man, and doubtless written in the
interest of the doctrine of immortality, these lines do emphasise the
human-ness of human beings. Their society cannot be built on sub-
human lines. They must be loyal to what Drummond called "the
spiritual." ^

Drummond never tires of describing the levels of organisation,
atomic, molecular, crystalline, organic, cellular, organismic, biological,
social, etc. "The inorganic had to be worked out before the organic,
the natural before the spiritual."^ In another passage, he correctly
shows the relations between the levels of organisation: "It is of course
not to be inferred that the scientific method will ever abolish the
radical distinctions of the spiritual world. True science proposes to
itself no such general levelling in any department. 'Any attempt to
merge the distinctive characteristic of a higher science in a lower, of
chemical changes in mechanical, of physiological in chemical, above
all, of mental changes in physiological, is a neglect of the radical
assumption of all science, because it is an attempt to deduce repre-
sentations of one kind of phenomenon from a conception of another
kind which does not contain it, and must have it implicitly and
illicitly smuggled in before it can be extracted out of it.' "^ This is
the meaning of the irreducibility of biology to physics and chemistry.
It has nothing to do with vitalism in any form; it simply means that
the laws which apply at the level of the organic do not operate at
the level of the inorganic. But at the same time it must always be
remembered that though we can chart out quite fully the laws existing
at a given high organisational level, we can never hope to understand
how they fit in to the picture of nature as a whole, i.e. how they
1 NLSW, p. 1 8. 2 NLSW, p. 21.

32

THE NATURALNESS OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD

join with the next higher and the next lower levels, unless we are at
the same time analysing those levels too. About this there is nothing
obscurantist, nothing animistic. Organisation is not inscrutable.
Organisation and Energy are the two fundamental problems which
all science has to solve.

"It is quite true," writes Drummond,^ "that when we pass from
the inorganic to the organic, we come upon a new set of laws. But
the reason why the low^er set do not seem to act in the higher sphere
is not that they are annihilated but that they are overruled. And the
reason why the higher laws are not found operating in the lower is
not because they are not continuous downwards, but because there
is nothing for them to act upon. It is not law that fails, but oppor-
tunity." This overruling of laws characteristic of lower levels, or
rather, the application of them in different, more co-ordinated, ways,
is a fundamental phenomenon. It constitutes the complete refutation
of all fascist philosophers who wish to build human society upon a
purely biological basis. Human society must be built upon a socio-
logical basis, and even, as Drummond would have said, upon a
spiritual basis.

It is here that we touch upon Drummond's unique contribution to
this line of thought, a contribution which perhaps only a christian
could have made. Social thinkers such as those who have already
been mentioned tended to mould their thought in broad, un-individual
terms, dealing with social mechanics and social statistics. But the
individual human being is also an entity of a high level of organisation,
the psychological. Hence Drummond's insistence on the development
of the individual personality. There is a definite affinity between
the classless world-state with its ordered production and racial equality,
and the Regnum Dei^ the genuine new world order, the christian ideal
of comradeship and social justice. But it was Drummond who pointed
out that for this noble state, noble individuals would be necessary,
guides and leaders towards it no less than operators of it. He even
placed the "natural man" over against the "spiritual man" as a different
level of organisation. "The spiritual man,"^ he wrote, "is removed
from the general family of men so utterly by the possession of an
additional characteristic that a biologist, fully informed of the whole
circumstances, would not hesitate a moment to classify him else-
where. ... It is an old-fashioned theology which divides the world
in this way, which speaks of men as living or dead, lost or saved, a
1 NLSW, p. 43. 2 NLSW, p. 83.

33 c

time: the refreshing river

stern theology all but fallen into disuse. The difference between the
living and the dead in souls is so unproved by casual observation, so
impalpable in itself, so startling as a doctrine, that schools of culture
have ridiculed or denied that grim distinction. Nevertheless it must
be retained. 'He that hath not the Son hath not Life.' "

At first sight this reads like some voice from the 17th century, and
it would indeed have been a mistake to revive any Calvinistic rejection
of the weaker brethren. But must we not admit the part which heroic
virtue plays in human evolution? Must we not pay homage to that
"additional characteristic" which enables some men to help onwards
their fellows? For the kind of personality we have in mind, only the
Chinese word Chun-f{e (^ •^) is adequate, for it means all at once,
the learned scholar, the true gentleman, the great-souled man (/xeyaAo-
ipvxos) of Aristotle, the hero of natural or spiritual war, the magnani-
mous lover of the people. There are many who spring to the mind in
this connection in their various ways — Sir Thomas More, the martyr of
mediaeval internationalism; John Lilburne and Thomas Rainborough,
fighting intellectuals of the English Revolution; Louis Pasteur, type
of the scientific benefactors to humanity; Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin,
philosopher and revolutionary leader of the people, visionary of the
machine in the service of man; John Cornford, the young historian
who thought it worth while to exchange a lifetime of study for the
grave of a soldier of the International Brigade in Spain.

It is an interesting commentary on time's changes in thought to
read the account of Henry Drummond in the Dictionary of National
Biography. In 1894 he published some American lectures under the
title "The Ascent of Man."^ On this one of his biographers wrote,
somewhat condescendingly, "Drummond's adroitness in rehandling
old arguments was truly remarkable, but his general thesis that the
struggle for life gradually became altruistic in character, or a 'struggle
for the life of others,' and that 'the object of evolution is love'
was very severely criticised by men of science, while some of his
attempts to qualify the apparent harshness of the scheme of natural
selection, by such phrases as 'With exceptions, the fight is a fair
fight; as a rule there is no hate in it, but only hunger,' or, 'It is better
to be eaten than not to be at all," must appear to be perilously near
the grotesque." Grotesque, no doubt, to his contemporaries, but as
we look to-day at the long aeons of rise in level of biological and
social organisation, what else can the trend of evolution be except

^ (London, 1894.)

34

THE NATURALNESS OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD

towards the higher levels of social solidarity which we have not as
yet attained ? Can we not consider love as the essential social cement,
the counterpart at high levels of organisation of the valencies, van
der Waals forces and other bonds the operation of which we see
among the molecules and colloidal aggregates? Hear Auden again:

O beggar, bigwig, mugrv^ump, none but have
Some vision of that holy Centre where
All time's occasions are refreshed; the lost
Are met by all the other places there;
The rival errors recognise their loves
Fall weeping on each other's necks at last;
The rich need not confound the Persons, nor
The Substance be divided by the poor.

Our way remains, our world, our day, our sin;
We may, as always, by our own consent
Be cast away: but neither depth nor height
Nor any other creature can prevent
Our reasonable and lively motions in •
This modem void where only Love has weight,
And Fate by Faith is clearly understood.
And he who works shall find our Fatherhood."

As for the hate and hunger of the struggle for existence in the
animal world, the Victorians tormented themselves like so many
fakirs with anxiety-neuroses about the tortures of the lower organisms.
Into every fish and insect they projected an image of their own
highly-organised human minds, endowing the humblest creatures
with capacities for fear and pain which a dispassionate consideration
of their nervous systems would have shown that they were entirely
incapable of. The biologist G. J. Romanes, who, like Henry Drum-
mond, had religious affiliations, though in Romanes' case these were
Anglo-Catholic, excelled in perplexities on this score.^

There is a real and interesting difference, however, between our
attitude to the evolutionary process and that adopted by thinkers
such as T. H. Huxley. "Let us understand, once and for all," he wrote,^
"that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the

^ G. J. Romanes, Thoughts on Religion, ed, by Charles Gore (London, 1895), and
Life and Letters (London, 1896).

^ Evolution and Ethics (7th edn., London, 191 1, p. 83).

35

time: the refreshing river

cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating
it." I shall quote from an acute commentary which my friend C. H.
Waddington^ has written on this pronouncement. "Huxley was
writing under the spell of that extraordinary impulsion, so incompre-
hensible to us to-day, which forced the Victorians to transmute the
simple mathematics of their major contribution to theoretical biology
into a battleground for their sadism. To Huxley, the cosmic process
was summed up in its method; and its method was 'the gladiatorial
theory of existence' in which *the strongest, the most self-assertive,
tend to tread down the weaker;' it demanded 'ruthless self-assertion'
and 'the thrusting aside or treading down of all competitors.' To us,
that method is one which, among animals, turns on the actuarial
expectation of female offspring from different female individuals, a
concept as unemotional as a definite integral; and we recognise that
quite other, though equally natural, methods of evolution may occur
when it is societies and not individuals that are in question. Moreover,
being no longer hypnotised by the methods of evolution we can see
its results^ and these can not be adequately summarised as an increase
in bloodiness, fierceness, and self-assertion." The matter could not be
better put. Man must indeed com.bat sub-human nature in so far as
it must be subdued to his will. He must never imitate it in forming
his social order. Evolution as a whole is neither a scene of Flaubertian
tortures as the Victorians saw it, nor yet does it betray any conscious
purpose of goodness. But in so far as the highest human societies,
yet achieved or yet to be achieved, are the product of evolution, the
good has arisen out of the evolutionary process. Just as Drummond
said.

His book The Ascent of Man is of such interest that we must discuss
it a little further. He did not merely draw attention to the earliest
phases of co-operation exhibited in the coming together of cells to
form the metazoan organisms, or in the development of close animal
associations like the termites and ants. He successfully traced the
origins of social altruism and co-operativeness to the many-sided
phenomena of parental care, and ultimately to that donation of part
of the self for the benefit of the offspring which occurs in every
reproductive act.^ While recognising the principle of natural selection
and the struggle for existence as the main factor in the origin of

^ Nature, 1941.

2 AOM, 1902 edition, pp. 278, 282, 286, 398. In many cases this takes extreme forms,
e.g. the exhaustion of the muscles of the migrating salmon in egg formation.

36

THE NATURALNESS OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD

Species, he insisted that it was only half the story.^ He was bold enough
to conclude, therefore, that love was not a late arrival, an afterthought,
in evolution, but in a sense the goal of the whole process since by
its operation alone could the highest stages of social human organisa-
tion come into being.^ "There is no such thing in nature," he remarked,
"as a man." There is only social man.^ Furthermore, Drummond
recognised in contemporary human society certain anti-social forces,
which he designated as "War" and "Industry" (by which he implied
predatory competition); these he believed were the remains of the
struggle for existence at sub-human levels. What he says on this
subject is so interesting that it deserves quotation in full: —

"When we pass from the animal and the savage states to
watch the working of the struggle for life in later times, the
impression deepens that, after all, the 'gladiatorial theory' of
existence has much to say for itself. To trace its progress further
is denied us for the present, but observ^e before we close what
it connotes in modem life. Its lineal descendants are two in
number, and they have but to be named to show the enormous
place this factor has been given to play in the world's destiny.
The first is War, the second is Industry. These in all their forms
and ramifications are simply the primitive struggle continued on
the social and political plane. . . . Along with Industry and for
a time before it, War was the foster-mother of civilisation. . . .
When society wonders at its labour troubles it forgets that
Industry is a stage but one or two removes from the purely
animal struggle.

But one has only to look at the further phases of the struggle
to observe the most important fact of all, the change that passes
over the principle as time goes on. Examine it on the higher
levels as carefully as we have examined it on the lower, and
though the crueller elements persist with fatal and appalling
vigour, there are whole regions, and daily enlarging regions,
where every animal feature is discredited, discouraged, or driven
away. ...

The amelioration of the struggle for life is the most certain
prophecy of science. . . . We find the animal side of the struggle
for life attacked in such directions, and with such weapons that
its defeat is sure. These weapons are in the armoury of nature;

^ AOM, pp. 30 fF. 2 AOM, pp. 276 and 428. ^ AOM, p. 312.

37

time: the refreshing river

they have been there from the beginning; and now they are
engaged upon the enemy so hotly and so openly that we can
discover what some of them are. The first is one which has
begun to mine the struggle for life at its roots. Essentially, as we
have seen, this struggle is the attempt to solve the fundamental
problem of all life — Nutrition. If that could be solved apart
from the struggle for life, its occupation would be gone. That
problem will be solved by science. At the present moment
chemistry is devoting itself to the experiment of manufacturing
nutrition^ and with an enthusiasm which only immediate hope
begets. . . . 'The time is not far distant ^en the artificial pre-
paration of articles of food will be accomplished. . . .'

But there is a higher hope. As there comes a time in a child's
life when coercion gives place to free and conscious choice, the
day comes to the world when the aspirations of the spirit begin
to compete with, to neutralise, and to supplant, the compulsions
of the body. Against that day, in the heart of humanity, nature
had made full provision. For there, prepared by a profounder
chemistry than that which was to relieve the strain on the
physical side, had gathered through the ages a force in whose
presence the energies of the animal struggle are as nought.
Beside the struggle for the life of others, the struggle for life
is but a passing phase. As old, as deeply sunk in nature, this
further force was destined from the first to replace the struggle
for life, and to build a nobler superstructure on the foundations
which it laid."^

The passage is interesting for many reasons, of which two may
be mentioned. First, Drummond put his finger on the very power
which has changed and will change the face of human civilisation,
applied science. His thought was exactly parallel with that of Marx
and Engels, who some years before had exchanged letters describing
their reading of the books of Liebig and the other agricultural chemists,
and showing how the rise of nutritional productivity which science was
bringing about knocked Malthus into a cocked hat. But secondly
though Drummond could recognise reproductive donation and
parental care as the origin of social altruism, he could not pass over
the threshold crossed by Marx and Engels alone,^. and point with
absolute clarity to the working-class movement of his day as the
historic force destined to lead the way to the higher forms of social

1 AOM, pp. 269 ff. 2 AOM, cf. p. 431.

38

THE NATURALNESS OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD

organisation, and to bring humanity from the Egypt of necessity into
the Canaan of freedom.

It was mentioned above that love might be considered as the
analogue of the physical bonds which unite particles at the molecular
level. This was indeed an idea of Henry Drummond's. Though it
would have been acceptable to the ancient Ionian scientists, it was
doubtless grotesque enough to the Victorians.

"Is it conceivable," he wrote, "that in inorganic nature,
among the very material bases of the world, there should be
anything to remind us of the coming of the Tree of Life ? To
expect even foreshadowings of ethical characters there were
an anachronism too great for expression. Yet there is something
there at least worth recalling in the present connection.

The earliest condition in which science allows us to picture
this globe is that of a fiery mass of nebulous matter. At the
second stage it consists of countless myriads of similar atoms,
roughly outlined into a ragged cloud-ball, glowing with heat,
and rotating in space with inconceivable velocity. By what
means can this mass be broken up, or broken down, or made
into a solid world .^ By two things, mutual attraction and
chemical affinity. . . . What affinity even the grossest, what like-
ness even the most remote, could one have expected to trace
between the gradual aggregation of units or matter in the con-
densation of a weltering star, and the slow segregation of men
in the organisation of societies and nations ? However different
the agents, is there no suggestion that they are different stages
of a uniform process, different epochs of one great historical
enterprise, different results of a single evolutionary law.^"^

Thus as cosm.ic development proceeded, conditions arose in which
highly complex molecular aggregates became possible. Various forces
joined them together. All things have come into being by way of an
eternal battle betv^'een attraction and repulsion, aggregation and dis-
aggregation, in which the victories of aggregation, though decisive,
are never absolutely complete; remnants of the defeated remaining
as essential elements of the new level of organisation. Thus are the
Furies conducted to their cave under the Acropolis; and the Dragons
incorporated into the Civil Service.

We are reminded of the Orphic hymn to love in Longus' Daphnis

^ AOM, p. 432.

39

time: the refreshing river

and Chloe: "My young friends," says Philetas, "Love is a god,
young, beautiful, and ever on the wing. He therefore rejoices in
the company of youth, he is ever in search of beauty, and gives
wings to the souls of his favourites. His power far exceeds that of
Zeus. He commands the elements; he rules the stars; he governs
the world, and even the gods themselves are more obedient to him
than these your flocks are to you. All these flowers are the works of
Love, these plants and shrubs are his offspring; through him these
rivers flow and these zephyrs breathe."^ But all this is of course
poetry. We cannot in sober truth be such hylozoists. One must
remember that historically the attribution of animistic emotions, etc.,
to inorganic things was the primitive method of explanation of natural
processes, from which science freed itself in the 17th and i8th cen-
turies only with great difficulty.^ Still, we can say with Drummond
that there may be something analogous between the bonds appropriate
to each of the different levels of organisation in the world. And we
remember that greak book in which Sigmund Freud described what
he called "the task of Eros" in the process of human social evolution.^
And hence the true profundity in the repeated invocations (so beauti-
ful, but sometimes in the past to me so puzzling) of Lucretius to the
Epicurean Venus, alma Venus: —

"quae quoniam rerum naturam sola gubernas
nee sine te quicquam dias in luminis oras
exoritur neque fit laetum neque amabile quicquam"*

(. . . For thou alone
Governest all things, and without thee naught
Is risen to reach the shining shores of light,
Nor aught of joyful or of lovely bom.)

She who is the Delight of Gods and Men embodies the principle of
Union and Aggregation.

Thus it will be seen that as social evolution is continuous with
biological evolution, so (Drummond was convinced) much of the
content of traditional christian theology — "the laws of the spiritual
world" — arose directly from what had preceded it in the highly
organised realm of the psychological. In this he complemented in
an important way the thought of his contemporaries, though his

^ Geo. Thornely's translation, 1657.

^ Cf. J. G. Gregory "Tlie Animate and Mechanical Models of Reality," Journ. Philos.
Stud., 1927, 2, 301.

^ Civilisation and its Discontents (London, 1930). * De Rer. Nat. I, 21.

40

THE NATURALNESS OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD

naturalism was so revolutionary that in his own time it was not well
understood. Moreover, he fully appreciated the fundamental point
that evolution is not over, and that our present social system is not
the best of which man, and hence nature, is capable. "Why should
evolution," said Drummond,^ "stop with the organic?" "These
kingdoms," he concludes his book, "rising tier above tier in ever
increasing sublimity and beauty, their foundations visibly fixed in
the past, their progress, and the direction of their progress, being
facts in nature still, are the signs which, since the Magi first saw his
star in the east, have never been wanting from the firmament of truth,
and which in every age with growing clearness to the wise, and with
ever-gathering mystery to the uninitiated, proclaim that the Kingdom
of God is at hand." This is surely only another way of saying that
the new world order of social justice and comradeship, the rational
and classless world state, is no wild idealistic dream, but a logical
extrapolation from the whole course of evolution, having no less
authority than that behind it, and therefore of all faiths the most
rational.

It costs something to say this, for these words are written after
the news of the outbreak of what must come to be called the second
world war. It is incredible that the agonies of 1914-1918 are again
to be repeated. But even so gigantic a set-back as a war of this magni-
tude unleashed by fascism cannot shake a faith which is based on the
considerations which convinced Drummond and Spencer, Engels and
Marx. The way may be long and we may not live to see, but the
triumph of the rational spiritual man is sure.

S.S. President Harding [Lone Star State]
At sea^ September 6", iS)39

1 NLSW, p. 401.
41

Science^ Religion and Socialism

(A contribution to the book of essays Christianity and the

Social Revolution, 1935? with additions, including material

from the Criterion, 1932, and Scrutiny, 1932.)

The problem of the relationship between the traditional religion of
the European West and the coming new world-order, as yet in its
details uncertain, seems at first sight to have little to do with the
preoccupations of the scientist. Whether the old forms of theology
and liturgy disappear, whether the new social order is, or is not,
more just than that which is breaking up, whether he has to live and
work in the corporate or in the classless State, might seem to be
matters of indifference to him. Nevertheless such a view would be
superficial. The moment a scientific worker begins to reflect upon the
nature and methods of his science, he will find himself involved in
its history and philosophy, and hence its relations to historical,
economic and intellectual factors, from which religious ideas certainly
cannot be excluded. The moment he begins to reflect upon the ends
to which others are putting the results of his work, he will find himself
involved in the current political discussion of his time. Even some
hypothetical scientist who aimed at the most complete neutrality
with respect to the world in which he lived could not long escape
the ultimate argument of economic forces, and would be induced to
think over his relation to his fellows when he found himself unem-
ployed after some sudden restriction of scientific effort.

The beginnings of the scientific movement in the 17th century are
discussed elsewhere in this book. Acquisition of personal wealth, the
fundamental motive of capitalist enterprise, acted then, and for a long
time afterwards, as the most powerful stimulus and support for
scientific research. But the indiscriminate application of the scientific
method to natural things bursts in the end these limitations. It shows
us not only how to make textiles and cheese, but also how, if we will,
a high degree of universal physical and mental well-being may
be achieved. In so doing, it goes beyond the facts which any
single group of men can lay hold of with the object of acquiring
private riches. And it dictates to the scientific worker a new
allegiance, a separation from his allies (or masters) of three centuries'
standing.

42

SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM

The Position of the Scientific Worker.

The position of the scientific worker in the world of to-day is
indeed a very difficult one. Owing to the gradual permeation of our
entire civilisation by the practical results of scientific thought and
invention, the scientific worker has in some measure succeeded to
the semi-oracular tripod previously occupied by the religious thinker,
whether enthusiastic saint or prudent ecclesiastic. That ancient
separation of life into secular and sacred, which arose out of the
acquiescence of the early christians in their failure to transform the
human society of their time into God's Kingdom on earth, still reigns
in our civilisation. Owing to the increasing intellectual difficulties
which the ordinary man of our time feels with respect to the theology
of the traditional form of western European religion, he turns more
and more to the scientific worker, expecting to hear from him a sound
doctrine about the beginning of the world, the dut}^ of man, and the
four last things. The scientific "ascetic" in the laboratory is the
monk of to-day, and is tacitly regarded as such by the ordinary man.^
Conversely, the secular power, the medieval imperium^ has been
succeeded by the power of the owner — the owner of factories, the
owner of newspapers and propaganda agencies, the owner of land,
the owner of finance capital.

In a new guise, then, the sacred and the secular are still at war.
We may study their antagonism best by observing the fate of the
concept of Regnum Dei^ the Kingdom of God — always the surest
indication of the relative power of priest and king. Roughly speaking,
there have been, in the history of the Christian Church, three separate
doctrines about the Kingdom of God, three separate interpretations
of the Kingdom-passages in the Gospels.^ First, there was the identifi-
cation of the Kingdom with a purely spiritual mystical realm of
beatitude, either to be reached after death by the faithful, or attainable
here and now through the methods of prayer and ascetic technique,
or existing in the future in Heaven after the last judgment. This has
been perhaps the commonest theory. It has flourished whenever the
secular was strong, since it discountenanced any attempt to improve
the conditions of life on earth. As an instance, one could mention
the mystical theology of lutheranism, whose founder held the world

^ He may be called an "ascetic" in that he has often sacrificed for his intellectual
calling those material benefits which Lord Birkenhead referred to as the "glittering
prizes" of the capitalist system.

* Cf. Bishop A. Robertson, Regnum Dei (London, 1901). We shall discuss this sub-
ject in more detail below, p. 50.

43

time: the refreshing river

to be utterly bad and irredeemable, a realm of Satan, from which the
only escape was by means of religious exercises within the organised
body of christians.^ But, secondly, in every age there have been those
who have interpreted the Kingdom as a state of divine justice in the
future and in the world, to be attained by unceasing effort on the
part of men and women. This struggle was the outcome of their
thirst for social justice, and gave meaning to all martyrdoms since
the beginning of the world.

In ages when ecclesiastical organisation was powerful, the visible
Church itself, sharing the world with the temporal emperor in a
condominium, could be identified with the Kingdom of God.
This was a third interpretation. With the reformation and the
splitting of the universal church into a thousand sects it lost its
force.

But if the scientific worker is the modern representative of the
mediaeval cleric, he finds himself in a relatively much worse position.
Science in our time is not able to dictate its terms to capitalist "cap-
tains of industry" and the governing class in general; on the contrary,
it is in utter bondage, dependent upon their fitful and grudging
support, itself divided by dangerous national boundaries and sover-
eignties. In such a case we should expect that many scientists would
interpret the concept of the Kingdom (though none of them, of
course, would dream of referring to it under that name) as something
spiritual, something harm.less, something incapable of any affront to
a capitalist world.

This is exactly what we find. Nothing could better illustrate the
point than the Huxley Memorial Lecture of A. V. Hill, in 1933, and
his subsequent controversy with J. B. S. Haldane — two of England's
most distinguished biologists.^ The discoveries of science, said Hill,
whatever mistakes may be made, do gradually build up a structure
which is approved by all sane men; in the last three hundred years,
the experimental method, which is universal, has produced results
beyond all previous human achievements. This universality of its
method and results gives science a unique place among the interests
of mankind. But "if scientific people are to be accorded the privileges
of immunity and tolerance by civilised societies, they must observe

^ See Pascal, R., The Social Basis of the German Reformation: Martin Luther and His
Times (Watts, London, 1933).

^ Hill, A. v., Huxley Memorial Lecture, 1933; abridged version: "International Status
and Obligations of Science," Nature, 1933, 132, 952. Hill, A. V., and Haldane, J. B. S.,
Nature, 1934, 133, 65.

44

SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM

the rules." "Not meddling with morals or politics; such, I would
urge," he went on, "is the normal condition of tolerance and im-
munity for scientific pursuits in a civilised state." Nothing would be
worse than that science should become involved with emotion,
propaganda, or particular social and economic theories. In other
words — "My kingdom is not of this world," must be taken as meaning
not in this world either. Let unemployment, repression, class justice,
national and imperial wars, poverty in the midst of plenty, etc., etc.,
continue and increase; nothing is relevant to the scientific worker,
provided only his immunity is granted — immunity to pursue his
abstract investigations in peace and quiet. Here we substitute for the
kingdom-concept of mysticism a kingdom-concept of mathem.atics,
equally sterile with respect to human welfare, equally satisfactory to
the powers of this world.

"The best intellects and characters, not the worst," continued Hill,
"are wanted for the moral teachers and political governors of mankind,
but science should remain aloof and detached, not from any sense of
superiority, not from any indifference to the common welfare, but as
a condition of complete intellectual honesty." Haldane was not slow
to point out that Hill's sterilisation of the scientific worker as a social
unit arose from the facile ascription to him of no loyalties save those
of his work. In so far as he is a citizen as well as a scientist, he must
meddle with morals and politics. But Hill's point of view cart be
attacked more severely from a deeper standpoint. Science does not
exist in a vacuum; scientific discoveries are not made by an inex-
plicable succession of demiurges sent to us by Heaven; science is, de
facto, involved with "particular social and economic theories," since
it exists and has grown up in a particular social and economic structure.
Here there is no space even to outline the marks which theoretical
and applied science bears revealing its historical position. I merely
wish to point out that it is not altogether surprising that the ordinary
man expects some lead from the scientific worker in his capacity of
citizen. In the Middle Ages, life was ruled by theology, hence
the socio-political influence of the theologian; today it is ruled
by science, hence the socio-political importance of the scientific
worker.

The Treason of the Scholars.

Hill's conception of the Kingdom as a realm of truth and exact
knowledge far removed from the affairs of human life has been most

45

time: the refreshing river

clearly formulated in our time by Julien Benda, in his book, La
Trahison des Clercs} The betrayal of our generation by the clerks,
that is to say, by the scientists and scholars which it has produced,
he conceives to consist in the fact that whereas the mediaeval clerk
was wholly devoted to the working out of the implications of a
transcendent truth, the modem clerk has no similar task, and therefore
engages without hesitation in the political struggles of the time.
"Our century," says Benda, "will be called the century of the intel-
lectual organisation of political hatreds. That will be one of its great
claims to fam.e in the history of human ethics." But does not Benda
misread the attitude of the mediaeval clerk .^ Preoccupied by trans-
cendent truths he might certainly be, but he was also very much
concerned about economic relationships, and, by virtue of that fact
alone, he was politically minded in the modem sense of the words.
For modem politics bear no relation to the politics of the mediaeval
world. A 13th-century theologian might well leave on one side the
quarrels of petty princes about territorial jurisdiction or feudal honours,
but he, on his own assumptions, could not, and did not, leave on
one side the detailed economics of the commerce and finance of the
time. Benda fails to realise that in our days there is no longer any
distinction between politics and economics. What are the ferocious
modern nationalisms which he describes with such force but devices
engineered and operated by economic interests which do not
wish co-operation and friendship between the comm.on peoples
of the world? What is jingo imperialist patriotism but an instru-
ment designed to drown the call to union of the Communist
Manifestoi^

The mediaeval scene was supremely characterised by its subordina-
tion of other interests to religion. We may call it a period of religious
genius, when all poetry, literature, learning, and music was co-opted
into the service of this primary preoccupation of men. And since
this was the case, no human interests could be regarded as outside
the sphere of theology, least of all the interests of the market-place,
where every economic transaction was a possible opportunity for the
snares of the devil, or, alternatively, could, by right arrangement, be
turned into an exercise of spiritual profit. The life of man on earth

^ Benda, J., La Trahison des Clercs (Grasset, Paris, 1927), The word clerk meant
originally any man who could read, an attainment chiefly confined in the Middle Ages
to ecclesiastics major and minor, cf. the Book of Common Prayer: "the priest and
clerks."

46

SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM

was regarded not as an end in itself, but as the preparation for a fuller
life in Heaven, a fuller life which could not be entered into without
the passport of justice, temperance, and piety. It was the province of
theology, therefore, to regulate public economic affairs just as much
as those of individual devotion. The most important means by which
this was done were first, the principle of the just price, and, secondly,
the prohibition of usury. Every commodity had its just price, based
on the cost of its production, and allowing to its producer a margin
of profit sufficient for him to live in that degree of comfort which
was considered appropriate to his station. It was unchristian to force
prices up in a time of scarcity, and thus to take advantage of the
necessity of others; unchristian to allow prices to fall in time of glut,
and so defraud honest merchants. Usury was prohibited alike by civil
and canon law.^ And the names of many other long obsolete mis-
demeanours, such as regrating, forestalling and engrossing, remain to
show how the theologian systematised mediaeval economic tran-
sactions.^

What would happen to our present social structure, we might ask,
if by some miracle the mediaeval Church were to have full power
again, and all usury were prohibited, the principle of the just price
exacted, and the restriction of profits renewed ? We should, of course,
observe a very spectacular collapse. The Middle Ages had, in fact,
their own conception of collectivism, but it was fundamentally non-
equalitarian. Each group, ecclesiastical, military, or commercial, held
a distinct place in a system of social orders possessing different degrees
of wealth and social prestige. And although it was true that each order
had definite duties towards the other orders, not excluding even the
peasant basis, it was equally true that these obligations were frequently
unfulfilled. Still, mediaeval society was organic, rather than indivi-
dualistic and atomic. As Chaucer's Parson said:

"I wot well there is degree above degree, as reason is, and skill
it is that men do their devgir thereas it is due, but certes ex-
tortions and despite of your underlings is damnable."

^ Cf, W. Cunningham's Christian Opinion on Usury (Edinburgh, 1884).

^ Regrating was the practice of buying goods in order to sell them again in the same
market at a higher price, and without adding to their value. Forestalling was the purchase
of goods on their way to the market, or immediately on their arrival, or before the
market had properly opened, in order to get them more cheaply. Engrossing was the
mediaeval counterpart of cornering, the buying up of the whole, or a large part, of the
stock of a commodity in order to force up the price.

47

time: the refreshing river

"The clerk can only be strong," says Benda, "if he is fully conscious
of his nature and his function, and if he shows us that he is conscious
of it, that is to say, if he declares to us that his kingdom is not of this
world. This absence of practical value is precisely what gives greatness
to his teaching. As for the prosperity of the kingdoms of this world,
that belongs to the ethic of Caesar, and not to his ethic. And with
this position the clerk is crucified, but he has won the respect of men
and they are haunted by his words." Yet if one of Julien Benda's
mediaeval clerks were placed in our modern world, would he not
denounce the fantastic system of economics under which we live;
would he not criticise the laws which cause food to be destroyed
because people are too poor to buy it? It is well that Benda castigates
the modern clerk for lending the weapons of his intellect to nationalism,
but there are other forces than nationalism at work in the political
world to-day. He can, of course, remain inactive, adopting the position
of absolute neutrality laid down by Benda, and urged, as we have
seen, by distinguished representatives of science, refusing to take
part in the political and social struggle, and finally perishing, like an
Archimedes, at his laboratory bench during a war. But what differ-
entiates the position of the modern from the mediaeval clerk is that,
if he was to be active, the latter had no choice in his allegiance, while
the former has a choice, and must make it. Thus there are two ways
open to the scientific worker at the present time. All the backward
pull of respectability and tradition urges him to throw in his lot with
the existing capitalist order, with its corollaries of nationalism, im-
perialism, militarism, and, ultimately, fascism. On the other hand, he
can adopt the ideals of social justice and of the classless State; he can
recognise that his own best interests lie with the triumph of the
working-class, the only class pledged to abolish classes; in a word,
he can think of the Kingdom literally and can work for its realisation.
A Kingdom not of this world, but to be in this world.

The transcendent truth of the mediaeval Church was bound up
with a definite economic order, feudalism; and it was capitalism, of
course, as it gradually developed, which upset this economic order,
and science which superseded this transcendent truth. The geographical
discoveries, which made the European home begin to seem a prison;
the astronomical discoveries, which made the earth as a whole, pre-
viously the scene of the drama of redemption, shrink to one among a
vast number of celestial bodies; the mechanical discoveries which
opened up the possibility of industrialism; all undermined the strength

48

SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM

of the old-fashioned system until hardly anything was left of it.
Moreover, there were discoveries in the spiritual world, too; there
was the important protestant discovery that material riches, far from
being a presumptive sign of ill dealings, were an outward and visible
sign of the inward approval and blessing of God. And most interesting
of all, there was the rise of the concept of scientific law, often con-
ceived of in a crude mechanical way, as was only natural at its first
beginnings. Who would connect with this the decline in the cult of
the Blessed Virgin? Yet there was a certain connection. "The Virgin,"
wrote Henry Adams,^ "embarrassed the Trinity. Perhaps this was
the reason why men loved and adored her with a passion such as
no other deity has ever inspired. Mary concentrated in herself the
whole rebellion of man against fate; the whole protest against divine
law; the whole contempt of man for human law as its outcome; the
whole unutterable fury of human nature beating itself against the
walls of its prison-house, and suddenly seized by a hope that in the
Virgin there was a door of escape. She was above law; she took a
feminine pleasure in turning hell into an ornament, as witness the
west window at Chartres; she delighted in trampling on every social
distinction in this world and in the next. She knew that the universe
was as unintelligible to her, on any theory of morals, as it was to her
worshippers, and she felt, like them, no sure conviction that it was
any more intelligible to the creator of it. To her, every suppliant was
a universe in himself, to be judged apart, on his own merits, by his
love for her — by no means on his orthodoxy or his conventional
standing in the Church, or his correctness in defining the nature of
the Trinity." What a collapse it w^as when men came to feel that this
way of escape was no longer open to them. As canon law decayed, as
confidence in the absoluteness and divine authority of civil law dis-
appeared, so scientific law arose like the growing light of day. The
mediaeval worship of Mary, so charming, so naive, was a phenomenon
of childhood. She could perhaps save a suppliant from a ruling, a
decretal, or a codex, but not from the laws of gravitation or thermo-
dynamics. Mankind was now to take up again the guidance of old
Epicurus —

"Hunc igitur terrorem animi tenebrasque necessest
non radii solis, neque lucida tela diei
discutiant, sed naturae species ratioque."^

1 Henry Adams, Mont St. Michel and Chartres, Massachusetts Historical Society,
p. 276. ^ De Rer. Nat. VI, 39

49

D

time: the refreshing river

(These terrors then, this darkness of the mind,
Not sunrise with its flaring spokes of light.
Nor glittering arrows of morning can disperse,
But only Nature's aspect and her law.)

The path lay open now towards a surer freedom, if first necessity
could be understood. Amid such vast changes of intellectual climate,
it is not surprising that the function of the clerk should both change
and yet remain the same.

The Concept of the Kingdom.

The concept of the Kingdom is of such importance for every
aspect of the relations between Christianity and communism that I
must amplify a little what I said above about the forms which it has
taken in christian thought. We may divide the logical possibilities
into four. The Kingdom of God has been thought to exist;

(i) Here and now;

(2) Here but not yet;

(3) Not here but now already;

(4) Not here and not yet.

Clearly the most fundamental distinction lies between those who
have looked for the Kingdom on earth, whether now or in the future,
and those who have interpreted it as meaning an essentially invisible
and other-worldly state. The extremest division lies between the
second and third alternatives.

The early Church, which for this purpose must be taken as meaning
up to the end of the 3rd century in the east and the end of the 4th
in the west, was almost wholly devoted to the second of these inter-
pretations. It was believed that the second coming of the Lord,
which was thought to be imminent, would inaugurate a visible reign
of complete righteousness, in which the saints would administer,
until the last judgment, a society based on love and justice. This
doctrine, known to theologians as millenniarism, chiliasm, or "realistic
eschatology," found its canonical authority largely in the Apocalypse
of John, and its intellectual defenders in such men as Cyprian, Justin,
Irenaeus and Tertullian. It was attacked, as time went on, by three
principal factors. First, there was the necessity of adapting the pro-
phetic vision of a world made new to a world in which the expected
leader did not return. Secondly, there was the influence of Hellenistic

50

SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM

mysticism and allegorisation, which in the hands of Origen and other
more thorough-going neo-platonists, tended to emphasise the third
interpretation, i.e. that the Kingdom was a purely mystical idea,
existing now but elsewhere, wholly in the world of the spirit. Thirdly,
there was the increasing organisation of the Church, and the acceptance
of this by the secular power in the time of Constantine; this invited
men to diminish their ideals of love and justice, and to identify the
Kingdom with an actually existing society. This led to the first
interpretation. The Kingdom Vv^as "here and now," either in the form
of the Eastern Empire or the Latin Church, which after Augustine
claimed, and still claims officially to this day, to be itself the Kingdom.
Lastly in all the ages of Christianity there have been supporters of the
fourth and most utterly remote interpretation, namely that the
Kingdom means only the reign of God after the last judgment.

The miilenniarist viewpoint was essentially a continuation of the
great strain of Hebrew prophecy, with which all the actors in the
drama of the Gospels, whether known or unknown to us, had cer-
tainly been familiar. In this the reality' of the time process was quite
central. Take, for example, the following passage from Amos:^

"Hear this, O ye that^ould swallow up the needy and cause the
poor of the land to fail, saying. When will the New Moon be gone
that we can sell com ? and the Sabbath, that we may set forth wheat ?
making the measure small and the payment great, and dealing falsely
with balances of deceit; that we may buy the poor for silver and the
needy for a pair of shoes. . . . The Lord hath sworn by the excellency
of Jacob, Surely I will never forget any of their works. ... I will
slay the last of them with the sword; there shall not one of them flee
away. Though they dig into hell, thence shall mine hand take them;
and though they climb up into heaven, thence will I bring them
down. . . . But in that day I will raise up the tabernacle of David that
is fallen, and close up the breaches thereof; and I will raise up his
ruins and build it as in the days of old. Behold, the days come, saith
the Lord, that the ploughman shall overtake the reaper, and the
treader of grapes him that soweth seed; and the mountains shall drop
sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt." It is extremely interesting
to contrast the Hebrew apocalyptic conviction that in the future evil
will be overthrown and the earth become a common and bountiful
treasury for a right-loving people, with the characteristically Hellenic
belief in a former Golden Age from which humanity has for ever

^ Chapter viii. 9.

51

time; the refreshing river

fallen away. The only other ancient literature which has resemblances
to that of the Hebrews in this respect is the Chinese, where remarkable
descriptions of social evolution occur in the I-Ching^ the "Book of
Changes" (4th or 5th century B.C.). Hesiod, on the other hand, says
that if it had not been for the act of Prometheus, who stormed heaven
by force, brought thence the gift of fire, and provoked the gods to
withhold from men an easy way of life, *'y^^ would have been able to
do easily in a day enough work to keep you for a year, to hang up
your rudder in the chimney corner, and let your fields run to waste."

Thus have decayed the first bright hopes and visions of the christians.
In a most interesting passage. Bishop Robertson reveals the class
character of the opposition to millenniarism. "Intense as was the
christian instinct to which millenniarism gave articulate form, it was
in some respects in latent antipathy to the ecclesiastical spirit, and
waned as that spirit gathered strength. Its rejection by rational the-
ology, and by the trained theologians who filled the more important
places in the Greek Churches in the third and fourth centuries, had
practically the effect of ranging the clergy in opposition to it. In
fact, millenniarism, by virtue of its direct appeal to minds of crass
simplicity, was a creed for the lay-folk and the simpler sort. When
religious interest was concentrated upon it, it would indirectly under-
mine the interest felt in doctrines requiring a skilled class to interpret
them. The apocalyptic spirit is in fact closely akin to the spirit of
unregulated prophesying, and the alliance has been apparent, not only
in the second century, but in mediaeval and modem times as well."
Crass simplicity — might we not almost say inferior economic position }
A skilled class — perhaps a privileged one too }

Of the hopes of the "simpler sort" we get a glimpse in that very
interesting fragment of Papias, preserved by Irenaeus^ and believed
to be an authentic saying of Christ himself,^ "The days will come
when vines shall grow, each having ten thousand branches, and on
each branch ten thousand twigs, and on each twig ten thousand
shoots, and on each one of the shoots ten thousand clusters, and on
every cluster ten thousand grapes, and every grape when pressed will
give twenty-five firkins of wine. And when any one of the saints shall
lay hold upon a cluster, another shall cry out, 'I am a better cluster;
take me; bless the Lord through me.' And in like manner, that a

^ See the Apocryphal New Testament, ed. M. R. James (Oxford, 1924, p. 36).
^ "Old men who knew John the Lord's disciple, remember that they heard from
him how the Lord taught concerning those times, saying, etc."

SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM

grain of wheat will produce ten thousand stalks, and each stalk ten
thousand ears, ..." and so forth.^ It has often been said that the
communism of the early christians was purely one of distribution, not
of production. Here, however, we have, as it were, a dream of the
abundance of natural wealth latent in the world's productive forces,
and to be unloosed by science so many centuries later.^ But the
inevitable answering note is struck. Asceticism comes to the aid of
the possessing classes, and w^hen we turn to Augustine we find:
"The opinion that the saints are to rise again would at least be tolerable
if it were understood that they would enjoy spiritual delights from
the presence of the Lord. We ourselves were formerly of this opinion.
But when they say that those who then arise will spend their time
in immoderate carnal feastings — in which the quantity of food and
drink exceeds the bounds not only of all moderation, but of all credi-
bility— such things cannot possibly be believed except by carnal
persons."

Whatever happened in later centuries, then, it is certain that the
christians of the primitive church put their Kingdom on the earth
and in the future. To this belief of "crass simplicity" let us return.
We reach the paradox that Marx and Engels would have been more
acceptable to the martyrs and the Fathers than the comfortable 19th
century theologians contemporary with them, seeking to excuse and
support the phenomena of class oppression. For the kingdom of
Marx was not of this w^orld, but to be in this world.

Yet Benda goes on: "I regard as being able to say 'my kingdom
is not of this world' all those whose activities do not pursue practical
ends, the artist, the metaphysician, the scientist in so far as he finds
satisfaction in the exercise of his science and not in its results. Many
will tell me that these are the true clerks, much more than the christian,
who only embraces the ideas of justice and love in order to win
salvation." Here he adopts, as I think, a quite unjustifiable separation
of these activities from practical affairs. In science, at any rate, the
closest relations exist between practical technology and pure research.

^ Similar accounts occur in the Jewish Apocalypse ofBaruch and the Coptic Apocalypse
of James.

^ "So when the Lord was telling the disciples about the future kingdom of the saints,
how glorious and wonderful it would be, Judas was struck by his words and said, 'Who
shall see these things ?' And the Lord said : 'These things shall they see who are worthy.' "
(Hippolytus, On Daniel, 4.) "Papias says that when Judas the traitor believed not and
asked, 'How then shall these growths be accomplished by the Lord?', the Lord said:
'They shall see who shall come thereto.' " (Irenaeus, Contra Haer, 5.)

53

time: the refreshing river

Biology would be in an etiolated condition if it were not bound up
at every point with stockbreeding, agriculture, medicine, the fisheries,
and sociology. With physics and chemistry the case is even more
obvious. "Historically, the sciences grow out of practice, the pro-
duction of ideas arises out of the production of things."^ It is true
that in science we must not set out, in general, to solve problems
because the answer will afford some new invention, but it is often
tlie technical practice which suggests the problem. The great difference
w^hich we must recognise bet^^een mediaeval theology and modem
science, is that an economic structure was directly and logically
derivable from the former, and no clear system in such matters has
as yet arisen from the latter. The former incorporated a system of
ethics, in tlie form of moral theology. The latter has not as yet pro-
duced one.

Where, then, is the moral theology of to-day .^ The only possible
answer is that communism provides the moral theology appropriate
for our time.^ The fact that a doctrine of God is apparently absent
from it is unimportant in this connection; what it does is to lay down
the ideal rules for the relations between man and man, to affirm that
the exploitation of one class by another is immoral, that national
wars for markets are immoral, that the oppression of subject and
colonial races is immoral, that the unequal distribution of goods,
education, and leisure is immoral, that the private ownership of the
means of production is immoral. It dares to take the "love of our
neighbour" literally; to ensure that by the abolition of privilege each
single citizen shall have the fullest opportunities to live the good life
in a community of free and equal colleagues. It continues and extends
the historic work of Christianity for woman, setting her on a complete
equality with man. Its concept of leadership is leadership from within,
not from above.

Only because christian theology three centuries ago gave up the
attempt to apply a very similar ethic to human affairs has this state
of things come about. The essential weakness of the modern clerk
resides in the fact that vast progress in art or science appears at first
sight to be theoretically equally compatible with national capitalism
or with international communism. The economic doctrines which he

^ Bukharin, N., Theory and Practice from the Standpoint of Dialectical Materialism
(Kniga, London, 1931, p. 5).

2 Cf, for example die essay "Communism and Morality" by A. L. Morton in
Christianity and the Social Revolution, 1935? ^"^ "Marxism and Morality" by J. Hunter
in University Forward, 1941, 6, 4.

54

SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM

must adopt are not at first sight a direct consequence of his own
fijndamental axioms, but embody themselves in a social theory
external to his own sphere. Hence the dual character of the scientific
worker, as scientist and as citizen. Hence the temptation for him to
shirk his public responsibilities and as "pure clerk" to be silent except
when he gives the results of his own exact researches.

We may remember the bitter words said to have been prefixed by
the mathematician, G. H. Hardy, to a book on pure mathematics:
"This subject has no practical value, that is to say, it cannot be used
to accentuate the present inequalities in the distribution of wealth or
to promote directly the destruction of human life."

Perhaps the most important task before scientific thinkers to-day
is to show in detail how the ethics of collectivism do in fact emerge
from what we know of the world and the evolutionary process that
has taken place in it. Scientific socialism (I believe) is the only
form of socialism which has the future before it; its theoreticians
must therefore s'how not only that high levels of human social organi-
sation have arisen and will arise by a continuation of the natural
process, but what are the ethics appropriate to them. Scientific ethics
should be to communist society what catholic ethics were to feudal
society and protestant ethics to capitalist society.

Theology and the Modern Man.

In the preceding section I said that a doctrine of God was apparently
absent from communist thought. I used the word "apparently"
because {a) dialectical materialism might be logically compatible with
a spinozistic theology;^ (^) the immanence of the christian Godhead
as Love is better provided for in communism than in any other order
of human relationships. Future communist Clements of Alexandria
will have the task of codifying the praeparatio evangelica of the
christian centuries.

Today we are all Taoists and Epicureans. For the taoists, the Way
of Nature was tiu-jan (g ^); it came of itself. So also in Lucretius'
great poem^:

"... natura videtur
libera continuo dominis privata superbis
ipsa sua per se sponte omnia dis agere expers."

^ Cf. Moscow Dialogues by J. Hecker (London, 1933), p. ^^, ^nd Fundamental Prob-
lems of Marxism, by G. Plekhanov (ed. D. Riazanov, London, 1928), pp. 9 ff.
^ De Rer. Nat. II, 1090.

55

time: the refreshing river

(Nature, delivered from every haughty Lord
And forthwith free, is seen to do all things
Herself, and through herself of her own accord,
Free of all Gods.)

On the one hand there is the cosmic force which is "responsible"
for the vast evolutionary process wherein we form a part, if any-
thing is responsible for it. The modern mind finds the ancient schol-
astic arguments for the existence of this force or "prime mover"
in no way convincing, still less that it partakes of the nature of what
we call "mind" or "personality," and even less still that its essence
is good. The good seems to arise out of the evolutionary process
rather than to have been in it from the beginning. But the good is an
immediate datum, and the holiness of good actions is an immediate
datum. These are the occasions of modern religion.

From this point of view, the bonds of love and comradeship in
human society are analogous to the various forces which hold particles
together at the colloidal, crystalline, molecular, and even sub-atomic
levels of organisation. The evolutionary process itself supplies us
with a criterion of the good. The good is that which contributes
most to the social solidarity of organisms having the high degree of
organisation which human beings do in fact have. The original sin
which prevents us from living as Confucius and Jesus enjoined^ is
recognisable as the remnants in us of features suitable to lower levels
of social organisation; anti-social now. If such an idea is accepted,
the insistence that we must have some extra-natural criterion of ethical
values ceases to have any point. The kind of behaviour which has
furthered man's social evolution in the past can be seen very well by
viewing human history; and the great ethical teachers, from Confucius
onwards, have shown us, in general terms, how men may live together
in harmony, employing their several talents to the general good.
Perfect social order, the reign of justice and love, the Regnum Dei of
the theologians, the "Magnetic Mountain" of the poets, is a long way
in the future yet, but we know by now the main ethical principles
which will help us to get there, and we can dimly see how these have
originated during social and biological evolution. There is no need
for perplexity as to whether we ought to call evolution morally

^ There is, of course, the incidental difficulty of continually modifying the letter
of the teaching of the great ethical "mutants" to fit changing techniques and increasing
knowledge, without losing their spirit.

S6

SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM

admirable or morally offensive; it is surely neither. The good is a
category which does not emerge until the human level is reached.^

The difficulty about religion is that it cannot be considered apart
from organised religion as embodied in institutions.^ In practice, its
effects throughout the world are, in the present social context, largely
harmful. How far religion can be transformed without the disappear-
ance of the old vessels is a very disputable matter. The detailed beliefs
of the past — verbal inspiration, eternal damnation, magical efficacy of
prayer for "particular mercies" (in the old phrase), ex opere operato
rites, miraculous intervention, ascription of psychological states to
God, and so on, are of course irrevocably of the past, not of the
present or the future. None of them are relevant to true religion.
Religion is seen not as a divine revelation, but as a function of human
nature, in Julian Huxley's words, as a "peculiar and complicated
function, sometimes noble, sometimes hateful, sometimes intensely
valuable, sometimes a bar to individual or social progress, but no
more aiid no less a function of human nature than fighting or falling
in love, than law or literature."^ Theology, indeed, comes off badly
in our modern survey. In so far as it is a codification of the experiences
of religious mysticism it is an attempt to reduce to order what cannot
be so reduced. In so far as it is a description of such experiences, it
is engaged on the fruitless task of describing the indescribable. And
in so far as it is occupied with cosmology, anthropology, and history,
it is trespassing on legitimate fields of scientific activity.

Many students of these problems at the present time see that the
essence of religion is the sense of the holy (Julian Huxley,* J. M.
Murry,^ Canon J. M. Wilson and others). Religion thus becomes no
more and no less than the reaction of the human spirit to the facts
of human destiny and the forces by which it is influenced; and natural
piety, or a divination of sacredness in heroic goodness, becomes the
primary religious activity. Consider also the following words of one
of our most judicious philosophers: — "The identification of this-
worldly with material values, other-worldly values alone being recog-
nised as spiritual, is what I am concerned to deny. I maintain that

1 In this connection C. M. Williams' Review of the Systems of Ethics founded on the
Theory of Evolution (London, 1893), is still not witliout value.

2 Cf. Lenin's remarks on religion in Works ^ Vol. 11, pp. 658 ff. and Lenin on Religion
(Lawrence, London, n.d.).

3 J. S. Huxley What Dare I Think? (Chatto and Windus, London, 193 1), p. 187.
* loc. cit.

^ J. M. Murry, many articles in tlie Adelphi, and especially 1932, 3, 267.

57

time: the refreshing river

spiritual good and evil are to be found in the daily intercourse of men
with one another in this world, independently of any relation of man
to God; further, that the significance of spiritual value does not
depend on God or upon the continuance of human beings after the
death of the body."^

These opinions are not indeed very different from those of many
modernist and liberal theologians. The difficulty about religion
within the framework of organised Christianity is that the "plain
statements in Bible and Prayer-Book stand uncorrected and un-
annotated," so that for simple people they mean what they say.
For liberal intellectuals, this may be myth, that may be symbol, this
may be a valiant attempt to express the inexpressible, that may be
an unfortunate inexactitude due to historical causes — but for the
majority of people, everything must be taken literally or not at all.
Critics, then, have no alternative but to stand outside the traditional
Church and give it advice from a distance, so that their remarks
acquire a remote and impractical character. But an acquaintance with
the life of religion from the inside convinces one that the sense of
the holy cannot be ordered about at will, unhooked from one thing
and hooked on to something else, or simply detached from ancient
traditions and poured into the cold vacuum of our modern mechanical
world. The poetic words of the Liturgy, for instance, philosophically
meaningless though they may be, cannot be separated from the
numinous feeling which has grown up with them. Though built
upon the basis of a world-view which we can no longer accept to-day,
they retain, for some of us, enough symbolism of what we <k> believe,
to make them of overwhelming poetic value^*

The upshot of the matter is, therefore, that in practice those who
can successfully combine traditional religious life with the life of
^ social and political action appropriate to our time, will be relatively
few. It is no good being in a hurry to descry and to welcome the new
forms of social emotion; they will emerge in their own good time and
perhaps we shall not live to see them. But meanwhile, like the last
Pontifex Maximus in Rome,^ we shall continue those ancient rites
which still have meaning for us, while nevertheless being on the best
of terms with the clergy and people of the New Dispensation.

^ Susan Stebbing, Ideals and Illusions (London, 1940), P- 3^'

^ Cf. Ste"W'art D. Headlam's The Service of Humanity (London, 1882) and The
Meaning of the Mass (London, 1905).

^ Or the last priest of Zeus in Richard Garnett's story. The Twilight of the Gods.
First published 1888, now in Thinker's Library Edition No. 81 (Watts, London, 1940).

58

SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM

Few would wish to maintain to-day that the organised religion of
Christianity has any gift of temporal immortality, and that it will not
find its end just as the religions of ancient Egypt, or of Mexico, found
theirs. But some would certainly wish to maintain that religion, as a
natural department of the human spirit, has survived these changes
and will always survive them. It could also be held that no historic
religious system has failed to contribute some element of advance to
man's social consciousness. The hope of making religion philo-
sophically respectable is probably quite vain, and the sense of the
holy in its ancient form cannot flourish in pure isolation away from
its ancient trellis. But will not christian feeling be succeeded by
another form of numinous feeling; a new development of social
emotions? Even to ask this question is to ask where it could come
from. We may be certain that it will not come from the lecture-rooms
of academic philosophy, still less from the armchairs of literary
critics or the speculations of scientific workers interested in religion
from the outside. Will it not come from the factory? Obviously not
the factory as we know it to-day, but the factory of the future, the
factory of co-operating producers, when the whole system of com-
mercial exploitation has been completely destroyed, and the means of
production have been taken over in communal ownership. The most
appalling struggles may well be involved in the death-throes of the
present system, and we may perhaps expect that the numinous feeling
of the future will take its origin from the consequent stress and strain.
Is not Mayakovsky's poetry, are not the "Twelve" of Alexander Blok,
the symbols of this ? But meanwhile. Religion is still resident in her
traditional house, and those who would seek her successfully must
seek her there as well as in the leaflet distribution and the Trade
Union Hall. Auden's words express what is going on; —

"Love, loath to enter
The suffering winter,
Still willing to rejoice
With the unbroken voice
At the precocious charm
Blithe in the dream
Afraid to wake, afraid
To doubt one term
Of summer's perfect fraud,
Enter and suflFer
Within the quarrel

59

time: the refreshing river
Be most at home,

'5

Among the sterile, prove
Your vigours, love.

Those of us who have loved the habitation of God's house and
the place where his honour dwells, would be well content if the
traditional forms of rite and liturgy could survive the coming storm.^
We would like to fill the old botdes of Catholic doctrine with new
wine. The words of the Fathers on equality and social righteousness
seem more likely to be fulfilled than we had hoped. But if this revivifi-
cation of the ancient faith cannot be accomplished, then we shall
accept the judgment with a Nunc dimittis; those who love both the
spirit and the letter will not complain if the spirit be taken and the
letter left.

. Before leaving the question of the possible forms which numinous
feeling may take in future ages, a word should be said of the part
which dramatic representations are likely to play. Cinema films of
great power (such as Eisenstein's celebrated "Cruiser Potemkin") and
also many documentary films portraying the natural and normal life
of mankind in its struggle against the external world and its attainment
of inner solidarity (such as the "Night Mail" of Grierson and Auden),
generate in those who see them emotions to which it would be
dangerous to refuse the term "numinous." After all, the religious
origins of drama are well known, and it is surely significant that in
the Soviet Union, the first great socialist state the world has ever
seen, drama, poetry, and all cognate arts flourish as never before.^
The catharsis of tragedy is only an extreme form of the effect upon
individual human beings which any dramatic representation based on
fundamental common human values must necessarily have. As the
following interesting passage shows, religious exhortations in the
old sense will not be needed in the future to awaken men to a sense
of their social duty:

"In one of the novels of Ilya Ehrenburg there is a description
of a play given by a ti-avelling company at a collective farm
somewhere in northern Russia. Othello was to be played, and
the actress who was to take the part of Desdemona (the only

^ Cf. what George Tyrrell said: "Houtin and Loisy are right; the Christianity of the
future will consist of mysticism and love, and possibly the Eucharist in its primitive
form as the outward bond" {Autobiography and Life, London, 19 12, vol. 2, p. 377).

2 Cf. the article on the theatre in the Soviet Union by Herbert Marshall (University
Forward, 1941, 7, 10).

60

SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM

sophisticated person present) felt that it was rather absurd. The
collective farm had its usual anxieties; the cows were giving
only half the amount of milk expected, the ploughing was
backward, the fields of mangold-wurzels (or whatever it was)
were covered with weeds and badly hoed. In the company's
repertory there were Soviet plays, but the provincial actor-
manager wanted to strut and gesticulate in the role of the jealous
Moor, and nothing else would do. The play began by being
misunderstood, but ended with great general emotion in the
midst of tears and enthusiastic applause. The peasants of the
collective farm were especially affected by Desdemona, but after
the performance they amazed her, and even made her cry,
because, instead of congratulating her on her acting, they made
all kinds of unexpected promises about the augmentation of the
milk yield, the improved cultivation of the fields, and the attain-
ment of more than their scheduled production."^

Thus even farm labourers, at a comparatively low level of education
and culture, could pass over very well from the emotion generated
by the tragic situation of individuals, to that involved in the common
situation of humanity. Not a few marxist thinkers have, as a matter
of fact, foreseen the replacement of organised religion by the arts
and drama.^ This is possible not because the numinous is identical
with the aesthetic, but because the never-ending tale of human
relationships in the successive stages of social evolution and progress,
can itself be the bearer of the numinous. As Feuerbach would have
said, man will in this way realise that in the ideological structures of
the traditional religions, he was really looking at himself and his own
fate and the fate of his society.

Enemies of Human Experience.

There is a kind of fundamental validity attaching to the five great
realms of human experience, philosophy, history, science, art, and
religion. Each of these has its enemies — those who go about to deny
their validity, or their right to exist, or their right to play the part
which they do play in our civilisation or our individual lives. Let us
consider some of these factors in relation to our main theme.

Against Philosophy come many opponents. Particularly, the

^ From an essay by a Polish writer, Andrzej Stawar, which a Polish friend of mine
and I translated together (Scrutiny, 1937, 6, 21).

^ Especially G. Plekhanov, Fundamental Problems of Marxism (London, n.d.), P- I43'

61

time: the refreshing river

mathematical logicians point out to us, that there are few, perhaps no,
metaphysical propositions which can be translated into the exact
language of mathematical logic. Philosophy on this view is an art, a
sort of music gone wrong. Among these opponents, however, marxist
ethics and orthodox theology cannot be numbered. They, at least,
cannot be accused of undervaluing philosophy.

Against Science come many influences, some of which are equally
opposed to philosophy. The whole anti-intellectual ist movement, so
protean in its manifestations in our time, acts in this direction. From
the mystical point of view represented by D. H. Lawrence and his
followers at one end to the folky-brutal atmosphere of nazism at the
other, we have a thoroughly anti-scientific front. For these minds, if
so they can be called, scientific internationalism is an illusion, racial
factors dominate human actions, and true patriots must think with
their blood. Nothing could be more valuable for the armament
manufacturers than these views; nothing could be more in line with
the feudal vestiges which have for centuries lingered on in the army-
officer class. We are witoessing at the present day a wholesale frustra-
tion of science.^ To the capitalist, scientific research is useful, but only
relatively in comparison with other and perhaps even cheaper ways
of obtaining profits. It is only when these fail that the capitalist now
needs the scientist. Again, the conditions of profit-making forbid the
introduction of safety measures and the application of labour-saving
devices which could greatly increase world-production, while at the
same time equalising leisure in the form of a five-hour day under a
planned socialist system. Or improved technical methods may be
used for actually destroying a part of the produced material, such as
coffee or rubber. Or the area of land sow'n may be compulsorily
restricted. Worst of all, perhaps, is the continuing and increasing use
of science in war preparations; the development and application of
the most diverse scientific researches to rendering the killing of
individuals more effective, cheaper, and possible on a still larger scale
than ever before. "It does not need much economic knowledge,"
writes Bernal,^ "to see that a system of which the essential basis is
production for profit, leads by its own impetus into the present highly
unstable and dangerous economic and political situation, where

^ See the book of essays, The Frustration of Science^ by Sir Daniel Hall, J. D. Bernal,
J. G. Crowther, E. Charles, V. H. Mottram, P. Gorer, and B. Woolf (Allen & Unwin,
London, 1934).

2 Bernal, J. D., "National Scientific Research," Progress, 1934, 2, 364.

62

SCIENCE RELIGION AND SOCIALISM

plenty and poverty, the desire for peace and the preparation for war,
exist side by side; but it does require far more knowledge to see how
an alternative system could be built up. And yet, unless scientists are
prepared to study this they must accept the present state of affairs
and see the results of their own work inadequately utilised to-day and
dangerously abused in the near future." Thus the figures of the
annual government grants speak for themselves. In 1933, for example,
the Medical Research Council received £139,000 and the Department
for Scientific and Industrial Research ;^443,838, while the research
grants for the Army, Na\y, and Air Force together were ;(^2,759,ooo,
i.e. five times as much as the whole total for civil research.^

Another of the influences working in our time against science is
the outcome of modern psychology.^ An argument nowadays need
not be answered; it is sufhcient to trace it back to the previous psy-
chological history, and hence the prejudices, of the person who
propounds it. A misunderstanding of marxism, with its insistence
upon the class basis of science, has exposed it to this accusation, but
it is perfectly legitimate to apply the class theory of history to the
history of science, and the results are frequently highly convincing.
On the other hand the fascist struggle (especially in Germany) against
"objective science," based on the racial theory of history, which has
no scientific basis of any sort, is the most dangerous form of this
kind of attack which exists, though it can only be seriously proclaimed
to the masses under conditions where all criticism is silenced by state
power. As for Art, it does not pay.^ No further enemy is needed.
And History, as eminent capitalists have assured us, is bunk.^

Against Religion come so many forces that it is hard to count
them. The general trend from religion to science which took place in
the Hellenistic age and the late Roman Empire repeated itself again in
our own western European civilisation from the Renaissance onwards.
Religion has had to face the great pretensions of the mediaeval
secular power, the mechanical philosophies of the 17th century, the
enlightened atheism of the i8th century, and the Victorian agnos-
ticism of the last age. Bourgeois agnostics and proletarian atheists
have attacked it from all sides. It is surprising that there is anything
left of it: and few people seem even to know what it is. Thus an

^ Budget Estimates.

- Cf. Joad, C. E. M., Guide to Modern Thought (London, 1933); and Under the Fifth
Rib: An Autobiography (London, 1932).
^ See p. 138.
* The dictum is attributed to Mr. Henry Ford.

63

time: the refreshing river

anonymous writer recently began an article on agnosticism with the
words: "The essence of religion is faith, the ability to accept as a
truth a hypothesis for which there is no positive evidence."^ Or
again, in Moscow Dialogues, Socratov says,^ "We are rather at a loss
to point to anything of a positive character in religion. If you can
suggest anything positive, I shall be glad to hear it"; and the Bishop
(very conveniently) replies, "Well, first of all, the Church has always
stood, even in its darkest days, for law and order." The first of these
writers was confusing, as is so common, theology with religion.
Theology has to accept hypotheses for which there is no positive
evidence, because in a system so unlikely as the universe, of which
there is only one, no comparisons can be made by which to test the
credibility of anything. This is no argument in favour of theology,
which may or may not be a necessary evil, but on the other hand,
it does not discredit religion. The second was erecting an episcopal
man of straw in order to have the pleasure of hearing the opium-
merchant give himself away red-handed. But the statement is not
historically true; when Irenaeus, Clement, and Tertullian were alive;
when Lilburne, Rainborough, and their "russet-coated captains" were
riding; the Church was not on the side of law and order. Christians
were able to imagine a better law and a juster order than the established
system of the Roman Empire,^ or the government of that "Man of
Blood," King Charles I.

The clearest understanding of religion has been given, in my view,
by the work of Rudolf Otto,^ a German theologian, who described
it as the sense of the holy. In primitive communities we see this
"numinous sense" applied to all kinds of worthless objects and rites,
and later incorporated in the apparatus of State government, but in
the great religions of the world it forms the essential backbone of the
experience of their participators. In Christianity, where the ethic of
love found its greatest prophets, the numinous sense has become
attached to the highest conception of the relations between man and
man that we know. The christian who becomes a communist does so
precisely because he sees no other body of people in the world of
our time who are concerned to put Christ's commands into literal

^ New Statesman, 1934, 8, 332 (September 15th).

^ Hecker, J., Moscow Dialogues (Chapman & Hall, London, 1933), p. 191.

^ On the socialism of the Apostolic Fathers, see the essay of Charles Marson in the
collective work by Tom Mann and others, Fox Clamantium, ed. Andrew Reid (London,
1894); and also his God's Co-operative Society (Longmans, Green, London, 1914).

^ See especially Otto, R., The Idea of the Holy (Oxford, 1923).

64

SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM

execution. If for seventeen centuries the Church has tended to put
allegorical constructions on the Gospels, we know that the christians
of the first two centuries did not do so.

That religion has been, and largely is, "the opium of the people'*
is plainly undeniable. Proletarian misery in this world has been
constantly lightened by promises of comfort and blessedness in the
world beyond the grave, an exhortation which might come well
enough from some ecclesiastical ascetic v/ho did not spare himself,
but very ill indeed from the employer of labour or the representative
of the propertied classes. But the conclusion usually drawn, namely,
that religion could have no place in a socialist State, where no class-
distinctions existed, does not seem to follow. Because religion has
been often used as a social opiate in the past, there seems no reason
why this should be so in the future. "Religion would continue to
exist," writes A. L. Rowse,^ "in the socialist community, but on its
own strength. It would not have the bias of the State exerted in its
favour, as it has had so strongly in England up to the present, and in
greater or lesser degrees in all western countries." It may indeed be
said that religion is "the protest of the oppressed creature,"^ and that
therefore when social oppression, in the form of the class-stratified
society, is done away with, the private need for religion will vanish
as well as the class which profited by it. This, however, is to forget
what we could call "cosmic oppression," or creatureliness, the un-
escapable inclusion of man in space-time, subject to pain, sorrow,
sadness and death. Shall we substitute for the opium of religion an
opium of science.^ It has always been the tacit conviction of the
social reformer and the person occupied with the practical application
of scientific knowledge that by man's own efforts, not merely minor
evils, but the major evils of existence may be overcome. This is
expressed in that great sentence: "Philosophers have talked about the
universe enough; the time has come to change it."^ But the problem
of evil is not capable of so simple a resolution. So long as time con-
tinues, so long as change and decay are around us and in us, so long
will sorrow and tragedy be with us.* "Life is a sad composition," as

^ Rowse, A. L., Politics and the Younger Generation (Faber, London, 193 1), p. 194-

^ Marx, K., Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law.

^ And also in the great concluding paragraph of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (written
bet^'een 1854 and 1859).

* Cf. Kierkegaard's distinction between "tribulations" (natural troubles which can
only be endured) and "temptations" (troubles due to,- and soluble by, acts of will),
discussed by Auden in New Year Letter^ 1941, p. 132.

65 E

time: the refreshing river

Sir Thomas Browne said, "we live with death and die not in a moment."
Or, in the words of the Contakion, *Tor so thou didst ordain when
thou createdst us, saying, 'Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou
return'; wherefore all we who go down into the grave make our
song unto thee, sighing and saying, Give rest, O Christ, to thy
servants with thy saints, where sorrow and sighing are no more,
neither pain, but life everlasting." The whole realm of thought and
feeling embodied in these phrases is fundamentally natural and proper
to man, and there is little to be gained by trying to replace it by a
eupeptic opium, derived from too bright an estimate of the possibilities
of scientific knowledge. Driven out, it will return in the end with
redoubled force.

Fundamentally natural and proper to man, the sense of the holy is
as appropriate to him as the sense of beauty. As we have seen, the
* 'moral theology" of communism lacks a doctrine of God, but this
does not affect the existence of the sense of the holy. After all, the
theology of the Gospels was not very complicated — Jesus did not
meet disease and hunger by persuading people that blessedness was
already theirs if they would accept a dogmatic intellectual system;
but by curing sickness and distributing bread. This was the practical
aspect of his teaching about love. In the motives of atheist communists
we detect, therefore, that which is worthy of numinous respect, for
they are working to bring in the World Co-operative Commonwealth.

Those who deny the importance of the sense of the holy are in
an analogous position to those who cannot appreciate music or
painting. It is an attitude towards the universe, an attitude almost of
respect, for which nothing can be substituted. "The problem of death,"
it has been said,^ "is not a 'problem' at all, it is due simply to the
clash between an idealistic egoistic philosophy and the disappearance
of the individual, not in the least to the fact of death." On this epicurean
view, science reveals facts to us so clearly as to reconcile us to them.^
But it is not our own death that we are thinking of We may well
be content to live on only in the effects which our living has produced
on our generation and those that come after.^ The point is that no
matter now much we know in the classless State about the biology
of death, we shall still suffer when someone that we have loved

^ Pascal, R., Outpost, 1932, 1, 70.

2 All sciences have as their aim the transformation of tribulations into temptations,
Auden, loc. cit. But the process is asymptotic.

2 A point of view admirably put in Afinogenov's play Distant Point.

66

SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM

suddenly dies or is killed. The question then reduces itself to a matter
of taste; shall we bury him with unloving haste and a callous reference
to the unimportance of the individual? Or shall we remember, as
we fulfil the rites of a liturgical requiem, that this is the common
end of all the sons of men, and so unite ourselves with the blessed
company of all faithful people, those who earnestly looked and worked
in their generation for the coming of the Kingdom ? It is true indeed,
as Merejkovsky has said, that whether we believe in Christ or not,
we must certainly suffer with him. And, indeed, it is my opinion
that if the ancient christian modes of satisfying this numinous sense
are discontinued (Eliot's ""vieilles usines disaffectis*'), other liturgical
forms will be devised to play their part in attempting to express that
which cannot be expressed. This we already see in such cases as the
tomb of Lenin himself, and the Red Corners.

In the Timiriazev Institute at Moscow I examined the red banner
which the scientists there were accustomed to carry on May Day and
other public occasions. It was of a velvety cloth with yellow fringes
and an elaborate hammer and sickle. How tawdry some of our re-
spectable middle class people in England would have thought it.
How they despise the native decorations and pictures on British
Trade Union banners on the rare occasions when these pass through
the streets in the light of day. But to me it was quite clearly numinous,
one with the cross of our salvation and the Vexilla Regis indeed,
conspicuous in the vanguard of humanity moving from the captivity
of necessity into the glorious liberty of the children of God. But
is this process ever complete? Are we not all for ever in bondage to
space-time? Is not this bondage our final evil? It is absurd to say
that "with the denial of an objective creator, socialism forgets the
problem of evil." Certainly no "person" is now responsible, but in
whatever society man arranges himself he must take up some attitude
towards the universe, and to the fate of individuals in it, and in this
attitude, the sense of the holy will always be an element.

Scientific Opium.

Not to be awake to the iniquity of class oppression, then, is religious
opium. Scientific opium would mean not being awake to the tragic
side of life, to the numinous elements of the VN'orld and of human
effort in the world, to religious worship. Scientific opium has often
been thought an integral part of marxism by its opponents, but for
us the question is what break with tradition the contribution of

67

time: the refreshing river

England and the west of Europe to the socialisation of the world
must involve. In this connection there are two considerations which
seem relevant, but which have not often been discussed. In the first
place, it is a historical coincidence that the early marxists adopted
the anthropological and psychological arguments against religion
which were fashionable at the time. These arguments are insufficient
ground for condemning one of the greatest forms of human experience.
The anthropological arguments all confuse origin with value, as if
primitive barbarism were not in the end responsible for science, art,
and literature just as much as for religion. To say that the concept
of God is derived from, or modelled on, the relation of primitive
exploiting lord to primitive exploited slave is to say nothing about
the religious value of the concept in a society where exploitation has
been abolished (should it continue to exist there); still less about
religion itself as opposed to theology or philosophy. For religion
does not know what God is; it only knows him if he exists to be
worthy of worship — a God comprehended would be no God — and
it does not know why the universe is as it is, but only that there is
holiness in it. An excess of mystical religion may indeed engender an
attitude of inactivity against the external world, but we need it as a
salt, not a whole diet. Must we have prohibition in the classless State
because some men drink too deeply to-day.^ In the end, there is but
one end, and communism can overcome the last enemy no more
than any other of man's devices. It is difficult, no doubt, to combine
scientific "pride" with religious "humility," but the best things often
are difficult.

In the second place, the Byzantine nature of eastern Christianity
is relevant. From the very beginning the Byzantine Church showed a
speculative rather than a practical tendency.^ The east enacted creeds,
the west discipline. The first decree of an eastern council was to
determine the relations of the Godhead; the first decree of the Bishop
of Rome was to prohibit the marriage of the clergy. Eastern theology
was rhetorical in form and based on philosophy; western theology
was logical in form and based on law. The Byzantine divine succeeded
to the place of the Greek sophist; the Latin divine to the place of the
Roman advocate. The eastern Church, therefore, occupied with
philosophy and theology, made little or no pretensions to control of
economic affairs, no attempt to subordinate the secular power to

^ See Milman, H. H., History of Latin Christianity (Murray, London, 1867); and
Stanley, A. P., Lectures on the History of the Eastern Church (Dent, Everyman edition).

68

SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM

itself in the interests of a particular theory as to how the mercantile
life should be lived. The Patriarchs, chosen from a monastic order
remarkable for its detachment from secular business, left all economic
questions to the chamberlains and officials who thronged the imperial
court. After the fall of Byzantium, this same tradition of complete
other- worldliness transferred itself to the Church of Russia. The
Russian Orthodox Church had no pope, no Hildebrand, to impose
a theological system of economics on Russian societ}^ It had no
scholastic philosophers, no "mediaeval clerks" to dictate to kings and
rulers what measures they should take to secure social justice. It
had nothing corresponding to our 17th-century High Churchmen, or
to our 19th-century Anglo-Catholics, reviving those traditions and
reminding men of the ideals of a pre-capitalist age. When capitalism,
in the time of Peter the Great, reached Russia, it found a perfectly
virgin soil for its operations, and had no such uphill task as it found
in the west. In three generations it enslaved a population which
could make no appeal to any distinctively christian social theories.
The appeal would have been vain, for the Orthodox Church had no
such theories, and had never developed the first beginnings of them.
On the contrary, it had become completely identified with the process
of exploitation of the Russian people. The contrast between this
situation and our own is quite remarkable.

It may be said that the meaning of the phrase "religious opium"
was that by anaesthetising the people, it prevented them from per-
forming those social actions necessary for social progress, combining
in unions, rebelling against exploitation, fighting the possessing class
in every possible way. "Scientific opium" could have no such meaning.
Yet I think it has, and it may be explained as follows. It is a blindness
to the suffering of others. A certain degree of ruthlessness is absolutely
inevitable in the period of revolutions when the people are defending
themselves against the final attack of the possessing class which sees
itself on the verge of expropriation. "Revolutions," said Lenin,
"cannot be made without breaking heads." But just as Lunacharsky
(whose role will be better appreciated by later historians) pleaded
successfully for the preservation of certain buildings, art treasures,
etc. in the heat of the revolution; so it is always necessary for the
christian man (even he who without reservation allies himself with
the revolution) to plead for the retention of certain christian principles
in dealing with people. The ruthlessness necessary in a revolutionary
period or an age of wars may too easily pass over, especially in a

69

time: the refreshing river

society based on science, and die more so the more it is so based,
into a ruthlessness derived from the very statistical character of the
scientific method itself. The ruthlessness with which a biologist
throws out an anomalous embryo useless for his immediate purpose,
the ruthlessness with which an astronomer rejects an aberrant observa-
tion, may too easily be applied to human misfits and deviationists in
the socialist world order. The wimess of the christian man may then
recall the marxist to a sense of the fundamentally unmarxist character
of such treatment. It is unmarxist because no philosophy recognises
the emergence of levels of high organisation better than dialectical
materialism, and the individuals of which the human social collectivity
is built up are themselves the most complicated organisms in the
living world.^ Hence christian love in the form of tolerance is trans-
formed into a recognition of the manifold forms which human thought
and being may take. As long as aberrant individuals are not permitted
to be a danger to the socialist state, the greatest tolerance should
prevail. There is no need for marxists to follow the example of those
many unchristian christians who manned the Inquisition, the witch-
hunting tribunals, and the boards of godly divines in Geneva, West-
minster and Massachusetts.

We have here a principle of genuine importance. Christian theology
has been called "the grandmother of bolshevism," since communist
planning alone has seen how to incorporate the love of one's fellow-
men in the actual structure of economic life. Some have seen another
ancestor in the rationalist and philanthropic ethic of ancient Con-
fucianism. But communism is based just as much on the findings
of natural science and the method of science itself The socialist
society must therefore guard against taking over from science too
much of scientific abstraction, scientific statistical ruthlessness, and
scientific detachment from the individual.

Christian Theology the Grandmother of Bolshevism.

Important for the decay of religion in our time is the general and
increasing domination of the scientific mind, or, rather, of a popular
version of the state of mind characteristic of the scientific worker.
Constantly growing power over external nature leads to a tacit belief
in the possibility of solving the problem of evil by what might almost
be called a matter of engineering. The principle of abstraction leads
to a weakening of that attention to the individual and the unique

^ This explains Blake's antipathy to Newton.

70

SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM

which must always be an integral part of the religious outlook. The
principle of ethical neutrality leads to a general chaos in the traditional
systems of morals, and hence to decay in the religious emotion
formerly attached to the performance of certain actions. The emphasis
laid by the scientific mentality on the quantitative aspects of nature
runs diametrically counter to the emphasis which religion would like
to lay on the other aspects of the universe. And, above all, in actively
interfering with the external world, in persistently probing its darkest
corners, science destroys that feeling of creaturely dependence upon,
and intimate relation to, a transcendent and supernal Being, which
has certainly been one of the most marked characteristics of the
religious spirit. In the modern world, Epicurus and Lucretius have
come into their own.

But here we find, paradoxically enough, that communism and the
christian religion are again on the same side. If these effects of the
domination of science w^ere to operate alone, we should have a truly
soulless society, much as is depicted by Bertrand Russell in The
Scientific Outlook^ and by Aldous Huxley, satirically, in Brave New
World? This is what we shall certainly get if capitalism can establish
itself anew and overcome the forces of fanatical nationalism which
threaten to disrupt it. For capitalism has a fundamentally cheap
estimate of the value of human life; mine disasters and wars alike are
but passing incidents in a society where the only principle recognised
is that might is right. Communism and Christianity, on the contrary,
estimate life highly. Ultimately the distinction here resolves itself into
what kind of human society we wish to aim at, and the choice may
be in a sense aesthetic. The logical continuation of the capitalist order
would be the tightening and stabilisation of class-stratification, which
seems to be the essential fiinction of fascism. This could then, in
time, be further fixed as biological engineering becomes more powerful.
In such a civilisation, the Utopia of the bourgeoisie, where an abund-
ance of docile workers of very limited intelligence was available, the
class stratification would be absolute, and the governing class alone
would be capable of living anything approaching a full life.^ Biological
engineering would have done what mechanical engineering had failed

^ (Allen & Unwin, London, 193 1.)

^ (Chatto & Windus, London, 1932.) We shall analyse this book in what follows.

^ It is of much interest that the similarity between fascism and the ancient caste-
system of India is expressly admitted in Sanatana Dharma, an advanced textbook of
Hindu religion and ethics, published by the Central Hindu College, Benares, 1923,
pp. 240 if. Both are said to be based on the doctrine of immortality.

71

time: the refreshing river

to do, and flesh and blood would have been adapted to machinery
rather than machinery to flesh and blood. Nevertheless the converse
process is equally possible, i.e. a continually increasing automatism of
machine operations, and hence an increasing liberation of man from
the necessity of productive labour. With the increase of leisure would
come an enormous increase in the beneficial and pleasurable occupa-
tions available for the workers. This is what is meant by the readiness
to sacrifice the bourgeois liberty of to-day for the much greater liberty
of the classless State. And these two alternatives are even now offering
themselves to us, with capitalism on the one side and Christianity
and communism together on the other. It is a pity that Spengler's
aphorism is not more widely known: "Christian theology is the
grandmother of bolshevism."

"Utopias," wrote Berdyaev, in a passage which Aldous Huxley
chose for the motto of Brave New World,'' appear to be much more
realisable than we used to think. We are finding ourselves face to
face with a far more awful question — how can we avoid their actuali-
sation.^ And perhaps a new period is beginning, a period when
intelligent men will be wondering how they can avoid these Utopias,
and return to a society non-Utopian, less perfect but more free."
Huxley's book was a brilliant commentary on this.

His theme is twofold, one of its aspects being the power of auto-
cratic dictatorship, and the other, the possibilities of this power,
given the resources of a really advanced biological engineering. The
book opens with a long description of a human embryo factory,
where the eggs emitted by carefully-tended ovaries are brought up
in their development by mass-production methods on an endless
conveyor belt moving very slowly until at last the infants are "de-
canted" one by one into a remarkable world. The methods of education
by continual suggestion and all the possibilities of conditional reflexes
are brilliantly described, and we see a world where art and religion
no longer exist, but in which an absolutely stable form of society
has been achieved, first by sorting out the eggs into groups of known
inherited characteristics and then setting each group when adult to
do the work for which it is fitted; and secondly by allowing unlimited
sexual life (of course, sterile). This idea was based on the suggestion
of Kyrle^ that social discontent, which has always been an important
driving force in social change, is a manifestation of the Oedipus
complexes of the members of society and cannot be removed by

^ R. M. Kyrle, Psyche, 193 1, 11, 48.
72

SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM

economic means. With decrease of sexual tabus, these psychologists
suggest, there would be a decrease of frustration and hence of that
aggressiveness which finds its sublimation in religion or its outlet in
political activity. Thus in the society pictured by Aldous Huxley,
erotic play of children is encouraged rather than prevented, universal
but superficial sex relations are the rule, and indeed any sign of the
beginning of more deep and lasting affection is stamped out as being
anti-social.

Perhaps only biologists really appreciated the full force of Brave
New World. They knew that Huxley included nothing in his book
but what might be considered legitimate extrapolations from already
existing knowledge and power. Successful experiments are even now
being made in the cultivation of embryos of small mammals in vitro.
One of the most horrible of Huxley's predictions, the production of
numerous workers of low-grade intelligence and precisely identical
genetic constitution from one egg, is theoretically quite possible.
Armadillos, parasitic insects, and even sea-urchins, if treated in the
right manner, will "bud" in this way now, and the difficulties in the
way of effecting it with mammalian and therefore human eggs are
probably purely technical.

It is just the same in the realm of philosophy. There are already
among us tendencies leading in the direction of Huxley's realm of
Antichrist. Fascism seeks no justification other than existence and
force. Its philosophy is one in which there is no place for science.
Science ceases to be the groundwork of philosophy, and becomes
nothing but the mythology accompanying a technique. Divorced
from religion, ethics and art, as well as from philosophy, it proceeds
to do the will of wicked and ungodly rulers upon humanity. "The
scientific society in its pure form," as Bertrand Russell has said, "is
incompatible with the pursuit of truth, with love, with art, with
spontaneous delight, with every ideal that men have hitherto cherished,
save only possibly ascetic renunciation. It is not knowledge that is
the source of these dangers. Knowledge is good and ignorance is
evil — to this principle the lover of the world can admit no exception.
Nor is it power in and for itself that is the source of danger. What
is dangerous is power wielded for the sake of power, not power
wielded for the sake of genuine good."

This train of thought leads us finally to consider on what ground
communism can stand as against nietszchianism or other doctrines of
the "superman." These may be, for all we know, perennial, if they

73

SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM

derive primarily from specific psychological types, and may appear
long after the classless society has been established. Thus if it be claimed
that the fulfilment of the personality of one sort of individual necessi-
tates the injury or exploitation of others, on what ground does com-
munist theory refute the claim? The ethical superiority of social
equality is in fact at issue. Barbara Wootton^ well points out that
"every type of economic organisation will turn top-heavy unless it
is quite definitely and deliberately weighted in favour of the weak,
the unfortunate, and the incompetent." What justification can there
be for this, except the dyam] rod TrX-qGiov of the Gospels, one of
the two commandments on which hang all the Law and the Prophets.''
And this leads us to ask whence came the noble hatred of oppression
found in Marx, and whence arises this passion in all the communist
confessors and martyrs of the present century.^ It cannot be a coinci-
dence that marxist morality grew up in the bosom of Christianity
after eighteen christian centuries, as if the phoenix of the Kingdom
should arise from the ashes of the Church's failure.

^ Plan or No Plan (Gollancz, London, 1934), p. 106.

74

Laiid^ the Levellers^ and the Virtuosi

(A contribution to the book of essays, Christianity and the

Social Revolution^ I935)

Seventeenth-Century England.

In seventeenth-century England, we have the fascinating picture of a
balance trembhng on a poise of equal weights — western religion having
lost little of its ancient power, western science having gained its first
magnificent victories. Even within religion there was a moment of
equal poise between the antagonists, before the mediaeval tradition,
in the form of the Church of England, ceded the power to the
Protestant and Puritan bodies. This contrast, like the former, was
but an aspect of what was perhaps a more deep-seated one, namely,
the passing of power from the feudal aristocratic and monastic system
to the middle or bourgeois class arising out of the mediaeval town
merchants. The civil war and the Commonwealth were the outward
and visible signs of the victory of this new order. The abolition of
the laws against usury; the "freeing" of trade from galling restrictions;
the beginning of large-scale industrial "ventures"; the great advances
in technology backed by science; the complete removal, in a word,
of mercantile and economic life from theological control — all signified
the triumph of the middle class.

The Laudian Divines.

Of all the ages of the Church's history after the first two centuries
there are few which can compare in brightness with the Church of
England in the seventeenth century. Poets like George Herbert,
Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, Henry King, and, we might add,
Thomas Browne and Jeremy Taylor; saints like Nicholas Ferrar and
Thomas Ken; careful restorers of what was destroyed, like John
Hacket, Matthew Wren and John Cosin; scholars like Lancelot
Andrewes and Henry More, statesmen like William Laud — all
combined to give the period a charm and depth which can never
be forgotten by those who have studied it.^ But while we usually

^ Cf. Grierson, H. J, C, Cross Currents in English Literature of the Seventeenth Century
(Chatto & Windus, London, 1929); and Willey, B., The Seventeenth-Century Background
(Chatto & Windus, London, 1934).

75

time: the refreshing river

think of these men in connection with their importance in the history
of theology or philosophy, or with regard to the literary beauty they
created, we forget that there was a significant economic aspect to
their existence. This may be summarised by saying that they were the
representatives of the old conceptions of social justice in economic
affairs, and were opposed to the new aims of capitalist freedom
in commerce.

William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, usually appears in
history as the instrument of monarchical oppression, and not as the
champion of popular agrarian rights. Yet there is no doubt that among
the economic causes of the civil war and of Laud's own fall was the
opposition which he aroused among landowners by his agrarian
policy.^ The problem of enclosures was by no means new in English
economic life in the days of the Stuarts; it runs, indeed, like a con-
necting thread through all the economic life of the country from the
early Middle Ages to the nineteenth century.^ Pasture was more of a
business proposition than tillage; it was capitalist in its methods,
and offered a better chance of big profits. It was the basis of the great
late mediaeval wool trade. But the social obligations of the feudal
landowner were forgotten; the peasant became a landless and insecure
wage-worker, and the land came to be looked upon solely as a source
of profit.

To whom were the peasants to turn for redress.^ Not to the justices
of the peace, for these were of the landowning class; not to Parliament,
where the same interests reigned. They most commonly appealed to
the King's Ministers, the Privy Council, and the Church. Laud strove
by every means in his power to prevent such enclosures as depopulated
the countryside, and, by heading the Commission on Depopulation,
infuriated the capitalist landowners whose interests were aligning
them with the industrial capitalists of the towns. Laud had no respect
for persons, and would allow no man, however powerful, to transgress
what he called the common law of Christ, binding upon man as
man. Peter Heylyn, his chaplain and biographer,^ seems to have
thought that Laud could have kept his place and saved his life if he

^ See Cole, G. D. H., Church Socialist, 1915; Hancock, T., The Pulpit and the PresSy
and other Sermons preached at St. Nicholas Cole Abbey (Brown & Langham, London,
1904); Sykes, N., The Way, 1941,3, 18; Schlatter, R. B., The Social Ideas of Religious
Leaders, 1660-1688 (Oxford, 1940).

^ Cf. the passage on it in Thomas More's Utopia.

^ Heylyn, P., Cyprianus Anglicus; or the History of the Life and Death of William,
Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1668).

76

LAUD, THE LEVELLERS, AND THE VIRTUOSI

had paid adulation to the great enclosers, but "he failed in so many
necessary civilities to the nobility and gentry" that it was clear he
was their enemy and the peasants' friend. His visitation articles, in
particular, questioned the churchwardens closely concerning en-
closures, detentions, inversions, and so on. To have such questions
put to them — as a writer complained a few months before Laud's
death, when the Archbishop was safely in the Tower — was a "vassal-
drie of the gentry of England," who, from the time of the Tudors,
had been impropriating wholesale the common property of the
people, their common Church, their common lands, and their common
free schools. "Many nobles and worthy gentlemen," said the com-
plainant, "are curbed and tyrannised over by some base clergy of
mean parentage." As Clarendon says,^ "The shame, which they called
an insolent triumph over their degree and quality, and a levelling
them with the common people, was never forgotten, and they watched
for revenge."

A final instance: from among his injunctions to the Dean and
Chapter of Chichester — "Use some means with Mr. Peter Cox"
(a land-grabbing alderman of that city) "that the piece of ground
called Campus now in his possession be laid open again, that the
scholars of your free school may have liberty to play there, as formerly
they had. And if he shall refuse, give us notice, or our vicar-general,
upon what reason and ground he does it." *^

But if some bishops were fighting on- the agrarian front, others
were leading the struggle against usur}\^ Lancelot Andrewes, the
admirable Bishop of Winchester, preached incessantly against it. He
made short work of the settlement of 1571, which had legalised
the taking of ten per cent. Joseph Hall, Bishop of Norwich; John
Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, and George Downam ("the hammer of
usurers") Bishop of Derry, were all prominent in this work.^ But
the merchants persisted ever that "it is not in simple divines to saye
what contract is lawfull, and what is not."

In the end these controversies were not settled except by force
of arms. In the civil war, the industrial and commercial cities and
areas were in general on the parliamentary side; the agricultural
parts of the country, except the Eastern Counties, where puritanism

^ Clarendon, History of the Rebellion.

^ See the classical Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, by R. H. Tawney (Murray,
London, 1926); and also H. M. ^oh^nsoris Aspects of the Rise of Economic Individualism
(Cambridge, 1933).

^ Cf. Blaxton, The English Usurer (London, 1634).

77

time: the refreshing river

was so strongly entrenched, were royalist. It was no coincidence that
the chaplains of the volunteer regiments of London were Presbyterian,
as opposed to the Anglican and Roman Catholic influence on the other
side.^ The golden age of seventeenth-century Anglicanism stood, in
fact, in its economic aspect, for a scarcely altered version of mediaeval
theocracy. The bishops were "mediaeval clerks," determined to control
the market-place. The victories of Cromwell opened the door for
the era of capitalist enterprise, and, w^hen the Church of England
regained its possessions at the Restoration, it was at the price of most
of its militant spirit. In 1692, when one David Jones was so indiscreet
as to preach at St. Mary Woolnoth, in Lombard Street, a sermon
against usury, his career in London was brought to an abrupt con-
clusion.

The Levellers.

Let us now cross over to the other side in the civil war in order
to trace another movement of great interest — that of the Levellers.
If we regard, as we must, the civil war as England's "bourgeois
revolution," we should expect to find a certain number of true
socialists on the left wing of the revolutionary party, men who would
not be content with the political equality which the Cromwellian
system would give, but would demand economic equality as well.
This is indeed exactly what happened, and from 1647 onwards the
parliamentary side was split into two portions, the main body quite
satisfied with the defeat of everything that the royalist and anglican
forces had stood for, and a smaller body desirous of pushing on
towards what we should now call a Socialist State.^ The fortunes of

^ It must be understood that names which we use today only for religious denomina-
tions had in tlie seventeenth century a strong political significance. On the Parliamentary
side tliere were few or no Anglicans. Presbyterianism stood for the moderate puritanism
of the middle-class merchant interest, and was compatible with compromise as regards
the royalist issue until an advanced stage of the Commonwealth. Independency (the
predecessor of modern Congregationalism) was adhered to by all the more revolutionary
elements, and where the revolution eventually split in taking its inevitable "two steps
for^'ard and one step back" was between the so-called "gentlemen-Independents" such
as Cromwell, Ireton and the other leaders on the one hand; and the Levellers, Diggers,
etc., on the other.

^ For the Levellers die most accessible book is Henry Holorenshaw's The Levellers
and the English Revolution (London, 1939); further see the work of E. Bernstein,
Cromwell and Communism; Socialism and Democracy in the Great English Revolution
(Allen & Unwin, London, 1930); also English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth
Century by G. P. Gooch, 2nd edition, edited H. J. Laski (Cambridge, 1927); T. C.
Pease, The Levellers' Movement (Washington, 1916); D. W. Petegorsky, Left- Wing
Democracy in the English Civil War (London, 1940); A. S. P. \\'oodhouse, Puritanism
and Liberty (London, 1938).

78

LAUD, THE LEVELLERS, AND THE VIRTUOSI

this smaller portion, the Levellers, varied considerably; at one time
they were sufficiently strong to take the field against Cromwell's
own forces in a short campaign which receives little or no mention
in orthodox history books,^ while towards the end of the Common-
wealth they were mostly in exile, reduced to plotting in company
with exiled royalists.

As the extreme left wing of the puritan and parliamentary move-
ment, they were, of course, implacably opposed to everything that
the Anglican divines stood for. However devoted the Anglican
divines might be to ideals of social justice, their positions made
them, in the eyes of the revolutionary puritans, pillars of oppression
and symbols of the old regime. The moderate puritans were well
aware of the situation. In 1641 the poet Edmund Waller, a Presby-
terian, said in the House of Commons that though it might be well
to restrict episcopacy, it were better not to abolish it altogether. "I
look upon episcopacy," he said, "as a counterscarp or outwork;
which, if it be taken by this assault of the people, and withal, this
mystery once revealed, that we must deny them nothing when they
ask it thus in troops, we may, in the next place, have as hard a task
to defend our property as we have lately had to recover it from the
royal prerogative. If, by multiplying hands and petitions, they prevail
for an equality in things ecclesiastical, the next demand perhaps may
be the like equality in things temporal." This was the authentic
voice of the rising middle class, determined to do away with feudal
absolutism, but equally determined to keep the property privilege for
itself. Waller went on to say, "I am confident that, whenever an equal
division of lands and goods shall be desired, there will be as many
places in Scripture found out which seem to favour that, as there are
now alleged against the prelacy or preferment of the Church. And
as for abuses, when you are now told what this and that poor man
hath suffered by the bishops, you may be presented with a thousand
instances of poor men that have received hard measure from their
landlords." Waller was a keen-sighted man. The preaching troopers
who began by finding no warrant in scripture for prelates, ended by
finding none there either for the class-domination of temporal rulers.

The Levellers first appear about the year 1647, at which time the
victorious army was dividing into the two sections above-mentioned,
the "gentlemen-independents" or "Grandees" being opposed to the

^ Contrast the excellent History of Feudalism by A. Gukovsky & O. Trachtenberg
(Moscow, 1934).

79

time: the refreshing river

"honest substantive soldiers" and their elected leaders or "Agitators."^
In the following year there appeared as one of the numerous pamphlets
of the time, an important programme of reforms, The Agreement of
the People^ '*to take away all known and burdensome grievances."^
One of the authors was the indefatigable Lieut.-Col. John Lilburne
("freeborn John").^ At this time, the Levellers numbered among
them many interesting and important pioneers, such as Colonel
Rainborough and other officers in the Army and Richard Overton
and William Walwyn in civil life. Walwyn wrote little, but he said:
"The world will never be well till all things are common." It would
not by any means be "such difficulty as men take it to be to alter
the course of the world in this thing; a very few diligent and valiant
spirits may turn the world upside down if they observe the seasons
and shall with life and courage engage accordingly." To the objection
that community of property would upset all and every Government,
he answered that "there would then be less need of government, for
then there would be no thieves, no covetous persons, no deceiving
and abuse of one another, and so no need of government. If any
difference do fall out, take a cobbler from his seat, or any other
tradesman that is an honest and just man, and let him hear the case
and determine the same, and then betake himself to his work again."
There is a remarkably modern ring about these sentiments. They
form a contrast indeed to the attitude of Cromwell, who was always
protesting that he was a "gentleman born."

Perhaps the most remarkable pamphlet of the Levellers was The
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire^ which laid down what "honest
people desire: — (i) a just portion for each man to live, so that none
need to beg or steal for want, but everyone may live comfortable;
(2) a just rule for each man to go by, which rule is to be found in
Scripture;" (3) equal rights; (4) government judges elected by all

"^ The word (first used at this time) meant a delegate to the Army Council elected
by the rank and file of a unit in order to do something, i.e. to see that the Council carried
out the wishes of the Regiments (for instance, not to disband until the Agreement of
the People was accepted and implemented by Parliament).

^ It demanded annual Parliaments, elected by a universal manhood suffrage, abolition
of all coercive laws respecting religion, a national militia recruitment to which should
recognise conscientious objections to bearing arms, replacement of all tithes, tolls, etc.,
by a single income tax, provision of work for the unemployed, an old age pension, and
adequate medical provision for all sick persons. In 1648! Parliament condemned the first
edition but the Army continued to produce them.

^ Cf. J. Clayton's biography of him in Leaders of the People (Seeker, London^ 1910).
It is interesting that some of his writings have been translated into Russian, ed. V.
Semenov (Moscow 1937).

80

LAUD, THE LEVELLERS, AND THE VIRTUOSI

the people; (5) a Commonwealth "after the pattern of the Bible."
Here the land was expressly stated to be the property of the whole
people, and, as we should say, its "nationalisation" demanded.

In April 1649, while Lilburne and other Leveller leaders were
confined in the Tower, there suddenly appeared at Cobham in Surrey
a number of men armed with spades, who began to dig up uncultivated
common land at the side of St. George's Hill, with the intention of
growing corn and other produce.^ They proposed to prove that "it
was an indeniable equity that the common people ought to dig, plow,
plant, and dwell upon the commons without hiring them or paying
rent to any." A fortnight later they were arrested by two troops of
horse, sent down by Cromwell, and their leaders, William Everard
and Gerrard Winstanley, brought before him. The examination
showed that these "true Levellers," as they called themselves, were
in reality trying to found what we should now call a "collective
farm," and their conviction was that, when men began to see the
success of their venture, they would join it, and so establish in course
of time a widespread co-operative system. The beginning was to be
on common-land, for which they asked no permission, since from
of old it had been the common property of the English people.

Of course, these beginnings were not allowed to proceed far, and
though Winstanley succeeded in establishing collective farms at
several other places besides Cobham, they were very short-lived. The
"true Levellers" seem eventually to have joined other later movements,
such as that of the Quakers, which had a more other-worldly back-
ground. Winstanley produced a book, however {The Law of Freedom
in a Platform^ or True Magistracy Restored^ i<^5i)> which unfolded
his real principles without any concealment, and propounded a
complete social system based on communist principles. "The Earth,"
he said, "should be a Common Treasury." Particularly interesting
here is his treatment of social prestige in a classless society: "As a
man goes through offices he rises to titles of Honour, till he comes
to the highest Nobility, to be a faithful Commonwealth man in a
Parliament House. Likewise he who finds out any secret in Nature,
shall have a title of Honour given him, though he be but a young

^ See BerenSjL. H., The Digger Movement under the Commonwealth (Simpkin Marshall,
London, 1906); Davidson, M., The Wisdom of Winstanley the Digger (Henderson,
London, 1904); Gerrard Winstanley^ s Collected Works, ed. Sabine (Cornell Univ. Press,
Ithaca, New York, 1941). In the course of time Winstanley will come to be appreciated
as standing with Milton and Bunyan as among the greatest of seventeenth-century
Englishmen.

81 F

time: the refreshing river

man. But no man shall have any title of Honour till he win it by
industry or come to it by age or office-bearing. Every man that is
above sixty years of age shall have respect as a man of Honour by
all others that are younger, as is shewed hereafter. "^

The Levellers' crisis came in 1649. ^^ January the King was executed,
in February the Council of State deliberated measures for the sup-
pression of "disturbers of peace" in the army. Soldiers who attempted
to incite the army to mutiny were to be hanged. Lilburne immediately
published a pamphlet, England's New Chains Discovered, against
the Council of State. In March the army itself, stationed at New-
market, protested, in a Letter to General Fairfax and his officers,
signed by eight soldiers, who demanded the acceptance of the
Levellers' Agreement, and who were, a few days later, after a short
trial, expelled from the army. Twenty days later, the army Levellers
published a pamphlet with perhaps the most remarkable title of all,
The Hunting of the Foxes from Newmarket and Thriplow Heath to
Whitehall by five small beagles late of the Armie- or, The Grandee
Deceivers Unmasked. The "foxes," of course, were Cromwell, Ireton,
and the rest; and their ambitious subterfuges were here exposed. A
few days later there was a mutiny in London in Colonel Whalley's
cavalry regiment, and, though quickly suppressed, it gave rise to
a unique manifestation of popular feeling at the funeral of one of
the Leveller soldiers, Robert Lockyer. I quote the account from
Whitelocke's Memorials'^
*

''April T.^th, 1649.

"Mr. Lockier, a trooper, who w^as shot to death by Sentence
of the Court Martial, was buried in this manner.

"About one thousand went before the Corps, and five or
six in a File; the Corps was then brought, with six Trumpets
sounding a Soldier's Knell, then the Trooper's horse came
clothed all over in mourning and led by a foot man.

"The Corps was adorned with Bundles of Rosemary, one-
half stained in Blood, and the Sword of the deceased with them.

"Some thousands followed in Ranks and Files, all had Sea-
green and Black Ribbon tied on their Hats (the Levellers'
colours), and the Women brought up the Rear.

^ Works, Sabine edn., p. 512.

^ 'Whitelock, B., Memorials of the English Affairs (London, 1732), P- 397.

82

LAUD, THE LEVELLERS, AND THE VIRTUOSI

"At the new Church-yard in Westminster some thousands of
the better sort met them, who thought not fit to march through
the City. Many looked on this funeral as an affront to the Parlia-
ment and Army; others called them Levellers; but they took no
notice of any of them."

Ten days afterwards the struggle -began in earnest. News came
that the troops at Banbury, Wantage, Salisbury, etc., had cast off
allegiance to Cromwell, and had raised the sea-green flag in favour
of the Levellers' principles. After a good deal of marching and counter-
marching by the Levellers and the Cromwellian praetorian troops, the
former were surprised at Burford in Oxfordshire, and a fight in the
streets of that town ended the chances of a second revolution. Early
in June the great merchants of the City of London, who had often
enough execrated Cromwell, and held tight the purse-strings in the
face of the financial requirements of the parliamentary army, celebrated
the overthrow of the Levellers by a splendid banquet given at Grocers'
Hall in honour of Cromwell and Fairfax, the saviours of sacred
property.

The Virtuosi.

Lastly, in this rapid survey of some aspects of the Seventeenth
century, we must give our attention to the scientific movement pro-
ceeding in quiet, apparently far removed from these excursions and
alarms, but destined to be of basic social and economic importance.
Out of all the events which make the seventeenth century one of the
cardinal periods in the history of science, perhaps the most important
was the grouping together of scientific workers of the time into
societies for the furtherance of experiment and observation.^ These
societies, of which the Royal Society in England was one of the
earliest, were generally under the close protection of some prince
or monarch. Such royal patronage, we may believe, was dictated
not so much by a purely disinterested passion for abstract truth, as by
a desire for that financial prosperity which the decay of anti-usury
doctrine, the urge of the rising middle class to industrial ventures,
and the far-ranging thought and new technology of the scientists
was combining to produce.

The Royal Society began as a group of scientists meeting both in

^ See Omstein, M., The Role of Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century
(Chicago, 1928).

83

time: the refreshing river

Oxford and in London, who called themselves the "Invisible College."
The first mention of them occurs in 1646, but their incorporation
under the present name did not occur till 1663. The preoccupation
of the early Fellows with practical interests, with the "improvement
of trade and husbandry," is patent to anyone acquainted with its
early history. Thus the great Robert Boyle wrote to a friend, Mar-
combes:^ "The other humane studies I apply myself to are natural
philosophy, the mechanics, and husbandry, according to the principles
of our new philosophical colledge, that values no knowledge, but as
it hath a tendency to use. And therefore I shall make it one of my
suits to you, that you would take the pains to enquire a little more
thoroughly into the ways of husbandry, etc., practised in your parts;
and when you intend for England, to bring along with you what
good receipts or choice books of any of these subjects you can pro-
cure; which will make you extremely welcome to our invisible
colledge, which I had now designed to give you a description of."
Among Robert Hooke's papers in the British Museum,^ Weld records
a statement, dated 1663 — "The business and design of the Royal
Society is to improve the knowledge of naturall things and all usefull
Arts, Manufactures, Mechanick practises, Engynes and Inventions by
Experiments." Or if we look through the account and defence of
the Royal Society published by Thomas Sprat, Bishop of Rochester,
some years later,^we find that he gives a series of thirteen sample
papers from the reports of the Society to show what good it has done.
Of these thirteen, five are purely technical (wine, guns, salt-petre,
dyeing, oysters), two are to do with exploration, and three with
meteorology and astronomy, important for navigation, making a
total of ten which would be "for the improvement of husbandry."
The remaining three we should now call "pure science," and were
devoted two to chemistry and one to physiology.

It is clear, then, that seventeenth-century science was expanding in
the closest relationship with industrial enterprise. The scientific men
took, indeed, little or no part in politics, but they definitely depended
for their support on the party standing between and against the two
groups already described (the Laudian Churchmen and the Levellers).
The former were representatives of a dying pre-scientific collectivism,
the latter were pioneers of a collectivism to which even yet we have

1 Quoted by Fulton, J. F., Isis, 1932, 18, 84.

2 Weld, C. R., History of the Royal Society (Parker, London, 1848).

' Sprat, T., The History of the Royal Society of London (Knap ton, London, 1722).

84

LAUD, THE LEVELLERS, AND THE VIRTUOSI

not attained. It was inevitable that the scientists should be with the
Presbyterian and Republican "centre," the party of the rising economic
individualism, since only capitalism, with its encouragement of
technology, would afford science with the means for its development.
But the relation between the Presbyterian merchants and the
Leveller Independents was, of course, much closer than the relations
of either to the Anglican and Royalist party. Science and Industry
were therefore connected broadly with the Puritan movement, a
link which constantly manifests itself in this period. The complaint
of a conservative Anglican divine after the Restoration is in this
respect especially revealing. Samuel Parker, in his Discourse of
Ecclesiastical Politic wrote as follows: "I confess I cannot but smile
when I observe how some that would be thought wonderfully grave
and solemn statesmen labour with mighty projects of setting up this
and that manufacture. . . . To erect and encourage trading combina-
tions is only to build up so many nests of faction and sedition, and
to enable these giddy and humoursom people to create public dis-
turbances. For 'tis notorious that there is not any sort of people so
inclinable to seditious practises as the trading part of a nation. And
if we reflect upon our late miserable distractions, 'tis easy to observe
how the quarrel was chiefly hatch'd in the shops of tradesmen and
cherished by the zeal of prentice-boys and city-gossips."

The Rise of Mechanistic Economics.

Drawing these many threads together now a little, we may refer to
one of the most fascinating aspects of the seventeenth century, namely,
the rise of "mechanistic economics." In pure science the concept of
mechanical causation (or, to be more accurate, the concentration of
interest on the Aristotelian eflicient cause, to the exclusion of the
other Aristotelian causes), was of enormous importance. No advance
beyond pure descriptive biology, for instance, could be made without
it. And it was just at this time that such advances were made. Thus in
1644 Sir Kenelm Digby,^ discussing embryology, in his Treatise on
Bodies^ took the example of a germinating bean: "Take a bean,"
he wrote, "or any other seed, and put it in the earth; can it then
choose but that the bean must swell } The bean swelling, can it choose
but break the skin.^ The skin broken, can it choose (by reason of

^ Digby, Sir K., Two Treatises, in the one of which the Nature of Bodies, in the other
the nature of Man s Soule, is look' d into, in way of discovery of the Immortality of Reason-
able Soules (Williams, London, 1664).

8s

time: the refreshing river

the heat that is in it) but push out more matter, and do that action
which we call germinating? Can these germs choose but pierce the
earth in small strings, as they are able to make their way? Thus by
drawing the thrid carefully through your fingers and staying at every
knot to see how it is tyed, you see that this difficult progresse of the
generation of living creatures is obvious enough to be comprehended
and the steps of it set down; if one would but take the paines and
afford the time that is necessary to note diligently all the circumstances
in every change of it." This was almost the first declaration of belief
in the comprehensibility of the mechanism of generation. It was
fundamental for the future of biology. But side by side with this,
there went a similar application of mechanical causation to economics,
equally fundamental for the future, but not of such happy augury.
In 1622 Gervase Malynes, in his Lex Mercatoria, wrote :^ "We see
how one thing driveth or enforceth another, like as in a clock where
there are many wheels, the first wheel being stirred driveth the next
and that the third and so forth, till the last that moveth the instrument
striketh the clock; or like as in a press going in a strait, where the
foremost is driven by him that is next to him, and the next by him
that followeth him." So men were to be thought of as selfish monads
or corpuscles, like the atoms of natural science, with the automatic
price-mechanisms taking the place of the Newtonian laws of motion.

Thus the theocratically legislative state of the mediaeval clerk was
dying, and could no longer attempt to control the great merchants
of London, Antwerp, or Venice, who looked after themselves, and
expected others to do the same. Thenceforward, there was to be no
interference with the free play of capitalist interests. All that was
lacking was the supreme piece of cant elaborated by the eighteenth
century, the opinion that when the "natural economic appetites" and
selfishnesses of men are allowed to take their course to the end, a
society results which does, by a strange but beneficent dispensation
of Providence, provide the maximum of attainable happiness for all
classes.

Mechanical causation was one concept taken over by seventeenth-
century economics from science; atomism was another. It is question-
able whether the social implications of these changes have been suffi-

^ Malynes, G., Consuetudo, vel Lex Mercatoria, or the Antient Law-Merchan (London,
1622), Malynes defends usury, and describes (p. 263) certain silver mines which the
owner will not allow to be worked. "Howsoever I thought good to remember this for our
posteritie, for there may come a time when industrious men shall be more regarded."

86

LAUD, THE LEVELLERS, AND THE VIRTUOSI

ciently realised. Does not the shift of emphasis from the mediaeval
state, carrying out in practice the detailed instructions of theology,
Regina Scientiarum, to the seventeenth-century capitalists, men like
Sir Thomas Gresham, pressing for the removal of every inhibiting
influence on financial transactions — does not this shift of emphasis
mirror in the economic sphere the transition from the four elements of
the aristotelians and the three primary substances of the alchemists to
the ''corpuscularian or mechanical philosophy" of Gassendi and Boyle?
"No one can deny," wrote the foreign merchants of Antwerp, about
1590, to Philip II, in a protest against an attempt to interfere with
the liberty of exchange transactions, "that the cause of the prosperity
of this city is the freedom granted to those who trade here." And the
unrestricted competitiveness of later capitalism, the continual demand
that the activities of the State should be restricted to the bare minimum
necessary to safeguard property, has something so obviously atomistic
about it that the nineteenth century seems surprisingly late for the
appearance of the codifier of chemical atomism, John Dalton. To-
day we are living in the time of the dissolution of this atomic form .
of society.

Of course, anarchic social atomism still (1941) finds theoretical
support. M. Polanyi^ seems to take the view that the laws of the
"fortuitous concourse of particles" have the status of laws eternally
applicable to human society. He first shows without difficulty that
"order spontaneously arising from the mutual interactions of particles
(dynamic order)," as in the crystallisation of several solutes simul-
taneously present in a system, much exceeds, in the inorganic world,
anything that "mechanically imposed order (corporate order)" could
perform. He then from this suddenly assumes the structure of com-
petitive atomistic capitalism as the analogue of this dynamic order
at the higher social level, perfect, ideal, and unalterable; apparently
quite unconscious that the problem is what precisely are the mutual
interactive forces between human "particles." Those who consider
that anarchic social atomism has no longer a progressive role to play
in human evolution do so precisely because they see that there are
important interactive forces the action of which is inhibited by this
system.

The fundamental drawback of atomistic capitalism^ is that its parts

^ In Economica, 1941, 8, 428, an article full of the most interesting fallacies.
2 Long after making this correlation between atomism and capitalism, I found that
it had been described by others also, e.g. A. M. Deborin in the Marx Memorial Volume

87

time: the refreshing river

have no organic connection with the whole. The only concern of
the industrial monads is, not that cost and price should balance but
that the latter should outweigh the former by as much as they can
make it. Hence a condition of universal war.^

It is interesting that the deficiencies of an atomistic society, as well
as the tremendous changes which applied science was to bring,
were realised, if dimly, by some contemporaries. Thus in 1641 Samuel
Hartlib published his Utopian Macaria, in which it was laid down
that the State alone should control and manage production as an
economic institution.^

In 1659 Cornelius Plockboy came forward with his proposal^ for
a co-operative society, and described all the advantages which would
accrue from the combination of agriculture with industry. "Whereas
the Traders in the World do oppress their workmen, with heavy
labour and small wages, instead thereof with us, the gain of the
Tradesmen will redound to the benefit and refreshment of the Work-
men."

A rather similar co-operative association was later proposed by
John Bellers in 1695.* No practical outcome of these schemes is
recorded. But the ideas of Bellers influenced Robert Owen and the
Chartists two centuries later.

A new Transition.

It is my profound conviction that we are standing to-day at a
turning-point between two civilisations, one of those turning-points

of the Moscow Academy of Sciences, 1933, English translation, Marxism and Modern
Thought, p. 108. Cf. also Auden's reference to the capitalist centuries:

On sterile acres governed by

Wage's abstract prudent tie

The hard self-conscious particles

Collide, divide, like numerals

In knock-down drag-out laissez-faire

And build no order anywhere."

New Year Letter, 1941, p. 34.

^ See B. Wootton, Plan or No Plan (London, 1934), p. 159.

^ Hardib, S., A description of the famous Kingdom of Macaria; shewing its excellent
Government, wherein the inhabitants live in great Prosperity, Health and Happiness: the
King obeyed, the Nobles honoured, and all good men respected. An example to other Nations.
In a dialogue between a Scholar and a Traveller (London, 1641).

^ Plockboy, P. C, A JVay propounded to make the poor in these and other nations happy
by bringing together a fit, suitable and well qualified people unto one Household government
or little Commonwealth, etc. (London, 1659).

* Bellers, J., Proposals for raising a College of Industry of all useful Trades and Hus-
bandry, etc. (London, 1695).

88

LAUD, THE LEVELLERS, AND THE VIRTUOSI

in history not unlike the first or second christian century, the Renais-
sance, or the seventeenth century in England. The transition from
an individualist to a collectivist state of society is at hand. In scientific
words, the time has come for the atomistic, inorganic, chaotic com-
munity to give way to the organised, living, planned, community.

"hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt, vigilemus

ecce minaciter, imminet arbiter, ille supremus."

I

The times are very evil, the judge is at the gate;^ it is the duty of
the christian to join his forces with all who are seeking to bring in
the new world order, the Kingdom on earth, Regnum Dei. As for the
scientific worker, he can acquiesce no longer in the frustration of
science, and must work with the rest for the overthrow of the capitalist
system.

This change is hardly more likely to be achieved without tumult
and civil commotion than it was likely that the middle class could
peacefully overthrow the paternal-feudal system existing before 1600.

"Comrades, my tongue can speak
No comfortable words.
Calls to a forlorn hope,
Gives work and not rewards.

O keep the sickle sharp
And follow still the plough;
Others may reap, though some
See not the winter through."

(C. Day Lewis.)

But the harshness of the days that lie before us is somewhat
mitigated for the reflective mind by a clear picture of the course that
history has taken. These troubles did not begin in our time; others
before us have perished that the Kingdom might come. In the fore-
going series of short pictures of seventeenth-century England, I
have tried to show some of the forces at work.

First, the Laudian Churchmen, quite apart from the literary aspects
of their brilliant scholarship and writings, were economically repre-
sentative of the collectivism of the past. In the Preces Privatae of

"^ From the De Contemptu Mundi of Bernard of Cluny, 1145 (ed. Hoskier, H. C,
London, 1929).

89

time: the refreshing river

Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester in 1618, there are the
following words, where he prays in the manner of the Orthodox
litanies, for the people of England, that they may be "subject unto
rule, not only for wrath, but also for conscience' sake; to husbandmen
and graziers, good seasons; to the fleet and fishermen, fair weather;
to mechanics, to work lawfully at their occupations; to tradesmen,
not to over-reach one another'^ And in another place, where he is
rehearsing the attributes of God, he writes under the heading "Muni-
ficent"; "Opening the eyes of the blind, clothing the naked, upholding
such as fall, gathering together the outcasts, giving food to the hungry,
bringing down the haughty, delivering the captives, loosing the
prisoners, lifting up those that are down, healing the sick, sustaining
the living, quickening the dead, lifting up the lowly, helping in time
of trouble." Does not this catalogue of the Divine actions curiously
resemble the socialist programme ? In the person of Lancelot Andrewes
there is a link between the theocratic collectivism of the past and the
proletarian socialism of the future.^

Secondly, it is in the seventeenth century that we can study the
beginnings of the great scientific movement, destined so to transform
the nature of civilised life in subsequent years. It was in the nature of
the case that science was associated with, and patro»ised by, the rising
middle class. And from contemporary scientific theory, indispensable
for progress within science itself, bourgeois economics took its canons.
But inner contradictions, given time, always come to the surface.
The individualism of capitalist production was congruent enough
with science in its early days, but in our time scientific effort needs a
co-operative atmosphere which capitalism cannot provide. Conversely,
although the bourgeois class raised itself to power partly by means
of science, its need for science is now less, and its primary subcon-
scious wish is to stabilise the existing condition of affairs. Fascism
and militarism are the result.

Thirdly, the Levellers, the extreme left wing of the revolutionary
forces, were really envisaging the classless State. They were far too
weak, however, to make the jump across three centuries of bourgeois
domination, for the economic conditions were not propitious. But is
it not of some value to English socialists, tired of hearing communism

^ In this connection it is interesting to find the common features in the economic
systems of Aquinas and Marx emphasised by a German catholic writer, William Hohoff
{Die Bedeutung d. marxistischen Kapitalkritik, Paderborn, 1908; and Warenwert und.
Kapitalprofit, Paderborn, 1902).

90

LAUD, THE LEVELLERS, AND THE VIRTUOSI

identified with foreign-sounding names and doctrines, to know that
the communists of the seventeenth century had names that run like
English villages — John Lilburne, William Walwyn, Gerrard Win-
stanley, Robert Lockyer, Giles Calvert, Anthony Sedley? So it will
be again, and not for failure.

91

Pure Science and the Idea of the Holy

(An address delivered to the annual conference of the National

Union of Students, 1 941)

It is quite natural that when we stand at the beginning of a lifetime
of scientific practice, whether in teaching or in industrial or "pure"
research, we should feel how vital a problem is the relation between
applied science and pure science. The question, moreover, is always
arising, how pure should science be? What is meant by its "ethical
neutrality?" Is it right or wrong for scientists to concern themselves
with the social applications of their discoveries? A great deal has been
written and spoken concerning these things in recent years; all I can
contribute is an approach to the subject which differs somewhat from
the usual approaches because of its historical and, dare I say, theo-
logical method.

Under enlightened editorship, the columns of "Nature," universally
acknowledged as the world's greatest scientific weekly journal, have
contained for many years past exchanges of views, sometimes put
sharply enough, on the social function of science. We cannot do
better than glance at two of these exchanges.

Meddling with Morals and Politics.

In 1933 the physiologist A. V. Hill discussed the general results
of the scientific method during the past three hundred years in
western Europe, commenting on the toleration which society as a
whole has exercised towards the labours of scientific workers.^
Scientific expeditions have been regarded as immune from the hazards
of war. During the Napoleonic wars there were interchanges between
French and British scientists. Science has been recognised as the
common interest of mankind. "If scientific people," he went on, "are
to be accorded the privileges of immunity and tolerance by civilised
societies, they must observe the rules." These rules seemed to Hill
to be most clearly embodied in one of the early descriptions of the
aims of the newly-founded Royal Society, written in 1663, probably
by Robert Hooke. "The business and design of the Royal Society is —

^ Nature, 1933, 132, 952.
' 92

PURE SCIENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY

To improve the knowledge of naturall things, and all usefull Arts,
Manufactures, Mechanick practises, Engynes and Inventions by
Experiments — not meddling with Divinity, Metaphysick, Morals,
Politicks, Grammar, Rhetorick or Logick." "Not meddling with
morals or politics," continued A. V. Hill, "such, I would urge, is
the normal condition of tolerance and immunity for scientific pursuits
in a civilised state."

We shall see later what was the historical context out of which
this phrase was taken. Hill's point of view, expressed as it was, seemed
to many to be designed to isolate the scientific worker from the
outside world as much as possible. No matter what state of dire need
that world might be in, of wars and oppressive tyrannies, of poverty
side by side with the possibilities of utmost well-being, of widespread
mismanagement and wholesale refusal to apply the lessons of scientific
discovery for the benefit of mankind — the scientist should close his
eyes to it, and continue his "pursuits" in courteous civility to the
powers that be, not too closely examining their papers of ordination.
The very word "pursuits" recalls the ideal, now somewhat thread-
bare, of the scientist as country gentleman, in the manner of Charles
Darwin, not bound to earn any living, and existing on means not
clearly specified. Hill's pronouncement quickly called forth a reply
from the biochemist and geneticist, J. B. S. Haldane,^ who had no
difficulty in showing that we must distinguish between the scientist
as scientist and the scientist as citizen. In his technical work, ethical
and political considerations are no doubt irrelevant, but as a citizen
he has a special responsibility to work for the beneficent utilisation
of the discoveries of himself and his colleagues. Haldane could point
to many of the most distinguished Fellows of the Royal Society
who had taken this attitude, to Pepys and Brouncker, to Priestley
and Franklin, of whom it was said (and could there be a more magnifi-
cent epitaph ?) :

"Eripuit caelo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis."

He tore the lightning from the heavens, and the sceptre from the
hands of tyrants. J. B. S. Haldane concluded, "I do not see why a
man of science who 'meddles' with such matters should thereby
forfeit a right to tolerance, and question whether Professor Hill has
done a service to science in penning a sentence which might be inter-

^ Nature, 1934, 133, 65.

93

time: the refreshing river

preted as meaning that his profession should be tolerated only in so
far as it is muzzled."^

Some seven years later, A. V. Hill abandoned his earlier position
by entering the House of Commons as parliamentary representative
for the University of Cambridge. The fact that on this occasion he
stood as (independent) Conservative candidate, threw, in the opinion
of some, an interesting light on the significance of his former entreaties
to scientists to keep out of politics, but in view of the very prominent
part he has taken in some of the most progressive causes of our time,
such as the succouring of exiled men of science from the Continent
of Europe, freely allow that he has altered his original views on the
value of the public services which a scientist can render.

The Holiness of Pure Science.

A similar controversy worthy of our notice arose again in 1941.
An editorial in "Nature"^ urged that "we should abandon once and for
all the belief that science is set apart from all other social interests as
if it possessed a peculiar holiness." The distinguished physical chemist,
M. Polanyi, rushed to the attack. "I, for one," he said,^ "can recognise
nothing more holy than scientific truth, and consider it a danger to
science and to humanity if the pursuit of pure science, regardless of
society, is denied by a representative organ of science. For the last
ten years we have been presented by an influential school of thought
with phrases about the desirability of a social control of science, ac-
companied by attacks on the alleged snobbishness and irresponsibility
of scientific detachment. The 'social control of science' has proved a
meaningless phrase. Science exists only to that extent to which the
search for truth is not socially controlled. And therein lies the purpose
of scientific detachment. It is of the same character as the independence
of the witness, the jury and the judge; of the political speaker and
voter; of the writer and teacher and their public; it forms part of the
liberties for which every man with an idea of truth, and every man
with a pride in the dignity of his soul has fought since the beginning

^ Much the same ground as had been traversed in the Hill-Haldane controversy was
gone over again by the eminent pharmacologist, Sir Henry Dale, in a Presidential
Address to the Royal Society (Nature, 1941, 148, 678; Proc. Roy. Soc, A 1942,
179, 254; B 1942, 130, 248), and the reply to him by the geneticist, C. D. Darlington
(New Statesman, 1941, p. 524). A failure to appreciate the social responsibility of the
scientist as citizen vitiates the otherwise interesting book of J. R. Baker, The Scientific
Life (London, 1942).

^ Nature, 1940, 146, 815. ^ Nature, 1941, 147, 119.

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PURE SCIENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY

of society." Polanyi has elaborated these views in other writings,
including a vigorous attack on Soviet Science,^ in which he takes
issue with the numerous pleas advanced by J. D. Bernal and Lancelot
Hogben in their books for a planned society and a socialised science
and medicine.

Counsel for the defence was the experimental morphologist, C. H.
Waddington. He suggested^ that the word "holy" needed closer
examination, that its use in the editorial had been to signify "eso-
teric," while its use by Polanyi signified "having overwhelming
ethical value." No sensible person would deny the tremendous
ethical value of the scientific method, or indeed of any of the other
basic forms of human experience. But that is not the question. The
question concerns rather its social relevance. Only on account of its
social relevance does the problem of social control arise. Polanyi
spoke of the independence of witness, jury, and judge. "But the
witness," commented Waddington, "the jury, and the judge, turn
their attention to problems presented to them as being socially im-
portant; they are not at liberty to spend the afternoon discussing the
sexual habits of Polynesian worms, or whatever else takes their fancy.
The editors of Nature were, as I understood them, inviting us to
spend more time investigating subjects as banal but as relevant as
crimes. Doubtless it is not altogether easy to preserve scientific
detachment in such matters; and one can expect that what are generi-
cally termed ' powerful interests ' will attempt to influence scientific
statements on matters of social consequence. But Professor Polanyi's
pessimistic assumption that such influences must always be successful
is vitiated by his own example of the persistence of a real and active
legal detachment through many centuries of close contact with the
turbulent forces of history. It may be urged that the law, though
employing the methods of impartiality, is in its content merely the
embodiment of the interests of the most powerful social group, and
in that most important respect unfree; and it can be argued that a
socially directed science, even though free to be critical and objective,
would have its attention fixed down to problems chosen for it by
social forces outside its control. But, speaking as an embryologist of

^ "Rights and Duties of Science" in Manchester School of Economic and Social
Studies, October, 1939, p. 175. Here he joined hands with A. V. Hill, who made a
similar attack, on the occasion of his parliamentary candidature; for this and for my
reply, see New Statesman, 1940, pp. 105, 174, 206. See also M. Polanyi's book, The
Contempt of Freedom (London, 1940).

^ Nature, 1941, 147, 206.

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time: the refreshing river

no cash value to anybody, and addressing a physical chemist of
great industrial importance, I should like to ask if something of this
sort is not true already ? Our civilisation is, to some degree, a society,
and not a mere collection of individuals. Men of science are, again to
some degree only, involved in the social bonds which create society's
coherence. One could only be justified in calling for a less degree of
involvement in those bonds if one disapproved of the society as a
whole, if, for example, one was a revolutionary who wished to stay
outside it so as to overthrow it." And no one could suppose that
this description could apply to Prof Polanyi.

A society and not a mere collection of individuals. Has not science
itself risen to its present position of domination over nature precisely
by virtue of taking social coherence seriously ? Is not modern science
distinguished from primitive forms of science such as alchemy by
the fact that the free publication of results permits of confirmation,
or failure of confirmation, by a thousand observers and experimental-
ists, scattered over the earth's surface, of every race, religion, colour
and creed .^ Does not science strive to perfect the means for the
communicability of human thought about nature? Science is a society
within a society. Its social nature and function are inescapable. Its
holiness, or the reverse, cannot be thought of without considering the
holiness of society as a whole. We shall return later to this question.

Science^ Authority and Freedom.

Here I would interject an extremely important matter to which
C. H. Waddington, in another place,^ has recently drawn attention.
Science, he says, is the most perfect resolution which man has yet
found, of the antinomy between Authority and Freedom. The
structure of human scientific knowledge about the world is never
complete; there is always the possibility that some fundamental
discovery may be made which will require the modification of at
any rate large parts of it. Such was the case with the theories of
Einstein on space and time. Authority in science can never, therefore,
be absolutely secure. It is open to anyone to upset the whole structure
or a large part of it, if he can. And it is part of the spirit of science
that he should try his best to do so. Freedom is therefore secure, but
in so far as the greater part of scientific knowledge is solidly established,
and therefore has a certain Authority^ Freedom becomes indeed the

^ The Scientific Attitude (Penguin Books, London, 1941), p. 93.

9<5

PURE SCIENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY

Knowledge of Necessity.^ These considerations have an important
bearing on the concept of the ideal human society. It ought to be so
rationally constructed, based so soundly on the ascertained nature
and needs of human beings, that though it would be open to anyone
to question the foundations of it, or of a large part of it, the chances
of the substantiation of a need for a radical reconstruction of it would
be extremely small. Since it is only by the scientific method that such
a society could be formed in the first place, we see a further significance
in the phrase "scientific socialism" adopted by the earliest exponents
of marxist theory. The phrase was used because this form of socialism
was based, not on Utopian hopes, but on a conviction of the continuity
of social with biological evolution, and hence a conviction of the
inevitability of higher forms of social organisation than those we
now possess. But it acquires a further significance when we realise
that the society of the future must be one so founded on reason that
its rulers can afford tlie luxury, hitherto unattained by any rulers, of
being open to conviction. A rational social system, as the world co-
operative commonwealth would be, would have nothing to fear from
the upwelling of its own irrational contradictions, but would be open,
just as the system of science is to-day, to proposals for change. Let
any comer better the system, if he can.

Let us now return to the historical origins of science in western
Europe, and particularly to the seventeenth century, the age of the
foundation of the Royal Society, from whose archives A. V. Hill
fetched his useful phrase.

The political background of the early Royal Society.

Modern historical research has established beyond question that
the great movement of science which, though extending back
into the fifteenth century, achieved its most magnificent victories
and attained its maximum rate of progress in the seventeenth,
was one of a number of vast social processes all taking place
at about the same time. The transition from the period of
mediaeval stagnation in science paralleled the economic transition
from feudal, social and economic forms to those of capitalism,
and this involved a general shift of emphasis from agricultural

^ Is it not interesting that we find in early Chinese thought a premonition of this ?
In tlie Kuan-tze, a philosophical work of about loo B.C. (ch. i8) we find: "The sage
follows after things, in order that he may control them." (Sheng-rjeng ying chih, ku
nang ch'ang chih.)

97 G

time: the refreshing river

production in small closed communities to industrial production
in large open ones. The country declined in importance and
the cities rose to power. The dominance of an aristocracy based
on land ownership gave place to the dominance of a merchant society
based on the possession of monetary wealth and the power to employ
it in profitable enterprises. To these changes in the world of daily
life there corresponded changes in the world of ideas, of philosophy
and theology, and here the transition was represented by the Reforma-
tion and all that that implied. Merit, formerly acquired by the con-
templative life, was now to be gained by the active life of service (not
without reasonable material recompense) to one's fellow-men. Wealth
ceased to be a sign of diabolic favour and became a sign rather of the
favour of God. The protestant and puritan movement was revolu-
tionary not only in theology, but in public life too. The right of
christian people to rebel against unchristian tyrants was invoked in
the cause of protestantism, as by Bishop John Ponnet.^ The soldier-
preachers of the Parliament's Army in the civil war period began by
finding no warrant in scripture for bishops or presbyters; they went
on to find no warrant there for landlords either. The mediaeval
restrictions on usury stood in the way of the new economic progress;
if some of the finest scholars and writers of Caroline England, such as
Jeremy Taylor and Lancelot Andrewes, stood in the way, so much

the worse for them.

It is almost unnecessary to ask on what side stood the protagonists
of that young giant awaking from his sleep, the scientific movement
itself. They were almost to a man associated with the progressive
social trend of protestantism. Miall, in his classical book on the lives
of the early naturalists, has shown the great preponderance of pro-
testants among the botanists and zoologists of the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries.^ Only one of the men who came together
in the year 1649 to discuss scientific subjects and make co-opera-
tive scientific experiments, in what was then known as the "Invisible
College" and afterwards became the Royal Society, was of royalist
affiliations, the physician, Charles Scarborough. And he was person-
ally connected with the only scientist of first-class importance in the
English seventeenth century, who was more or less on the royalist
side, namely the great William Harvey, physician to King Charles I.

1 A Short Treatise of Politique Power (1556), the first book the Parliament reprinted
in their propaganda campaign of 1642.

* L. C. Miall, The Early Naturalists; their lives and work (London, 19 12).

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PURE SCIENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY

In an important monograph, R. K. Merton has conclusively shown
that the affiliations of all the early Royal Society Fellows, with very
few exceptions, were with the protestant and parliamentary side.^

In the light of facts such as these, the statement quoted by A. V.
Hill is to be seen in a rather different light. The early Fellows of the
Royal Society were no doubt, as a body, desirous of taking no par-
ticular political line, but that does not mean that individually they
had no political sympathies. There is significance in their meeting-
places, first at Oxford, then at Gresham College in London, and later
their close connection with Cambridge, the home of their greatest
ornament, Isaac Newton. The University of Oxford, where they met
first, and where a marked group of scientific men had gathered, was
not definitely royalist, as it became during the civil war. Posts there
were later taken from their holders and given to royalist supporters;
thus William Harvey was made Warden of Merton, but wisely rode
out over Shotover Hill with the retreating royalist army when Oxford
finally fell to the Parliament's arms. In London, Gresham College
had been founded by one of the most famous of London's six-
teenth century financiers. Sir Thomas Gresham, a member of my own
Cambridge College, Caius. He established there professors of such
useful sciences as astronomy, geography, navigation, and the like,
with the avowed intention of training the technicians required by the
new expanding capitalist enterprises. His school at Holt in Norfolk
could take care of less advanced education. And his third foundation,
the Royal Exchange, had a connection with the power of the City
which needs no emphasis. That the movement of science passed from
Oxford before the civil war to Cambridge afterwards is also interesting,
for Cambridge had been almost wholly on the progressive, revolu-
tionary, puritan, parliamentary side. Only two colleges sent plate to
the King's treasurer, and that had been neatly recovered before it
ever reached him. Cambridge w^as the headquarters of the Eastern
Counties Association, the backbone of the parliamentary army before
the establishment of the New Model. It was held for Parliament
throughout the war.^ What manner of men accepted posts in the
University under the revolutionary auspices may be seen by such
examples as Benjamin Whichcote and William Dell.

^ R. K. Merton, "Science, Technology and Society in seventeenth century England"
in Osiris, 1938, 4, 360.

^ Cf. Cambridge during the Civil War by F. J. Varley (Cambridge, 1935), and East
Anglia and the Civil War by A. Kingston (London, 1897).

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time: the refreshing river

Benjamin Whichcote, a gentle Neo-Platonist, made Provost of
King's, proceeded to divide his salary in half and share it with the
extruded royalist. William Dell, made Master of Caius, used his
opportunities for urging a vast extension of educational facilities, at
that time unheard of. He believed that the Universities should banish
the classics, and teach rather "logic and mathematics, but especially
arithmetic, geometry, geography, etc., which as they carry no
wickedness in them, so are they besides very useful to human society.'*
He also wrote against the monopoly of learning by Cambridge and
Oxford, suggesting that it would be "more advantageous to the good
of all the people, to have universities or colleges, one at least, in every
great town or city in the nation, as in London, York, Bristol, Exeter,
Norwich, and the like; and for the State to allow these Colleges an
honest and competent maintenance, for some godly and learned men
to teach the tongues and arts there, under a due reformation." After
the Restoration, Dell retired to the country, and did not escape the
following accusations; —

*'He has reported that the King and his followers were like
the Devil and his angels, and has approved the murder of the
late King, and the taking away of the House of Lords. He has
entrapped the gentry of the county into discourses and then
given information against them. He has declared in the public
congregation that he had rather hear a plain country man speak
in the church, that came from the plough, than the best orthodox
minister that was in the country; upon Christmas Day last, one
Bunyan, a tinker, was countenanced and suffered to speak in
his pulpit to the congregation, and no orthodox minister did
officiate in the church that day. Since the restoration of the
expelled members of parliament he has declared that the power
was now in the hands of the wicked, and that the land was like
to be flowed over again with popery. He has put forth several
seditious books, and before the horrid murder of the late King
he declared publicly to his congregation that the King was no
king to him; Christ was his King; Venice and Holland were
without earthly kings; why might not we be without.^ and that
he did not approve of earthly kings."

Not bad for a Master of a College.

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PURE SCIENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY

Science and Society in the English Revolution.

But to return to the Royal Society. That the first meetings of it
took place about 1649 is a remarkable historical coincidence. For that
was the year which, after the execution of the King in January, saw
during the summer the lightning campaign in which Cromwell and
Ireton, with their praetorian guard of dependable troops, put down,
at the battle of Burford, the armed attempt of the Parliamentary
Army's left wing, the Levellers, to attain power in order to implement
the Agreement of the People. Here we cannot tell the story of those
remarkable days.^ The Agreement, though hot what we should regard
to-day as a socialist document, was a great deal beyond anything that
the eighteenth or even the nineteenth centuries achieved.

The Levellers comprised, besides their military wing, at one time
dominant over all other feeling in the army, a civilian, pacifist, wing,
known as the Diggers. Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of this group,
which mainly devoted its efforts to the initiation of co-operative
farming, a venture which did not succeed owing to opposition both
local and central, was clearly aware of the importance of science, the
"new or experimental philosophy," for social welfare. This is shown
by his books A New Year's Gift to the Parliament and the Army;
The Law of Freedom in a Platform, and The True Leveller's Standard
Advanced, all published about the year 1650.^

Winstanley discusses science in relation to religious services,
which in those days were a medium for the dissemination of news
and popular education as well as for public worship.

"If the earth were set free," he said, "from kingly bondage,
so that every one might be sure of a free livelihood, and if this
liberty were granted, then many secrets of God and his works
in Nature would be made public, which men do nowadays keep
secret to get a living by; so that this kingly bondage is the cause
of the spreading of ignorance in the earth. But when the Com-
monwealth's freedom is established, then will knowledge cover
the earth as the waters cover the seas, and not until then. He
who is chosen minister for the year shall not be the only man
to make sermons or speeches (on the day of rest from labour);

^ See The Levellers and the English Revolution by Henry Holorenshaw (London,

1939)-

- The collected writings of this great Englishman have just been published by Prof.

G. Sabine in the U.S.A., and a selected edition will, it is hoped, appear in this country

under the editorship of Mr. L. Hamilton.

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time: the refreshing river

but everyone who has any experience and is able to speak of
any art or language, or of the nature of the heavens above or
of the earth below, shall have free liberty to speak when they
offer themselves and in a civil manner desire an audience; yet
he who is the reader for the year may have his liberty to speak
too, but not to assume all power to himself, as the proud and
ignorant clergy have done, who have bewitched all the world
by their subtle covetousness and pride. And every one who
speaks of any herb, plant, art, or nature of mankind, is required
to speak nothing by imagination, but what he has found out
by his own industry and observation in trials [experiments].
And thus to speak, or thus to read, the law of Nature (or God)
as He hath written His name in every body, is to speak the truth
as Jesus Christ spake it, giving to everything its own weight
and measure. 'Aye, but' saith the zealous but ignorant professor
[of religion], 'this is a low and carnal ministry indeed. This leads
men to know nothing but the knowledge of the earth, and the
secrets of Nature; but we are to look after spiritual and heavenly
things.' I answer, to know the secrets of Nature is to know the
works of God, and to know the works of God within the^
creation is to know God himself, for God dwells in every visible
work or body. And indeed, if you would know spiritual things,
it is to know how the Spirit or Power of Wisdom and Life,
causing motion or growth, dwells within and governs both the
several bodies of the stars and planets of the heavens above,
and the several bodies of the earth below; as grass^ plants, fishes,
beasts, birds, and mankind; for to know God beyond the creation,
or to know what he will do to a man after the man is dead, if
any otherwise than to scatter him into his essences of fire, water,
earth, and air, of which he is compounded; is a knowledge
beyond the line or capacity of man to attain to while he yet
lives in his compounded body."^

This wonderful passage demonstrates that even among a true repre-
sentative of the people (for Winstanley was not of middle-class origin,
like most of the early scientists) a clear understanding of the social
importance of science could be found. Both Winstanley and the early
Fellows of the Royal Society, good puritans, gave as their conscious
motive the study of the works of God.

' Works, Sabine edn. (Cornell, 1941), p. 564.

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PURE SCIENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY

I shall give two other instances of the close connection between
revolutionary politics in the seventeenth century and strongly pro-
gressive ideas in science. Puritans coupled intense scorn for "jejune
Peripatetick Philosophy" (i.e. the outworn Aristotelianism) with
admiration for "mechanical knowledge." Noah Biggs, a staunch
puritan, wrote a book entitled Mataeotechnia Medicinae Praxeos
(165 1), dedicated to Parliament and Cromwell, and calling on its title-
page for "a thorough reformation of the whole art of physick." He
put his finger on the right spot in asking "Wherein do the Univer-
sities contribute to the promotion or discovery of truth? Where have
we anything to do with Mechanicall Chymistrie, the handmaid of
Nature, that hath outstript the other sects of philosophy, by her
multiplied real experiences } Where is there an examination and con-
secution of Experiments } encouragements to a new world of know-
ledge, promoting new Inventions.^ where have we constant reading
upon either quick or dead Anatomies ? or an ocular demonstration of
Herbs } Where a Review of the old Experiments and Traditions and
a casting out of the rubbish that has pestered the Temple of
Knowledge.^"

So also that remarkable man, Marchamont Needham. From 1643
to 1647 he edited the newspaper of Parliament, in opposition to the
royalist newspaper edited by Sir Roger I'Estrange. He then started a
new paper, more royalist in tone, for which he has often been con-
demned by subsequent writers as a turncoat, but when the facts are
closely examined, it is seen that this was just the time when Cromwell
and indeed all parties were trying to get the King to come to some
compromise. The change was thus more apparent than real, as is
further shown by the violence with which the new paper attacked
the Presbyterian Scots, even before they had invaded England to
restore the King. After the King's death and the establishment of
Cromwell as Protector, Needham threw off conciliatory masks and
published The Case of the Commonwealth of England Stated, in which
he showed himself almost the only writer then living who fully
understood that he was in a revolutionary period. For the rest of
the Commonwealth period he continued to edit the Parliament's
newspaper, in co-operation with John Milton. But now, at the
Restoration, after he had retired from public life, and taken up again
the practice of medicine, he produced his Medulla Medicinae (1665).
In this book he made an intensive attack on the old-fashioned reliance
on Galenic or herbal remedies in therapy, thus aligning himself with

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time; the refreshing river

the followers of Paracelsus, such as Thomas Willis and Thomas
Dover, who did in the end succeed in introducing into the pharma-
copoeia such valuable drugs as antimony, mercury, alum, bismuth,
and other "chymical" remedies. Even in this latter part of his life
Needham was a storm-centre; of the drug controversy he wrote,
"Four champions were employed by the Colledge of Physicians to
write against this book; two died shortly afterwards, the third took
to drink, and the fourth asked my pardon publicly, confessing that
he was set on by the brotherhood of that confederacy!"

What of the Restoration? It is often misunderstood. Though
accompanied by repressive measures, no doubt, against the William
Dells and the Needhams and Winstanleys, it was a restoration, not
of the absolute Stuart monarchy, but an instauration of something
very different, something that was soon to become, in so far as it
was not already, a constitutional government in which the King
would govern, if he governed at all, by the grace of the bourgeoisie
embodied in the power of the City of London. It was, in fact, a
compromise, or perhaps a dialectical synthesis arising out of the
former deadlock. When Monk called on old retired Fairfax at his
home in Yorkshire in 1660, "My Lord told him his mind, that there
was no peace or settlement to be expected in England, but by a free
Parliament and upon the old foundation of Monarchy." Though the
Parliament's dead may have turned in their graves to see a King at
Whitehall again, they need have had little anxiety. It was not what
they had expected, but it was quite different from what they had
destroyed. The English revolution had done what all successful social
revolutions do, it had gone two steps forward and only one step
back. The bourgeoisie was now in power. Hence the royal patronage
extended to the scientists in their labours, labours which, as almost
anyone could see, would be for "the improvement of trade and
husbandry." It was their own phrase.

This close association of the early Royal Society with practical
industrial development has puzzled many later writers, but it is
now a well-known story, and has even had special books, such as
that of G. N. Clark,^ devoted to it. "The noise of mechanick imple-
ments," wrote Bishop Thomas Sprat,^ the Royal Society's first
historian, "resounds in Whitehall itself" It would not have done so
in a Caroline court. So, too, about the same time, science in education,

^ Science and Social Welfare in the Age of Newton (Oxford, 1937).

^ History of the Royal Society (London, 1670, often reprinted, e.g. 1722).

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PURE SCIENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY

urged by the great Comenius, became respectable. "I have often
thought it a great error, wrote Bishop Burnet, "to waste young gentle-
men's years so long in learning Latin by so tedious a grammar. I know
those who are bred to the professions in literature, must have the
Latin correctly. . . . But suppose a youth had, either for want of
memory or application, an incurable aversion to Latin, his education
is not for that to be despair'd of; there is much noble knowledge to
be had in the English and French languages; geography, history,
chiefly that of our own country, the knowledge of Nature, and the
more practical parts of the Mathematicks . . . may make a gentleman
very knowing, tho' he has not a word of Latin."

But long before, in Francis Bacon's writings, that great man born
out of due time and languishing in an age just before the dawn, there
were constant indications of the practical outlook. In Valerius
Terminus^ for example: "And therefore it is not the pleasure of
curiosity, nor the quiet of resolution, nor the raising of the spirit, nor
the victory of wit, nor faculty of speech, nor lucre of profession, nor
ambition of honour or fame, nor inablement for business, that are
the true ends of knowledge; . . . but it is a restitution and re-investing
(in great part) of man to the sovereignty and power (for whensoever
he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names he shall again
command them), which he had in his first state of creation." And later,
"The dignity of this end, the endowment of man's life with new
commodities, appeareth by the estimation that antiquity made of such
as guided thereunto. For whereas founders of states, law-givers,
extirpers of tyrants, fathers of the people, were honoured but with
the titles of Worthies or Demigods, inventors were ever consecrated
among the Gods themselves." And again, in the Filum Labyrinthi^
"He [Bacon himself] saw plainly, that this mark, namely invention of
further means to endow the condition and life of man with new
powers or works, was almost never yet set up and resolved in man's
intention and enquiry."

These passages, among many others which could be quoted,
though indicating the traces of magical ideas which existed in the
Baconian concept of foolproof inductive methods, abundantly show
how central was his emphasis on the improvement of the lot of
mankind which science would achieve. A lonely figure, the "Bell that
called the Wits together" rang with very good effect. And the close
association of the Royal Society with trade and husbandry lasted on

1 Works, ed. Ellis & Spedding, p. i88. ^ Ibid., p. 208.

time: the refreshing river

into the eighteenth century, until a new economic situation and new
imperial conquests brought a new equilibrium of classes in which the
Royal Society turned its attention rather to "pure" science. Then the
centre of gravity of applied science shifted to the north, where the
"Lunar Society" at Birmingham, and certain Scottish groups, took
up the tale.

Evidently, there is a great deal more in the proposal of the
Fellows of 1663 not to "meddle with morals or politics" than
meets the eye.

So much by way of commentary on the case of Hill v. Haldane. We
may now consider the case of Polanyi v. Waddington. What exactly
do we mean by pure science.'^

The Meaning of Pure Science.

Everyone agrees that the essence of science is the spirit of free
enquiry. Science is, as Polanyi says, a body of valid ideas about Nature.
The basic test of scientific truth is whether or not it fits in with the
total body of scientific concepts which has grown up through centuries
of human effort. The first necessity, when a new group of facts has
been established by competent workers armed with the appropriate
techniques, and duly confirmed, is to elaborate some hypothesis
linking it up in a rational way with the existing body of scientific
knowledge. The predictability of events is taken as justification for
the belief that through the centuries science is approximating more
and more closely to truth. Science is autonomous in that certain
modes of reasoning are entirely foreign to it, and ethically neutral in
that natural phenomena are unaffected by our desires. They represent
what is, irrespective of what we think ought to be.

But science does not exist in a vacuum. It is essentially a product
of society, and the communism of its co-operating observers is but a
prefiguration of that economic and social solidarity which humanity
is destined to achieve. The social background of science influences it
in many ways. Among the most important of these are the factors
which stimulate the interest of a scientist at a given moment in history
in one direction rather than another. Out of the infinity of possible
problems which he might attack, he does in fact attack only a certain
problem since life is short and the art long. The history of science
abounds in illustrations of this, starting from primitive examples
such as the origin of alchemy in the search for the Pill of Immortality
in China and the Philosopher's Stone in the West, to the factors in

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PURE SCIENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY

seventeenth-century economic life, which, as Hessen^ showed in a
classical essay, directed the attention of Newton into specific channels.
Works such as those of Singer,^ Pledge,^ and Crowther* give many
more such instances. Genetics, to pass to biology, did not originate out
of pure rationalistic thought of Greek type, but in close association
with problems of plant breeding, in the garden of an abbey. Nor are
the departments of science themselves in watertight compartments;
the observations of botanists gave rise to the physical chemistry of
membrane permeability, and the study of monomolecular films
would perhaps never have arisen without the biochemistry of lipoidal
materials.

The fears expressed regarding pure science really imply that social
forces external to scientists may attempt to confine their activities to
"applied" problems of short-term scope. Were this to happen any-
where it would indeed be a calamity. It would be killing the goose
that lays the golden eggs. The development of scientific thought,
proceeding according to its own inner logic, and free to direct its
attention to whatever facts may seem relevant, is the only guarantee
that discoveries of fundamental importance to humanity will be made.
Societies which sought to save their life by narrow scientific concen-
tration on short-term problems, would certainly lose it. But this
attitude is to be found neither in the democracies nor in that bugbear
of Polanyi's, the Soviet Union. We may illustrate the Russian marxist
policy in these matters by one very striking example, namely the
support which has been given in Russia to the sciences of experi-
mental morphology and embryology. These subjects are of quite
fundamental importance for biological thought since they elucidate
the laws of the coming-into-being of organisms, the fixation of fates,
the morphogenetic hormones, the onset of differentiation by function,
etc., etc. But they stand at the furthest remove from likely practical
applications, either in war or peace. The two countries where they
were most extensively studied, up to about 1920, were America (for
invertebrates) and Germany (for vertebrates) ; England, unfortunately,
has never had a vigorous embryological tradition. But during the past
ten years these important subjects have almost ceased to exist in
Germany, while Russia, building on substantial previous foundations,

1 B. Hessen, "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia" in Science
at the Cross-roads (Kniga, London, 1931).

2 C. Singer, A Short History of Science (Oxford, 1941).
^ H. T. Pledge, Science since l5oo (London, 1939).

* J. G. Crowther, The Social Relations of Science (London, 1941).

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time: the refreshing river

has more than taken Germany's place, and America has benefited by
a large number of first-rate morphologists exiled from Germany.

Again, fears have sometimes been entertained that the sciences of
evolution, palaeontology and the like, would suffer in a socialist
society. But in point of fact, they have a fundamentally important use,
the construction and elaboration of that true world-view on which
"scientific socialism" determined to base itself, apart from the fact
that they are inextricably intertwined with matters of practical use in
the ordinary sense. Thus the school of geochemistry for which Russia
is famous, headed by Vernadsky,i helped to reveal the course of the
earth's evolution as well as the sites of mineral resources. And the
unrivalled collection of cultivated plant varieties from all over the
world made by the school of Vavilov,^ threw much light on the pre-
historic origin and development of agriculture as well as providing
unfamiliar and desirable types of plant for practical cultivation.

All this is a remarkable commentary on Polanyi's fear that "pure"
science has been banished from marxist Russia.^ It is a fear without
rational basis.

There is really no distinction between "pure" and "applied" science.
The common distinction between science "for its own sake," and
science "for its practical usefulness" is unsound.^ Human motivations

^ See W. Vernadsky, La Biosphere (Paris, 1929).

2 Now (1942) a Foreign Member of the Royal Society.

^ A few further words may be added regarding the attacks of Hill and Polanyi on
Soviet science. One may grant them that the language of editors of Soviet periodicals
has been uninhibited and lacking in old-world courtesy. One cannot but regret the
difficulties which individual scientists may have got tliemselves into with the Soviet
government, altlaough in the absence of the full facts, any decision on such matters is
difficult. One cannot defend the lesser degree of individual liberty which is thought to
have prevailed in the Soviet Union during the past twenty years, except by pointing
out that the period of dictatorship of the proletariat involved methods of defence
unnecessary in the older democratic countries. Such methods were employed in the
belief that the Soviet Union would probably be attacked by the fascist powers, a belief
now shown to have been only too well founded. Polanyi draws attention to the con-
troversies in the Soviet Union on genetics and psycho-analysis. For the formei: the reader
is referred to an article (Modern Quarterly, 1938, 1, 369) which shows that far too much
has been made of the genetics controversy in this country. As regards psycho-analysis,
the remark said to have been made by a psycho-pathologist is worth quoting. "In Russia,
people can marry whom they like; that would take away half my practice. They can
also divorce whom they like. That would take away the other half." As for Professor
Kapitza, who is represented by Professor Polanyi as a haggard political prisoner, he
has now (1941) received the highest Soviet decorations and has spoken on the radio to
British scientists as the mouthpiece of Soviet physicists.

* Though still maintained by eminent scientists, e.g. A. G. Tansley in the Herbert
Spencer Lecture at Oxford for 1942.

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PURE SCIENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY

are always too mixed. There is really only science with long-term
promise of applications and science with short-term promise of
applications. True knowledge of nature emerges from both kinds
of science.

A few words may be added about the planning of scientific research.
Polanyi, and Baker (in The Scientific Life)^ with their individualist
bias against the modern trend towards more adequate planning, go
about to alarm us of the evils of an excess of it. They would have us
believe that planning is not compatible with "pure," though it may
be with "applied," science. But the positive advantages of planning
are agreed to upon all sides; it is essentially only an extension of
broadly-conceived research programs such as already exist, it is
necessitated by that ever-increasing complexity of research which
demands collaborative methods, and it will facilitate the interrelations
of specialised workers. The kernel of truth in the protests of Baker
and Polanyi is that scientific discovery partakes of the nature of the
creative arts, and that scientists can not guarantee to produce results
to a timetable. Russians, however, are not often accused of lack of
understanding of art and artists. Their scientific planning has indeed,
for the most part, been broadly conceived. Moreover, it ill becomes
the capitalist countries to criticise any growing pains of socialist
planning, for the pressure on the young scientific worker to produce
results at all costs has nowhere been more acute than in some American
institutions, and is far from unknown in England.

Pure Science and Philosophy

Or again, it may be held that scientific research can only be pure
when it is conducted in an atmosphere unpolluted by any particular
philosophy. That the influence of an official state world-outlook,
philosophy, or set of theories can be catastrophically bad for science
is seen from the condition of science under nazism and fascism. The
principle of "race-conditioning" of scientific thought has led to an
infinity of absurdities in the German literature, and to a substantial
fall in productivity in many branches of science, both in bulk and
quality, by the exiling of many of the most distinguished German
scientists. But Soviet Russia also has a philosophy accepted by the
dominant party in the state, that of marxist dialectical materialism. On
the value of this to science, opinions differ. Polanyi and a number
of other British scientists dismiss it as nonsense, though never clearly
stating their objections to it. Some of us, on the other hand, in growing

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time: the refreshing river

number, believe it to embody a world-outlook of great value and to
be capable of providing the working researcher with a reliable guide
to his thought, not indeed telling him what he is likely to find, but
ensuring that when he has found it he shall avoid making the various
kinds of mistakes which builders of scientific theory have often made.
If we look back at the beginnings of the scientific movement in
England and throughout Europe, we see at once that the "founding
fathers" of science were by no means indifferent to philosophy. The
rise of the "new or experimental philosophy" was carried through to
the accompaniment of a furious battle with the surviving representa-
tives of the Aristotelian or scholastic tradition. In order to gain some
understanding of what the early scientific workers were up against,
every student of science to-day should read the Scepsis Scientifica of
Joseph Glanville,^ or the classical essay on this seventeenth-century
struggle by Francis Gotch.^ In the year 1631 a young man delivered
in the Old Schools of Cambridge University, only a stone's throw
from where I write these lines, an "academic prolusion" in the
form of a frontal attack on scholastic philosophy. That young
man was John Milton, later to be Latin or Foreign Secretary of the
Commonwealth of England. The studies of scholastic philosophy,
he said:^

"are as fruitless as they are joyless, and can add nothing
whatever to true knowledge. If we set before our eyes those
hordes of old men in monkish garb, the chief authors of these
quibbles, how many among them have ever contributed anything
to the enrichment of literature ? Beyond a doubt, by their harsh
and uncouth treatment they have nearly rendered hideous that
philosophy which was once courteous, well-ordered, and urbane,
and like evil genii they have implanted thorns and briars in
men's hearts, and introduced discord into the schools, which has
wondrously retarded the progress of our scholars. For these
quick-change philosophasters of ours argue back and forth, one
bolstering up his thesis on every side, another labouring hard

•^ Scepsis Scientifica; or Confest Ignorance the Way to Science, in an essay on the Vanity
of Dogmatising and Confident Opinion by Joseph Glanville, F.R.S. (London, 1661,
reprinted 1885).

^ In Lectures on the Method of Science, ed. T. B. Strong (Oxford, 1906). For other
details on the twilight of Aristotelianism, see my History of Embryology (Cambridge,

1934).

^ John Milton's Private Correspondence and Academic Exercises, tr. P. B. Tillyard,
ed. E. M. W. Tillyard (Cambridge, 1932). The third Prolusion, pp. 67 ff.

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PURE SCIENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY

to eause its downfall, while what one would think firmly es-
tablished by irrefragable arguments is forthwith shattered by an
opponent with the greatest ease. . . ."

In this attack Milton was thus at one with another great patron
saint of the scientific era, the Czech Comenius (Jan Amos Komensky),
who strove through forty years of exile in nearly every European
country for an education based on things and actions, not words
and ideas^ and who was later personally known to Milton when he
visited England in 1641 at the request of Parliament to plan a
reform of our educational system. But we are back in the schools at
Cambridge ten years before. Milton is going on, in his sonorous
Latin, to say;

"How much better were it, gentlemen, and how much more
consonant with your dignity, now to let your eyes wander as it
were over all the lands depicted on the map, and to behold the
places trodden by the heroes of old, to range over the regions
made famous by wars, by triumphs, and even by the tales of
poets of renown, now to traverse the stormy Adriatic, now to
climb unharmed the slopes of fiery Etna, then to spy out the
customs of mankind and those states which are well-ordered;
next to seek out and explore the nature of all living creatures,
and after that to turn your attention to the secret virtues of
stones and herbs. And do not shrink from taking your flight
into the skies and gazing on the manifold shapes of the clouds,
the mighty piles of snow, and the source of the dews of the
morning; then inspect the coflfers wherein the hail is stored and
examine the arsenals of the thunderbolts. And do not let the
intent of Jupiter or of Nature elude you, when a huge and
fearful comet threatens to set the heavens aflame, nor let the
smallest star escape you of all the myriads which are scattered
and strewn between the poles; yes, even follow close upon the
sun in all his journeys, and ask account of time itself and demand
the reckoning of its eternal passage."

In such a sublime manner did the spokesmen of the scientific move-
ment inaugurate their plan. What was inconsistent with its free

^ Cf. the volume published on the occasion of the Tercentenary of Comenius' visit
to England — The Teacher of Nations, with essays by President Bene§, J. L. Paton,
J. D. Bemal, Ernest Barker and others (Cambridge, 1942).

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time: the refreshing river

development had to go; and the AristoteHan concepts of causation,
of the four elements, of form and matter, of qualities and entities;
the Galenic concepts of virtues and humours, were inconsistent with
it. It was no chance that science was called then and for long after-
wards, "natural philosophy." But we have litde reason for supposing
that any improvement on the philosophy which grew up with the
scientific movement is now for ever impossible.

One thing at least is clear; it is impossible for a scientist to have
no philosophy at all. The freer from it he thinks he is, the more
surely he is in the grip of some unconscious system, perhaps a garbled
form of idealism which he received as a virus in the milk of the religion
on which he was nourished as a child.^ Purity of science in this sense
is an illusion. In the christian western democracies, theological ideal-
isms of various kinds have long overlain the materialism of primitive
Christianity. One might almost take leave to doubt whether the
philosophy of dialectical materialism is more dominating in the minds
of Soviet scientists, than the mystical idealism of Sir Arthur Eddington
and Sir James Jeans in the minds of British scientists who firmly
believe themselves to have no philosophy at all. But if one must
have a philosophy, let it be a good one, congruent with the scientist's
experience of nature. The dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels,
the organic mechanism of Whitehead,^ the emergent evolutionism of
Lloyd-Morgan^ and Smuts,* the temporal realism of Alexander,^ the
evolutionary naturalism of Sellars,^ and many other writers; all these

^ Cf. the words of Engels:

"Scientists imagine that they can free themselves from philosophy by ignoring
or disdaining it. But as they are unable to move a step without tliought, and thought
demands logical definitions, the only result is that they take these definitions
uncritically either from the current ideas of so-called educated people, dominated
by hang-overs from philosophical systems long since decayed, or else from their
random and uncritical reading of all kinds of philosophical works. In fact, they
prove themselves the prisoners of philosophy, but unfortunately on most occasions,
of philosophy of die worst sort. Thus while they are most violent in their contempt
for philosophy they become the slaves of the most vulgarised relics of the worst
philosophical systems." (Dialectics of Nature, Gesamtausgabe edition, Moscow,
1935, P- 624.)
^ See another essay in this book, p. 178.

^ Gifford Lectures, Emergent Evolution and Life, Mind and Spirit (London, 1923
and 1926). It is interesting that Lenin in his Materialism and Empiric-Criticism {Works, 11,
p.* 244), approved of Lloyd-Morgan's earlier work, in which he attacked the Machian,
Karl Pearson.

* Holism and Evolution (London, 1926).
^ Space, Time and Deity (London, 1927).
^ Evolutionary Naturalism (Chicago, 1922).

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PURE SCIENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY

have much help to give to the scientific worker and tlie greatest of
them is the first.^

Political Distortions of Scientific Ideas.

There is one sense, however, in which the scientific worker should
be perpetually on his guard as to the purity of science. Every form of
human activity which has elaborated a theoretical structure has had
this theoretical structure systematically distorted as part of the ex-
ploitation of all ideas in the interests of dominant classes. The history
of theology, for example, shows the emphasis laid on pietistic and
other-worldly conceptions, an emphasis much to the advantage of
those who were doing very well out of this world and were determined
to do better. Hence the condemnation of religion as the opium of the
people — not a new idea at all, but clearly expressed by Gerrard
Winstanley and Richard Overton^ in seventeenth-century England. So
also historians of the Roman religion of pre-christian times, such as
B. Farrington,^ have elucidated the class elements in the opposition of
the Epicureans to the superstitious beliefs and rites cynically imposed
by governments of wealthy sceptics. This is indeed quite explicit in
Cicero's De Natura Deorum.^ Was not the doctrine of original sin
also of use to the governing class? Did it not, by suggesting a
fundamental hopelessness regarding the improvement of human
society, insinuate that the masses would never learn to rule them-
selves ,''

So it has been with ideas of a scientific order. Among the oldest
of these is the comparison between the social organism and a living
biological organism. The social organism was supposed to have also
its brain, its belly and its legs. And just as the upper parts of the body,
the brain, the organs in the thorax, etc., were supposed to be nobler
and more honourable than those in the viscera or limbs, so obviously,
it was argued, there must always be some classes of society possessing
honours and privileges, while there must always be others deprived
of them. The attribution of ethical superiority to some of the organs
of the body is so strange an idea in itself that it must surely be regarded

^ Perhaps the best discussions of the help given to biological thinking by dialectical
materialism are in the contributions of H. J. MuUer and J. Schaxel to the Lenin Memorial
Volume of the Moscow Academy of Science (1934).

2 Mans Mortalities 1643.

^ Modem Quarterly, 1938, 1, 214.

* English translation, London, 1896.

113 H

time: the refreshing river

as the physiological reflection of an already existing class structure of
society. Such ideas are found in Aristotle and Plato, with the added
notion that to the three sorts of soul (the vegetative, the sensitive,
and the rational) there must correspond three groups of men in social
life. Shakespeare made use of this doctrine in the opening act of
Coriolanus^ where the First Citizen is compared with society's big
toe. Here is an urbane statement of the same idea by a seventeenth-
century divine, George Hickes, Dean of Worcester. "Civil equality is
morally impossible, because no commonwealth, little or great, can
subsist without poor. They are necessary for the establishment of
superiority and subjection within human societies, where there must
be members of dishonor as well as honor, and some to serve and obey,
as well as others to command. The poor are the hands and feet of the
body politick . . . who hew the wood and draw the water of the rich.
They plow our lands, and dig our quarries and cleanse our streets,
nay those who fight our battels in the defence of their country are
the poor soldiers. . . . But were all equally rich there would be no
subordination, none to command nor none to serve."

There is nothing wrong with the idea that society is an organism.
But it is an organism of far higher grade than any of the biological
individual organisms, and hence the biologist must even to-day be on
his guard against the crude taking over of biological ideas in the
service of the ruling class. The Victorians were interested in the
analogy. Herbert Spencer, in his Sociology^ elaborated it in much
detail, not even hesitating to refer to the peasant class of a human
community as its endoderm-cells, and to the military class as its
ectoderm. Executive scribes corresponded to the central nervous
system and the king's council to the spinal medulla. All such analogies
tremble on the verge of absurdity, and fall to the ground because
man in his societies constitutes a higher level of organisation and
complexity than anything else met with in the living or non-living
world. The possession of consciousness and communication bet^^en
individuals in a highly developed state, and especially the use of tools
in the processes of production, mark off human society as a higher
level than biology, just as biology itself deals with systems more
highly organised than those of physics and chemistry. Herbert Spencer,
however, was aware of the dangers of biological analogies applied to
human affairs. So also was Walter Bagehot, in his Physics and Politics^
which treads on the same ground. And in our own time the physio-

^ (London, 1872.)
IT4

PURE SCIENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY

legist W. B. Cannon^ has shown how the analogy can be safely and
fruitfully handled.

Not so certain modern writers, however, such as Morley Roberts,
whose book Bio-Politics^ is an outstanding example of the fallacy or
distortion here discussed. It will long remain a museum of absurdities.
Compare "the action of a national press as a powerful secreting organ
needs no demonstration" with "in the organisation of the reticulo-
endothelial system it is impossible not to see deep social analogues in
the police, the seamen and the soldiery of a nation." Or, still better;
"All cells with a nucleus possess tools and weapons with which they
do their work. These biochemical tools I have no hesitation in de-
scribing as their property. I commend these notions to the legal
profession if they should be hard pressed to defend the descent and
inheritance of property." (Very candid.) Or again; "Capital is a
natural phenomenon and cannot be abolished till we abolish physiology
and physics. What begins in nature in the egg will continue so long
as eggs are laid." (Loud and prolonged applause from the Right.
And all this a hundred years after the work of Marx, Veblen, George,
Engels and many others on the analysis of property and capital.)
Fascist philosophers such as Spann also argue in this way. But the
attempt to justify class robbery, oppression, social injustices and war
by conferring upon them unimpeachable scientific authority will
never succeed.

A second important case of the distortion of scientific theory for
specific political ends is, of course, tliat of Darwinism. The principle
of natural selection necessarily implied a struggle for existence among
animal species competing for food and reproductive facilities, and also
among the individuals in any one species. It is no criticism of this
theory to point out, as Engels did, that it was the reflection on to the
animal world of the competitive conditions prevailing in the economic
world of nineteenth-century capitalism. In the animal world it hap-
pened to be to a large extent true, and the principle of natural selection
is to-day held to account very substantially, if not entirely, for the
phenomena of organic evolution. The obvious conclusion was that if
competitive capitalism was so like the sub-human world, that was

^ The Body as a Guide to Politics (London, 1942). He compares the constancy of the
physiological internal environment with that social stability in employment and com-
modity-exchange, combined with individual freedom, which we have not yet attained.
See also Science, 1941, 93, i.

^ London, 1938.

time: the refreshing river

just too bad for competitive capitalism. Like the dinosaurs, it was
getting a little out of date.

All this, however, was quite beyond the grasp of most Victorian
writers and thinkers. All they could see was that the struggle for
existence was, as they would have put it, the universal law of life,
and that the more red in tooth and claw life could be made in the
industrial areas, the more would human civilisation benefit. In other
words, the struggle for existence supplied the grandest argument
yet available for the necessity of laissei-faire capitalism. While it
lasted, the going was good, but inconvenient critics such as Kropotkin,
in his Mutual Aid, demonstrated the large part played in evolution
by animal associations including the colonial hymenoptera. Drummond
traced the origins of altruism back to the beginnings of the family
and the factors involved in primitive reproduction. Darwin himself,
though emphasising the competition between species and individuals,
had not overlooked the co-operative element. In his Descent of Man}-
he said, "Those communities which included the greatest number of
the most sympathetic members would flourish best and rear the
greatest number of offspring." And as for human society, Marx and
Engels, by their historical analysis, showed that capitalism had not
always existed, and that there was no reason whatever to think that
free competition in exploitation of commodities and labour was more
than a stage in man's evolution towards a planned and rationally
controlled society.

A third case of systematic distortion and falsification of scientific
ideas would be found in the whole history of racialistic theories from
Gobineau onwards. While completely contrary to all the most solidly
established scientific knowledge about human beings, these theories
have played an enormous part in the political life of the twentieth
century. We will not further consider them here.

Distortions of science may also occur in the interests of sections
of the ruling class. Thus the patent medicine trade and pseudo-
scientific advertising come to mind. Professor A. J. Clark's exposure^
of the former in 1938 revealed the colossal annual financial turnover
which the business of battening on the people's ill-health achieves;
at that time about equivalent to the national annual public expenditure
on hospitals. Exposures, however, are few, since the patent medicine
trade constitutes the greatest single advertiser in the daily newspapers,
and is therefore in a position to exert overriding influence against the

^ Ch. 4, p. 163. ^ "Patent Medicines," Fact, 1938, No. 14.

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PURE SCIENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY

publication of any criticism, no matter on what scientific authority.
I say this on the basis of first-hand editorial experience. Furthermore,
it is not generally realised what systematic mystification goes on
within important departments of national life such as the chemical
industry. A friend of mine who became an industrial chemist used to
tell me of the code employed by the storekeepers in his firm, in which
every chemical substance which the workmen had to draw from the
store was given a wrong, and if possible, a confusing, name, so as to
avoid at all costs the danger of any trade secret leaking out to a com-
peting firm through the workers employed. On one occasion some
plumbers who were doing a job in the works and drew what they
were told was "rosin" from the store, drew something very different,
with remarkable effects. All these phenomena are not those of a
healthy society.

It is clear, therefore, that one important sense of the phrase "keeping
science pure" is that scientific men should be constantly on their
guard against the distortion of truth for reactionary, political or
economic purposes. I write "reactionary" deliberately. Progressive
political movements have no need to distort it.

The Position of the Scientist in Society.

We return at last, then, to the position of the scientist in society.
He is not only a scientist, but a citizen as well. There has been much
talk (and not uncommonly, in the editorials of Nature), about the
importance of giving the scientist more say in government. The
value of this is not to be denied. But when it is carried further, as in
the views of the "technocrats," and when it is suggested that scientists
should themselves be the rulers of society, the suggestion reveals its
superficiality.^ What has to be decided is the ultimate end for which
society exists. Is it the greatest happiness of the greatest number.'^
The right of every man and woman to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness } The right of the individual to work, food, love, and
opportunity to develop his talents in the common service.^ Or the
military domination of one state or "race" over other peoples, the

^ This was the theme of another controversy in Nature. R. H. F. Finlay (1941, 147,
119) expressed the hope that "scientific instead of party government would prove the
unifier of man, and usher in an era of universal peace." The distinguished entomologist,
V. B. Wigglesworth (1941, 147, 206) hastened to point out that divided counsels are
the very breath of science, which is always growing. It would be a tyranny indeed to
give to the current beliefs of science the force of law.

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time: the refreshing river

perpetuation of a class supremacy and privilege, the regimentation of
a mass of helots for the upkeep of a veneer of oligarchic culture?
The scientist, as administrator, can make administration more efficient.
He cannot take away from humanity the duty of facing up to the
fundamental moral principles. He cannot relieve humanity of the
fundamental moral choice. Only by political action can moral choices
be implemented and political history made.

Science must be set apart from all other beliefs as possessing a
peculiar holiness, wrote Polanyi in the passage quoted above. The
word "holiness" here is really significant. To the court of religion he
has appealed, to the court of religion he shall go.

In one of the most brilliant discussions of the history of religious
ideas known to me, John Lewis described in some detail how through-
out the history of Jewish and christian theology there has been
unceasing strife between the sacred and the secular.^ Prophets arise to
castigate the shortcomings of the social life of the people, to menace
the wealthy exploiters with divine wrath; to demand restitution of
property robbed from the workers, the fatherless and the widows;
and to turn the financiers out of the Temple with a whip of short
cords. But repentance is soon over, the existing economic processes
resume their sway, and the religious ideas of love and equity, never
wholly lost, are stored up in churches under the guardianship of
priests. "Religious emotion," wrote Marx,^ "is, on the one hand, the
expression of actual misery, and on the other, a protest against actual
misery. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the kindliness
of a heartless world, the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the
people's opium. The removal of religion as the illusory happiness of
the people is the demand for its real happiness. The demand that it
should give up illusions about its real conditions is the demand that
it should give up the conditions which make illusions necessary.
Criticism of religion is therefore at heart a criticism of the vale of
misery for which religion is the promised vision."

Criticism of the vale of misery, carried through to its ultimate
point, becomes the demand for a thorough renewal and reconstruction
of society in the interests of rationality and love, interests which
cannot rule under the system of exploitation of man by man in social
classes. When once ownership of the means of production and of all

^ "Communism the Heir to the Christian Tradition" in Christianity and the Social
Revolution (London, 1935).

^ Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law.

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PURE SCIENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY

natural resources is wrested from a class and transferred to the com-
munity, "the relations between human beings in practical everyday-
life would assume the aspect of perfectly intelligible and reasonable
relations as bet^^een man and man, and as betrv^een man and nature."
"The moment this becomes possible," John Lewis goes on, "the
religious institution is confronted with an altogether new crisis.
Hitherto it has stood for an unrealisable ideal, and has alternated
bet^^een secularisation and transcendentalism. It now becomes possible
to enmesh the ideal in the material world without loss.^ So long as
the social and economic organisation was of such a character that it
could not permit the realisation of his ideals, the idealist was steadily
forced to accommodate his principles to its inexorable demands in so
far as he decided to live and work in society and not to dream. On
the other hand, if he determined to keep his ideals intact, then he
could not effectively grapple with reality, and was compelled to
become a hypocrite (making the best of both worlds) or a mystic.
But when social development reaches the stage when ideals are
realisable, the struggle becomes capable of a successful issue. It is not
settled, but it is no longer condemned to futility by the very nature
of the conditions. As a consequence, the whole structure of religion
changes. The ecclesiastical, devotional, and mystical forms proper to
a dualistic period, become obsolete. Religion has been adapted to the
needs of a class society; it must now suffer complete transformation
as the classless world approaches. To some this spells the death of
religion, and 'blank materialism;' to others it is what they had always
sought. The prophet should be able to welcome the new age. Now
at last it will be possible to manifest the will of God in social relations,
and show forth the glory of His purpose in the common ways of life.
In the words of Zechariah^ and Ezekiel:^

'In that day there shall be written upon the bells of the
horses. Holy unto the Lord. . . . Yea, every pot in Jerusalem
shall be holy unto the Lord of Hosts.'

^ The belief that it is possible to enmesh the ideal within the real ^orld, to transform
the real world, is profoundly Christian, but also profoundly Hebrew and profoundly
Confucian. In ancient Chinese writings the sages are frequently said to unite Heaven
and Earth by their virtue (teh, ;^). Apart from magic imdertones, tliis surely means
that by their insight into the nature of human community, they understood how to
enmesh the highest moral good in the real world. As the Ta-shioh says, one must find
the highest moral good and then stop (chih, ([-) there, not going on beyond it or
evading it by sophistical arguments.

^ xiv. 20, 21. 8 xliii. 12.

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time: the refreshing river

*This is the law of the house . . . the whole limit thereof
round about shall be most holy. Behold, this is the law of the
house.'

"The sacred is far from being the 'wholly other'; it is the quality
of the secular raised to its highest power and consecrated to the
noblest purposes. As each part of life is integrated into the social
organism, it finds itself, and takes on the special quality that belongs
to a part of a new whole. On the other hand, transcendentalism
withers away. It is no longer necessary to project into another world
the order, the justice, and the beauty, which we cannot achieve in
this. The life process of society loses its veil of mystery when it
becomes a process carried on by a free association of producers,
under their conscious and purposive control."

I make no apology for quoting this splendid passage at length,
since it perfectly gives the judgment for which we were looking. It
embodies the profoundly christian doctrine that the world is redeem-
able. There is nothing holy but flesh and blood. The essence of our
purpose should be, not so much, as M. Polanyi would have it, to keep
science "holy," but to make the whole of human society holy. This
is only another way of pointing to the high levels of social organisation
to which humanity has yet to climb. At those high levels scientific
truth will be well able to look after itself, since on the foundation of
scientific truth alone can those high levels be built. The scientist, it
was said, is not only a scientist, he is a citizen as well. He must be
a citizen, not only of that temporal nation to which he happens to
belong to-day, but also a citizen of no mean city, the Civitas Dei,
or, if you prefer to call it so, the World Co-operative Commonwealth.

1 20

Thoughts of a Young Scientist on the
Testament of an Elder One

(^John Scott Haldane)

(Based upon an address to the World Congress of Faiths,
1936; later expanded for Fact; and Science and Society, 1937)

All through this century and for some time before it began, the
meetings of the Physiological Society were enlivened and adorned
by the presence of a peculiar stooping figure, whose bushy eyebrows
and moustache hardly concealed a countenance of great charm and
originality. It was John Scott Haldane, one of England's best physi-
ologists, a tireless investigator of the mechanism of respiration, an
acknowledged expert on the conditions of labour in coal-mines, and
a philosopher whose permanent place in the history of biological
theory was long ago assured. Personal contact with him I had none,
but from my earliest undergraduate days I had been nourished on
his work, and warned against his errors by those who did not agree
with him. Those of us who later made a special study of biological
theory had to pass through his books, and, as it were, out at the
other side, before reaching a satisfactory viewpoint. In this way, his
Mechanism^ Life and Personality^ his Materialism and his Philosophical
Basis of Biology were all important books, and like those of Hans
Driesch, had to be fully digested before we earned the right to abjure
for ourselves the name of vitalist.

In 1936, in his 77th year, he died. But some time before, he had
been invited to take part in a World Congress of Faiths by contributing
a paper on science and religion, and this paper he wrote. It was to
be his last writing. And it fell to me to open the discussion on this
paper at the Congress itself, an undertaking which could not be
refused, partly in gratitude for the violent intellectual shocks which
I had received for so many years before from J. S. Haldane, partly
on account of the stimulating nature of this "testament" itself. If, as
will be seen by those who read further, I disagreed profoundly with
what he said, this disagreement was to some extent a disagreement of
generations, for the generation of to-day cannot accept the formu-
lations of the past. Too much has happened since the quiet days of

121

time: the refreshing river

Haldane's pre- 19 14 Oxford. And it seemed to me that to discuss
materialism now in much the same way as it would have been dis-
cussed thirty or even sixty years ago was just unrealistic.

f
Religion and the Forms of Materialism.

Even at the first paragraph I was brought up sharply.^ "To many
persons in modern times," he began, "it seems as if the only reality
is what can be interpreted in terms of the physical sciences, with the
addition, however, that certain physical processes occurring in the
brain are mysteriously accompanied by consciousness, the quality of
which depends on the nature of these processes. This belief is known
as materialism, and for those holding it, religion is necessarily no
more than an illusion based on ignorance." "This belief is known as
materialism." But to speak in this way is to make no distinction
between materialisms, of which there may be more than one. Most
of Haldane's criticism bore against traditional mechanistic or meta-
physical materialism only. Dialectical materialism he in no way
considered.

The character of mechanical materialism is, I suppose, the belief
that all changes in living and non-living objects are ultimately re-
ducible to changes in the position of invisible particles which simply
are?' These particles and their motions are quite independent of our
thought. The degrees of complicatedness in the world are illusory, or
if not illusory, are degrees of complexity only, not of organisation.
All should be reducible to atomic laws. But the essence of dialectical
materialism, on the contrary, is the acceptance of the existence of
diverse levels of complexity and organisation, and the interpretation
of them as successive stages of a world-process the nature of which
is synthetic or dialectical. Order and organisation are fully allowed for.

As far as metaphysics is concerned, many scientists have always
felt a strong disinclination to take up a position in the classical philo-
sophical controversy between realism which asserts the primacy of
the object, and idealism which asserts the primacy of mental cognition.
This controversy seemed uninteresting and academic. They were
loath to make the old sharp distinction of the philosophers between
the world of spirit and the world of matter. After all, for the biologist
there is no strict separation. In animal and human behaviour there is a

^ The full text of J. S. Haldane's paper will be found in the Proceedings of the World
Congress of Faiths, 1936.

^ L. J. Russell's phrase, Aristotelian Society Symposium, 1928,

122

THOUGHTS ON THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN SCOTT HALDANE

unity; the "mental event" cannot really be separated from the
"physical neural event," and it is profitless to try to do so.^ So in the
coming into being of the world as a whole, we should envisage a
unity, as dialectical materialism in fact does. Out of original chaos a
vast flowering of the new has originated, and that is all that can be
said. This point of view can be found already in scholasticism, when
Duns Scotus asked "whether it was impossible for matter to think .^"^
In the seventeenth century Hobbes maintained that it was impossible
to separate matter from matter which thinks. In the eighteenth, we
have that celebrated dialogue of Diderot with d'Alembert.^ They
discuss the development of the sensibility of the chick embryo in its
egg.^ Diderot maintains that one must either admit some "hidden
element" in the egg, penetrating into it in some unknown way at a
certain stage of its development, an element about which we know
nothing, v/hether it occupies space, whether it is material, or whether
it is created independently for each chick (an idea contrary to com-
mon sense and leading to inconsistencies and absurdities) — or one
must make a "simple supposition which explains everything, namely,
that the faculty of sensation is a general property of matter, a pro-
duct of [certain forms of] its organisation." To d'Alembert's
objection that such a supposition implies a quality which is essentially
incompatible with matter, Diderot retorts: "And how do you know
that the faculty of sensation is essentially incompatible with matter.'^
You do not know the essence of anything, neither of matter nor of
sensation."

Dialectical materialism itself may, in a sense, be considered his-
torically as a dialectical synthesis. Classical metaphysical materialism
and idealism were the antitheses which gave rise to a deadlock. The
former was unable to account for any of the higher manifestations
of the human spirit, values, artistic creation, altruism, love. It had

■^ Cf. Pavlov's famous essay on the fusion of the subjective and the objective.
Introspective psychology plus the physiology of conditioned reflexes and other
neurological methods promise at last an understanding of the relations between the mental
and physical levels of organisation (^Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes, London, Vol. I,
p. 39, Vol. II, p. 71). Pavlov had been stimulated by the brilliant insight of a Russian
physiologist of an older generation, I. M. Sechenov, whose Cerebral Reflexes appeared
in 1863 (see Seclienov's Selected Works, English edition, Moscow, 1935).

^ Cf. Engels' exposition of this in, Ludwig Feuerbdch, p. 84,

^ Cf. Lenin's exposition of this in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p. 104.

* The "problem" of the entry of the soul into the embryo is of great antiquity;
see the account of it in my History of Embryology. For an insight into tlie way in which
the development of behaviour in the embryo is treated by modern science, the papers
of Kuo Zing- Yang in the psychological and physiological literature should be consulted.

time: the refreshing river

to be **ascetic" or "misanthropic" in picturing its grey world of
clashing particles. Idealism, on the other hand, always verging on
subjectivism and solipsism, could never be united with the require-
ments of the scientific mind or with progressive social movements.
The difficulty had occurred long before to the scientific philosophers
of the ancient Mediterranean world, to Epicurus and Lucretius, who
introduced the famous "swerve" or clinamen of their atoms in order
to save the possibility of free will and other complex phenomena of
human life and society. This device was rather a transparent one, and
indeed no true synthetic way out of the difficulty was available until
the fact of cosmic, biological and sociological evolution came to be
appreciated by mankind. Room could then be found for the under-
standing of all the highest phenomena of human life as the character-
istic properties of the highest levels of organisation in the known
universe, without at the same time having to give up materialist
philosophy, i.e. the conviction that, though there may be a certain
distortion in the process, external nature does exist independently of
our observation and that we do receive a substantially true picture
of it as we investigate it. It did, moreover, exist for many aeons
without the contemplation of any observing spirits such as our own.
Their appearance was part of the formation of ever higher levels of
organisation and complexity.

These new levels were to some extent recognised by Haldane
himself. Thus later on he wrote, "Vitalist biologists assumed un-
justifiably that in a living organism something interferes from outside
with physical processes. For the newer biology there is no interference
from outside, but the integration characteristic of life is inherent in
the events perceived, and they cannot be described apart from it."
Indeed, Haldane's great service to biological theory was the way in
which he persistendy called attention to the special form of organisa-
tion existing in living things. On the other hand, his great failure
consisted in his defeatist wish to accept this principle of organisation
as axiomatic, instead of tracing its relation to the lower principles
of organisation seen in para-crystals, colloids, and similar states of
matter.

Again, for materialists, Haldane wrote, "religion is necessarily no
more than an illusion based on ignorance." For me this was frankly
incomprehensible. His conception of religion must have been very
rationalistic, some kind of theistic explanation of the universe. For
me, on the contrary, ever since I first read Rudolf Otto's fundamental

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THOUGHTS ON THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN SCOTT HALDANE

book The Idea of the Holy^ it has always seemed that what distin-
guished religion from theolog}^ or inferior philosophy was the sense
of the numinous,^ the divination of sacredness in certain external
things, persons or actions. At first this sense is fetishistic: It attaches
purely to certain objects, apparently at haphazard. Then great pioneers
discover that certain actions are holy — comforting the fatherless and
the widow, or putting down the mighty from their seat and raising
up them that fall, or following justice and mercy, or above all, the
ayairy] rod ttXtjctlov of the Gospels, the love of one's comrade.

This kind of religion seems to me to have no metaphysical com-
mitments of any sort. Whether your comrade is a higher ape with a
very complicated nervous system embodying a vast set of reflexes,
or on the other hand, a non-material soul inhabiting in some curious
way a material body — he is at any rate both beautiful and lovable,
and in a certain sense pathetic, and the disposition to love him is a
grace not affected by your theories of his nature.^ I do not know
what is meant by the phrase the pastoral theologians use, "the love
of souls," but I have found that superficial anim.osities and differences
tend to disappear if men and women are visualised as the children they
once visibly were. Some such deeper comprehension and love must
have informed the carver of one of the greatest of all statues of Mary,
Conrad of Einbeck, whose work is still in the great church at Halle.

^ English translation by J. W. Harvey (Oxford 1923).

^ From the Latin word numen, which means a deity, Otto coined the adjective
numinous to designate the quality of sacredness or holiness attached to things, persons
or actions. In mediaeval Christianity, the paten and chalice in the Mass were thought to
possess this quality, so that even today the subdeacon, being a layman, may only handle
them ceremonially wearing the "humeral veil." This is akin to the "mana" of the
anthropologists. But persons and their actions may also be numinous, for example, the
widow in the Gospels contributing her small coin to the collection, or Irenaeus saying
on the morning of his martyrdom, "Now I begin to live," or the death of the five Leveller
Corporals in Burford Churchyard, or Dimitrov's immortal witness to certain principles
in the face of dementia enthroned.

^ After I had written the above words, I came across the following in S. Alexander's
Space, Time and Deity (London, 1927), Vol. II, p. 32:

"The experience which assures us not inferentially but directly of other minds
is a very simple and familiar one, that of sociality, and it has a double aspect. Our
fellow human beings excite in us the social or gregarious instinct, and to feel
socially towards another being is to be assured that it is something like ourselves.
We do not first apprehend that another being is a mind and then respond to him,
whether positively in affection or negatively in aversion; but in our tenderness
or dislike we are aware of him as like ourselves. . . But we do not experience the
satisfaction of sociality till the creature towards which we act socially reciprocates
our action."

Cf. also Henry Maudsley's Body and Will (London, 1883), p. 45.

time: the refreshing river

The Development of Religious Feeling.

More emphasis ought, indeed, in justice to traditional Christianity,
to be laid on the materialist elements in it;^ for example, the sacra-
mental principle. In the poetic symbolism of the sacrifice of the
Eucharist, we take clearly materialistic things, bread and wine, and
with them we offer and make, to a God anciently conceived of as
both immanent and transcendent, a holy and efficient sacrifice, remem-
bering that (in this language) material objects are necessary as carriers
of grace. Grace can have no existence in isolation. If we love not our
brother whom we have seen, how can we love God whom we have
not seen.^ The material bread and wine of this sacrifice ought to teach
us that only by caring for the body and blood and secular spirit of
our comrade can we assist his soul, whatever that may be. The
material bread and wine ought to remind us that the most exalted
spiritual things are connected with, and have arisen in evolution out
of, the most primitive processes of living and dead matter. Christians
themselves rarely seem to understand this.^

No metaphysical commitments. Haldane's fundamental error of
identifying religion with metaphysical idealism made him blind to
one of the most impressive facts of our time, namely that everywhere
there is proceeding a persecution paralleled only by those of the
early Church, a persecution of materialists who hold this doctrine
of love of our comrade in a more thoroughgoing and enlightened
manner than it has evea been held before. Of course, I refer to the
communists, and those who sympathise with them, who in all
countries, Latin, Slavonic, Anglo-Saxon, are being imprisoned,
tortured, and murdered every day.^ Their doctrines might be de-
scribed, perhaps rather provocatively, as the highest form which
religion has yet taken, a form in which it negates itself, and must
necessarily be at war with all previous forms of itself. In my view,
the communist has, although in most cases he will never admit it, a
more highly developed sense of the holy than any of the adherents
of traditional religions, for he sees that the oppression of man by
man is unholy, and he is determined to banish it from the

^ Cf. McTaggart, J., Some Dogmas of Religion (London, 1906), p. 250.

2 But long after I had written this, I found that Archbishop Wm. Temple does. In
his Gifford lectures {Nature, Man and God, London, 1934), he says "Christianity is the
most avowedly materialist of all the great religions" (p. 478). And later he approximates
his own position to that of dialectical materialism (pp. 487 ff.)-

^ Cf. A. D. Nock, Conversion (Oxford, 1933), p. 228, where the position of early
christians is likened to tliat of modern communists.

126

THOUGHTS ON THE TESTAAIENT OF JOHN SCOTT HALDANE

world.^ In the effort to do this, he is perfectly reaHstic. For example, he
understands the necessity for making the contacts between men and
machinery beneficent, not lethal. This is the kind of ethic appropriate
to our civilisation. He has faith also, the faith that infinite capacities
for good are resident in man, the faith that the early christians had,
that the Regnum Dei can be built on earth. Alone in the world to-day
he has noted the apostle's warning: "He that despiseth man, despiseth
not man, but God." Finally, his philosophy is precisely dialectical
materialism, the view that one original creative event, probably for
ever impenetrable to us and therefore hardly worth prolonged dis-
cussion, gave rise to a succession in time of dialectical developments,
ever higher stages of organisation being reached. The classless state
of justice and happiness on earth itself forms part of this succession
and belief in it is therefore no mere desperate act of faith, but a part
of an eminently rational philosophy and a declaration of unshakeable
confidence — "Magna est Veritas, et praevalebit."

The highest form which religion has yet taken is a form in which
it negates itself, and must war with all previous forms of itself. These
words require further elucidation. For this purpose I suggest that
instead of defining religion, with Haldane, as a kind of theistic
philosophy without historical antecedents, we should accept the
following propositions. First, that as Otto showed, religion begins
in shuddering fear and dread of the numinous, a special category of
external nature; and is then later attached to ethical actions with
exceedingly powerful psychological means by certain persons, such
as Jesus, whose death on the cross epitomises all the guiltless sufferings
of the just. Secondly, as would follow from the conceptions of Marx
and Engels, this numinous quality was from the beginning also
attached to the exploiting lord as opposed to the exploited serf.
Hence all organised religion tended to stabilise the exploitation of
man by man. In so general a discussion as this, examples will occur
to every reader, but mention may be made of the sacredness of the
Roman imperium,^ the history of the Papacy, and St. Paul's phrase
"the pov/ers that be are ordained of God," to say nothing of such
minor phenomena as the deacon's dalmatic placed upon the Kings

■"^ The numinous shifts as the economic possibilities open out during human social
evolution. Those who are ahead of their time are those who visualise the new possibilities
and are able to divine the new position of the numinous.

^ Cf. the extraordinary forms which tliis sacratissimum ministeriutn took in tlie time
of the thirteenth century Hohenstaufen Emperors {Frederick the Second^ by E. Kan-
torowicz, London, 193 1).

127

time: the refreshing river

of England at their coronations. Religion, like Folk Art, is the spiritual
protest of the oppressed creature, and organised religion is an opiate
in so far as it canalises and confines this protest purely to the spiritual
realm, turning it thus into an escape from the real.

Thus religion begins with fear; is stabilised by priests as an instru-
ment of subjection; is transformed by prophets into ever higher
forms of the sense of the holy, and ends in the idea of love as holy.
By removing earthly oppression, the necessity for spiritual compensa-
tions is also largely removed, and in this way when perfect love casts
out fear, religion (in one sense) goes with it. In another sense it remains
as the symbolism of comradeship. Hence the paradox of communism —
the only persons in the world to-day who take the Gospels seriously
are just those who declare themselves the enemies of all religion.
This fact, I cannot help feeling, might be more congenial to the
central figure of the Gospels than most christians would imagine.
For when that which is perfect is come (the Kingdom of God), that
which is imperfect (organised religion) shall be done away. Or, as
John Lewis has put it,^ Religion must die to be born again as the
holy spirit of a righteous social order.

The Parallel of Folk Art,

Further mention of folk art at this point is no digression. As the
semi-inarticulate manifestation of the consciousness of an oppressed
class, it demands comparison with religion. And here also the sacra-
mental principle is evident; the actors in the mummers' play are
saying far more than they mean, the sword-dancers and the wren-
hunters are symbolic to the core. Nor is this remote from Haldane,
writing in his study his last contribution, for no one knew better the
coalfields than he, and no one could have watched the rapper sword-
dancers of Northumberland and Durham with greater sympathy. But
the truth has never yet been told about folk-verse, folk-music, folk-
dance. The folk-songs of England are the songs of the peasantry
(labourers, cowmen, woodmen, shepherds, etc.), the seamen (in the
form of chantys), and other types such as the town artisan and trades-
man, the peddlar, and the rank-and-file of the army. And two features
of working-class life especially have stamped their character upon the
folk-songs, first the lack of education of the people, and second the
hardness of their life and the lack of security in their occupations. The
second is the more important. In the haunting minor tunes, the

■"• In Christianity and the Social Revolution (London, 1935).

128

THOUGHTS ON THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN SCOTT HALDANE

Strong preoccupation with the evanescence and sadness of life, and
the fundamental seriousness which makes folk-songs so beautiful as
well as so charming, we see the expression of the people's sufferings.
Even the apparently most individual theme of love is in no way-
immune from this, for whereas in its simplest forms it may involve
great torment, all this pain is enormously increased by adverse
economic and social conditions. Hence the ballads of violent action,
the songs of separation, and the fewness of the songs with happy
endings. It is in this light that we can recognise the essential rottenness
of a pseudo-folk book such as Mr. Weston s Good Wine^ for although
to the folk, the standing conventions of capitalist society, such as the
persecution of unmarried mothers, appeared as unalterable laws of
the universe; a sophisticated author well knows that they are nothing
of the kind, and yet in spite of that, fails to indicate their true nature.
There are many folk-songs about the kidnapping of lovers by tlie
pressgangs, but it would have been fantastic to accept this institution
as inevitable.

Another point to which attention is not usually drawn is the
affection of the folk for outlaws such as Robin Hood or the innumer-
able highwaymen who appear in the songs. Whether real or legendary,
these figures are important indications of the psychology of expro-
priation on the part of the country working-man, and they exist
everywhere. Not only in England, but also in the Carpathians, does
Robin Hood, under the name of Janosik there, waylay the rich
knights to the joy of the Polish and Slovak mountaineers. Listen to
the verse from "The Robber":

"I never robbed a poor man yet,

Nor never was I in a tradesman's debt.

But I robbed the lords and the ladies gay
And took the gold.

And took the gold to my love straightway."

The same psychology also appears in the way the folk took to
heart the biblical story of Dives and Lazarus, as shown in the famous
song "Lazarus and Diverus."

Folk-song, like religion, is the sigh of the oppressed creature. The
disappearance of folk-song in the past was partly due to active sup-
pression. Alfred Williams, in his Folk-Songs of the Upper Thames,^

^ (London, 1923.)

129 I

time: the refreshing river

says that the poHce, who were apparently unable to distinguish between
a folk-song and a "rough house," exerted themselves about 1900 to
forbid all singing in inns and public-houses. In the future, its dis-
appearance may be one of the prices we shall have to pay for a more
general happiness and well-being. But we may reflect that v/hen the
oppression of man by man has been liquidated, a certain number of
fundamental limitations will still remain. Inhabitants of space and
time, subject still to the oppression of mortality, men will surely
still be able to create and appreciate the kind of art-productions — for
such they are, however communal and however artless — which we
know as folk-songs.^

The folk-dance, too, has interest both for the archaeologist, since
it is found in association with many different rites, often undoubtedly
the late survivals of pre-christian festivals; and also for the amateur
of dancing, since in many cases it is skilled and beautiful in the
highest degree.^ But even here we cannot fail to note the same socio-
logical factor. The seasonal festival was a recognised means of escape
from the state of subjection in which the peasant normally lived.
"We daren't come out but on Plough Monday," an East Anglian
dancer said to me once, "they'd have the law on us if we ploughed
up a doorstep, but on that day they can't touch us, because it's an
old charter." Unfortunately, even this was often denied. In 1816 the
ringleader of a gang of "plough-bullocks" was severely reprimanded
and fined before a magistrate before whom he was brought. "These
men had a notion that they had a privileged right on certain days in
spring, to exact donations from respectable residents, and in default
of payment to damage their premises." The authentic bourgeois tone.
The two great theophanies of the bourgeois, the Puritan and the
Business Man, both hated the Morris, the Maypole, the Plough-Stots,
and the Mummers. They wanted to make the world safe for the
profit of godly industry, and they succeeded, although with time, it
became, as we have observed, much less godly and distinctly more
profitable.

In the socialist state of the future, as in the Soviet Union to-day,
the traditional ritual dances of the people will be treasured indeed.
They are the pure creations of the working-class, and they will

^ The justice of this belief is strongly reinforced by the interesting article of
M. Azadovsky on the present position of folk-songs in the Soviet Union {Lenin
Commemoration Volume, Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 1934).

^ Cf. my monograph "Geographical Distribution of English Ceremonial Folk-
Dances" in Joum. Eng. Folk Dance and Song Soc, 1936,3, i.

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THOUGHTS ON THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN SCOTT HALDANE "

unite by a remarkable continuity the developed communism of the
future with the antique primitive communism of the far past.

Modern Manichaeism.

All this is a manifestation of the consciousness that what ought to
be is distinct from what is. In a fine passage, Haldane comments on
this. "However what is evil, or what ought not to be, is interpreted,
we find that the distinction bet^^een what ought, and what ought
not, to be, is generally acknowledged, together with the obligation
to further what ought to be. It is on the recognition of this obligation
that the religions of the world are founded; and although they differ
in matter of detail, they are united in their recognition of what is
good, or what ought to be, and the obligation to further it. The belief,
however, in spiritual powers of evil is now, I think, a waning one in
all civilisations; and evil has come, or is rapidly coming, to be regarded
commonly as the unchecked prevalence of what is interpreted as
belonging to the physical world over what is spiritual." A good
beginning but a bad ending. I pardoned myself for the fleeting thought
that not all living religions only, but also all the dead ones, were to
be represented at the Congress. The Manichaeans themselves could
hardly have put their case better.^ Such a conclusion, violently at
variance with Christianity and communism alike, could only lead, it
genuinely followed through, to a retrograde asceticism. For marxism,
the origin of evil, like the ultimate origin of everything else is, I
suppose, inscrutable, and the problem of evil is not a problem of
fixing the responsibility on some one, some being, or some constituent
of the universe, but a problem of biological engineering. "Philosophers
have talked about the world enough, the time has come to change it."
We must, of course, accept in all probability an irreducible minimum
of pain and sorrow so long as man is a patient being immersed in
space-time, but this is like that irreducible minimum of the alogical,^
to which scientific explanation is always asymptotically tending. The
reduction of the alogical in our picture of the universe is what Haldane

^ Manichaeism was one of the many religions which disputed with Christianity
for the mastery of the late Roman world. Its founder, Mani, maintained that matter
was utterly and irredeemably evil. Its adepts were, therefore, under the necessity of
pretending not to eat or to perform any other bodily functions (see The Religion of
the Manichees by F. C. Burkitt, Cambridge, 1925).

2 Tennant, F, R., Philosophical Theology (Cambridge, 1928), Vol. I, ch. 13. Dingle
calls it Deus ex aequatione with the character of an arbitrary constant.

time: the refreshing river

called, in the manner of his generation, the search for truth. On it he
bases his argument for the existence of God.

"The search after truth," he writes, "which appeals to all man,
implies the existence of personality which extends over and includes
all individual personalities. In other words, it implies all-embracing
personality, which for religious interpretation is the personality • of
God. In the furtherance of truth, as revealed in experience of any
kind, God as the supreme Person is revealed to us, and our trust in
experience is trust in God." But this is more poetical than philo-
sophical. If transcendence is assumed it is unconvincing. If immanence
only is meant, why should not this all-embracing personality be that
of the human collectivity, as McTaggart^ and Marx alike would
require ? If, moreover, there is any value in Otto's theory of religion,
"religious interpretation" is a phrase almost without meaning. Religion
is not concerned with interpretations, but with emotions favourable
or antagonistic to social coherence. Emotions favourable to social
coherence are perhaps the analogues of those bonds which hold
entities together at the physical level. From this point of view, one
can only accept the word "God" as a poetic term analogous to that
used in the apostolic precept already referred to — "He that despiseth
man, despiseth not man but God," i.e. the highest worshipful values
we know.

The Ethics of a Machine Age.

To some it may seem that this criticism of Haldane's paper has
too political a character, but one must remember that it has been the
opinion of many a christian theologian that politics cannot be
divorced from ethics; is, indeed a branch of ethics. Since ethics, in its
turn, cannot be divorced either from religion or from philosophy, no
one can undertake to discuss materialism and religion at the present
time without considering dialectical materialism and the communist
paradox within the realm of the numinous. In his address to the
World Congress of Faiths, Haldane made no mention of any political
issue. But in one of the pronouncements of this remarkable man, he
did touch upon such problems, and it is interesting to compare what
he then said with the theme of his last paper. It was in 1924 that he
was invited, because of his long life of research in industrial physiology,

^ J. McTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion (London, 1906), pp. 12, 121, 133; "If all
reality is a harmonious system of selves, it is perhaps sufficiently godlike to dispense
with a God," p. 250.

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THOUGHTS ON THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN SCOTT HALDANE

to become President of the Institution of Mining Engineers, and the
presidential address which he gave on that occasion was reprinted in
his book of essays, Materialism, eight years later. After some intro-
ductory paragraphs about the capital value of British coal-mines, in
which he showed a naive acceptance of the whole usurious system of
shareholders and owners, he proceeded to develop a peculiar argument.
Modern materialism, he felt, was at the bottom of the failure of the
capitalist system to work properly. Modern materialism involves the
tacit assumption that everything, including the economic system,
works mechanically, hence the industrial machine of a coal-mine is
conceived of as a "soulless" interplay of forces. The corollary is that
pitmen are not thought of as human beings but simply as "hands,"
and are to be asked to work as long hours as possible for as small a
wage as they can be induced to accept.

If this is "materialism," there is certainly nothing good to be said
for it. But has it anything to do with the philosophical debate ? Is it
not rather a question of ethics and morality incarnate in problems of
practical economics.'^ The question is whether the welfare of the
workers, or the accumulation of profits, is the primary consideration.
If profit-making is by far the most important consideration, as under
capitalism it must be, then all that has to be done is to hand the factory
over to the investigations of "efficiency engineers," who will plan for
maximum production irrespective of anything else. Care for the
workers will take the form of pushing "rationalisation" up to the very
maximum limits of what the "hands" will stand. Thus the conveyor
belt (satirised in Chaplin's famous film Modern Times) has in-
creased both drudgery and tension. Most jobs simple enough to be
done in series can be done entirely mechanically, but where labour is
cheap and conditions need not be considered, it is naturally not worth
while making the machines. Few people yet realise the marvels of
self-acting productive machinery which the linking of "receptor
engines" such as the selenium cell and the infra-red ray receiver,^ with
the "effector engines," could achieve. This was the moral of another
famous film (whether understood or not by the audiences which saw
it) — Rene Clair's A Nous la Liberie, which ends with the gramo-
phone factory turning out the gramophones almost entirely auto-
matically, while the factory staff sit on the banks of the adjacent canal
enjoying the fishing. Under this symbolism a profound truth was

^ See R. Calder's article "Millions of Men with Teaspoons" in New Statesman, 1940,
p. 178.

time: the refreshing river

concealed. Not only abundance of all commodities could be attained
by the proper use of the world's raw materials and the available
technical and mechanical genius, but also abundance of leisure. But
the ruling classes of the world are afraid of leisure for the people.
Just as up to the i8th century free thought was regarded as the preserve
of the ruling classes, so now leisure is a jealously guarded privilege.
Under conditions of greater leisure, the workers might begin to think.
But to return to the ethics of modern technology. As Stuart Chase
pointed out in his remarkable book Men and Machines^ the contacts
of men with machinery may be classified into a list. Some contacts
are beneficial, others are lethal. A list of this kind (modified from
Chase's presentation), would be as follows; —

Beneficial Contacts:

(i) Operating machines with a large measure of individual re-
sponsibility (e.g. locomotives, motor-cars).

(2) Operating stationary machines with responsibility only for

speed or direction control (e.g. liner engines, turret-lathes).

(3) Inventing, designing, repairing, or inspecting machines.

(4) Playing with machines (e.g. amateur radio, models).

(5) Submitting to a machine process in someone else's control

(e.g. dentist).

Neutral Contact:

(i) Being carried by a machine with no responsibility for control
(e.g. train, ship, plane).

Lethal Contacts:

(i) Tending machines with no responsibility for control (e.g.
feeding raw material, receiving and stacking finished
products).

(2) Participating in the work of machines with no responsibility

for control (e.g. performing comparatively simple operations
on objects passing on a conveyor belt).

(3) Submitting to a machine process in someone else's control

(e.g. being shelled or bombed).

(4) Forming part of a machine under the control of others (e.g.

army or prison "discipline").

These are the kind of considerations which should be taken into
account in thinking of productive labour. Under the capitalist economic

134

THOUGHTS ON THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN SCOTT HAXDANE

system and the old liberal conception of the freedom of the worker
to sell his labour in the market for whatever wages, such contacts
are not classified. Whether they are beneficial or lethal does not
matter in capitalist society. Haldane might well have considered
this.

But it was the direction of his thought. His good instinct was shown
as follows: — "It is not with scientific abstractions called 'labour' and
'capital' that British mining engineers have to work, but with their
fellow-countrymen, their own flesh and blood. These fellow-countrymen
will give loyal and efficient service, will face any danger, will forgive
real or imagined mistakes, and will take the rough with the smooth,
the bad times with the good; but what they will not tolerate is being
treated as if they were mere tools, to be cast aside without compunc-
tion." Haldane went on to speak of the comradeship which often
existed between all ranks in the First World War, and of the "com-
radeship taught in the Gospels." His good instinct was clearly in-
adequately backed by political insight. All the remedy he could
propose for the evil effects of his materialism was "effective and
sympathetic contact between the head management and the men
employed." No glimmering of an idea that there might be something
wrong about the basic relationship of master and man, of owner and
labourer. No suggestion that such relationships belong to the category
of exploitation, that productive machinery should not be in private
hands at all. No appreciation of the vast difference in material and
spiritual goods, advantages and privileges, which separates the mine-
owner from the pitman. So deeply engrained in a middle-class scholar
are the convictions of upbringing, the belief that classes are a natural
phenomenon as inevitable as the tides or the weather. And we see
how the natural instincts of so admirable a man as Haldane lead to a
philosophy quite suitable for fascism. His recommendation that direct
contact between master and man was the main need of our time is a
piece of mediaevalism, a retrograde step, an invitation to fascism
because it plainly conserves the stratification of classes. Back to the
master-craftsman and his journeymen subordinates. The air resounds
with such slogans. Back, said Sir Josiah Stamp (at a British Association
meeting) to a lesser production of goods and inventions.^ A halt
must be called to science. Back to the pre-war period, said the German
Nationalists. Back beyond the Renaissance, say Spann and the "German

^ Qualified a good deal, it is true, in his later Science of Social Adjustment (London,
1937)-

time: the refreshing river

Christians." Back to primitive paganism, says Klages. The essay of
Karl Polanyi in Christianity and the Social Revolution is a perfect
museum of such regressive movements. One may well feel depressed.
Then one's eye catches the following, written without doubt in all
sincerity — "If at any time we feel discouraged, we should remember
that behind our comradeship there stands the wider comradeship of
which the British flag is for us the symbol — a symbol alike of righteous
and humane dealing, and of the fearless power that lies behind it.
Let us never allow the fickle waves of passing public sentiment to
obscure our vision of that wider comradeship." How the women and
children immolated in the early industrial age in the pits of those
mining districts that Haldane knew so well would have reacted to
such words, it is hard to say. The Irish victims of the Black-and-Tan
regime, the cheated native miners of South Africa, the Chinese
mandarins vainly trying to stem the import of opium into China by
British trade and finally forced to fight unequal wars over it, the
Indians struggling against a rule of censorship and concentration-
camp could hardly cherish such emotions. The fact is that the flag of
no existing national state dare claim to be the symbol of the world-
comradeship of humanity. It was with profound insight that the
pioneers of the workers' movement chose the colour of blood for
the banner of world community and solidarity, for the blood of
animals and men is, after all, the internal medium which assures the
co-operation of all the cells in that society of cells which is the body.
And in the history of every people there have been inspiring times
when they made their contribution to human progress. The British
flag must remind us, not of the Factory Children and the Opium
Wars, but rather of the Spirit of 1381, the New Model Army, the
Floating Republic, and the Dorset Martyrs.

What a paradox that Haldane should have chosen materialism as
the cause of all the trouble. Capitalist economics may indeed be
inseparable from a mechanistic and atomistic sociology; the two arose
together historically; Descartes and Boyle on the one hand. Petty
and Gresham on the other. But the dialectics of nature, and dialectical
materialism, are quite another matter.

The West and the East.

And so I come to the last paragraph of the last paper written by
one of my principal teachers. "Materialism," he had written, "is a
form of naive belief which is easily understood by all nations, both

136

THOUGHTS ON THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN SCOTT HALDANE

Western and Eastern, and it seems to me unfortunate that Western
civilisation, with all the superficial advantages which the successful
study of physical science confers upon it, has come to stand in the
eyes of many in Eastern countries for little more than materialism.
But materialism forms no basis for honesty, charity, regard for truth,
loyalty, or art; and without these, real civilisation does not exist, and
any apparent civilisation is quite unstable. The real strength of both
Western and Eastern civilisations lies in their religions, and an under-
standing and respect for their religious ideas is essential for mutual
understanding." No, it was not sufficient for the need of 1936. Between
traditional metaphysical materialism and dialectical materialism no
distinction was made. Yet to many of us it seems that precisely
materialism is the best basis for honesty, charity, regard for truth,
loyalty and art. Honesty hitherto may have been founded on philo-
sophical idealism and the primacy of cognition or perception. But
honesty has also been an almost impossible virtue in bourgeois
civilisation, for the capitalist system of production is, and has always
been, essentially predatory and atomistic, not co-operative. It was no
coincidence that during the rise of capitalism at the Reformation and
in the sixteenth century, there should have been so great a return, as
represented in protestantism, to the Old Testament at the expense of
the New. Honesty might play a minor part in the relations between
merchants of the same town, but there were always Philistines or
Egyptians whose exploitation could hardly reasonably be considered
as displeasing to God. So much for honesty. Charity has become a
word of abuse, implying the erratic bounty of wealthy robbers
towards the poor and simple-hearted. Never will charity in its evan-
gelical sense of love become a reality until the spiritual wickedness
of class-distinctions is banished from the world. Regard for truth is
in our civilisation confined to a few scientists and philosophers; it is
not to be found in the realms of the patent medicine traffic, competitive
advertising, unscrupulous journalism, artistically false nitwit enter-
tainment and other like manifestations of the profit-making system.
Loyalty of course is possible anywhere, but its value surely stands in
proportion to the ideals which it serves. There is a loyalty of criminals
one towards another; there is the loyalty of men and women towards
their national flag, and at the other end of the scale there is the loyalty
of often isolated individuals to the future Civitas Dei^ the worldwide
union of socialist republics, in which national sovereignty and human
exploitation will seem as remote as the sacrifices of the Aztecs seem

137

time: the refreshing river

to us now. And lastly art, from being the product of the few for
the few, will become the production of the many for the enjoyment
of all.

But as regards what the East accepts from the West, and vice versa,
Haldane was undoubtedly right. Mechanical materialism, plus idealistic
religion, plus science for science's sake, plus capitalist economics,
plus fascist armaments, class-stabilisation, and war-philosophy, will
only spread misery, disappointment, and destruction. But there is a
hope elsewhere, a red morning star. In playing my part at the funeral
games of our lost kindly champion, what could I do else but point
towards it ?

And here we approach a remarkable historical paradox, a paradox
of the greatest interest, but of which most people are still quite
ignorant. The red morning star of progressive social philosophy,
culminating in socialism and communism, has not always stood over
Europe. In former times, it shone in the East, in more senses than one.
Haldane discussed what the East was accepting from the West; it
never occurred to him that the West owed something to the East.
But there is a great debt, in general altogether unrealised, and here a
brief explanation of it must be given.^ I leave on one side, of course,
the obvious debt of christian civilisation to Hebrew culture and what
was bom from it.

In traditional Western thought, the conception of ''original sin"
was dominant; Pelagius was the exception and the followers of
Augustine were orthodox. It seems that the social consequences of
this have never been fully explored, but it is extremely likely that a
doctrine of original sin was of no small help to the property-owning
classes in the propagation of the belief that the working masses could
never hope to run a State organisation successfully. However one
phrases it, the association between original sin and a pessimistic view
of the possibilities of social organisation is unmistakable. Conversely,
that optimistic view of the possibilities of social man which arose at
the Enlightenment prior to the French Revolution in the eighteenth
century, and which lies at the bottom of all subsequent optimistic
social thought, was connected with a denial, tacit or avowed, of the
conception of original sin. If the spirit of man is fundamentally good,
then obviously the prospects of social justice are better than if the
reverse is true. It may be granted that in strictly orthodox christian
theology, the intrinsic goodness of the human soul had always been

^ See the forthcoming book by Dr. E. R. Hughes, The Great Learning in Action.

138

THOUGHTS ON THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN SCOTT HALDANE

maintained, with only a certain proneness to evil; but we are con-
cerned here rather with the effect on the climate of thought than with
the letter of the law on which a defence of christian theology might
rely. The Encyclopaedists, therefore, were striking out a new line
in their insistence on the intrinsic goodness of man's nature.

It now appears that in this progressive effort they were mightily
assisted by a knowledge of the fact, then just entering Europe, that
in traditional Chinese thought, the essential goodness of man's nature
had always been a basic belief. In China Meng-tze (Mencius) had been
orthodox, and the pessimistic philosopher, Hsiin-tze, had been hereti-
cal. The great story of the influence of China on European thought
in the eighteenth century is only now coming to be written. An
outward and visible manifestation of it was, of course, the Chinoiserie
period which set its mark so thoroughly on all the arts of domestic
decoration. But the philosophers of the Enlightenment were
amazed, and deeply encouraged, to find that their belief in the
separability of morality from superstitious religion, was and had
been for more than a thousand years an essential tenet of classical
Chinese philosophy.

About the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Jesuit mission-
aries reached Peking. They were highly cultivated men, who found
the Chinese irflfcllectual atmosphere so congruent with christian ideas
that they felt they had but to add certain keystones to an arch already
complete. Hence their very adequate translations of the Chinese
Classics of Confucian philosophy; for example the Confucius Sinarum
Philosophus of 1687, which includes Latin versions of the Lun-Yii
and the Ta-ShioL Such books contained notions of natural law, the
possession of certain inalienable rights by common humanity, and
above all, the view, enshrined to this day in the first schoolbook
learned by every Chinese child (the three-character classic, the San-
Tie-Ching)^ that man's spirit is fundamentally good. From this it was
not a far cry to the slogan of Rousseau, "Man is everywhere born
free, but he is everywhere in chains."

Evidence of the interest taken in classical Chinese philosophy by
the Encyclopaedists, Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, etc. is easy to find.
In Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique one finds: —

"I knew a philosopher who had no portrait but that of Con-
fucius in his working room, and underneath it he had written
these lines:

139

time: the refreshing river

'De la seule raison salutaire interprete,
Sans eblouirle monde clairant les esprits,
II ne parla qu'en Sage, et jamais en Prophete;
Cependant on le crut, et meme en son pays.'

"I have read his books widi attention, and I have made
extracts from them; I found nothing in them except the purest
morahty, without the least admixture of charlatanism."^

And in Germany, where the same movement was in progress,
Christian Wolff delivered an inaugural address "Rede iiber die
Sittenlehre der Sineser" in 1721 when appointed Pro-rector of the
University of Halle. For this address, in which it was asserted that
morality is independent of revelation, Wolff was so persecuted that
he had to leave Prussia for twenty years.

We have, therefore, the remarkable paradox that China gave to
the West a single precious treasure of doctrine, an idea that may yet
save the West from itself, and the world from the domination of that
Western commercialism against which Haldane wrote so strongly.
Haldane did not wish the East to accept from the West mechanical
materialism. In this he was right, though he did not couple with it
what goes with it, other-worldly religiosity, servile science, and
capitalist economics. He did not know that the We^accepted from
the East two centuries ago the germ of all those progressive social
conceptions which alone can turn the spread of western civilisation
throughout the world into beneficent channels. If christian theology
is one grandmother of communism, Confucian philosophy is the other.

■^ Dicdonnaire Philosop/iique, 1834 edn. Vol. II, p. 406.

140

Limiting Factors in the History of Science^
as Observed in the History of Embryology

(Carmalt Lecture at Yale University, 1935)

Probably the best way to summarise the influences which have
operated in the history of embryology is to concentrate attention on
what may be called, borrowing a phrase from general physiology,
the "limiting factors" of advance. We may thus regard the progress
of knowledge about generation as governed by a reaction-chain, one
link of which may at any given time be slower tlian all the others,
and hence may set the speed for the whole.

Relation of investigators to their environment

Limiting
factors

Co-operation of investigators

Technique

Practical

Theoretical <

Terminological

Conceptual

Psychological

Constructive
Destructive

Balance between Speculation, Observation, and Experiment

Scientists and their Environment.

Of these limiting factors the first which may be mentioned is the
relation of investigators to their environment. The Carlylean tendency
to regard the history of science as a succession of inexplicable geniuses
arbitrarily bestowing knowledge upon mankind has now been generally
given up as quite mythological. A scientific worker is necessarily the
child of his time and the inheritor of the thought of many generations.
But the study of his environment and its conditioning power may be
carried on from more than one point of view.

A sharp distinction is made by the culture-historians, between
the mental atmosphere of the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Rococo,

141

time; the refreshing river

the "Aufklarung" period, and so on. The political absolutism of the
Baroque period mirrored itself in the extreme rationalism of seven-
teenth century biology. The Rococo period then brought in new
movements towards freedom in the political sphere, and this took
the form in science of a return to empiricism, so that the biological
observations of Redi^ and Wolffs were as much connected with the
romantic movement as were the philosophical speculations of
Rousseau. In the Encyclopaedists, the connection between empiricism
in science and political freedom is particularly well seen. Men of
learning examined the traditions of the technical arts and trades
with new interests. The new eminence of the female sex in the
Rococo period, unimaginable to previous ages, was perhaps connected
with the temporary triumph of ovism.^

The social and political ruling ideas of an epoch thus play a large
part in the scientific thought of the time, and may act as limiting
factors to further advance.

Another point of view which may be taken regarding the environ-
ment of the scientific worker as a limiting factor is that which empha-
sises his existence as an economic unit and seeks to shovv^ how his
position in a society with such and such a class-structure influences
the development of his thought. It seems to offer considerable chances
for new discoveries in the history of science, for it directs its attention
precisely upon those aspects of human society (technical achievement,
labour conditions, the everyday life of the mine, the factory, the
barber-surgeon's shop) which, precisely because of their assumed
inferiority, have not been incorporated in the majority of books,
written inevitably by members of the governing classes or by those
who aspired to imitate gentility. Thus the rather sharp cleavage
between the philosophic biologist of the Hellenistic age, and the
contemporary medical man, who might often be a slave, contributed
to the sterility of ancient Mediterranean medicine, including obstetrics
and gynaecology. In the later christian West there was not much

^ Esperlenie . . . alia generaiione degl'Insetti, 1668.

^ Theoria Generationis, 1759.

^ T. Bilikiewicz, Die Embryologie im Zeitalter d. Barock u. Rokoko (1-eipzig, 1932),
"Die Frau habe heute nicht nur das Recht, dass ihre Schonheit und Weiblichkeit in
Dithyramben besungen werde; wenn sie den Platz auf dem Throne einnehmen oder
iiber Throne verfugen konne, oder wenn sie im allgemeingesellschaftlichen Leben mit
der wachsenden Gleichberechtigung immer verantwortlichere Rollen iibernehmen
konne, so habe sie auch das Recht, auf dem Gebiete der Embryologie dem mannlichen
Geschlechte in die Augen zu schauen als ein Wesen, das dieselben Rechte auf Freiheit
habe. Der Ovismus liess diese Standarte wehen."

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LIMITING FACTORS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

incentive to embtyological study so long as the process of child-
birth was left to the charms and incantations of barbarous midwives.
But for a better insight into the economic position of embryologists
in past ages nearly all the work remains to be done.

One necessity must constantly be kept before the mind's eye,
namely, the knowledge of the relations between scientific thought
and technical practice at any given period. For embryology this
knowledge is difficult to acquire, since up to the time of the Renaissance
obstetrics remained a part of primitive folk-medicine rather than of
serious medical science. We see, however, in the publication of the
Hellenistic gynaecological treatises in the i6th century (Bauhin,^
Spach^) the satisfaction of a new demand, even though it took the
t\^pical Renaissance form of reprinting the Graeco-Roman classics.
It was part of that movement to rationalise obstetrics which included
William Harvey's Exercitadones De Generatione Animalium^ and
Malpighi's De Formatione Pulli^'^ and culminated in the celebrated
man-midwives of the i8th century.^ Again, the relation of the early
systematists — Belon,^ Rondelet,^ Aldrovandus,® Ray^ — to the be-
ginnings of capitalist expansion is fairly clear, for the mediaeval
bestiary could not cope with the influx of new animals and plants
from hitherto unknown regions, any one of which might prove to
be an exploitable commodity.

The Hellenistic divorce between scientific thought and empirical
technique is an important case in point. Greek life was divided strictly
into Oeojpia and TTpd^Ls; theory and practice. The latter was not
thought fitting for a man of good birth. "Antiquity," says Diels,^^
"was entirely aristocratic in attitude. Even prominent artists, such as
Pheidias, were classed as artisans, and were incapable of bursting
through the barrier separating the workers and peasants from the
upper class. A second cause of the slight technical progress in antiquity
was its slave-holding system, which led to a lack of any impulse to
develop the machine as a substitute for manual labour." Xenophon

^ Gynaeciorum, etc., 1586. ^ Ibid., etc.," 1597.

^ 1651, Eng. tr. 1653. * 1672.

^ E.g. The Chamberlens, Mauriceau, William Smellie, John Burton of York ("Dr.
Slop") and Joseph Needham of Devizes; see the articles of Rosenthal, Janus, 1923, 27,
117 and 192 and Mengert, Ann. Med. Hist., 1932, 4,453. The dissertation of Caspar
Bose (^De obstetricum Erroribus, 1729) is a typical attack on the midwives of the time.

^ Natural History of Fishes, 1591, . . . of Birds, 1555.

' De Piscibus Marinis, 1554. * Ornithologia, 1597.

* Wisdom of God in Creation, 1714. ^^ Antike Technik (Leipzig, 1920).

time: the refreshing river

in the Oeconomicus held the industries in poor repute. "Men engaged
in the mechanical arts," he says, "must ever be both bad friends and
feeble defenders of their country." He troubled himself little with
those skilful in carpentry, metallurgy, painting, and sculpture, but was
always anxious to meet a "gentleman" (o KaXos KayaOog). The
results of this were inevitable. Classical surgery and obstetrics benefited
practically nothing from the speculations of the biologists from Alc-
maeon to Herophilus. Surgeons and midwives remained members of
the painter-cobbler-builder group, the group of base-bom mechanics,
entirely distinct from the astronomer-mathematician-metaphysician-
biologist group, the group familiar with courts and tyrants.^

Only the greatest broke away from this tradition: Aristotle, when
he conversed with fishermen; Archimedes perhaps, when he con-
structed his mechanical devices. For the rest, it was too strong.
Down to the end of the Roman period the artillery in use remained
precisely what it had been six hundred years before, although the
empire was crumbling under barbarian pressure, and would have
given anything, one would imagine, for an improved artillery capable
of withstanding the Gothic armies. It is strange, as has been acutely
said, that the Romans never invented anything so much in the Roman
taste as a railway. So far as Hellenistic empirical industrial chemistry
was concerned, the Democritean and Epicurean atoms might never
have existed. And in medicine, the only effect of the brilliant Greek
atomic speculations was to give rise to the Methodic school of Roman
physicians, described by Allbutt,^ the influence of which was never
strong, and contributed relatively little to the main stream of thera-
peutics originating with Hippocrates.

In sum, we cannot dissociate scientific advances from the technical
needs and processes of the time, and the economic structure in which
all are embedded. We shall never understand the failure of Greek
science if we consider it in abstraction from the environment which
sterilised its speculation. The history of science is not a mere succession
of inexplicable geniuses, direct Promethean ambassadors to man
from heaven. Whether a given fact would have got itself discovered
by some other person than the historical discoverer had he not lived

^ In the Renaissance period Vesalius himself realised this: see B. Farrington,
•'Vesalius on the Ruin of Ancient Medicine," Modern Quarterly, 1938, 1, 23. The
question is also well discussed by J. G. Crowther in The Social Relations of Science
(London, 1941), p. 378.

^ Greek Medicine in Rome (London, 1921).

144

LIMITING FACTORS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

it is certainly profitless and probably meaningless to enquire. But
scientific men, as Bukharin^ said, do not live in a vacuum; on the
contrary, the directions of their interest are ever conditioned by the
structure of the world they live in. Further historical research will
enable us to do for the great embr}'ologists what has been well done
by Hessen^ for Isaac Newton, and in this survey it will not be out of
plate to take into account the social and economic status of the in-
vestigator himself (Cf. Frank Chambers^ for the Hellenistic artist;
M. Yearsley* for the sixteenth-century physician).

It would thus be of the greatest interest to know accurately the
sources of the emoluments of embryologists at different times.^
From Omstein's admirable book on the scientific societies of the
Renaissance,^ the suspicion arises that their royal patronage was
dictated not so much by a purely disinterested passion for abstract
truth, as by the desire to profit as much as possible by the new tech-
niques which the decay of the anti-usury doctrines, the willingness of
the rising capitalist class to make industrial "ventures," and the far-
ranging thought of the scientific men were combining to produce.
In our own Royal Society, indeed, the preoccupation of the early
Fellows with the "improvement of trade and husbandry" is patent to
anyone acquainted with its early history (Cf. Thomas Sprat's account
of it^). Thus Dr. Jasper Needham, elected in 1663, read only one
paper before the Society — not, as might have been expected from his
profession, on the transfusion of blood or the anatomy of the brain,
but on the value and use of China Varnish.^ However, it is probable
that for the most part the embryologists whose work we shall have
to discuss were practising physicians, free or relatively free, from the
ancient tradition, and conscious that to understand the mystery of
generation would be to advance the science and art of medicine.

In this connection, it is of interest that the Church in the 17th
and 1 8th centuries provided a certain source of demand for embryo-
logical research. Of this Swammerdam^ and Malebranche^^ provide

^ Historical Materialism (Allen & Unwin, London, 1928).

2 "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia" in Science at the Cross-
Roads (London, 193 1).

^ Cycles of Taste (Harvard, 1928).

* Doctors in EUiabethan Drama (London, 1933).

^ On this, cf. Cumston, Ann. Med. Hist., 1921, 2, 265 and Dittrick, Ann. Med. Hist.,
1928, 10, 90.

* The Role of Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1928).
' History of the Royal Society^ 1670. ' i.e. lacquer.

^ Biblia Naturae, 1737, ■"' Recherche de la Verite, 1672.

145

K

time: the refreshing river

interesting examples, and the conviction, then widely held, that
research into the nature of generation would throw light on orthodox
theological doctrines, such as that of original sin, led to an economic
situation of value for biological development. Finally, it would be
rash to minimise the factor of pure curiosity in seventeenth-century
science. This was extremely marked in Leeuwenhoek's microscopical
investigations, as Becking^ has pointed out.

Scientific Co-operation.

Next comes Co-operation of Scholars. In the civilisation of the
Hellenistic age, it may be said, a considerable measure of such co-
operation had been attained ; the works of Aristotle and Hippocrates
were fairly readily available in written form, and evidence has been
brought forward, particularly with regard to Jewish thought, that
this was well used.

During the period when the biological school of Alexandria was
at its height, that city became an important Jewish centre. Two
centuries later it was to produce Philo, but now the Alexandrian Jews
were writing that part of the modern Bible known as the Wisdom
Literature. In books such as the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus,
Proverbs, etc., the typical Hellenic exclusion of the action of gods in
natural phenomena is clearly to be seen. There are two passages of
embryological importance. First, in the book of Job (x. lo). Job is
made to say, "Remember, I beseech thee, that thou hast fashioned
me as clay; and wilt thou bring me into the dust again .'^ Hast thou
not poured me out like milk, and curdled me like cheese.'^ Thou hast
clothed me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and
sinews." This comparison of embryogeny with the making of cheese
is interesting in view of the fact that precisely the same comparison
occurs in Aristotle's book On the Generation of Animals. Still
more extraordinary, the only other embryological reference in the
Wisdom Literature, which occurs in the Wisdom of Solomon (vii. 2),
also copies an Aristotelian theory, namely, that the embryo is formed
from (menstrual) blood.

The Talmudists thought, moreover, that the bones and tendons,
the nails, the marrow in the head and the white of the eye, were
derived from the father, "who sows the white," but the skin, flesh,
blood, hair, and the dark part of the eye from the mother "who sows
the red." This is evidently in direct descent from Aristotle through

^ Sci. Monthly, 1924, 18, 547.
146

LIMITING FACTORS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

Galen, and may be compared with the following passage^ from the
latter writer's Commentary on Hippocrates: "We teach that some parts
of the body are formed from the semen and the flesh alone from
blood. But because the amount of semen which is injected into the
uterus is small, growth and increment must come for the most part
from the blood." It might thus appear that, just as the Jews of Alex-
andria were reading Aristotle in the third century B.C. and incorporat-
ing him into the Wisdom Literature, so those of the third century
A.D. were reading Galen and incorporating him into the Talmud.

But we must beware here of suffering a distortion of perspective in
the contemplation of antiquit}^, for it is easy to exaggerate the co-
operation of ancient thought. A single idea could consider itself
lucky if it passed once in twenty-five years between Greece and India
after Alexander. Among the conflicting influences that gave rise to
the civilisation of the later West, this co-operation, hampered by
enormous linguistic difficulties on the one hand and by the diversion
of interest from scientific to ethical and theological channels on the
other, sank to a very low level. Hence we have the remarkable
spectacle of a Leonardo, many years ahead of his contemporaries,
and able to earn a living only as a designer of fortifications, finding
it impossible to communicate his discoveries to any living person,
and reduced to burying them in note-books,^ only by a mere chance
available to scholars of after ages.

Scientific Technique.

Among the most important of limiting factors we must reckon
Technique, extending the term to cover mental as well as material
methodology. The part which the latter has played in the history of
embryology can hardly be overrated. Thus until the introduction of
hardening agents, especially alcohol, by Boyle,^ the examination of
the early stages of embryos was bound to remain crude, and embry-
ology attained an entirely different level immediately afterwards, in
the hands of Maitre-Jan.^ The parallel case of the microscope is too
familiar to dwell on, but the work of Malpighi obviously marked a

^ Ten centuries later it was still worth while for Harvey to have a hit at this opinion.
"In the interim," he says (1653, p. 116), "we canot chuse but smile at that fond and
fictitious Division of the Parts into Spermatical and Sanguineous; as if any part were
immediately framed of the semen, and were not all of one extract and original."

2 QuaJerni d'Anatomia, ed. Vangensten, Fohnahn & Hopstock (Copenhagen, 191 1).

^ Phil Trans. Roy. Soc, 1666, 1, 199.

* Observations sur la formation du Poulet, etc.^ ij22.

time: the refreshing river

turning-point in the science. It may here be noted, however, that even
when methods are available, the workers of the time do not necessarily
use them, and although Harvey could have employed an early form of
microscope, he voluntarily restricted himself to the weak lenses,
"perspicilia," or perspectives, which had already been used by
Riolanus. A still more obvious instance is that of artificial incubation.
Carried on in Egypt since the remotest antiquity, this process must
have been at the disposal of Egyptian physicians, Alexandrian bio-
logists, and Arabian scholars for a period of three thousand years,
yet so far as we know, no embryological use of it was ever made.
In eighteenth-century France and England the technique of the
process had to be painfully rediscovered at a time when biologists
were only too eager to make use of such assistance. Let us mention,
as other instances of the effect of material technique on embryology,
the burst of knowledge which followed the invention of the auto-
matic microtome by ThrelfalF and others about 1 860, and the great
advance which in our own century has followed the successful
mastery of grafting technique by Spemann.^

Just as important, however, as material technique is mental tech-
nique. And first with respect to words; on several occasions we have
had to notice a standstill on account of the lack of a satisfactory
terminology. Thus in the thirteenth century Albertus of Cologne^
had arrived at a point beyond which progress was impossible in the
absence of new words. When, for example, there was no other means
of describing the sero-amniotic junction in the hen's egg than by
speaking of "the hole on the left side of the vessel which runs above
the membrane on the right hand of something else," accuracy was
difficult and speed impossible. A precisely similar position was
occupied by Boerhaave* in the eighteenth century, only now in the
case of biochemical words. Faced with some substance such as a
"greasy, streaky yellow oil, smelling of alkaline salt" Boerhaave was
unable to describe it except in these common-sense terms, and lack-
ing the means either to submit it to further analysis or to characterise
it by accurate physico-chemical constants, he was forced to admit a .
vast number of ultimates into his schemes which were not ultimate
at all.

Mental technique, as a limiting factor in embryological history,

^ See Biol. Rev., 1930,5, 357.

2 See my Biochemistry and Morphogenesis (Cambridge, 1942).

3 De Animalibus^ ed. Stadler, 1916. * Elementa Chetnlae, 1732.

148

\

LIMITING FACTORS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

goes deeper than words, however, for it involves the concepts of the
investigator. What the Germans call "Begriffsbildung" or the con-
struction of concepts congruent with certain sorts of natural pheno-
mena, though never conscious in the history of biology, has none
the less been operative. In this field we may remember the doctrine
of Galen concerning the natural faculties (Sum/xet?), and the im-
mense length of time which was required for biologists to see that it
was nothing more than a concise statement of the phenomena them-
selves. Not until it was "seen through" as an explanation was post-
Renaissance biology possible. Similarly, the peculiar contribution of
Leonardo to embryology was his realisation that embryos could be
measured at a succession of moments. The application of the concept
of change in weight and size with time, a concept which, as modem
biology shows, admits of much accuracy when properly worked
out, was thus first made by Leonardo. In the same way Boyle^ was
the first to see clearly that a problem of mixture is presented by the
developing embryo (though Hippocrates had stated it dimly some
two thousand years before). If the embryo is made up of mixed
things, some definite proportion and way of mixture must exist.
And no hope of finding out what this was could be obtained from
the Aristotelian elements (heat, cold, moisture, and dryness) or from
the Alchemical principles (salt, sulphur, and mercury). Hence Boyle*s
emphasis on the corpuscularian or mechanical hypothesis, and all its
historical implications.

His preference for the "mechanical or corpuscularian" philosophy
was mainly due to his realisation that unless chemistry was going to
start measuring something it might as well languish in the obscurity
to which Harvey would willingly have relegated it. Thus he says: —

"But I should perchance forgive the Hypothesis I have been
examining (that of the alchemists), if, though it reaches but to
a very little part of the world, it did at least give us a satisfactory
account of those things which 'tis said to teach. But I find not
that it gives us any other than a very imperfect information even
about mixt bodies themselves; for how will the knowledge of
the Tria Prima?' discover to us the reason why the Loadstone
drawes a Needle, and disposes it to respect the Poles, and yet
seldom precisely points at them } How will this hypothesis teach

^ The Sceptical Chymist, l66l.

^ The three alchemical (hypostatical) principles.

149

time: the refreshing river

us how a Chick is formed in the Egge, or how the seminal
principles of mint, pompions, and other vegetables, can fashion
Water into various plants, each of them endow'd with its peculiar
and determinate shape and with diverse specifick and discrimin-
ating Qualities? How does this hypothesis shew us, how much
Salt, how much Sulphur, how much Mercur}^ must be taken to
make a Chick or Pompion ? and if we know that, what principle
is it, that manages these ingredients and contrives, for instance,
such liquors as the White and Yolke of an Egge in such a variety
of textures as is requisite to fashion the Bones, Arteries, Veines,
Nerves, Tendons, Feathers, Blood and other parts of a Chick;
and not only to fashion each Limbe, but to connect them alto-
gether, after that manner which is most congruous to the
perfection of the Animal which is to consist of them? For to
say that some more fine and subtile part of either or all the
Hypostatical Principles is the Director in all the business and the
Architect of all this elaborate structure, is to give one occasion
to demand again, what proportion and way of mixture of the
Tria Prima afforded this Architectonick Spirit, and what Agent
made so skilful and happy a mixture ?'*

Boyle's instance of the magnetic needle pointing nearly, not
exactly, at the north, and his use of the expressions "how much,"
*'how many," "proportion," "way of mixture," indicate that he was
moving towards a quantitative chemistry, and by express implication
a quantitative embryology. Elsewhere he says that he thinks the
Tria Prima will hardly explain a tenth part of the phenomena which
the "Leucippian" or atomistic hypothesis is competent to deal with.
Thus, although Boyle made few experiments or observations on
embryos, he occupies a very important position in the history of
embryology.

Allied to this creation of concepts, and the choice of one of them
to apply, we find that the mentality of the workers of the past has
often been particularly different with regard to a quality which can
only be called Audacity. Probably Aristotle's greatest claim to our
respect is that alone of his contemporaries and predecessors he had
the audacity to suggest that animal form was not limitlessly manifold
or infinite in its manifestations, but that given industry and intelligence,
a classification was possible. This alone marks him out above all
subsequent biologists. On a smaller scale, we find the same mental

150

LIMITING FACTORS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

audacity in Kenelm Digby,^ whose discussions of the development
of the chick are remarkable for their naturalistic tone, for their con-
viction that the processes of development are not beyond the reach
of the reason and imagination of man. It is ironic that Digby, who did
little or nothing himself to advance our knowledge, should have
spoken thus, and that his great contemporary, William Harvey, to
whom we are indebted for so many advances in embryology, was led
to despair of understanding development Another interesting point
that emerges from the same period is that such mental audacity can
go, perhaps, too far, as when Descartes^ and Gassendi^ built up an
embryology more geometrico demonstrata, in which the facts were
relegated to an inferior position and the theory was all.

But not only must the right concepts be chosen, the wrong ones
must be abandoned. One of the principal necessities which has faced
investigators since the earliest times has been the recognition of silly
questions in order to leave time for the examination of serious ones.
It was presumably inevitable that the pseudo-problems concerning
the entry of the soul into the embryo should be taken seriously until
a very late date. But a more typical instance of a meaningless question
may be found in the dispute about what parts of the egg form the
chick and which feed it. The tacit assumption here was that since to
common sense food and flesh are different things, there must be in
the hen's egg, aside from a sufficient provision of food, some sort of
pre-flesh out of which the embryo can be made. Not until 165 1 did
this pseudo-problem go out of currency in the light of Harvey's
demonstration of the unsoundness of the assumption.

The expulsion of ethics from biology and embryology forms
another excellent example. That good and bad, noble and ignoble,
beautiful and ugly, honourable and dishonourable, are not terms
with a biological meaning is a proposition which it has taken many
centuries for biologists to realise.

Ideas of good and bad entered biology partly under the concept
of "perfection." In 1260 Albertus was maintaining that male chicks
always hatched from the more spherical eggs and female chicks
from the more oval eggs, because the sphere is the most perfect of
all figures in solid geometry, and the male the more perfect of the

^ Two Treatises, in the one of which the Nature of Bodies, in the other the Nature of
Man's Soule, is looked into, in way of discovery of the Immortality of Reasonable
Soules, 1644.

^ L' Homme, et la formation du Foetus, etc., 1664. ^ Opera, 1658.

time: the refreshing river

two sexes. We realise to-day that to ask which is the more perfect
of the two sexes is a meaningless question, for we have expelled ethics
from science and cannot regard any one thing as being more perfect
than any other. Again, describing the course of the arteries in the
developing chick, Albertus says: "One of tlie two passages which
springs from the heart branches into two, one of them going to the
spiritual part which contains the heart, and carrying to it the pulse
and subtle food from which the lungs and other spiritual parts are
formed; and the other passing through the diaphragm to enclose the
yolk of the egg, around which it forms the liver and stomach." This
distinction between the organs above the diaphragm — the lungs,
heart, thymus, etc. — called "spiritualia," and the organs below —
the stomach, liver, intestines, spleen, etc. — runs through the whole of
the early anatomy. It was as if the organs of the thorax were regarded
as a respectable family living at the top of an otherwise disreputable
block of flats. To us it seems absurd to call one organ more "spiritual"
than another, but that is because we realise the irrelevance of ethical
issues in biology. Thomas Aquinas, about the same time, in his
Summa Theologica, dealt in passing with human generation. "The
generative power of the female," he said, "is imperfect compared to
that of male, for just as in the crafts, the inferior workman prepares
the material and the more skilled operator shapes it, so likewise the
female generative virtue provides the substance but the active male
virtue makes it into the finished product." This is really the pure
Aristotelian doctrine, but St. Thomas gives it the characteristically
mediaeval twist. Aristotle might make a distinction between form and
matter in generation, but the feudal mentality, with its perpetual
hankering after status, would at once enquire which of the two, male
or female, was the higher, tlie nobler, the more honourable.

In the eighteenth century tlie same frame of mind persisted. It was
maintained that in every detail of the visible world some evidence
could be found for the central dogma of natural theology, the belief
in a just and beneficent God.^ Between 1700 and 1850 a multitude
of books were written which purported to reveal the wisdom and
goodness of God in the natural creation. The theologians took what
suited their purpose and left the rest. It is instructive to see how
Goethe, who was somewhat committed to the theological inter-
pretation of phenomena, reacted to the ornithological anecdotes of

^ For a striking example of this, see Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (London, 1907,
and many later editions).

LIMITING FACTORS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE "

his secretary Eckermann on October i8, 1827.1 He said little while
Eckermann told him about the habits of the cuckoo and other birds,
but when Eckermann related how he had liberated a young wren
near a robin's nest and how he had found it subsequently being fed
by the robins, Goethe exclaimed: "That is one of the best ornitho-
logical stories I have ever heard. I drink success to you and your
investigations. Whoever hears that, and does not believe in God,
will not be aided by Moses and the prophets. That is what I call the
omnipresence of the Deity, who has everywhere spread and implanted
a portion of His endless love." And so it always was with the theo-
logical naturalists; they hailed with enthusiasm the discovery of
monogamy in tortoises, or mother-love in goats, but they had nothing
to say concerning the habits of the hookworm parasite or the appear-
ance of embryonic monsters in man. Not until the beginning of the
nineteenth century did it become clear that nature cannot be divided
into the Edifying, which may with pleasure be published, and the
Unedifying, which must be kept in obscurity.

The Balance of Thought and Observation.

In the end we may say that the progress of a branch of natural
science such as embryology depends on a delicate balance of three
things; speculative thought, accurate observation, and controlled
experiment. Any modification of the optimum balance will act as a
powerful limiting factor on progress. Speculative thought, in par-
ticular, has shown a tendency to crystallise too readily into doctrines
which, by way of attachment to some philosophical or theological
issue, live a longer life than they deserve. Thus the Aristotelian theory
of the formation of the embryo by the coagulation of the menstrual
blood, built in the first instance upon a faulty deduction, became
incorporated in the Aristotelian tradition oi forma and materia^ and
although quite repugnant to observation, remained the official theory
throughout the European middle ages, and apparently in perpetuity
in India. So powerful was the rationalism of a medical education at
about 1630 that the physicians to whom Harvey demonstrated the
empty uteri of the King's does preferred to believe their books rather
than the evidence of their senses.

The account given by Harvey himself (1653, p. 416) cannot be
omitted ;

^ Conversations with Goethe, Everyman edition, p. 243.

time: the refreshing river

"When I had often discovered to His Majesties sight this
alteration in the Womb, and having Hkewise plainly shewed
that all this while no portion of seed or conception either was
to be found in the Womb, and when the King himself had
communicated the same as a very wonderful thing to diverse
of his followers, a great debate at length arose: The Keepers
and Huntsmen concluded, first, that this did imply, that their
conception would be late that year, and thereupon accused the
drought; but afterwards when they understood that the rutting
time was past and gone; and that I stood stiffly upon that, they
peremptorily did affirm, that I was first mistaken my selfe, and
so had drawn the King into my error; and that it could not
possibly be, but that something at least of the Conception must
needs appear in the Uterus: untill at last, being confuted by
their own eyes, they sate down in a gaze and gave it over for
granted. But all the King's Physicians persisted stiffly, that it
could no waies be, that a conception should go forward unless
the males seed did remain in the womb, and that there should
be nothing at all residing in the Uterus after a fruitfull and
effectual 1 Coition; this they ranked amongst their dSvpara.

Now that this experiment which is of so great concern might
appear the more evident to posterity; His Majestic for tryal-
sake (because they have all the same time and manner of con-
ception) did at the beginning of October separate about a dozen
Does from the society of the Buck and lock them up in the
Course near Hampton Court. Now lest any one might affirm
that doubtlessly there did continue the seed bestowed upon
them in Coition (their time of Rutting being then not past) I
dissected divers of them, and discovered no seed at all residing
in their Uterus; and yet those whom I dissected not, did conceive
by the virtue of their former Coition (as by Contagion) and did
Fawn at their appointed time."

And precisely parallel to this attitude was that of the preforma-
tionists in the following century, who, having decided, like Bonnet,^
that epigenesis was inconceivable, only accepted such observations as
confirmed their a priori view.

Preformationism as a manifestation of rationalism merits further
examination. The dogmatic manner in which preformationism was

^ Considerations sur les corps organisees, 1762.

LIMITING FACTORS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

held during the eighteenth century would not perhaps have been so
crushing if the biologists of that time had been able to take a
mathematical argument more seriously. There was Harvey's very con-
vincing argument about the circulation of the blood, and Freind's^
equally convincing (though unfortunately in tendency erroneous),
argument about the quantity of menstrual blood and the weight of the
newborn foetus. Verbally, it was still quite possible to support the
Hellenistic view that the embryo was formed from menstrual blood,
in the post-Harveian period, if it were admitted that this blood flowed
little by little through the umbilical vessels. This was the position of
John Freind in his treatise on menstruation, Emmenologia (1700-30).
Calculating the amount evacuated in nine months, he said: "The
quantity of Blood which the Mother may bestow upon the nourish-
ment of her Offspring will be lib. i^ § 2J, which will outweigh the
newborn Foetus with all its Integuments, if they should be put into
a Balance; and leave no room to doubt, its being able to bestow
very proper nourishment on the Embrio. For the mean weight of a
new-born Foetus is about /ib. 12, some-times it is found greater,
and very often less."

If these could have been accepted, it was a pity that Hartsoeker's
argument about preformation could not. In 1722 Hartsoeker^ cal-
culated that lo^^'^'^o^ rabbits must have existed in the first rabbit, assu-
ming that the creation took place 6,000 years ago and that rabbits begin
to reproduce their kind at the age of six months. But to this Bonnet
merely answered that it was always possible, by adding zeros to units,
to crush the imagination under the weight of numbers, and he de-
scribed the performation theory as one of the most striking victories
of the understanding over the senses. It would have been better
described as one of the most striking victories of the imagination
over the understanding.

The fact is that the biologists of the eighteenth century, carried
away by preformationist theory, took embryology on to a plane
where observation became superfluous. They would have found
acceptable the sentiment satirised by Boyle that "it is much more
high and philosophical to argue a priori than a posteriori,'' and were
eventually debarred from looking at developing embryos by their
conviction that structure and organisation would certainly be there,
whether they could see it or not. The preformationist controversy
was, in fact, a repetition in biology of the controversy between the

^ Emmenologia, 1720. ^ Receuil de plusieurs pieces de physique, 1722.

time: the refreshing river

rationalists and the empiricists in philosophy. The contemporary
rationaHsts were people who held that "human beings were in
possession of certain principles of interpretation which were not
simply generalisations from experience, but could nevertheless be used
as major premises in arguments concerning nature. If observations
were not in accordance with expectations founded on such reasoning,
they were dismissed as illusions. The empiricists, on the otlier hand,
held that there was no knowledge independent of observation, and
that the rationalists' principles, in so far as they were admissible at
all, were generalisations from experience." It is obvious that nearly
all the preformationists were rationalists. They thought that Reason
was in a position to decide the issue whatever might be the results
of observation. "It is remarkable," as Cole says,^ in his book on
this period, "that the preformationists did not realise that if the
point to be established is assumed at the outset all further discussion
is superfluous." In this example, then, we have a disturbance of the
balance towards the side of rationalistic speculation.

It would be a mistake, however, to regard this tendency as confined
to the eighteenth century. Ample examples of its presence can be
collected from nearly every period in biological history. "We plume
ourselves," says Cole, "on that aspect of our work which is vain and
argumentative, and condescend to the more modest but enduring
labour of observation." There can be no doubt that this state of
affairs, so unfortunate for science, is one aspect of that contempt for
manual labour which has run through the stratified structures of all
societies in the history of civilisation. The manipulator of paper and
ink, educated in the classical traditions of his time, has always
seemed, by reason of his superficial similarity to the political
administrator, a superior being to the empirical mechanic engaged
in the manual work of the arts and industries. The tradition is as old
as civilisation, yet for the advance of science it must be broken. Not
until the manuar worker and the audacious theorist are combined
in one person will the fullest development of scientific thought be
possible.

All the greatest experimental scientists are evidence of this, but
by no means all of them have been conscious of it. It is therefore
of particular interest to read the words which the great Russian
physiologist, Pavlov, wrote to a meeting of Stakhanovist miners,
in 1935.

^ Early Theories of Sexual Generation (Oxford, 1930).

156

LIMITING FACTORS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

"All my life," he said, "I have loved and still love both
intellectual and manual work, and the second perhaps even more
than the first. Especially have I felt satisfaction when into the
latter I have been able to carry some good problem, thus uniting
head and hands. Upon this same road you are travelling. With
all my heart I wish that you may advance far along this path,
the only path that secures happiness for man."^

Experiment in Embryology.

When I once gave some lectures on this subject at University
College, London, they bore the title "Speculation, Observation and
Experiment as Illustrated by the History of Em.bryology." Of the
first two of these factors we have seen enough, but the third would
necessitate the continuation of the story down to the end of the
nineteenth century. The true science of experimental embryology
did not come into being until the time of Wilhelm Roux.^ The early
chemical observations on the embryonic liquors were indeed observa-
tions rather than experiments; and there was no systematic study of
the changes which the liquors undergo during the development of
the foetus; this was not done till the time of John Dzondi.^ Harvey's
segregation of does at Hampton Court merits, no doubt, the name of
experiment, involving as it did, the use of "controls," and an out-
standing instance is the ligature of Nuck* in 1691. The work of Nuck
is very important, as one of the earliest instances of experimental
procedure. He ligatured the uterine horns after copulation in a dog,
and observed pregnancy afterwards, implantation having taken
place above the ligature. His conclusion was that the embryo was
derived from the ovary and not from the sperm — ''animal ex ovo
generari experimento probaturT

As in Nuck's case, experiment in the hands of both Spallanzani^
and J. T. Needham^ led to error. Spallanzani confuted his adversary
on the question of spontaneous generation and the vegetative force
by what amounted to rigid criticism of experimental conditions, but
later on denied their proper function to the spermatozoa on exactly
the same methodologically faulty grounds.

1 Quoted in Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes, vol. II, p. 53 (London, 1941).

'^ Gesammelte Ahhandlungen u. Entwicklungsmechanik, 1895.

^ Journ. f. Chem. u. Physik, 1806, 2, 652.

* Adenographia curiosa, 1691. ^ Saggi di osservaiioni microscopiche, etc., 1766.

^ New Microscopical Discoveries, 1745.

time: the refreshing river

Nevertheless, experimentation, the active interference with the
course of nature and the subsequent observation of the resulting
system in comparison with systems in which no such interference
has taken place, was a characteristically nineteenth-century product
as far as biology and embryology are concerned. Only at the present
day, indeed, are we beginning to appreciate the statistical and other
difficulties attending upon the full application of the experimental
method to living organisms, and the manifold obstacles which prevent
obedience to the rule that only one variable be modified at one time.
But this is no matter of reproach against the older embryologists.
Knowledge of form, must necessarily precede knowledge of change of
form and the factors producing it, and so we see during the last
seventy years the production of "Normaltafeln" or tables of morpho-
logical pictures showing normal development; these are the essential
basis for experimental studies.

On the other hand, there can be no doubt that a plethora of observa-
tion and experiment is also bad for scientific progress. Modern biology
is the crowning instance of this fact. What has been well called a
"medley of ad hoc hypotheses" is all that we have to show as the
theoretical background of a vast and constantly increasing mass of
observations and experiments. Embryology in particular has been
theoretically backward since the decay of the evolution theory as a
mode of explanation. Embryologists of the school of F. M. Balfour^
thought that their task was accomplished when they had traced a
maximum number of evolutionary analogies in the development of
an animal. Wilhelm His,^ perhaps the first causal embryologist,
struggled successfully to end this state of affairs. "My own attempts,"
he wrote in 1888 in a famous passage,^ "to introduce some elementary
physiological or mechanical explanations into embryology have not
been generally agreed to by morphologists. To one it seemed ridiculous
to speak of the elasticity of the germinal layers: another thought
that by such considerations we put the cart before the horse; and one
recent author states that we have something better to do in embryology
than to discuss tensions of germinal layers, etc., since all embryological
explanation must necessarily be of a phylogenetic nature." But this
strictly evolutionary dominance in embryology did not last on into
the twentieth century. The unfortunate thing is that nothing has so
far been devised to put in its place. Experimental embryology,

^ Comparative Embryology, 1880. ^ Unsere Korperform,

^ Proc. Roy. Soc. Ed., 1888, 15, 294.

LIMITING FACTORS IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE

Morphological embryology, Physiological embryology, and Chemical
embryology form to-day a vast range of factual knowledge, without
any great unifying hypothesis, for we cannot as yet dignify the
axial gradient doctrines, the field theories, and the speculations on
the genetic control of enzymes, with such a position. We cannot
doubt that the most urgent need of modern embryology is a series
of advances of a purely theoretical, even mathematico-logical, nature.
Only by something of this kind can we redress the balance which
has fallen over to observation and experiment; only by some such
effort can we obtain a theoretical embryology suited in magnitude
and spaciousness to the wealth of facts which contemporary investi-
gators are accumulating day by day.

159

The Biological Basis of Sociology

(Based on a contribution to the Second Conference
on the Social Sciences, 1936)

There are two extreme views which might be taken concerning the
significance of biological data and conclusions for sociological thought.
It might be held, either that our present biological knowledge has
no relation to the understanding of social phenomena; or conversely,
that it is more important than any other illumination we can expect
to have. The first of these views might perhaps be taken by some
old-fashioned theologian, but probably no reader of this book would
support it. The second has a more subde appeal, and has been rather
widely held. Nevertheless, I believe it to be exceedingly dangerous.
I believe, on the contrary, that while our present biological knowledge
can furnish us with many essential guiding principles and clues in
the study and direction of social phenomena, it must at all points be
supplemented by principles derived from observation of the social
facts themselves and applying only to those facts. In the world of
nature we have to deal with a succession of levels of complexity and
organisation. The principles which apply to one of these levels do
not apply to the others, although at every level the principles appro-
priate to the lower levels must be taken into account, modified though
they may be by the special new conditions prevailing. At the level of
life itself, this doctrine is not vitalism, any more than it is **crystallism"
to demonstrate the special laws which govern the behaviour (to use
a convenient facon de parler) of liquid and solid crystals.^ Similarly,
in the associations of highly cerebrated ape-like organisms which are
studied by sociology, new principles apply, principles which are
meaningless when mentioned in connection with lower levels,
principles which may have manifestations familiar to us by quite other
names, such as purpose, the good life, social cohesiveness, love, etc.^

^ See the author's Order and Life, pp. 46, 47.
^ After writing the above, I found the following:

"The laws of social development are specific laws. It is, therefore, fundamentally
incorrect and methodologically impermissible to transfer mechanically laws of a
biological order into the province of social development" (Bukharin, N., in the
Marx Memorial Volume of the Moscow Academy of Sciences, 1933, Eng. tr.,
Marxism and Modern Thought, p. 33).

160

THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF SOCIOLOGY

Biology, therefore, can contribute greatly to sociological study and
social control, but its word can never be the last one. Sociologists
and social engineers may neglect it at their peril but equally they
must master it and never let it master them.

The Denial of the Sociological Level; ''Biologism.""

It may be advisable to give a few illustrations of the melancholy
consequences which follow abandonment of this philosophic principle.
Recent articles by E. W. McBride will do. In' a letter to Nature,^
this writer (a professional biologist) opened the question of the
cultivation of the unfit. Describing a certain physical deterioration
which followed the isolation of chamois and red deer in special parks
separated from their natural enemies, he went on to speak of the
"elaborate and costly social services" which keep alive the "morally,
mentally, and physically" human unfit. In his opinion, sterilisation to
prevent further reproduction should be applied to all those who
"have to resort to public assistance in order to support their children,'*
although at the same time he was at pains to point out that sterilisation
must be regarded as a trauma and hence as a punishment. "If the
deep-seated sub-conscious desire to perpetuate himself by producing
offspring is rendered impossible," he said, "however slight and
painless the operation may be, it leaves a psychic wound which will
never heal." Now the apparently guileless transition from the red
deer to the unemployed workmen of a civilised country covers
several non sequiturs. We are given no evidence that the deformed
specimens of deer were mentally or morally unfit, or if so, unfit for
what.'^ One would have thought that childhood fairy stories apart,
adult reasoning would not attribute mental and moral qualities to
animals. Fitness or unfitness in men or animals, says McBride, is
ability" or inability to maintain themselves in their normal environ-
ments. But what is a normal environment.^ Do not men differ from
animals precisely in that their environment is partly of their own
creating } Do they not have the power to alter their environment and
to make it anew, in nearer accordance with their wishes } We clearly
see that endless difficulties are created by the refusal to admit that
social phenomena are upon a different level from biological pheno-
mena, and that thinkers who will not admit the difference are the most
dangerous of guides. One must seek some further explanation of the

^ E. W. McBride, Nature, 1935, 137, 44, further correspondence, p. 188.

161 L

time: the refreshing river

sadistic attitude of this writer towards the working class, other than
the conclusions of a sound sociology.

Sterilisation, indeed, is perhaps the best example of the dangerous
possibilities now at the disposal of the advocates of class and race
oppression who desire to put their proposals on a scientific basis.
J. B. S. Haldane^ in his Lock3^er Lecture for 1934 instanced the case
of a labourer recommended for sterilisation in the state of Washington,
U.S. after conviction for stealing food. The whole family was of
sub-normal intelligence and had been for a long period on the verge
of starvation. But as Haldane says it did not occur to the judge
either that there might be any connection between the starvation of
the children and their mental dullness, or that there was anything
wrong with conditions under which a beet-sugar labourer could not
earn enough to support five children. The review of Vignes^ shows
that there are cases where sterilisation is suitable. But Jennings,^ in
his acute enumeration of current popular biological fallacies, points
out that many people think that if we prevent the breeding of hereditary
defectives we shall largely get rid of such defectives in future genera-
tions, and conversely, that superior people come from superior
parents, and that these things will continue to happen. Any society
that carries out this plan will be in for a great disappointment. For
unfortunately the great majority of defective genes which cause the
troubles we want to get rid of are contained in normal people who
carry them just as "typhoid-carriers" carry the bacilli of typhoid
fever widiout ever getting it themselves. Thus 0.3 per cent of the
world's population is actually suflFering from feeblemindedness, but
no less than 10 per cent is composed of people carrying the defective
genes, while normal themselves. R. A. Fisher's calculations* showed
that about 1 1 per cent of the feebleminded of any generation come
from the mating of the feebleminded of the previous generation,
while 89 per cent of them come from matings among the carrier group.
The converse case, that of genius, almost certainly works in the same
way, according to Raymond Pearl.^ It is unfortunately only too

^ J. B. S. Haldane, Human Biology and Politics, Lockyer Lecture, British Science
Guild, 1934.

^ H. Vignes, La Presse Medicale, 1934, May 19th and June 13th,

^ H. S. Jennings, The Biological Basis of Human Nature (London, 1930).

* R. A. Fisher, Journ. Hered., 1927, 18, 529. See also J. B. S. Haldane, New Paths
in Genetics (Allen & Unwin, London, 1941), esp. p. 115 flf.

' R. Pearl, Amer. Mercury, 1927, 12, 257. Pearl employed the following method
Genius was, for the present purpose, defined as that which entitles its bearer to more
than one page of space in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Among the 126 parents of 63

162

THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF SOCIOLOGY

obvious how easily a weapon such as steriHsation may be used in-
discriminately by a fascist government at the dictates of racialist
theories entirely without serious scientific foundation, as may be
read in the book of Huxley, Haddon & Carr-Saunders.^ If we may
judge from accounts of "national-socialist biology" such as that of
Brohmer,^ such political sterilisation is an actual fact to-day.

I come back to the question of fitness and unfitness, and the
relative parts played by inheritance and environment in moulding
human material. The stupid acceptance of the conditions holding
good in the animal world, and their application to human societies, did
not originate with McBride. Already in the last century the conception
of the struggle for existence in the world of animals introduced by
Darwin under the name of natural selection, unfavourable or lethal
variations being weeded out by the press of circumstances, was
appealed to as the justification for laissei-faire economics. Such a
book as that of Headley,^ Darwinism and Modern Socialism^ dating
from 1903, well illustrates this trend, and the great embryologist,
O. Hertwig, found it necessary to write a book expressly condemning
the sociological application of the principle of natural selection.*
For men of the type of Headley, socialism conflicted with ineradicable
human instincts and could only thrive as a theory. In this way, the
atomistic and individualistic character of the system of capitalist enter-
prise, which had already in the seventeenth century received support
from the concurrent theories of physical atomism, was now to be
based on the perpetual and universal strife for food and generation
found in the world of wild animals. It was, of course, suggested, as
by Engels^ and later by Pannekoek,^ that die theory of natural selection
was the effect, not the cause, of capitalist production, since Darwin's
mind cannot but have been receptive to the atmosphere of the society
in which he found himself; and certainly it is undeniable that the

philosophers of genius, only three were themselves sufficiently distinguished to leave
behind them any record of the fact. Among the 170 parents of 85 poets of genius, only
three (again) were sufficiently distinguished for posterity to be aware of it.

^ J. S. Huxley, A. C. Haddon & A. M. Carr-Saunders, JVe Europeans (London,

1935)-

^ P. Brohmer, Mensch-Natur-Staat; Grundlinien einer naiional-soiialistischen Biologie

(FYankfurt, 1935).

^ F. W, Headley, Darwinism and Modern Socialism (London, 1909).

* O. Hertwig, Zur Abwehr des ethischen, soiialen, und politischen Darwinismns
(Jena, 1921).

^ F. Engels, Dialectics of Nature, p. 641.

* A. Pannekoek, Marxism and Darwinism (Chicago, 1912). ^

163

time: the refreshing river

theory originated from Malthus, since Darwin says so himself in his
autobiography. We thus have a theory arising from an absurdly
easy (as it now seems to us) acceptance of discomfort in human
societies, applied with much success to a field where it more properly
belonged, that of animals in natural surroundings, and then brought
back again with all the resounding prestige which it acquired from its
biological success, to justify sociological states of affairs to which
it was perfectly inapplicable. In reading Malthus I find nothing more
amazing than the mental blindness with which he approached the
subject of birth control. "Improper Arts," as he called them, being
utterly out of the question, the population must increase more rapidly
than the available means of subsistence, and struggle must ensue. If
capitalist competition and misery due to under-production could in
those days be represented as unavoidable natural laws, there can
certainly be no sense in so regarding them in an age when birth-
control is rationally considered and when the advance of scientific
technology has rendered under-production a thing of the past. It
seems quite clear that a control of population by a world-authority
subject to no class or race prejudices, is the goal towards which all
our efforts should be tending.

The Mechanisation oj Democracy.

Reference was made just now to the fallacy that most of the m.ental
deficiency in a population arises from the reproduction of mentally
deficient people. Allied to the above fallacy is that which alleges that
biology requires an aristocratic constitution of society. Each grade of
society, it is said, reproduces itself. Criminals produce criminals,
public school tie men produce public school tie men, intellectuals
produce intellectuals. The children of Plato's guardians become
guardians too.^ Whereas the fact is that from the higher many lower
are produced, from the lower many higher, and from the great
mediocre mass are produced more of the higher than the higher
produces itself, and more of the lower than the lower produces itself.
A democracy that can produce experts is emphatically the form of
society called for by the facts of human biology.

Hence the biologist and sociologist can not but be interested in

^ W. R. Inge, the former Dean of St. Paul's, did his best to foster this superstition
of course, by publishing his own "family tree" (in Outspoken Essays, II. 260). But
even in cases where achievements more valuable to the community than orthodox
theological scholarship recur in close successive generations, the point is that this is the
rare exception, not the rule.

164

THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF SOCIOLOGY

the most widely voiced criticism of modern democracy, namely tliat
it is inefficient as compared with totalitarian or authoritarian rule.
This criticism is not one which can be waved aside. Those of us who
have had experience of existing national organisations such as the
labour movement, realise only too well the creaking slowness with
which such bodies react to the stream of events. I knew a trade
unionist once who only consented to become secretary of his local
Trades Council on condition that he was not obliged to instal a
telephone at his house, fearing too many calls on his time; and this
in a period when Europe was being shaken to its foundations by the
aggressions of the fascist powers. If an executive committee is accus-
tomed to meet on the first Tuesday of every month, the heavens
might fall before it would agree to be called together at an intermediate
time. But all dirough evolution, organisms have been forced to resort
to ever more efficient machinery for the control of their growing
complexity. At the present time, human society has not yet developed
the technique which it needs for looking after its affairs. The solution
of the fascists, to abandon democratic principles, is a false one, since
it involves treating human beings as units less highly organised than
in fact they are. The proper solution is the "mechanisation" of
democracy.

Perhaps I can explain what I mean by this phrase if I refer to the
meeting of the International Physiological Congress in Moscow in
1935. At the plenary session, each delegate was supplied with head-
phones which he could plug in to one of a number of sockets in the
desk before him. According to which one he chose he could hear
the speech being delivered, either in the language of the speaker, or
in French, German, English or Russian, spoken more or less sentence
for sentence with the visible speaker, by hidden broadcasters from
previously prepared translations. This is the kind of mechanisation
of which we ought to have far more. There is nothing except prejudice
and financial reasons which prevents each member of an executive
committee, for example, being able to confer with the secretary at
any time, possibly by small radio sets. These can be developed well
enough for the purposes of war but so far have been not applied for
making the machinery of democracy work in peace-time. In his book
T/ie Social Relations of Science, J. G. Crowther has written;

"At present science is developing in the direction of big
instruments and organisations. It seems probable that it will

165

time: the refreshing river

evolve through this phase, and arrive at a new and higher one
in which its instruments will again be small and compact. Science
may show how a man can provide all his needs, in communica-
tion, food and transport, from very small instruments and
concentrated supplies carried in his pockets. ... If science is
developed to this stage, it would provide new concrete bases for
freedom."^

The Dominance of Economics over Eugenics.

In the case of an animal occupying a known oecological niche,
there is but one possible environment, and the dominant species
may be said to be well fitted for it. But the environment of man is
not given a priori. In an exceedingly important paper, the great
geneticist H. J. Muller,^ has once and for all demonstrated the false-
ness of the assumption often made, that our present social stratification
is correlated positively with genetic worth. Apologists for the existing
social order, he says, defend their position with the a priori argument
that in the social struggle, the better rise to the top. They neglect
to show that success in modern economic competition depends on
many factors beside innate endowment, and that to-day we have
increasingly operative the principle of "to him that hath, more shall
be given." But let us assume that inborn differences do play some
role. The question is, what role.^ Are the characteristics which now
lead men to rise economically, those which are the most desirable
from a social point of view.^ It could at least as well be maintained
that the dominant groups tend to have the genetic equipment which
would be least desirable in a well-ordered social system, since they
have been selected chiefiy on the basis of predatory, rather than
constructive and unselfish behaviour. This opinion is confirmed by
a view of the lives of the more eminent financiers. It may even be
maintained with some show of reason that the successful captain of
industry, the eminent military leader or politician, and the successful
gangster, are psychologically not far apart. In the social battle of
present-day society, the high-minded, the scrupulous, the idealistic,

^ p. xxvii.

2 H. J. Muller, Sci. Monthly, 1933, 37, 40. Muller is one of the most brilliant pupils
of T, H. Morgan. It was Muller who discovered the effect of X-rays in increasing the
mutation-rate of animals — a discovery which, apart from being an important research
tool, may still open the way to an understanding of the mechanism of evolution itself.
He was for long the director of the biological departments at the University of Texas,
and later he organised the famous genetics institute at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

166

THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF SOCIOLOGY

the generous and those who are too intelligent to wish to confine
their interests to their personal monetary aggrandisement, are apt to
be overwhelmed. This is what Muller calls the "Dominance of
Economics over Eugenics." But what scientific evidence there is
available, tends on the other hand to show that the differences in
scores on intelligence tests, made by different races and classes, are,
to the best of our knowledge, due to the differences in environ-
mental advantages which they have received. It must, of course, be
admitted that as yet we are ignorant of the distribution of genetic
worth in the population of any civilised country with a capitalist
form of economics and a strong class-stratification. Hogben has
shown in an elegant way^ that while we may safely speak of a genetic
difference between two groups measured in one and the same environ-
ment, or between two environments in which one and the same genetic
group is tested, we cannot discuss the relative contributions of
inheritance and environment in the case of different groups in different
environments. Those of us who propose to abolish class-distinctions
and privileges must therefore act in faith, a faith supported, it is true,
by the results of the tests mentioned above, the faith that the contri-
bution of genetic worth at present suppressed by adverse environment,
will be immensely large and significant. We shall not be deterred by
this fact, for here humanity has nothing to lose.

Muller returned to the attack in a small but important book^ in
which he ranged over tlie whole question of the past, present and
future of man, arising "out of the dark" of prehistoric savagery into
more or less civilised communities and possessing a potential future
of great grandeur. Man must recognise, he said, that this future can
only be brought about by the continued and consciously fostered
growth of that intelligence and co-operation which have brought him
to his present status. Similar views have been forcefully expressed by
another geneticist, Mark Graubard.^

Both these biologists agree that the social struggle under our
existing civilisation does not lead to the reproductive survival of the
germ plasm most favourable to this intelligence and co-operation. A
competitive civilisation based on predatory individualism must, and
obviously does, give particularly good opportunities to those persons

^ L. Hogben, Journ. Genetics, 1933,27, 379.

^ Out of the Night by H. J. Muller (Vanguard Press, New York, 1935; GoUancz,
London, 1936).

^ Genetics and the Social Order by Mark Graubard (Tomorrow Press, New York,
1935) and Aian the Slave and Master (New York, 1938 and London, 1939).

167

time: the refreshing river

whose genetic constitution predisposes them for aggressive action.^
Yet, as we have seen, humanity must move onwards to closer co-
operative forms or perish. Individuals of the opposite type, charac-
terised by more than the usual tendency to affection, kindliness, and
fellow-feeling, naturally adapted to a co-operative social order, are
on the contrary selected against. In the world of commerce, they
have to go out of business; in learned circles, their just recognition
is stolen from them; in medicine they are worn out with over- work
and under-pay. Most significant of all, into the higher ranks of
administration, government, and finance, they never penetrate. This
state of affairs requires a "godly thorough reformation." After the
adoption of an overtly social ideal by society, says Muller, and tlie
changes in economics, ethics, and education that this will bring about,
the urge to utilise all means of progress towards this ideal will become
irresistible. The possibility of the genetic as well as the environmental
improvement of mankind will then for the first time receive adequate
recognition. But this will not in the least resemble the programmes of
those present-day eugenists who accept the class-stratification of our
society as inevitable and naively equate it with assumed genetic
differences.

The Denial of the Sociological Level- ^^ PhysicismJ"

If some thinkers try to force the phenomena of human social life
into the narrower framework of purely biological categories, it is
perhaps hardly surprising that others should have made the attempt
to force them into categories of physico-chemical type. This is what
Pareto did. The Treatise on General Sociology of Vilfredo Pareto,
first published in 191 6, has attracted attention in much wider circles
than those of professional sociologists and economists. It has been
described as a work of genius which should be read by all who take
an interest in human affairs and human relationships, whether
politically or from the point of view of the pure spectator.

Pareto was bom in 1848 in Paris, where his father was in exile on
account of revolutionary activities in connection with the party of
Mazzini. It was against this revolutionary atmosphere that Pareto
was in rebellion throughout his life. He shared in the disillusionment

^ The Tory propagandist, F. J. C. Hearnshaw, has the following extraordinary
passage in a pamphlet issued by the Individualist Bookshop, Ltd. (No. 7). "Socialism
is tlie system which legislates unsuccessful people into prosperity by legislating successful
people out of it. It is essentially predatory." He has not examined his criteria of success;
or perhaps they hardly admit of statement in plausible or even diplomatic terms.

168

THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF SOCIOLOGY

which followed the victory of the Italian national cause in 1866, but
instead of being temporarily alienated from the ideals of his father's
generation, he retained to the end a positive hatred for them. He is
continually attacking humanitarianism, the "god of progress," etc.
Trained as an engineer, he occupied a high post in the Italian railways,
and was for a long time active in the effort to induce the government
of the day to adopt the principle of free trade, which he believed to
be an essential condition of economic prosperity. This led to a conflict
with the governm^ent so severe that he had to go into retirement.
Before long, however, he was invited to occupy the chair of econo-
mics at the University of Lausanne, and from 1894 to 1923 he lived at
Celigny "shutting out the troubles of the world, cultivating and
storing the finest wines and fruits, and enjoying the material and
spiritual pleasures of life." It is striking that one who has been called
the chief theoretician of Italian Fascism should have been an aristocrat
by birth, the son of a revolutionary father by upbringing, a dis-
appointed politician in middle life, and a sybaritic Professor in old age.
How did Pareto go to work ^ L. J. Henderson (himself one of the
greatest living biologists) shows^ that he tried to apply to the social
sciences, where the variable factors are the natures and interactions of
human beings, the concepts of equilibrium which have been found so
essential in the physical and biological sciences. First of all, however,
Pareto's treatise is not "normative"; that is to say, he is concerned
with "what men do, and not with what they ought to do." He is
interested in the concept of the social system. His social system
contains individuals roughly analogous with the "components" of
the thermodynamic physico-chemical systems of Willard Gibbs. It is
heterogeneous, i.e. in physico-chemical terms, it contains various
"phases," for the individuals are of different families, trades, and
professions, associated with different institutions and members of
different economic and social classes. And as Gibbs considers tempera-
ture, pressure, and concentrations, so Pareto considers "sentiments'*
or^ strictly speaking, the manifestations of sentiments in words and
deeds; "verbal elaborations," and economic interests. The analogy
with the Gibbs system drawn by Henderson is illuminating, but
neither he nor other commentators, such as Borkenau,^ seem to have
sufficient acquaintance with the work of Marx and Engels. If they

^ Pareto's General Sociology: A Physiologist's Interpretation by Lawrence J. Henderson
(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1935).

^ Pareto by Franz Borkenau (Chapman & Hall, London, 1936).

169

time: the refreshing river

had studied this as carefully as that of Pareto, the suggestion could
hardly have been made that Pareto was the first to elaborate the concept
of the social system as an equilibrium mixture, alteration of which
at one point duly affects all the other points.

But where the system of Pareto differs most profoundly from that
of Marx seems to be that Pareto's is an "idealistic" as opposed to a
materialist one. Pareto pays a great amount of attention to the first
two factors mentioned above; the sentiments and the verbal elabora-
tions, which he calls respectively Residues and Derivations. He is
therefore much more of a psychologist than Marx, for whom all
ideological "superstructure" is secondary, though in its turn reacting
back. Translated into psychological terms. Residues would be com-
plexes, and Derivations would be rationalisations, but the translation
would leave a good deal to be desired. Residues are well explained
by Henderson as follows: for ceremonial purification some peoples
have used blood, the ancients used water, and water is still used in
christian baptism to symbolise the effacement of sin. In these pheno-
mena there are manifested at least two sentiments, the sentiment of
integrity of the individual, and the sentiment that actions favourable
to this integrity can be perform^ed. These are Residues. They may be
thought of as the residuum left after all the variable features of the
phenomena have been dissected away. But the phenomena also include
explanations of these ritual processes. These are Derivations. An
extremely large part of Pareto's book is devoted to analysing and
classifying residues and derivations. He evidently regards them not
as secondary effects of changes in the productive economic relation-
ships of men, but as primary causative agents in human mass actions.

The interest of this classification and analysis can hardly be dis-
puted. But most of its details are disputable, as Borkenau demonstrates,
and it is when we pass to other aspects of Pareto's work, such as his
theory of elites and his treatment of utility, that the extreme dis-
advantages of his purely idealist approach make themselves felt. His
theory of elites is completely vitiated by the improbable assumption
that the class-stratification of modern European capitalism corresponds
to some biological or genetic differences in the classes concerned.
Borkenau's chapters on this subject are especially damning. Pareto
assumes, moreover, as a basic point of his analysis, that class-domina-
tion must exist, since the special demands of a given society will lead
to special treatment for those who possess the special abilities it most
requires. This could not for a moment be accepted by those who

170

THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF SOCIOLOGY

advocate the communal ownership of the means of production.
Class-domination is meaningless in the absence of property, through
which alone hereditary classes can be perpetuated. Then secondly,
his treatment of utility, though it involves scrupulous classification,
is yet somewhat naive. The distinction is made between the utility of
a collectivity (people, nation, state) and utility for a collectivity.
Consider the population of a country. There will be a certain optimum
population. But optimum for what.'^ A great increase of population
will increase the "utilit\^" of the country by leading to increased
military and political power. For this the optimum would be high.
A lesser increase in population, however, might lead to a maximum
distribution of individual goods (utility for the country). Hence this
optimum would be much lower. But is this more than a rather
pedantic way of saying that an imperialistic foreign policy demands a
large internal population as potential cannon-fodder } This we knew
before. Everyone has noted the double activity of Mussolini and
Hitler in discouraging birth-control and demanding territorial ex-
pansion at one and the same time.

The upshot of the matter is that although the biological, and even
the physico-chemical, approach to sociology has a certain part to
play, any attempt to construct a sociology on their foundations alone
is bound to lead to failure. Pareto was not the first to have recourse
to the analogies of physico-chemical equilibria; Bogdanov and others
in Russia had taken that line at the beginning of the century, and it
is interesting that they were severely criticised by Lenin.^

The Contribution of Psychology.

So far this review has mainly been concerned with the contribution
of Genetics to a human biology. But there are reasons for thinking
that Psychology, Physiology and Biochemistry have equally great
contributions to make. It seems that sociologists have hitherto some-
what underrated the possible value of a psychological approach,
repelled perhaps by the exaggerations of some of the lesser followers
of the psycho-analytic schools. Nevertheless, I am convinced that on
most of the fundamental problems, the psycho-analysts are correct
in their attitude. The psychologists of the future ought to be able to
provide us with a theory of child upbringing which would abolish,
by a kind of preventive medicine, the warped and unhealthy mental
states which to-day so often threaten the otherwise good relationships

^ In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Works, Vol. II, p. 379.

171

time: the refreshing river

which might be estabUshed between human beings. Revolutionaries,
it is true, are perfectly right when they complain that many psycho-
analysts aim at reconciling their patients to the existing order, i.e. of
fitting them for their environment; and that they do not consider
the possibility that this environment is itself sick.^ But the proper
conclusion surely is that both the social environment and man himself
need radical alteration.^ To abandon the attempt to transform the
form.er would be to go back on all the past centuries of human
struggle. Yet whatever w^e do to it, there is no immediate possibility
that we could make man any other than an organism beginning by
growth and development in utero, having parents and later developing
mentally under their influence or the influence of substitutes for
them, and at last living in a space-time continuum with all the inevit-
able frustrations depending upon this fact. There is, as it were, an
irreducible minimum of hardness in man's condition. Take, for
example, Eliot's poem, "Animula:"^

"The heavy burden of the growing soul
Perplexes and offends m.ore, day by day;
Week by week, offends and perplexes more,
With the imperatives of is and seems
And may and may not, desire and control.
The pain of living and the drug of dreams
Curl up the small soul in the window-seat
Behind the Encyclopaedia BritannicaJ"

Or the speech of the Four Tempters to Thomas of Canterbury in the

play:*

"Man's life is a cheat and a disappointment;
All things are unreal.
Unreal or disappointing;
The Catherine wheel, the pantomime cat.
The prizes given at the children's party,
The prize awarded for the English Essay,
The scholar's degree, the statesman's decoration. . . ."

^ Some psychologists do apparently realise this, e.g. Burrow and Frank; see Syz,
Amer. Journ. Sociol., 1937,42, 895.

^ Two books from diis \iewpoint whicli are much to be recommended are Soviet
Russia Fights Neurosis by F. E. Williams (London, 1934) and The New Road to Progress
by S. D. Schmalhausen (London, 1935).

^ T. S. Eliot, "Animula" in Collected Poems, p. iii.

* T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, p. 44..

172

THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF SOCIOLOGY

For stability and happiness, then, in the most just social order
which we can conceive, psychological hygiene will at all points be
necessary. With the "liquidation" (as we might say) of the neuroses,
paranoia, and the generally unrecognised but potent minor conditions,
such, for example, as sadism, which existed beforehand, an enormous
part of human unhappiness will disappear. I am well aware of the
fact that psychologists are often in diametrical disagreement as to the
proper means to be adopted for this end; e.g. sexual frustration is
held by Kyrle^ to be a force adverse to civilisation, and by Unwin^
to be precisely the opposite. But in general I believe that the movement
initiated by Freud has promise of sociological importance wider
than most of us can yet realise, and that criticisms of such books as
that of Glover^ on the psychologic causes of war, from the point of
view of the primacy of economic causes, are misdirected though not
unjustified.

The problems of sex illustrate well how the reformation of individual
life follows upon the reformation of social life. As Schmalhausen*
says : —

"Property, [modern] puritanism, and pornography go sur-
prisingly well together. Property is concerned with institutions,
not with impulse. Puritanism is concerned with tabus on impulses
dangerous to the patriarchial-propertied way of life. Porno-
graphy is the safety-valve for emotions and curiosities repressed
by patriarchal-propertied puritanism. Under these darkening
and constricting auspices, sex was a reality remote from love,
and love dissociated from marriage. . . . Since the love of
comrades, rooted in sex attraction, but flowering in sheer
humanness, will be the natural state of affairs in our new society,
intimacy will know a wider range of possibility and fulfilment
than was admissible under repressive civilisations, except in
secret forms of 'immorality' and perversions. A certain aboriginal
innocence," out of primitive and pagan patterns, will be restored
to sex love, giving it wings and inspiration once more among
the pleasures and satisfactions of life. Christian marriage has
been built on three weird assumptions; that sex is evil, that love
is unreliable, and that unwanted children are socially desirable.
Such marriage is the compulsory method of coercing man's

^ R. iM. Kyrle, Psyche, 193 1, 11, 48.

^ J. D. Unwin, Sex and Culture (Oxford, 1934).

^ E. C. Glover, War, Sadism, and Pacifism (London, 1933). * Loc. cit., pp. 237 ff.

173

time: the refreshing river

evil impulses into giving women unwanted children, for the
greater glory of God. Communist marriage drastically alters
these assumptions; it innocently assumes that sex is good, love
attainable, and marriage with or without children the comradely
creation of a man and woman who enjoy each other's company
so much that they want to try the experiment — it can not
rationally be more than that — of living together for that period
of time during which their intimate friendship makes life seem
more livable and lovable. In communist ethics, the unholy
alliance of property, puritanism and pornography is dissolved,
sex love becoming candid without lewdness, informal without
degradation, free without debauchery."

In this connection one cannot but be reminded of those sparks
of prophetic insight concerning human relationships which scintillate
among the apocryphal writings of early Christianity.^ In the Gospel
according to the Egyptians^ which Origen criticised, there occurs
the following: — "When Salome inquired as to when the things
concerning which she asked should be known, the Lord said: 'When
you have trampled on the garment of shame, and when the two
become one, and the miale with the female is neither male nor female."
A similar passage occurs in the Second Epistle of Clement.

In the fragment of a gospel in the Oxyrhynchus Papyrus (655)
there occurs the following: "His disciples said unto him, 'When
wilt thou be manifest unto us, and when shall we see thee.^' He saith,
'When ye have put off your raiment and are not asham.ed.' "

In reading these strange fragments one cannot help thinking of the
great advance in civilisation which is implied by tlie possibility of
men and women working together in intellectual and productive
work. For earlier forms of civilisation, in which sex was a force far
less under rational and technical controls than now, this collaboration
was impossible. The liquidation of male aggressiveness and the
. liberation of the female from age-old slavery is the guarantee of the
stable and organised society of the future with its infinite control
over nature.

The Contribution of Physiology and Biochemistry.

The contribution of physiology to human affairs may seem to
many to be exhausted by its effects upon our knowledge of what is
healthy and what is not. Thus the realisation that Vitamin D is

^ The quotations following are from The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford, 1924).

THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF SOCIOLOGY

synthesised in our skin by the photo-chemical action of ukra-violet
Hght leads to discontent with the conditions of life in our cities and
hence to means of combating them, such as more sensible clothing,
or lack of clothing, and provision for quick transit to and from urban
and industrial areas. But nerve-physiology has far more fundamental
fruits than these. In a particularly striking and irrefutable manner,
such researches as those of Pavlov^ and other neurologists show the
error of the ancient aphorism that "human nature cannot be changed."
Sociologists should have no further connection with theories which
postulate any such unchangeableness. The whole group of facts
centering round the phenomenon of the conditioned reflex means
that the nervous system of the higher mammal is still pliable; that
new reflex paths may be established; that because we are, to a large
extent, what our education (in the widest sense) was, by remodelling
that education, the men and women of the future may be as superior
to us as we are to the painted Britons. We cannot too much insist on
this contribution of neurology to sociology. In so far as sociology is
normative, it must seek means to increase the general good. For this
purpose it has always been customary, largely because of the influence
of individualistic christian theology, to accept the view that ameliora-
tion must begin in the individual unit, and thence spread outwards
to the mass of humanity. But nerve-physiology seems to show that
just the opposite is true. Radical improvement in the social conditions
governing education would condition the mass of humanity to the
higher levels of comradeliness and social cohesion necessary for the
more highly organised, and hence ameliorated, state of society. It
must, however, be admitted that this outcome of physiology works
both ways. "Conditioning" may be used for good purposes but also
for bad ones. We need only refer to the millions of young people
now being conditioned in fascist countries to the notion that racial
struggle is inevitable in the world, that the racial or national flag is
the highest symbol of human effort, and that war is the most natural
activity of man. This conclusion of physiology receives further
support from anthropology. That human behaviour ("human nature")
may be inconceivably different according to the social structure of
the unit in which it is displayed, appears with great force in such a
book as that of Mead,^ where the sex behaviour of three diflferent
primitive peoples is contrasted in detail.

^ I. P. Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes (Oxford, 1927, tr. G. V. Anrep).

^ M. Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (London, 1935).

time: the refreshing river

Lastly, as in private duty bound, I come to the subject of bio-
chemistry. To sociologists the subject of human nutrition cannot fail
to be of interest, and it is biochemistry which shows us what a properly-
balanced and adequate diet should contain, and how any given diet
falls short of these requirements. We shall doubtless all be familiar
with the recent work of Orr^ in which the nutritional aspects of the
class-stratification of the social system in which we live, are graphically
plotted. An optimum diet is defined as a diet to which nothing need
be added to ensure a better degree of health and well-being. In England
we find that about half of the entire population fall below this level,
and clearly this must mean a great deal more than half of the working-
class. In the lowest group of all, containing lo per cent of the popula-
tion, the diet is deficient in every single constituent, minerals, vitamins,
organic substances, etc., and it is significant that no less than 25 per
cent of the children of the country fall into this group, precisely
because the larger number of children in a family, the more tendency
tliere is for the family to come into the lowest group, even if the
wage-earner is well paid relatively, since the groups are reckoned on
a per capita basis of weekly income. In the disputes of recent times
about the absolute minimum upon which a family can support life,
we have seen biochemistry, brought into the limelight by august
public bodies whose good intentions and would-be generosity cannot
be questioned, become a subject as controversial as geology once
was when the episcopate was a more powerful (or less diplomatic)
intellectual force than it is now. Whatever the outcome may be, the
sociologist must always take into account, as one of his essential
base-lines, the knowledge concerning the chemical constitution of
man and its maintenance, which it is the business of the biochemist to
provide.

Boundaries of Social Theory.

In conclusion, to restate the thesis of the present paper would be
to say that biology, like biochemistry and biophysics, is an unescapable
datum for the sociologist. It gives the limits within which the answer
must fall, and not the answer itself. Like the crystal physicist who
can say of the proposed chemical formula of a substance that whatever
the true one is it cannot be that one, without being able to say what
the true one is; so the biologist can lay down numerous boundaries
which no social theory can expect to transgress. Whatever the details

^ J. B. Orr, Foodf Health and Income (London, 1936).

176

THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF SOCIOLOGY

of the just social order, it is not true that human nature cannot change,
as our social inheritance develops; it is not true that human beings
do not need more than fifty calories a day, or so many milligrams
of such and such a vitamin; it is not true that psycho-analysis throws
no light on human behaviour. The sciences of the sub-social organisa-
tional level state, in fact, the laws applicable to human organisms as
animal organisms. But by virtue both of their humanity, and of the
fact that they congregate together in supra-human organismic groups,
they constitute a higher level of experience, for which the laws of the
lower level alone will not suffice. The sociologist must cope with the
greater complexity on its own ground. To treat sociological problems
with purely biological concepts is to add oneself to the long list of
humanity's false prophets.

177 M

A Biologist s View of Whitehead' s

Philosophy

(From the Whitehead volume in the Library of Living

Philosophers, 1941)

The author of this contribution is very conscious, both of the honour
which has been done him in an invitation to contribute to the present
symposium, and of the pleasure which it is to be able to participate
in a reasoned tribute to one of the greatest of living philosophers.
The reader's indulgence is begged at the outset in case any of what
follows should appear unduly trite, but in requesting the co-operation
of a working biologist, the editors laid themselves open to receiving
a paper in which the finer points, to say the least of it, of Professor
Whitehead's philosophy, should be but poorly appreciated.^

Trends in Theoretical Biology.

The author's interest in "philosophical" or theoretical biology was
probably awakened by the very fact of his being a biochemist. The
zoological systematist may get along well enough by treating his
data as an array of empty forms unconnected with a material sub-
stratum; the psychologist may do the same; and the organic chemist
may reveal the structural formula of some compound once involved
in a living cell, or analyse the constituents of blood or tissue fluids,
without devoting much thought to the organisation of the living
being which synthesised the one or secreted the other. But the true
biochemist is deeply concerned about the structure and organisation
of the living cell, with its "topography" permitting of innumerable
simultaneously-proceeding chemical reactions, its faculty of getting
things done just at the right time and place, and its remarkable pro-
perties of symmetry and polarity, exhibited in an aqueous colloidal
medium of certain essential constituents, especially the proteins,

^ Abbreviations adopted in what follows:

S & MW Science and the Modern World.

AOI Adventures of Ideas.

N & L Nature and Life.

P & R Process and Reality,

MOT Modes of Thought.

178

A biologist's view of whitehead's philosophy

carbohydrates and fats. The ancient problem of body and mind, too,
was always around the corner. How to reconcile the introspected "me"
and the domain of mind and spirit with the world of flesh and blood,
of macromolecules and hydrogen ions, with which the former seemed
to be so strangely connected ^ This interest in the organisation of the
living cell, the borderline between biology and physics, was natural
in Cambridge, where the tradition of W. B. Hardy and F. G. Hopkins
was, and still is, in full vigour.

The author's first approach to the whole subject on the theoretical
side was therefore a careful, if somewhat unrewarding, examination
of the voluminous and polemical literature on "vitalism," "neo-
vitalism," and "mechanism," which had appeared during the last
decade of the past century and the first two of the present one. The
writings of Hans Driesch, J. S. Haldane and E. S. Russell on the
one side, and of men such as Jacques Loeb, H. S. Jennings and Judson
Herrick on the other, were gone through. It would be probably well
worth someone's while to take this literature and make a coherent
historical summary of it, for it belongs to a distinct period which
has been closed since about 1930. The vitalists systematically drew
attention to the flaws in the over-simplified explanations of biological
processes which workers such as Loeb, recognising them to be
interim hypotheses only, were always putting forward. Their attitude
was no doubt partly inspired by the human, all too human, but
nevertheless obscurantist, desire to retain elements of mystery in the
universe, and hence they fought decade after decade a stubborn
withdrawing action against the ever-fresh shock-troops of the
mechanists. The process had begun long before; it was familiar to
the men of T. H. Huxley's time, as witness the interesting passage
in the book of that curious character, W. H. Mallock, The New
Republic (1878).

"Saunders (intended to be W. K. Cliflbrd, the mathematician):

*One word more, one plain word, if you will allow me. All
this talk about religion, poetry, morality, implies this — or it
implies nothing — the recognition of some elements of in-
scrutable mystery in our lives and conduct; and to every
mystery, to all mystery, science is the sworn, the deadly, foe.
What she is daily branding into man's consciousness is that
nothing is inscrutable that can practically concern him. Use,
pleasure, self-preservation — on these everything depends; on

179

time: the refreshing river

these rocks of ages are all rules of conduct founded, and now
that we have dug down to these foundations, what an entirely
changed fabric of life shall we build upon them. Right and
wrong, I say again, are entirely misleading terms, and the
superstition that sees an unfathomable gulf yawning between
them is the greater bar to all health and progress.'

''Laurence (intended apparently to be Mallock himself):

'And I say, on the contrary, that it is on the recognition of
this mysterious and unfathomable gulf that all the higher
pleasures of life depend. . . .'"

The vitalists, in fact, were concerned, perhaps because of some
misplaced sense of the numinous, to retain at all costs a measure of
animistic mystery in the nature and behaviour of living organisms.
The neo-vitalists, as they called themselves, centred this mystery in
the very organisation of life itself, regarding organising relations as in
principle inscrutable and axiomatic, rather than a subject for investi-
gation.

The atmosphere surrounding these controversies was always
somewhat polemical. As W. T. Marvin said in 191 8, compare Driesch
and Loeb — nobody could call them unimpassioned neutrals examining
a body of evidence. He went on to suggest a psychological difference;
the vitalist hoped that the scientific method as applied to life and
mind would fail, the mechanist hoped it would succeed.

"If science wins, the world will prove to be one in which man
is thrown entirely on his own resources, skill, and self-control,
his courage and his strength, perhaps on his ability to be happy
in adjusting himself to pitiless fact. If science fails, there is room
for childlike hopes that unseen powers may come to the aid of
human weakness. If science wins, the world is the necessary
consequence of logically related facts, and man's enterprise the
playing of a game of chess against an opponent who never errs
and never overlooks our errors. If science fails, the world
resembles fairyland, and man's enterprise no longer a test of
skill and knowledge, but conditioned by the goodness of his
will or the possibility of luck."^

Vitalists and neo-vitalists were found rather among the philosophers
than among the biologists themselves. Certainly during the present

1 W. T. Marvin, Philos. Rev., 1918, 27, 616.

180

A biologist's view of whitehead's philosophy

century the vast majority of working biologists and biochemists have
been "mechanists." Their conception of the task of biology was
consistently that sketched out in T. H. Huxley's definition of physi-
ology in 1867: "Zoological physiology is the doctrine of the functions
or actions of animals. It regards animal bodies as machines impelled
by certain forces and performing an amount of work which can be
expressed in terms of the ordinary forces of nature. The final object
of physiology is to deduce the facts of morphology on the one hand
and those of oecology on the other, from the laws of the molecular
forces of matter."^ This, however, though useful as a slogan, can
never have satisfied even the working biologists. It must always have
been obvious that the laws of chemistry do not appear until you are
dealing with entities sufficiently large to show the phenomena of
chemical combination, and similarly that the laws governing crystal
structure do not appear until crystals have been formed, and a fortiori
the laws of living organisms or social units cannot be studied except
at their own level. This is the problem which the emergent evolu-
tionists afterwards brought into prominence. If one were to know
all tliere is to know about the properties of atoms, for instance, it
may be said, one should be able to predict all the molecular com-
binations they would form, and all the living structures that could
be built up from them; but in order to know all about the atoms one
has to know a great deal about the molecules and the living cells
first. In 1838 K. F. Burdach had said "Physiology will always be able
to dispense with the aid of chemistry." This was not necessarily a
vitalist statement. During the succeeding century it became quite
clear that the regularities established in the biological sciences —
physiology, experimental morphology and embryology, genetics,
cytology, and the like — remained of durable validity, whatever
discoveries might be made in biochemistry and the organic chemistry
of substances of biological origin, to say nothing of biophysics. The
question became critical; how are the levels related? How do bio-
chemistry and biophysics contribute (as they obviously do) to a
unified picture of life and nature } For certain studies the problem
was a desperate one. When Wilhelmi Roux in the last two decades of
the nineteenth century founded the science of experimental mor-
phology ("Entwicklungsmechanik") by the strict application of
causal analysis to developmental processes instead of their mere

^ T. H. Huxley, Science Gossip, 1867, p. 74, and in Lay Sermons; Addresses and
Reviews (London, 1887), p. 83.

181

time: the refreshing river

description, he divided the biological factors into two, the "simple
components," whose connection with physico-chemical factors could
immediately be seen, and the "complex components," where the
relation with physico-chemical factors was much less obvious, but
might reasonably be expected to be revealed in due course.^ The
curling of a piece of ectoderm, for instance, if understood in relation
to protein fibres, surface forces, lipo-protein monolayers, etc. would
be a case of a simple component. The regularly reproducible self-
differentiation of an isolated eye-cup under certain conditions, for
instance, involving processes much too complicated at present for
physico-chemical explanations, would be a case of a complex com-
ponent. But the terminology of components (einfache and complexe
Komponenten) never came into general use.

By 1928 the position of most working biologists could be summed
up not unfairly as follows:

"Mechanists do not say that nothing is true or intelligible
unless expressed in physico-chemical terms, they do not say
that nothing takes place differently in living matter from what
takes place in the dead, they do not say that our present physics
and chemistry are fully competent to explain the behaviour of
living systems. What they do say is that the processes of living
matter are subject to the same laws that govern the processes
in dead matter, but that the laws operate in a more complicated
medium; thus living things differ from dead things in degree
and not in kind; they are, as it were, extrapolations from the
inorganic."^

The nature of this relationship, however, still remained obscure.
In the following year, however, the situation was greatly clarified by
the appearance of J. H. Woodger's book Biological Principles. This
important work set out to discuss the classical contradictions in
biological theory, vitalism and mechanism, structure and function,
organism and environment, preformation and epigenesis, teleology
and causation, mind and body. Contradictions once recognised, fruit-
ful synthesis followed. From his discussion it followed that the term
"vitalism" ought henceforward to be restricted to all propositions of
the type "the living being consists of an X in addition to carbon,

^ See W. Roux, Gesammelte Abhandlungen u. Entwickhmgsmechanik der Organismen
(2 vols. Leipzig, 1895).
2 SB, p. 247.

182

A biologist's view of whitehead's philosophy

hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, etc., plus organising relations." This,
for biologists, at any rate, was one of the first clear statements of the
obiectivit}^ and importance of organising relations in the living system.
They had always been recognised, but at the same time obscured,
by the persistent opposition of progressive experimental science,
implacable but correct, towards every form of lingering animism, the
spiritus rector^ the nisus formativus, the archaeus, the ente/echia, etc.,
etc. And the situation had not been improved by the adoption of the
organising relations by the neo-vitalists as the very citadel of the
anima itself.

Organising relations, tlien, were to become the object of scientific
study, not the home of an inscrutable vital principle, nor the axiom
from which all biology must proceed. Since 1930 this point of view
has penetrated widely through scientific circles, all the more so as it
was really a description of what a large number of scientific workers
had previously believed in a somewhat unconscious way. If space
permitted, it would be interesting to consider the practical applications
of these ideas, the question, for instance, of what methods may be
adopted in the study of organised living structure. How far may
wholes be made transparent, as by X-ray analysis of the crystalline
and liquid crystalline arrangements which, as we now know, play
such an important part in the structure of the living body.^ How far
can living structure be so explored without interference with its
delicate organisation (cf. the principle of indeterminacy) } What are
the forces which hold morphological entities together, and how do
they link up with forces at the molecular and sub-molecular level .^ <
We cannot go into these questions at this time. Biological organisation
is not immune from scientific enquiry, it is not inscrutable, and it
cannot be "reduced" to physico-chemical organisation, because
nothing can ever be reduced to anything. As Samuel Butler once
remarked, "Nothing is ever merely anything." The laws of higher
organisation only operate there.

For the emergent evolutionists, as is well known, emergence was
a logical as well as a historical category. Not only had the various
levels of complexity in the universe emerged in a historic sequence;
but each was logically unpredictable from the basis of those lower
than itself. Modem physical accounts of chemical events and chemical
accounts of biological events, however, have rendered this point of
view too simple. Chemical behaviour can be deduced from atomic
physics, and biological behaviour from biochemistry. But the essential

183

time: the refreshing river

point is that by the time this has become possible, the physics and
the chemistry have been completely transformed by the incorporation
of wider factual ranges. The matter has recently been well put as
follows: *'It seems to become clear that chemistry will never become
predictable mathematically, and that, in fact, we have rather to make
mathematical physics — in a sense — more chemical. We have to dis-
cover a set of empirical simplifications — corresponding to the nature
of the chemical properties of matter — which will allow us to crystallise
the general equations of atomic physics into a form readily applicable
to chemical changes."^

Woodger*s point of view, supported also by the Austrian theoretical
biologist V. Bertalannfy,^ was perhaps the most technically well-
informed manifestation of a great movement of modern thought
which sought to base a philosophical world-view on ideas originating
from biology rather than from the classical physics. It fused once
again what Descartes had put asunder. It was Descartes, as Woodger
acutely said, who introduced the practice of calling organisms
machines, with the unfortunate consequence that transcendent
mechanics had to be invented to drive them. Organicism, if not
obscurantist, was bound to be the death of "vitalism" as well as of
"mechanism." It was likely to be the death of animism too, since
mental phenomena cannot but be considered in the light of the
evolution of the central nervous system, as is discussed in the latest
and most interesting work of this kind, the Gifford Lectures of Sir
Charles Sherrington.^

Succession in Time and Envelopes in Space.

From the scientist's standpoint, the organic conception of the
world involves succession in time and envelopes in space. Taking the
latter first, it is obvious that the different levels of organisation, for
such we must call them, occur one within the other. Ultimate particles,
the proton, electron, etc. build up atoms, atoms build molecules,
molecules build large colloidal particles and cell-constituents and
paracrystalline phases and the like, these in their turn are organised
into the living cell. Above this level, cells form organs and tissues,
the latter combine into the functioning living body, and the bodies
of animals, especially men, form social communities. As the central

^ M. Polanyi, Nature, 1942, 149, 510.

^ L. V. Bertalannfy, Theoretische Biologie (Berlin, 1932).

^ C. Sherrington, Man on His Nature (Cambridge, 1941).

184

A biologist's view of whitehead's philosophy

nervous system becomes more complex so mental phenomena emerge,
until the elaborate psychological life of man is attained. There is a
sense in which minds include and envelop bodies, for the boundaries
of thought are far wider than those of what the special senses can
record, and minds interpenetrate as bodies cannot^ (see on, where
Whitehead's concept of the focal region is described). The remarkable
thing about our world is, however, that these envelopes seem each
to be analogous to past phases in the history of its development.
There were "inorganic" molecules before there were living cells, the
origin of which evidendy depended upon the right environmental
conditions for the flowering of the potentialities of the protein system,
there were living cells before there were organs or tissues of metazoan
organisms, there were primitive organisms before there were any
higher ones, and higher organisms before there were any social
associations. The fundamental thread that seems to run through the
history of our world is a continuous rise in level of organisation. Whether
this organisation is the same as that to which physicists refer in their
discussion of the shuffling process which underlies the second law of
thermodynamics, and whether its rise in the domain of living organ-
isms has entailed some corresponding loss of organisation somewhere
else, are matters which we cannot stop to deal with here.

The basically important fact that social evolution must be regarded
as continuous with biological evolution was appreciated already by
Herbert Spencer, who in this respect, though not of course in others,
made an approach to the organic conception of the world. It has the
extremely important corollary that any static or too conservative
view of the present position of human institutions becomes impossible. '
If living organisation has such triumphs behind it as the first invention
of the cell-membrane, the kidney-tubule, the notochord, the flint-
knife and the plough, the art of language and the skill of ships, it is
not likely that the agreements of Ottawa or Munich have any durable
importance, or that human society will always remain separated into
states with national sovereignties above the moral law, and social
classes with different privileges and manners. This has generally been
appreciated by upholders of the organic view of the world, but much
more boldly by Marx and Engels, for instance, than by Smuts, Lloyd-
Morgan, or Sellars.2

1 Though some of them sometimes long to.

2 Smuts, J. C, Holism and Evolution (London, 1926); Lloyd-Morgan, C. (Gifford
Lectures, ist Series, Emergent Evolution, London, 1923, 2nd series, Life, Mind and
Spirit, London, 1926); Sellars, R. W., Evolutionary Naturalism (Chicago, 1922).

185

time: the refreshing river

It is probable, indeed, that the organic view of the world has
considerable historical and social significance. The seventeenth
century, the age of Gassendi and Newton, of Boyle and Descartes,
was a time in which the capitalist system of economic individualism
won its first decisive victories in taking over state power. The sur-
render of the last royalist troops in the English civil war was the final
conclusion of centuries of feudalism, for though the monarchy was
restored in England, feudalism was not. All later monarchs ruled by
the grace of the City of London. Parallel with the breaking-up of
the old guilds, and the absolute freeing of commercial enterprise in
every kind of new exploitation, went the rediscovery of atomism by
Gassendi and its application to chemistry as the "corpuscularian or
mechanical hypothesis" by Boyle. The analogy between free mer-
chants, projectors, and industrialists, and the fortuitous concourse of
atoms, can even be found explicitly stated in seventeenth-century
books on economics. Is it not therefore of interest that in our time,
when capitalist economics has worked itself through to a new state
of society demanding everywhere more social control and organisation
of human affairs, that there should be a rediscovery of the organic
interpretation of the world, an interpretation in which the monads
**do not blindly run" in Whitehead's famous phrase,^ "but run in
accordance with the whole of which they form a part." Function
depends on position in the whole. Statistical regularity of fortuitous
random motions is not the whole story; there is a plan of organising
relations too. The world is not entirely like a perfect gas or an abso-
lutely homogeneous solid, it also contains viscous phases, crystals
rigid in one, two or three dimensions, plasticity and elastic deforma-
bility, living organisation. It may be that we are on the threshold of a
long period, lasting perhaps for several centuries, in which the organic
conception of the world will transform society, giving it a unity
more comradely and equal than feudalism, but less chaotic and self-
contradictory than the centuries of capitalist atomism.^ In Alfred
North Whitehead we surely have to recognise the greatest living
philosopher of the organic movement in philosophy and science.

Historical origins of Organicism and Dialectical Materialism.

About the historical origins of the organicistic viewpoint in biology

a great deal could be said. There is space to refer only to one or two

iS&MW, p. 113.

^ Or, as a friend of mind acutely puts it, Contract is not returning to Status but going
forward to Function.

186

A biologist's view of whitehead's philosophy

points. Samuel Taylor Coleridge is not generally regarded as having
contributed much to theoretical biology, yet surely his essay The
Theory of Life, published in 1848, was more advanced than any
other thought at the time, and than a great deal since. Coleridge
wrote :

"I define life as the principle of individuation, or the power
which unites a given all into a whole that is presupposed by its
parts. The link that combines the two, and acts throughout
both, will, of course, be defined by this tendency to individuation.
Thus, from its utmost latency, in w^hich life is one widi the
elementary powers of mechanism ... to its highest 'manifesta-
tion . . . there is an ascending series of intermediate classes, and

of analogous gradations in each class In the lowest forms

of the vegetable and animal world we perceive totality dawning
into individuation, while in man, as the highest of the class,
the individuality is not only perfected in its corporeal sense,
but begins a new series beyond the appropriate limits of
physiology."-'-

It is curious to think that Coleridge was as unconscious as Aristode
(who also recognised a "ladder of beings") of the evolutionary suc-
cession which has coloured all our thought on these subjects since the
middle of the last century.

More important, some decades later, was the work of the London
philosopher, Karl Marx,^ and the Manchester business man, Frederick
Engels.3 The views of the latter on scientific theory have in recent
times become generally recognised as having been far in advance of
his age. The author would disclaim any competence for presenting
the contributions of these great thinkers as they deserve, but there
are numerous handbooks which may be consulted, a process which
is in this case especially necessary as the views of these men on political
subjects, then unorthodox, caused them to be somewhat boycotted
in academic circles.* Marx and Engels were, of course, profoundly
influenced by Hegel, just as Coleridge had been. But whereas he

1 S. T. Coleridge, Theory of Life (ist edn., 1848, usual edn., London, 1885).

2 See esoecially The German Ideology and Theses on Feuerbach. ^. , •

3 See especially Anti-Dtihring; Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, and the Dialectics

* sle'eg T. A. Jackson, Dialectics, the logic of marxism, 1936; D. Guest, Textbook
of dialectical materialism, 1939; R- Maublanc, La Philosophie du marxisme et V enseignement
officiel, 1936; J. Lewis, Introduction to Philosophy, 1937-

187

time: the refreshing river

tended to retain Hegel's metaphysical idealism, they "turned it right
side up" and while keeping Hegel's dialectical account of change
and process, in which a synthesis arises out of the deadlock of the
thesis and the antithesis, they adopted a realist metaphysics. Their
materialism, however, was to be known as "dialectical materialism"
as opposed to the old mechanical materialism, in order to show its
naturalistic character, its determination to account for all the highest
phenomena of mind and social organisation without leaving the firm
basis of the real objective existence of matter. Something of this kind
was meant by Marx's saying that materialism must cease to be "mis-
anthropic." Of course, the only way in which such a naturalism could
account for the highest phenomena of mind and social organisation,
love and comradeship, justice and mercy, was by admitting a series
of levels of organisation, arranged in the successions and envelopes
of which we have already spoken. And so from this standpoint also
there came a doctrine of levels of organisation. It had, however, the
cardinal virtue, which not many other naturalisms have had, of
emphasising the transitory character of human institutions. It showed
that evolution of social systems continued from that of biological
systems, and urged the optimistic but tolerably convincing view that
human misery is essentially connected with a low and inferior stage
of social organisation, that it had in the past been much worse than
it is now, and that in the future it ought to be greatly decreased.
This is not the place to discuss Marx's theory of history, but if history
is the history of class-struggles (and to some extent it undeniably is),
there is room for hope that when mankind has united in a world
co-operative commonwealth unmarked by social classes, a good
many of the more unpleasant features of life in a semi-barbarous state
will have ceased to exist. And indeed this is not a hope at all, but a
prediction based on that guiding thread of rise in level of organisation,
which we have seen running throughout the evolution of our world;
and hence a scientific prediction. It was for this reason that the kind
of socialism advocated by Marx and Engels received the name which
it bears to this day, "scientific" socialism, as opposed to the Utopian
varieties, which based their hopes only on the goodness of human
nature or similar more or less reliable factors.

Dialectical materialism has been called the theory of transformations,
of the way in which the qualitatively new arises, of the nature of
change in the natural world. Its outcome in biology — to return to
our main theme — was certainly beneficial. In 1931 a Russian biologist,

188

A biologist's view of whitehead's philosophy

B. Zavadovsky, expounded this for an English symposium.^ An
equally good description was given by M. Shirokov:

"A living organism is something that arose out of inorganic
matter. In it there is no 'vital force.' If we subject it to a purely
external analysis into its elements we shall find nothing except
physico-chemical processes. But this by no means denotes that
life amounts to a simple aggregate of these physico-chemical
elements. The particular physico-chemical processes are con-
nected in the organism by a new form of movement, and it is in
this that the quality of the living thing lies. The new in a living
organism, not being attributable to physics and chemistry,
arises as the result of the new synthesis, of the new connection
of physical and chemical movements. This synthetic process
whereby out of the old we proceed to the emergence of the
new was understood neither by the mechanists nor the vitalists.
. . . The task of each particular science is to study the unique
forms of movement characteristic of that particular level of the
development of matter."^

A few years later there was another good statement from a French
biologist, professor of zoology at the Sorbonne. Marcel Prenant
wrote :

"In biology dialectical materialism is opposed both to vitalism
and to mechanical materialism, which are both really meta-
physical theories. He refuses to make a sharp distinction between
the physical and biological sciences, to reserve causal determinism
to the former and to appeal to teleology in the latter. But neither
does he suppose that biology must try to reduce itself to the
physical sciences. He affirms the unity of the world, in which
neither life nor human society constitute domains apart, but he
also affirms that this unity expresses itself in qualitatively differ-
ent forms of whose distinctive characters one should never lose
sight."3

Dialectical materialism has been perhaps more successful in em-
phasising the existence of the levels of organisation and in showing

^ B. Zavadovsky, essay in Science at the Cross-Roads (London, 193 1).
^ From M. Shirokov & J. Lewis, Textbook of Marxist Philosophy (London, n.d.)
p. 341.

' M. Prenant, Bull. Soc. Philomath. Paris, 1933, 116, 84.

189

time: the refreshing river

the dialectical character of human thought and discovery than in
elucidating the dialectical character of the transitions between the
natural levels.^ There have, however, been some interesting sug-
gestions. J. D. BernaP has pointed out that natural processes are
never loo per cent efficient. Besides the main process or reaction,
there are always residual processes or side-reactions, which, if cyclic
or if adjuvant to the main reaction, will not matter very much. But
they may be opposing and cumulative, so that after some time a new
situation will arise in which such opposing processes may make an
antithesis to the main reaction's thesis. This situation may be unstable,
and wherever instability occurs, one of the possible resulting syntheses
may be a level of higher organisation. Such a scheme can be worked
out for the aggregation of particles in planets, the formation of
hydrosphere and atmosphere, and the development of economic
processes since the renaissance. J. B. S. Haldane,^ too, has discussed
evolution theory from this viewpoint, distinguishing three Hegelian
triads: —

Thesis Antithesis Synthesis

(i) Heredity Mutation Variation

(2) Variation Selection Evolution

(3) Selection of the fit- Consequent loss of Survival of those

test individuals fitness in the species species showing

little intraspecific
competition.

The early conviction of Engels that Nature is through and through
dialectical was rightly directed against the static conceptions of irhe
scientists of his time, who were unprepared for the mass of contra-
dictions that science was about to have to deal with, and who did not
appreciate that Nature is full of apparently irreconcilable antagonisms
and distinctions which are reconciled at higher organisational levels.
The well-known rules of the passing of quantity into quality, the
unity of opposites and the negation of negations, have all become
commonplaces of scientific thought.* What has not yet been done,
however, is to elucidate the way in which each of the new great

^ Cf. F. Engels, Dialectics of Nature (Gesamtausgabe edn., Moscow, 1935), p. 640.
^ J. D. Bernal, essay in Aspects of Dialectical Materialism (London, 1934).
^ J. B. S. Haldane, Science and Society, 1937, 1, 473.
J. B. S. Haldane, Marxism and the Sciences (London, 1938), and a series of articles
in Labour Monthly, 1941, 23, 266, 327, 400 and 430.

190

A biologist's view of whitehead's philosophy

levels of organisation has arisen, and although this must to some
extent await the results of further experiments and observations,
there is quite enough knowledge already available to permit of a
good deal of theoretical thinking along these lines.^

One outstanding example, however, of the existence of contra-
dictions within the processes of developing Nature, is the ever-
recurring opposition between the old decaying factors and the new
arising factors at any given stage. The new tendencies win, but
they do not have it all their own way, and the eventual outcome
is a kind of synthesis. Lucretius was well aware of this strife between
the old and the new: —

". . . omnia migrant, ^

omnia commutat natura et vertere cogit.
namque aliut putrescit et aevo debile languet,
porro aliut clarescit et e contemptibus exit."

(All things depart;
For Nature changes all, and forces all
To transmutation; lo, this moulders down,
Aslack with weary eld, and that, again.
Prospers in glory, issuing from contempt.)^

So it has been said "Dialectics holds that internal contradictions
are inherent in all natural phenomena; the struggle between the old
and the new, that which is dying and that which is being born, con-
stitutes the internal content of the developmental process."^ To take
a concrete example, we might say that at certain stages of the world's
development, when complex molecules were first becoming stable,
and again when life was originating, the forces of repulsion constituted
the old, and the forces of aggregation constituted the new. The
forces of aggregation never win entirely, for in Nature though
victories may be decisive they are never total; the new synthesis at the
higher level embodies elements of both the warring sides at the
lower level. This is the secret of all high levels of organisation. But
the history of the world shows that the forces of aggregation do, on
the whole^ succeed in their tasks.

^ Cf. the valuable book of A. I, Oparin, The Origin of Life (Moscow, 1936, 2nd edn.
enlarged 1941; Eng. tr. by S. Morgulis, New York, 1938).

^ De Rerum Natura^ V, 830 ff.

^ J. Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism (Lawrence & Wishart, London,
1941, p. 9).

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time: the refreshing river

Now there is a certain fundamental affinity between organicism
and the dialectic. As Mortimer Adler has pointed out,^ entities in
opposition to one another are parts of a whole which stands on the
level of their ultimate synthesis. The syntheses at all the successive
levels of being, resolving the successive contradictions, form a series
of envelopes, for they each include the elements of the contradictions
on the levels below them as a series of parts. Like so many things
in nature, the successive syntheses form a dendritic continuum or
hierarchy of wholes.^

Whitehead as the Philosopher of Evolution.

And so we come to consider Whitehead's own contributions from
the biologist's point of view. Unlike so many philosophers he has
always appreciated the structure of our world in its succession and its
envelopes. Perhaps one of his most famous and influential passages was
that in which he said: ''Science is taking on a new aspect which is
neither purely physical nor purely biological. It is becoming the study
of organisms. Biology is the study of the larger organisms, whereas
physics is the study of the smaller organisms."^ And so, regarding
envelopes: "In surveying nature, we must remember that there are
not only basic organisms whose ingredients are merely aspects of
eternal objects [i.e. the ultimate particles of physics, each of which
is related to everything else in the universe by its bare co-existence].
There are also organisms of organisms. Suppose for the moment
and for the sake of simplicity, we assume, without any evidence, that
electrons and hydrogen nuclei are such basic organisms. Then the
atoms and the molecules are organisms of a higher type, which also
represent a compact definite organic unity. When we come to the
larger aggregations of matter, the organic unity fades into the back-
ground. It appears to be but faint and elementary, it is there, but the
pattern is vague and indecisive. It is a mere aggregation of effects.
When we come to living beings, the definiteness of pattern is recovered
and the organic again rises into prominence."* Elsewhere, Whitehead

■^ M. J. Adler, Dialectics (London, 1927), pp. 164 ff; cf. also Stalin, loc. cit., p. 6,
"Dialectics regards Nature as a connected and integral whole, in which phenomena
are organically connected with, dependent on, and determined by, each other" (italics
mine).

^ Cf. the work of J. H. Woodger, "The Concept of Organism, etc.," in Quart. Rev,
Biol, 1930, 5, I, 438 and 1931, 6, 178.

3S&MW, p. 150.

^ S & MW, p. 161.

192 ^

A biologist's view of whitehead's philosophy

elaborates this at length.^ "The universe," he says, "achieves its
values by reason of its co-ordination into societies of societies, and
into societies of societies of societies. Thus an army is a society of
regiments, and regiments are societies of men, and men are societies
of cells, of blood, and of bones, together with the dominant society
of personal human experience; and cells are societies of smaller
physical entities such as protons, and so on. All of these societies
presuppose the circumambient space of social physical activity."

So also with the successions. According to Whitehead, Nature
exhibits itself as exemplifying a philosophy of the evolution of
organisms subject to determinate conditions. Surveying the levels of
organisation, he writes:^ "One conclusion is the diverse modes of
functioning which are produced by diverse modes of organisation.
The second is the aspect of continuity between the different modes.
There are borderline cases, which bridge the gaps. Often these are
unstable and pass quickly, but span of existence is merely relative to
our habits of human life. For infra-molecular occurrences, a second
is a vast period of time. A third conclusion is the difference in the
aspects of Nature as we change the scale of observation. Each scale
of observation presents us with average effects proper to that scale."

Here is how he speaks of the emergence of mind.^ "In so far as
conceptual mentality does not intervene, the grand patterns pervading
the environment are passed on with the inherited modes of adjustment.
Here we find the patterns of activity studied by the physicists and
chemists. Mentality is merely latent in all these occasions as thus
studied. In the case of inorganic Nature any sporadic flashes are
inoperative so far as our powers of discernment are concerned. The
lowest stages of effective mentality, controlled by the inheritance of
physical pattern, involve the faint direction of emphasis by uncon-
scious ideal aim. The various examples of the higher forms of life
exhibit the variety of grades of effectiveness of mentality. In the social
animals there is evidence of flashes of mentality in the past which have
degenerated into physical habits. Finally, in the higher mammals and
more particularly in mankind, we have clear evidence of mentality
habitually effective. In our own experience, our knowledge con-
sciously entertained and systematised can only mean such mentality,
directly observed."

Turning to the borderline of metaphysics, it is interesting to note

1 AOI, p. 264; P & R, pp. 115 ff.; MOT, pp. 31 ff.

2 N & L, p. 73. 3 N & L, p. 94.

193 N

time: the refreshing river

that Whitehead goes so far as to say that "a thoroughgoing evolu-
tionary philosophy is inconsistent with [mechanical] materialism. The
aboriginal stuff, or material, from which a materialist philosophy
starts is incapable of evolution. This material is itself the ultimate
substance. Evolution, on the [mechanical] materialist theory, is
reduced to the role of being another word for the description of the
changes of the external relations between portions of matter. There
is nothing to evolve, because one set of external relations is as good
as any other set of external relations. There can merely be change,
purposeless and unprogressive. But the whole point of the modem
doctrine is the evolution of the complex organisms from the antecedent
states of less complex organisms. The doctrine thus cries aloud for a
conception of organism as fundamental for nature. It also requires
an underlying activity — a substantial activity — expressing itself in
individual embodiments, and evolving in achievements of organism.
The organism is a unit of emergent value, a real fusion of the characters
of eternal objects, emerging for its own sake."^ If in this passage
Whitehead speaks like Lloyd-Morgan, we shall see others in which
he speaks like Marx. Little though the philosophers of organic evo-
lutionary naturalism may have borrowed from one another, they
march in the same ranks.

Elsewhere Whitehead explains why he ignores for the most part
nineteenth-century idealism. It was, he says, too much divorced
from the scientific outlook, yet at the same time it swallowed the
scientific scheme in its entirety and then explained it away as being
an idea in some ultimate mentality. He leaves open, however, a final
decision on the metaphysical issue — "However you take it, the
idealistic schools have conspicuously failed to connect, in any organic
fashion, the fact of nature with their idealistic philosophies. So far
as concerns what will be said in these lectures [Science and the
Modem World], your ultimate outlook maybe realistic or idealistic-
My point is that a further stage of provisional realism is required in
which the scientific scheme is recast, and founded upon the ultimate
concept of organism." 2 While this failure to close the door definitely
on idealism has endeared him to theologians such as Thornton,^
many scientists have preferred the robuster materialism of the
marxists. No marxist, however, could be more strongly opposed to
mechanical materialism than Whitehead.

iS&MW, p. 157. 2S&MW, p. 93.

L. Thornton, The Incarnate Lord (London^ 1930)-

194 -^

4i

A biologist's view of whitehead's philosophy

"My aim," he says,^ ". . . is briefly to point out how both Newton's
and Hume's contributions are each, in their way, gravely defective.
They are right as far as they go. But they omit those aspects of the
universe as experienced, and of our modes of experiencing, which
jointly lead to the more penetrating ways of understanding. In the
recent situations at Washington, D.C., the Hume-Newton modes of
thought can only discern a complex transition of sensa and an entangled
locomotion of molecules, while the deepest intuition of the whole
world discerns tlie President of the United States inaugurating a
new chapter in the history of mankind. In such ways the Hume-
Newton interpretation omits our intuitive modes of understanding."
In other words, what the President does is relevant to events at an
extremely high level of organisation, and the concomitant atomic
happenings are not directly concerned, though they underlie, and
are entirely presupposed by, all that goes on at that high level.

Whitehead as the Philosopher of Organism.

Whitehead proceeds to his famous attack on the notion of "simple
location. "2 "To say that a bit of matter has simple location means
that, in expressing its spatio-temporal relations, it is adequate to
state that it is where it is, in a definite finite region of space, and
throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any essential
reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space
and to other durations of time. Again, this concept of simple location
is independent of the controversy between the absolutist and relativist
views of space or time. So long as any theory of space, or of time,
can give a meaning, either absolute or relative, to the idea of a definite
region of space, and of a definite duration of time, the idea of simple
location has a perfectly definite meaning. This idea is the very
foundation of the seventeenth-century scheme of Nature. Apart from
it, the scheme is incapable of expression. I shall argue that among the
primary elements of nature as apprehended in our immediate experi-
ence, there is no element whatever which possesses this character of
simple location. It does not follow, however, that the science of the
seventeenth century was simply wrong. I hold that by a process of
constructive abstraction we can arrive at abstractions which are the
simply-located bits of material, and at other abstractions which are
the minds included in the scientific scheme. Accordingly the real

1 N & L, p. 26. 2 s & MW, p. 84 (italics inserted).

time: the refreshing river

error is an example of what I have termed the fallacy of misplaced
concreteness."

To the biologist all this was extremely welcome. If for three
hundred years he had been a "mechanist" following in the footsteps
of Descartes and la Mettrie, it was not because he felt satisfied with
the seventeenth-century statistical picture of the fortuitous con-
course of particles, each with a momentarily defined exact position
in space, but because there was no other scheme by the aid of which
he could proceed with the causal analysis of biological phenomena.
The difficulties rose, of course, to a wild crescendo in the science of
embryology at the turn of the century. When experimental embryology
was put on a firm foundation by Wilhelm Roux, it was supposed
that all eggs showed what is called "mosaic" development, that is to
say, they would, if injured or divided, produce a finished organism
lacking precisely all that would have developed from those parts
which had been destroyed or removed. About 1895, however, the
discovery was made (and this is what has secured Hans Driesch's
name in history, not what he wrote long aftei-wards) that in many
eggs, at any rate, all kinds of interferences could be made without
affecting at all the embryo resulting. Large pieces could be removed
from the egg, several blastomeres could be taken away, or the blasto-
meres could be shuffled at will, and yet a normal, though small-
sized, embryo would result. Any one monad in the original egg-cell,
then, was capable of forming any part of the finished embryo. Driesch
was quite right in proclaiming that this was beyond the powers of
any machine such as man has ever constructed, but he soon left the
straight and narrow path by insinuating his non-material entelechy
into the works as the inevitable transcendent mechanic or driver. C. D.
Broad's comment deserves to be better known: "If you want a mind
that will construct its own organism, you may as well postulate God
at once. If He cannot perform such a feat, it is hardly likely that what
has been hidden from the wise and prudent will be revealed to en-
telechies."!

Looking at the matter to-day after the passage of forty years
of research in experimental morphology, we realise that what these
early workers were up against was a very general process in develop-
ment which we now speak of as Determination.^ The individual

^ C. D. Broad, Proc. Aristot. Soc, 1919, 19, 123.

^ As the new concepts came in in embryology, the old apparent necessity for pos-
tulating non-material factors went out. The process was excellently described by a

196

A biologist's view of whitehead's philosophy

cells of the very young organism are not strictly determined as to
their fate in the finished product, and this determination comes
about as development goes on, partly at least through the action of
chemical substances, about which we already know a good deal.^
But the important point is that these chemical substances (the Evo-
cators and Organisers) do not act at random, but faithfully in accord-
ance with that plan of the body which is decreed by the characters
of the species, whether embodied in the nuclear chromosomes or
perhaps in the cytoplasm of the egg, a plan the field properties of
which have earned for it the name of Individuation Field. Hence the
fate of a given monad, protein molecule, atomic group, or what
have you, in the original egg, is a function of its position in the
whole. And thus we have a typical instance of the way in which the
concept of simple location is hopelessly inadequate to cope with the
facts arising in biological studies. The reader may be referred to
Whitehead's own writings for an account of why it is inadequate in
physics also, but others have made similar approaches, for example
Wo. Kohler, starting from psychology, with his theory of physical
''Gestalten."2 According to Whitehead, all the things in the world
are to be conceived of as modifications of conditions within space-
time, extending throughout its whole range, but having a central
focal region, which is in common speech "where the thing is." In
topographic analogy, such as thermodynamicians use, the influence of
the thing grades off past successive contours, like the slopes of Fuji-
yama, in every direction. The connection of this idea with the sort
of fact which we are always meeting in biology, namely phenomena
of field character, is obvious, and to-day the concept of field is equally
widespread and necessary in biology as in physics.

To this may be added the following. The abstraction of classical
seventeenth-century science from the life sciences had the effect,
wrote Whitehead,^ of bringing it about that dynamics, physics, and
chemistry were the disciplines which guided the gradual transition

. philosopher, S. Alexander (in his Space, Time and Deity, vol. ii, p. 65). After discussing
the phenomena of pluripotence in embryonic development, he says, "Is there anything
in these facts which is inexplicable when the initial constellation is considered ? Instead
of straightway postulating an entelechy to act as a guide, it would seem to me more
reasonable to' note that a given stage of material complexity is characterised by sucli
and such special features, and that these are part and parcel of the principle or plan of
the new order of complex." Determination is an empirical concept congruent with the
facts of embryonic development.

1 Cf. my Biochemistry and Morphogenesis (Cambridge, 1942).

2 Wo. Kohler, Die physische Gestalten, 1920. ^ S & MW, p. 6c:

197

time: the refreshing river

from the full common-sense notions of the sixteenth century to the
concept of Nature suggested by modem speculative physics. This
change of view, occupying four hundred years, may be characterised
as the transition from Space and Matter as the fundamental notions,
to Process conceived of as a complex of Activity with internal
relations between its various factors.^ The phrasing here is important
in view of what has to be said below concerning the transition from
the concepts of Form and Matter to those of Organisation and Energy.
The older point of view abstracted from any long-continuing change
and conceived of the full reality of Nature at a single instant. It
abstracted from any temporal duration, and characterised the inter-
relations in Nature solely by the distribution of matter in space.
For the modern view, process, activity, and change, are, as for the
dialectical materialists, the matter of fact. "At an instant there is
nothing. Each instant is only a way of grouping matters of fact.
There is no Nature at an instant. All interrelations of matters of fact
involve transition in their essence. All realisation involves implication
in the creative advance."^

Whitehead and the History of Science.

It is extremely interesting that Whitehead in this century, and
Engels in the last century, both selected an almost identical group of
scientific advances which they felt to have been the deciding factors
in necessitating the great transition from the Renaissance or New-
tonian outlook in science to the modern, dialectical, or organic.
The three major discoveries selected by Engels were these: —

"The first was the proof of the transformation of energy.
All the innumerable operative causes in nature, which until then
had led a mysterious, inexplicable, existence as so-called ^forces' —
mechanical force, heat, radiation, electricity, magnetism, chemical
affinity, etc. — are now proved to be special forms, modes of
existence of one and the same energy, i.e. motion. The unity
of all motion in nature is no longer a philosophical assertion but
a fact of natural science.

"The second — chronologically earlier — discovery was that
of the organic cell by Schleiden and Schwann, of the cell as a
unit, out of the multiplication of which, and its differentiation,
all organisms, except the very lowest, arise and develop.

^ N & L, p. 45. 2 N & L, p. 48 (italics inserted).

198

A BIOLOGIST S VIEW OF WHITEHEAD S PHILOSOPHY

"But an essential gap still remained. If all multicellular organ-
isms— plants as well as animals, including man — grow from a
single cell according to the law of cell-division, whence, then,
comes the infinite variety of these organisms? This question
was answered by the third great discovery, the theory of evolu-
tion, which was first presented in connected form and substan-
tiated by Darwin."^

Whitehead speaks of four rather than three great advances, the
first two being the idea of a field of physical activity pervading all
space, and of atomism.^ In the seventies of the last century some of
the great departments of physics, such as light and electromagnetism,
were established on the basis of waves in a continuous medium.
But other sciences, such as chemistry, were established on the basis
of ultimate particles or atoms and their interactions. Whitehead
includes the cell-"theory" in biology as another example of the
atomistic basis. It was, he says, in some respects, more revolutionary
than the atomism of Dalton, for it introduced the notion of organism
into the world of minute beings. "There had been a tendency to treat
the atom as an ultimate entity, capable only of external relations, but
Pasteur showed the decisive importance of the idea of organism at
the stage of infinitesimal magnitude." Whitehead's second group of
two new ideas comprises the law of the conservation of energy, and
the doctrine of evolution. In energy-transformations, permanence
underlies change. In evolution, permanence abdicates and change
takes its place. There is, therefore, in the world an aspect of permanence
and an aspect of change. In modern physics, wrote Whitehead,^
"mass becomes the name for a quantity of energy considered in
relation to some of its dynamical effects. This train of thought leads
to the notion of energy being fundamental, thus displacing matter
from that position. But energy is merely the name for the quantitative
aspect of the structure of happenings; in short, it depends on the
notion of the functioning of an organism." And evolution is the
evolution of organisms of ever increasing organisation. As for the
dialectical contradiction between particles and waves, that has only
in our own time been, at any rate partially, resolved, with the modern
theories of wave-mechanics, quantum mechanics, etc., about which it
is hardly fitting that a biologist should speak.

^ Appendix B to Ludwig Feuerbach and the outcome of classical German philosophy,
2 S & MW, pp. 143 ff. ^ S & MW, p. 149.

199

time: the refreshing river

In parenthesis, having mentioned the agreement between White-
head and Engels on the history of science, it is interesting to find at
various places in Whitehead's writings remarkable echoes of marxist
thought. One conceives that these originate from the congruity that
there is between the dialectical conception of Nature and the organic
conception. For example, when discussing dualism. Whitehead says,
"The Universe is many because it is wholly and completely to be
analysed into many final actualities. It is one because of the universal
immanence. There is thus a dualism in this contrast between the
unity and multiplicity. Throughout the Universe there reigns the
union of opposites which is the ground of dualism."^ And in another
place, "In the past human life was lived in a bullock cart; in the future
it will be lived in an aeroplane; and this change of speed amounts
to a difference in quality.'"'^ More important, there are some fine
passages where Whitehead expounds the changeableness of scientific
formulations; the additions, distinctions, and modifications which
have to be introduced perpetually into them; and the complete
inadequacy of formal logic for science.^ "We are told by logicians
that a proposition must either be true or false, and that there is no
middle term. But in practice, we may know that a proposition ex-
presses an important truth, but that it is subject to limitations and
qualifications which at present remain undiscovered." Clashes between
theories are no sign of the failure of science, they are dialectical
contradictions out of which much better approximations to truth will
later arise. "A clash of doctrines is not a disaster — it is an oppor-
tunity."* A contradiction may be a sign of defeat in formal logic,
but in science it marks the first step towards a victory. A reliance on
scholastic and undialectical logic, which has marked so much writing
in biological theory (e.g. the later works of H. Driesch) has been
the reason why few biologists have troubled about it.

The Naturalness of the Mental and the Spiritual.

Reference was made above to Marx's phrase about making material-
ism not "misanthropic." An admirably parallel passage is to be found
in Whitehead.^ "In the same way as Descartes introduced the tradition
of thought which kept subsequent philosophy in some measure of
contact with the scientific movement, so Leibnitz introduced the

1 AOI, p. 245. 2 S & MW, p. 142. 3 s & MW, p. 262.

4 S & MW, p. 266. 5 s & MW, p. 225.

200

A biologist's view of \^TFiITEHEAD's PHILOSOPHY

alternative tradition that the entities which are the ultimate actual
things, are in some sense procedures of organisation. . . . Kant
reflected the two traditions, one upon the other. Kant was a scientist,
but the schools deriving from him have had but slight effect on the
mentality of the scientific world. It should be the task of the philo-
sophical schools of this century to bring together the two streams
into an expression of the world-picture derived from science, and
thereby end the divorce of science from the affirmation of our aesthetic
and ethical experiences." This, then, can only be done by recognising
them for what they are, manifestations of the highest organisational
levels, sublime indeed, but connected as surely with all the lower
levels as the physical hands of a man playing a violin in an orchestra
are with the claws of a crab.^

Such a connection involves what we have already had occasion to
mention, the problem of the origin of mentality in evolution. There
seems to be a bifurcation^ here. As we ascend the organisational levels
we seem to be led off in two separate directions, one the ascending
series of social groups through animal associations to human com-
munity, the other the ascending series of stages of mental development.
Perhaps it is not erroneous to regard the sociological and the psycho-
logical series as different aspects of one and the same set of high
organisational levels. Only where the brain and central nervous
system reaches its heights as in the prim.ates does social organisation
really develop, or conversely only where complexity is sufficient to
allow of social life, intelligible communication and co-operative
effort, does the mental life and its physical basis attain a high
status.

The problem of "mind and matter" has always been the skeleton
in biology's cupboard. Though generally abandoned to the philo-
sophers, biologists never felt any satisfaction at the way in which
their colleagues were dealing with it. When some trv^enty years ago
the present writer constructed a chart to show the historical develop-
ment of biochemistry and physiology since the fifteenth century, he
built it around the mind-body problem. Later for a long time he
thought that this had been a mistake, but perhaps it was really a
correct and useful plan, though now it would require considerable
revision. Physiology has had a curious history in this respect. Though
the word was first used in its present sense by John Femel in the

^ Cf. Engels, Dialectics of Nature (Gesamtausgabe edn., Moscow, 1935), p. 695.
^ I use the word not in its technical Whiteheadian sense.

201

time: the refreshing river

sixteenth-century, the first textbook of physiology was the De
Homine of Descartes, completed in 1637 but not published till 1662.
Here mind and matter were absolutely separated. But as knowledge
of the nervous system grew during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, it became more and more impossible to uphold this separa-
tion. As Whitehead acutely remarks,^ *'The effect of physiology was
to put mind back into nature. The neurologist traces first the effect
of stimuli along the bodily nerves, then integration at nerve centres,
and finally the rise of a projective reference beyond the body with a
resulting motor efficacy in renewed nervous excitement."

Elsewhere he sums up the situation thus:^ "Descartes expresses
dualism with the utmost distinctness. For him, there are material
substances with spatial relations, and mental substances. The mental
are external to the material substances. Neither type requires the other
type for the completion of its essence. Their unexplained interrelations
are unnecessary for their respective existences. In truth this formulation
of the problem in terms of minds and matter is unfortunate; it omits
the lower forms of life such as vegetation and the primitive animal
types. These forms touch upon human mentality at their highest
and upon inorganic nature at their lowest. The effect of this sharp
distinction between nature and life has poisoned all subsequent
philosophy. Even when the co-ordinate existence of the two types of
actuality is abandoned, tliere is no proper fusion of the two in most
modem schools of thought. For some, nature is mere appearance and
mind the sole reality. For others, physical nature is the sole reality
and mind an epiphenomenon. Here the phrases *mere appearance'
and 'epiphenomenon' obviously carry the implication of slight
importance for the understanding of the final nature of things. The
doctrine that I am maintaining is that neither physical nature nor
life can be understood unless we fuse them together as essential
factors in the composition of 'really real' things, whose intercon-
nections and individual characters constitute the universe." This is a
fine statement of the true scientific attitude to the problem of minds
and bodies, and would be as acceptable to the dialectical materialists
as to the emergent evolutionists. It means that when we speak of
mind we mean (as Eddington would say) "mind (in the sense of
Pavlov and Sherrington)" and not "mind (loud and prolonged
applause)."

1 S & MW, p. 213. 2 N & L, pp. 56, 57.

202

A biologist's view of whitehead's philosophy

A Lack of Social Leadership.

Nearly all that has so far been said has been in praise of Whitehead's
writings from the biological point of view, though with no attempt
to pronounce upon the subtler points of his philosophy, a task im-
practicable for a working biologist. If any criticism were permitted,
it would be that Whitehead has not been sufficiently outspoken in
leading along the sociological and political directions in which his
philosophy clearly points. It is true that he describes the creative
aspect of evolution like any marxist, as the creation of their own
environment by organisms. He says that here the single organism
is helpless and that adequate action needs societies of co-operating
organisms. But what tendencies in the world to-day are showing a
capacity for such adequate action.^ If it were possible for Marx and
Engels in the days of a capitalism comparatively mild and progressive
to state their views uncompromisingly, whether right or wrong,
about the line humanity must take towards higher levels of organisa-
tion, how much more necessary would it be in our own time, when
the state power of fascism has arisen in a tottering social system, a
power purporting falsely to be a higher level of organisation, but
really -no more than a mechanical tyranny. One looks in vain in
Whitehead's writings for some clear lead among the social tendencies
of our times. This is not to say that he has not sketched out, sometimes
with brilliant detail, the historical origin of many of the features of
economic individualism. Just as we made a connection earlier in this
paper between economic individualism and seventeenth-century
atomism, so Whitehead points out the connection between both
these and the individualistic "cogito, ergo sum" of Descartes.^ It
led, he says, from private worlds of experience to private worlds of
morals. Moreover, he suggests, not unconvincingly, that the assump-
tion of the bare valuelessness of mere matter led to a lack of reverence
in the treatment of natural and artistic beauty. The supreme ugliness
of industrial civilisation, as it first arose, would thus be connected
with its utter failure to recognise the unity of mind and matter at all
the levels of organisation. But this is not what we are looking for.
Whitehead's apparent inability to give a lead in his own time comes
out especially strikingly in Adventures of Ideas ^ where the adventure
of civilisation is discussed.^ It is too abstract. It does not interlock
with the concrete realities of political life. The objection or the defence

1 S & MW, pp. 279 ff. 2 AOI, pp. 352 ff.

203

time: the refreshing river

that philosophers are not to be expected to descend into the arena of
political struggles has no force. Philosophers themselves have said
that the world would not be well until philosophers became kings.
To-day kingship lies open to whoever cares to take it. It is said that
Stalin was once asked when and where did Lenin expound dialectical
materialism.'^ He answered, "When and where did he not expound
it.'^" — a curiously Confucian reply.

^''The Rival Errors recognise their Loves T

But if the cobbler must stick to his last, the general upshot of this
contribution is the great debt which biologists owe to A. N. White-
head as the greatest living philosopher of organism. The epigram of
old John Scott Haldane, neo-vitalist though he was, is coming true:
"If physics and biology one day meet, and one of the two is swallowed
up, that one will not be biology." In justice we should add that
though it might perhaps be classical physics, it will not be physics
itself, either; the two disciplines constituting indeed a Hegelian-
Marxist contradiction of which the philosophy of organism is the
synthesis. In conclusion it may be of interest to give two examples,
from the author's own field, of the way in which the newer attitude
is changing previous conceptions.

The question of the reducibility or irreducibility of biological facts
to physico-chemical facts has already arisen several times above.
Once tlie idea of a series of organic levels is reached, what we have
to do is to seek to elucidate the regularities which occur at each of
these levels without attempting either to force the higher or (an-
atomically) coarser processes into the framework of the lower or finer
processes, or conversely to explain the lower by the higher. From
this viewpoint the regularities discovered by experimental morphology
will always have their validity; they cannot be afifected by anything
which either biochemistry or psychology may in the future discover.
The behaviour, for instance, of an embryonic eye-cup isolated into
saline solution — its capacity for self-differentiation, fusion with another
eye-cup, lens-induction, regulation, etc. will always remain the same
however our knowledge of biochemistry or biophysics may advance.
This is the reason why prediction is possible at levels which, strictly
speaking, we do not "understand" at all, for example, genetics.
But though the biological regularities, once well and truly established,
may remain for ever irrefragable, they will, considered alone, remain
for ever meaningless. Meaning can only be introduced into our

204

A biologist's view of whitehead's philosophy

knowledge of the world by die simultaneous investigation of all the
levels of complexity and organisation. Only in this way can we
hope to understand how one is connected with the others. Only by
understanding how one is connected with the others can we hope to
see the meaningful integration of the evolving world in which organi-
sation has been achieving its ever new triumphs.

The second question is one which has deeply concerned the present
writer in his aim to unify biochemistry and morphology, namely
the ancient problem of Form and Matter. Though not frequently
discussed by Whitehead, it is fundamental for die biologist. The
setting of iJLop(f>r] and ethos against vXi] by Aristode has had an
incalculably great influence on the historical development of biology.
In the characteristic Greek art, sculpture, the form was certainly
much more relevant to human interests dian the marble or the bronze
manifesting it. So for many centuries biologists devoted themselves
to the study of animal form without much consideration of the matter
with which it is indissolubly connected. It is not surprising that the
numerous devils of vitalism found a congenial abode in the empty
mansions of form thus suitably swept and garnished. The morpho-
logical tradition (originating perhaps from die idea of change as the
pri\ ation of one form and die donation of another) was to think of
matter far too simply, ignoring what we now know to be the vast
complexity of chemical structures, and the unbroken line of sizes
reaching from the sub-atomic levels to the particles of virus molecule
size. Only in the light of the conception of organic levels can the
saccular gulf between morphology and chemistry be bridged.

It is true that Aristode held that there could be form without matter,
though no matter without form. But according to him, die only
entities which possessed form without matter, were the divine prime
mover, the intelligent demiurges diat moved the spheres, and perhaps
die rational soul of man. Some of diese are factors in which experi-
mental science has never been very much interested. On the other
hand, he maintained that there could be no matter without form,
for however pure the matter was (even the chaotic primal menstrual
matter which was the raw material of the embryo), it was always
composed of the elements, i.e. always either hot or cold, wet or dry,
and hence had a minimum of form. In its primitive way, this mirrors
die position of modem science. Form is not the perquisite of the
morphologist. It exists as the essential characteristic of the whole
realm of organic chemistry, and cannot be excluded either from

205

time: the refreshing river

"inorganic" chemistry, or from nuclear physics. But at that level it
blends without distinction into order as such, and hence we should
do well to give up all the old arguments about Form and Matter,
replacing these factors with two others more in accordance with
modem knowledge of the universe : Organisation and Energy. From
this point of view there can no longer be any barrier between mor-
phology and chemistry. We may hope that the future will show us,
not only what laws the form of living organisms exhibits at its own
level, but also how these laws are integrated with those which appear
at lower levels of organisation. This formulation is surely in line
with Whitehead's philosophy of organism, and no less so with that
of the dialectical materialists and the emergent evolutionists.^

Let us say once more then that in Whitehead's philosophy biologists
find a view of the world which they are particularly well fitted to
appreciate. Though dialectical materialism and emergent evolutionism
have also much to teach us, they see in him the greatest and subtlest
exponent of organic mechanism. These words are written in the
College of Francis Glisson and William Harvey, of W. B. Hardy and
Charles Sherrington. Isaac Newton's rooms, in that College of the
Holy and Undivided Trinity, to which A. N. Whitehead himself
belongs, lie only a stone's-throw away. From the neighbouring bio-
logical stronghold a word of deep respect and salutation goes out to
the repairer of the onesideness of that Newtonian system which in its
time was so profoundly progressive, the instaurator of the organic
conception of the many-levelled world.

1 Cf. the opinion expressed by Engels on form and matter:

"The whole of organic nature proves without exception that form and matter
are identical or inseparable. Morphological and physical, form and function, are
mutually determined. The differentiation of form (in the cell) conditions the
differentiation of substance in muscle, skin, bone, epithelium, etc., and the differ-
entiation of substance reacts back again and conditions new form" {Dialectics of
Nature, Gesamtaugsabe edn., Moscow, 1935, p. 623).

206

Evolution and Thermodynamics

(1941)

The development of modern science has led to a curious divergence
of world-views. For the astronomers and the physicists the world is,
in popular words, continually "running down" to a state of dead
inertness when heat has been uniformly distributed through it. For
the biologists and sociologists, a part of the world, at any rate (and
for us a very important part) is undergoing a progressive development
in which an upward trend is seen, lower states of organisation being
succeeded by higher states. For the ordinary man the contradiction,
if such it is, is serious, because many physicists, in expounding the
former of these principles, the second law of thermodynamics, employ
the word "organisation" and say it is always decreasing. Is there a
real contradiction here } If so, how can it be resolved }^

At the outset it must be recognised that there is no question of
rejecting the second law of thermodynamics. It is the basis of all our
engineering technique which gives mankind power in controlling
natural processes. The only question is, what exactly does it mean.'^

The Meaning of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

In the general language which scientific workers use every day
we say simply that free energy, that is, energy capable of doing work,
is constantly decreasing, and bound energy (entropy) is correspond-
ingly increasing. This absolutely irreversible process accompanies
every natural change, whether physical or chemical. In a series of
linked changes, however, there may be local decreases of entropy,
provided that over the whole system entropy increases. The irreversi-
bility of the "degradation" of energ}^ has been identified by Eddington^
and many other writers with the basis of our knowledge of the one-

^ In thinking over these problems I have had the invaluable help and counsel of a
number of friends: Professor Bernal, Dr. R. E. D. Clark, Dr. Danielli, Professor Dingle,
Professor Donnan, Sir Arthur Eddington, Dr. Guggenheim, Dr. Robin Hill, Dr.
Neuberger, Professor Polanyi, Dr. Shih-Chang Shen, Dr. Waddington, and Mr. Lancelot
Whyte. Should this survey chance to fall under their eye, they will recognise points
which they themselves have emphasised, but the whole responsibility for the general
line and conclusions must necessarily be borne by me.

^ e.g. in The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge, 1928).

207

time; the refreshing river

way character of time. Only in reversed cinematograph films, but
never in nature, does water flow uphill of itself, or the smoke and
gases of an exploding bomb recompress themselves, like the djinn
of fable, into the reassembling case with its explosive content.

This description approaches the simple examples which are given
by all elementary expositions of statistical mechanics.^ If a number
of atoms are introduced at one corner of a room, they will in a short
space of time be found equally distributed within it (assuming that
their kinetic energy is great enough to overcome their mutual attrac-
tions). In other words, it is impossible for a gas in a vacuum to occupy
anything less than the whole of the space available. In the same way,
if "hot" molecules are introduced at one corner of the room, and
"cold" molecules at another, their collisions will soon ensure that all
the molecules have the same velocity and that the temperature of the
room is uniformly warm.

The significance of the second law of thermodynamics is, therefore,
that all particles, when left to themselves, tend to become disarranged
with respect to one another. Now such a process is similar to the
shuffling of a pack of cards, or the random distribution of a quantity
of black and white balls when continuously shaken together. "Shuff-
ling," wrote Eddington, "is the only thing nature can never undo."
High probability, therefore, is associated with randomness, low ■
probability with the opposite, whatever you like to call it — perhaps
arrangement or order. Hence the definition that entropy is the sum
of the logarithms of the probabilities of the "complexions" of the
parts of a system. A complexion or micro-state is simply an assembly
of particles having the same velocity, rotational energy, rotational
axis, etc. The more complexions there are in the system the less
disordered it is. The presence of many complexions having very
high or very low energies different from those in their vicinity is the
condition under which useful work can be obtained from the system.
This relatively unusual or improbable state constitutes what the
physicist calls "order" or "arrangement." The corresponding "dis-
order" is measured by the logarithm of the probability.

Thus in an isolated system the net increase of entropy implies a
net decrease of "order" and a net increase of "disorder." In such an
isolated system a decrease of entropy can only occur in one part
provided it is over-compensated by a simultaneous and greater

^ e.g. A System of Physical Chemistry by W, C. McC. Lewis, 3 vols., vol. iii (London
1919).

208

EVOLUTION AND THERMODYNAMICS

increase of entropy in another part. The two parts must, of course,
be interlinked by some sort of action, e.g. radiation. The essential
ph3^sical meaning of increase of entropy is a loss of power of spon-
taneous action. Two bodies at different temperatures automatically
tend to come to a common temperature, but having done that they
stop doing anything. It is the same with matter at different levels
(subject to the law of gravity), electricity at different potentials, and
so on. The tendency is always to come to a state of passivity, and
whenever such a tendency takes effect, entropy increases. The "run-
ning down" of the world is therefore a drift towards a state of relative
quiescence.

From the point of view of other sciences and of the human world-
view in general, it is important to note exactly what words the physicist
uses to describe his improbable order and his probable disorder. If
we turn to the writings of the American mathematical physicist,
Willard Gibbs, the first among the great founders of thermodynamics,
we find that he only uses one "ordinary" word to describe high
entropic states, namely "mixed-up-ness."^ This does not occur in any
of his published writings, but only as the title of a paper which he
had intended to write, and which was found among a list of such
titles among his papers after his death. The opposite of "mixed-up-
ness" is separatedness.

Later on, however, the practice grew up among physicists and
astronomers of using the term "organisation" for pre-entropic states.
Eddington has been a protagonist of this use, as the following passages
from his Nature of the Physical World s\\.ow.

"We have to appeal to the one outstanding law, the second
law of thermodynamics, to put some sense into the world. It
opens up a new province of knowledge, namely, the study of
organisation; and it is in connection with organisation that a
direction of time-flow and a distinction between doing and un-
doing appears for the first time."^

Or again:

"Let us now consider in detail how a random element brings
the irrevocable into the world. When a stone falls it acquires
kinetic energy, and the amount of the energy is just that which
would be required to lift the stone back to its original height.

^ Collected Scientific Papers of J. Willard Gibbs (London, 1906), p. 418.
^ The Nature of the Physical JVorld, p. 67.

209 O

time: the refreshing river

By suitable arrangements, the kinetic energy can be made to
perform this task; for example, if the stone is tied to a string
it can alternately fall and reascend like a pendulum. But if the
stone hits an obstacle its kinetic energy is converted into heat-
energy. There is still the same quantity of energy, but even if
we could scrape it together and put it through an engine we
could not lift the stone back with it. What has happened to
make the energy no longer serviceable ? Looking microscopically
at the falling stone we see an enormous multitude of molecules
moving downwards with equal and parallel velocities — an
organised motion like the march of a regiment. We have to
notice two things, the energy, and the organisation of the energy.
To return to its original height the stone must preserve both of
them.

"When the stone falls on a sujfficiendy elastic surface the
motion may be reversed without destroying the organisation.
Each molecule is turned backwards and the whole array retires
in good order to the starting-point.

'The famous Duke of York
With twenty thousand men.
He marched them up to the top of the hill
And marched them down again.'

"History is not made that way. But what usually happens at
the impact is that the molecules suffer more or less random
collisions and rebound in all directions. They no longer conspire
to make progress in any one direction; they have lost their
organisation. Afterwards they continue to collide with one
another and keep changing their direction of motion, but they
never again find a common purpose. Organisation cannot be
brought about by continued shuffling. And so, although the
energy remains quantitatively sufficient (apart from unavoidable
leakage which we suppose made good), it cannot lift the stone
back. To restore the stone we must supply extraneous energy
which has the required amount of organisation."^

A similar use of the term "organisation" occurs at many other
places in Eddington's writings.^ In the above example, it seems to
mean no more than a group of uniformly directed motions, and such

^ The Nature of the Physical World, p. 70.

^ e.g. The Nature of the Physical World, p. 104.

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EVOLUTION AND THERMODYNAMICS

an order might conceivably be regarded as the most primitive form
of organisation. But to the biologist there is a sharp contradiction
between this use of the term, and hence the view that the organisation
in the universe is perpetually decreasing; and his own use of it which
is associated with the evolutionary process. Here, in a part of the
universe, at any rate, organisation is always increasing.

The matter is brought to a head when we find a physical chemist^
describing the laws of probability and the second law of thermo-
dynamics as the "law of morpholysis." This is well calculated to
astonish the evolutionary morphologist, and makes imperative the
effort to clarify the terminological situation.

The Meaning of the Law of Evolution,

Modem biology is nothing if not evolutionary. There are now no
reasonable grounds for doubt that during successive ages after the
first appearance of life upon the earth it took up a succession of new
forms, each more highly organised than the last. This is not gainsaid
in any way by the existence of highly adaptive parasitism and retro-
gression in certain types of plants and animals, nor by the fact that a
hundred disadvantageous mutants may have to be produced for
every one which is of evolutionary value. It is surprising that the
theory of biological organisation is still in such a backward state.
Though there are few penetrating accounts of it in the literature,
every biologist has a rough working idea of what he means by it.^
Here one may perhaps say that as we rise in the evolutionary scale
from the viruses and protozoa to the social primates, there is

(i) a rise in the number of parts and envelopes^ of the organism
and the complexity of their morphological forms and geo-
metrical relations;

(2) a rise in the effectiveness of the control of their functions by
the organism as a whole;

(3) a rise in the degree of independence of the organism from its
environment, involving diversification and extension of range
of the organism's activities;

^ R. E. D. Clark in Evangelical Quarterly, 1937, 9, 128, and in School Science
Review, 1939, 21, 831; 1940, 21, 11 17; see also his book The Universe and God
(London, 1939).

^ Attention may be drawn to R. W. Gerard's thoughtful discussion "Organism,
Society and Science" in Sci. Monthly, 1940, 50, 340, 403 and 530; and to a paper of
A. H. Kamiat, Internat. Joum. Ethics, 1933,43, 395.

^ See above, p. 184.

211

time: the refreshing river

(4) a rise in the effectiveness with which the individual organism
carries out its purposes of survival and reproduction,^ including
the power of moulding its environment.

There is nothing vitalistic about these criteria. All the levels of
biological organisation are higher than the physico-chemical level,
hence it is only natural that regularities will be expected to occur in
them which cannot be seen at any physico-chemical level. But this is
not to say that biochemistry and biophysics are not the fundamental
sciences of biology. A living organism is both a ''patterned mixed-
up-ness," and a "patterned separatedness." The mere fact of the
aggregation of millions of cells together into a functioning metazoon
necessitates the provision of efficient means of control of the whole.
Hence the mysterious similarity between the view that we see when
looking down a microscope at a transparent blood-vessel, and the
view of Broadway from the top of a skyscraper. Hence the mysterious
similarity between the nerve fibres and the pyloned wire striding
across the countryside. The new walls built in and around bombed
buildings in London seem like scar tissue growing in an animal's body.
A partly built steel-frame building, with its maze of pipes visible,
seems like a metal organism in which human beings are parasitic.
We speak of the "saturation" of anti-aircraft defences just as we
speak of the saturation of an enzyme by its substrate, and the filtering
of tanks through a line of defences resembles diapedesis.^ Those
thinkers who apply biological analogies to human society and its pro-
ducts are as foolish as any who would conversely try to persuade us
that there really are micro-telephone-operators within the coelentrate
nerve-net. The point is that the works of organisation have a certain
similarity at all levels of their operation.

Furthermore, it is in general true that the higher the level of bio-
logical organisation, the more independent of the environment the

^ There is a sense, of course, in which an amoeba is as organised as a man in that it
carries out all the functions of assimilation, metabolism, reproduction, etc., but the
difference lies in the variety of conditions under which it can do so, and the kind of
limitations on the type of life which it can lead. There is also a sense in which all those
species of plants and animals which have succeeded in persisting through evolutionary
change are equally successful. But this is not the only criterion of success. Merely to
persist is certainly the sine qua non, but we have also to consider under what variety
of changed circumstances this persistence can occur, and also what the organism does
with its persistence. One of the main objects in defining biological organisation and its '
rise during evolution is to get rid of as much subjectivism as possible in our outlook
on other living things.

^ C. M. Beadnell, Literary Guide, 1942, 57, 79.

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EVOLUTION AND THERMODYNAMICS

organism is. Among the higher types decrease in number of repro-
ductive products and corresponding increase of parental care illustrate
this, and vast chapters of comparative physiology and biochemistry
are devoted to the origin and development in evolution of body-
temperature regulation, desiccation control, adjustment of the compo-
sition of the blood and the like. "The constancy of the internal
medium," said Claude Bernard, in an aphorism popularised by
Barcroft,^ "is the condition of all free life." Nor is there in purposive-
ness anything that lies outside the scientific frame of reference. The
Aristotelian theory of causation is irrelevant. Biological purposiveness
and adaptation are concepts inseparable from biological facts, and as
Donnan^ has shown, there exist branches of mathematics, such as
integro-differential equations, which may be able to cope with systems
whose behaviour differs according to their past history. Consciousness
is the highest phase of this behaviour and when the organisational
level is reached at which psychological phenomena first appear,
sociological phenomena appear too. One may say that biological
organisation is as much an organisation of processes as of structures.
The point at issue is, then, whether the concepts of organisation
as used by physicists and by biologists have anything in common.^

The Two Concepts of Organisation.

It is curious that this difficulty has not been more widely felt.
Some thinkers have, indeed, been acutely troubled by it, for instance
Rusk,* who spoke of a "conflict of currents," the physical world
losing organisation and the biological world gaining it; and Ralph
Lillie,^ who opposed in an "apparent paradox" the "diversifying
tendency" of evolution to the "dissipative tendency" making for

^ "La Fixite du Milieu Interieur est la Condition de la Vie litre," by J. Barcroft, Biol.
Rev., 1932,7, 24; and later as part of his book Features in the Architecture of Physiological
Function (Cambridge, 1934).

^ F. G. Donnan in Acta Biotheoretica, 1936, 2, i.
■ ^ We consider mainly in this survey the rise in level of organisation during phylo-
genesis (evolution). But embryologists also see a rise in level of organisation during
ontogenesis (the growth and differentiation of the individual). So far as we know,
nothing that happens during embryonic development infringes the second law, and apart
from the energy turnover in metabolic upkeep during development, there is little or
no energy associated with the highly complex finished structure. For further information
on tliis difficult subject see the section on energetics in Chemical Embryology (by
J. Needham', Cambridge, 193 1) and the review of O. Meyerhof (Handbuch d. Physik,
T026, 11, 243).

* R. D. Rusk, Atoms, Man and Stars (New York, 1937), p. 273.

^ R. S. Lillie, Amer. Nat,, 1934, 68, 318; Philos. of Sci., 1934, 1, 297.

time: the refreshing river

uniformity, of the second law. So also Levy,^ in his popular exposition
of the sciences, remarks:

"The fact is that the second law of thermodynamics, which
regards systems as passing from orderly arrangement to dis-
orderly randomness, classifies any future pattern or more complex
orderly arrangement that may arise subsequent to the original
order, as one of the innumerable accidental situations that have
no special significance for man; as if a complex computing
machine were indeed a random combination of parts. It may
indeed mean that the energy of the original material from which
the metal was drav/n is now less available in one sense, but as a
computing machine, it has now made available a mass of energy
that was not previously capable of being tapped. Side by side,
therefore, with the second law of the thermodynamics, in so far as
it may be valid for large-scale systems — if it is so valid — there
must exist a law for the evolution of novel forms of aggregated
energy and the emergence of new qualities. A generalisation of
this nature has not yet been made but that a general rule of this
type must exist is evident."

One wonders why Levy did not allude at this point to the law of
biological, psychological and sociological evolution. Long before,
Engels, whom nothing escaped, had faced the problem, as we see
from the following passage (in his Ludwig Feuerbach) :

"It is not necessary here to go into the question of whether
this mode of outlook [evolutionary dialectical materialism]
is thoroughly in accord with the present position of natural
science which predicts a possible end for the earth, and for its
habitability a fairly certain one; which therefore recognises that
for the history of humanity also there is not only an ascending
but also a descending curve. At any rate we still find ourselves
a considerable distance from the turning point at which the
historical course of society becomes one of descent, and we
cannot expect Hegelian philosophy to have been concerned with
a subject which natural science had at that time not as yet placed
upon the agenda." ^

^ H. Levy, Modern Science; A Study of Physical Science in the World Today (London,
1939), p. 203.

^ F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the outcome of Classical German Philosophy
(London, n.d.), P- 2i.

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EVOLUTION AND THERMODYNAMICS

By this he would seem to have meant that a time may some day
come when the struggle of mankind against the adverse conditions of
life on our planet will have become so severe that further social
evolution will become impossible. This was a sensible approach, but
it was made in 1885, before statistical mechanics was fully developed,
before the second law of thermodynamics had attained its present
position of canonical importance, and before its interpreters had
challenged the biologists by appropriating the term "organisation."

One reason why the apparent contradiction between the second
law and the process of evolution has not caused more perplexity is
that the attention of those few scientific thinkers who try to unify
the world-view of science has been largely directed towards the
question of the existence of disentropic phases within living matter
itself. From the description of the second law already given it must
have been quite clear that this generalisation has a statistical basis,
and hence that if we had to deal with vessels so small that individual
"complexions" could be separated, the statistical law valid for swarms
of them might not in all cases hold good. Disentropic, "unusual,"
fluctuations might then, if amplified (and amplification is a process
at which living matter is very efficient), account for such phenomena
of high organisational level as "free will." Such a point of view has
been ably put by Ralph Lillie^ and discussed by Donnan.^ It would be
related to the standpoint of A. H. Compton,^ and of G. N. Lewis,*
who describes living organisms as "cheats in the game of entropy."

"They alone," he wrote, "seem able to breast the great
stream of apparently irreversible processes. These processes
tear down, living things build up. While the rest o( the world
seems to move towards a dead level of uniformity, the living
organism is evolving new substances and more and more intricate
forms."^

Evidently he grasped the whole of the problem, but there is still
one insuperable obstacle to the view that living organisms evade the
second law of thermodynamics. It is simply that no evidence of any

1 R. S. Lillie, Science, 1927, 66, 139; Journ. Philos., 1930, 27, 421; 1931, 28, 561*
1932,29, 477; Amer. Naturalist, 1934,68, 304; Philos. of Sci., 1934, 1. 296; 1937,4, 202.

2 F. G. Donnan, Journ. Gen. Physiol., 1927,8, 685.

3 A. H. Compton, The Freedom of Man (Yale, 1935).

* G. N. Lewis, The Anatomy of Science (Yale, 1926), ch. vi and viii.
^ The Anatomy of Science^ p. 178.

time: the refreshing river

infringement of the second law on the part of Uving organisms has
ever been forthcoming, and on the contrary a great deal of evidence
that they obey it. Their life is always associated with, and depends
upon, the processes of metabolism, in which there is always a net
loss of free energy, complex organic compounds being broken down
to CO2 and water, and their energy being dispersed as irrecoverable
heat. The processes of metabolism, moreover, are invariably very
inefficient.^

The idea that living organisms might be cheats in the game of
entropy originated from the conception of the so-called Clerk-
Maxwell demon. Clerk-Maxwell, in his expositions of the second law,
found it convenient to picture a vessel divided into two compartments
which were connected by a hole and a trap-door which could be
opened and shut at will by a "being whose faculties are so sharpened
that he can follow every molecule in its course."^ The demon could
thus let through fast molecules but not slow ones, in which case,
starting from a uniform temperature, one side would get hot and
the other side cold. He could therefore easily, in Kelvin's words,^
make water run uphill, one end of a poker red-hot and the other
ice-cold, and sea-water fit to drink. The idea has thus been often put
forward that living organisms evade the second law. "Es gibt seine
Damonen," cried Driesch,* "wir selbst sind sie." But as Clark^
rightly says, what had really been proved was not that the second
law was inapplicable to living matter, but that, z/a mind could deal
with individual molecules, and if it had suitable frictionless apparatus
at its disposal, and if it was desirous of doing so at the moment when
an observer happened to be looking, it could decrease entropy. These
conditions are never, in practice, fulfilled. So far as- we know, living
organisms and their minds cannot handle molecules individually.
The Maxwellian demon had in fact been endowed in its definition
with just the qualities our minds possess of arranging, sorting and
ordering. And our minds do not exist "in a vacuum," created from
nothing; they belong to the highest stage in an evolutionary process
continuous back to the most primitive single living cells. But the
paradox is that in all this arranging, sorting and ordering which

^ See J. Needham, "Recent Developments in tlie Philosophy of Biology," Quart.
Rev. Biol., 1928, 3, 77.

^ J. Clerk-Maxwell, Theory of Heat (4th ed.), 1875, p. 328 ff.

^ Kelvin, Proc. Roy. Inst., 1879, ^» ^^3-

* Driesch, H., Science and Philosophy of the Organism (London, 19 12), vol. ii, 202.

^ Clark, R. E. D., School Sci. Rev., 1940, 21, 11 25.

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EVOLUTION AND THERMODYNAMICS

living things perform, there is never any infringement of the second
law of thermodynamics.

A Paradox with Social Significance.

At this point I wish to pause before pursuing the argument further
in order to meet the criticism that the whole question is of purely
academic interest. What difference does it make, one may ask, whether
the world is thought to be "running down" or not, or whether the
emergence of novelty in evolution is real ? The answer is that our
ideas on these questions have very marked and sometimes unrealised
effects on our social behaviour.

The social significance of the first law of thermodynamics, i.e. the
law of the conservation of energy, has long been realised. It was
one of the basic pillars required for the development of industrial
civilisation, as the physicists of the last century themselves knew
very well. Crowther has summarised the matter:

"The discovery of the conservation of energy is connected
with the notion of exchange value. Capitalist civilisation cannot
be operated without an exact knowledge of the equivalence of
different forms of energy. . . . When coal, electricity, gas and
labour are to be sold in exchange, they must be measured and a
common currency found for them. That currency is energy."^

And again;

"All matter appeared to be made of electricity; industrial
civilisation had at length succeeded in interpreting the universe
in terms of one of its own concepts. The cosmos was conceived
as made of one universal world material, electricity."^

Thus the thought introduced by the pre-Socratic Ionian philo-
sophers 2500 years before, came to fruition. Thomson^ has reminded
us, in connection with the tyrant Midas and the first invention of
gold coinage, that Heraclitus said, "Fire is the primary substance of
which the world is made. Fire is exchanged for all things and all
things for fire, just as goods for gold and gold for goods."

As with the first law, so with the second. Since it involves the time

^ J. G. Crowther, The Social Relations of Science (London, 1941), p. 409.

2 Loc. cit., p. 455.

^ G. Thomson, Aeschylus and Athens (London, 1941), p. 85.

217

time: the refreshing river

process more profoundly than any other scientific law, it immediately
brings up all the "first and last things" of theology, from the creation
to the last judgment. It has been a godsend to theologians filled with
pessimism about human affairs, and delighted to find scientific backing
for their despite of nature — "the heavens shall perish . . . they shall
all wax old as doth a garment." That arch-reactionary neo-Platonist,
W. R. Inge, the former Dean of St. Paul's, devoted an entire book to
demonstrating that since the universe is steadily approaching a state
of thermal equilibrium and immobility, therefore {a) all evolution
and human progress is an illusion and {b) men should return to what
he calls the "philosophia perennis" of Christianity, the conviction that
all man's good lies in another life.^

"We have here no continuing city, neither we ourselves nor
the species to which we belong. Our citizenship is in heaven,
in the eternal world to which even in this life we may ascend
/ in heart and mind."^

"So far as I can see," he goes on, "the purposes of God in
history are finite, local, temporal, and for the most part individual.
They all seem to point beyond themselves to the 'intelligible
world' beyond the bourne of time and place. ... In so far as
the modern doctrine of the predestined progress of the species
is only a spectral residuum of traditional eschatology, I think we
must be prepared to surrender it."^

We might leave these stately passages to summarise Inge's position,
were it not for another remark elsewhere in the same book which
breathes the very spirit of the ecclesiastical department of the bour-
geoisie:

"Those who throw all their ideals into the future are as
bankrupt as those who lent their money to the Russian or German
governments during the war."*

^ God and the Astronomers (London, 1933). Cf. also The Fall of the Idols (London,
1940). I confess that the general level of the argument in these books, though not its
trend, reminds me of the well-known story in which a lecturer was giving a popular
talk on the subject of the second law of thermodynamics and its implications. As soon
as the meeting was thrown open for discussion, a member of the audience rose and
said, "How long, sir, did you say it would be before tlie universe ran completely down?"
The lecturer replied that he had said seven hundred million years. His questioner heaved
a deep sigh of relief and said, "Thank God. I thought you had said seventy million
years."

^ Ibid., p. 137. ^ Ibid., p. 172. * Ibid., p. 28.

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EVOLUTION AND THERMODYNAMICS

In justice to the theologians, it must be remembered that some
have strongly contested Inge's views, notably Rashdall.^

Another reason for which theologians or' theologically-minded
scientists extol the second law is that it is tempting to identify the
"winding-up" process, whatever it was, which started our galaxy
off on its course with a maximum of free energy, with the act of
creation by a personal deity. This always seems to me extremely
premature, for we have no evidence that the universe does not operate
in a cyclical way, periods of entropy-increase alternating with the
appearance of new free energy. Milne^ has pointed out that "the arrow
of time" should more properly be regarded as a flight of arrows,
since other galaxies are not at the same stage of their development as
ours. Moreover, it may be that at the "edges" of the universe — if
this expression means anything — free energy is continually being
formed, so that like animals living in a stream or pipe which find the
water always going by, we should see our world always "running
down" but never reaching the end of the process. For those who
like theological speculation, this might be regarded as a modem
form of the doctrine of the "General Concourse" in which God
must ever uphold the universe which he created. But I am unable
to see that these speculations do anyone any good except those who
are concerned to give ideological justification to ideas associated with
backward social tendencies. It would be far better to await the further
discoveries of astronomy and astro-physics with an open mind.

Thinkers approach the second law, therefore, with various forms
of tacit bias, and these should be taken into account in considering
what they say. One welcomes the degradation of energy and the
disintegration of the world in the interests of other-worldly theology;
another seeks evidence for a creator. I have no reason to suppose
that I am without bias myself; in so far as anyone can state his own
with any accuracy, I find the background of my thought to be the
elucidation of the nature of life and man, the definition of the direction
in which evolution has occurred, and the establishment of hope for
man's struggles towards the perfect social order. The reason why the
contradiction between the two concepts of organisation is so important
is because the world-view, and hence the behaviour, of men in general
is deeply affected by the "first and last things" of the world and of
life and man within it.

^ Ideas and Ideals (Oxford, 1928), by H. Rashdall.

^ E. A. Milne, Relativity, Gravitation and World Structure (Oxford, 1935), P- 286.

219

time: the refreshing river

The Two Views oj the Contradiction.

We may now proceed to consider the two views which may be
held about this contradiction. They are as follows; —

(i) The concepts of organisation as held by physicists and biologists
are the same; but all biological, and hence social, organisation
is kept going at the expense of an over-compensating degra-
dation of energy in metabolic upkeep.

(2) The two concepts are quite different and incommensurable. We
should distinguish between Order and Organisation.

First of all, can we find the first of these opinions explicitly stated ?

Metabolism and Irreversibilty.

It is not difficult to do so. The physicist, Schrodinger, refers to the
matter in his interesting book Science and the Human Temperament:

"We are convinced," he writes, "that the second law governs
all physical and chemical processes, even if they result in the
most intricate and tangled phenomena, such as organic life, the
genesis of a complicated world of organisms from primitive
beginnings, and the rise and growth of human cultures. In this
connection the physicist's belief in a continually increasing dis-
order seems somewhat paradoxical, and may easily lead to a
very pessimistic misunderstanding of a thesis which actually
implies nothing more than the specific meaning assigned to it
by the physicist. Therefore a word of explanation is necessary.

"We do not wish to assert anything more than that the total
balance of disorder in nature is steadily on the increase. In
individual sections of the universe, or in definite material systems,
the movement may well be towards a higher degree of order,
which is made possible because an adequate compensation occurs
in some other systems. Now according to what the physicist calls
'order,' the heat stored up in the sun represents a fabulous
provision for order, in so far as this heat has not yet been dis-
tributed equally over the whole universe (though its definite
tendency is towards that dispersion) but is for the time being
concentrated within a relatively small portion of space. The
radiation of heat from the sun, of which a small proportion
reaches us, is the compensating process making possible the
manifold forms of life and movement on the earth, which fre-

220

EVOLUTION AND THERMODYNAMICS

quently present the features of increasing order. A small fraction
of this tremendous dissipation suffices to maintain Hfe on the
earth by supplying the necessary amount of 'order,' but of
course only so long as the prodigal parent, in its own frantically
uneconomic way, is still able to afford the luxury of a planet
which is decked out with cloud and wind, rushing rivers and
foaming seas, and the gorgeous finery of flora and fauna and the
striving millions of mankind."^

Thus in this charming passage we are to visualise biological order
as identical with that order which thermodynamically is always
disappearing, the local increase being more than compensated for by
the decrease due to the cooling of the sun. Eddington, though more
uncertainly, adopts a like view, in his New Pathways in Science.

"In using entropy as a signpost for time we must be careful
to treat a properly isolated system. Isolation is necessary because
a system can gain organisation by draining it from other con-
tiguous systems. Evolution shows us that more highly organised
systems develop as time goes on. This may be partly a question
of definition, for it does not follow that organisation from the
evolutionary point of view is to be reckoned according to the
same measure as organisation from the entropy point of view.
But in any case these highly developed systems may obtain their
'energy by a process of collection, not by creation. A human
being as he grof/s from past to future becomes more and more
highly organised — or so he fondly imagines. At first sight this
appears to contradict the signpost law that the later instant
corresponds to the greater disorganisation. But to apply the law
we must make an isolated system of him. If we prevent him
from acquiring organisation from external sources, if we cut off
his consumption of food and drink and air, he will before long
come to a state which everyone would recognise as a state of
extreme 'disorganisation.' "^

Here, then, are statements of the view that there is no essential
difference betw^een thermodynamic and biological order. No doubt
this IS the simpler of the two alternatives.

Among the reflections which have led thinkers to support it is a

^ E. Schrodinger, Science and the Human Temperament (London, 1935), p. 39,
^ A. S. Eddington, New Pathways in Science (Cambridge, 1935), p. 56; see also
Nature, 193 1, 127, 448.

221

time: the refreshing river

recognition of the irreversibility which exists both in the second law
and in biological evolution. The pioneer work of the palaeontologist
Dollo^ led to the generalisation which has since been called by his
name. An organ which has been" reduced in the course of evolutionary
development never again reaches its original importance, and an organ
which has altogether disappeared never again appears. Further, if in
connection with adaptation to a new environment (such as aquatic,
terrestrial, or aerial life) an organ is lost which was valuable in the
previous environment, and if, as often happens, a secondary return
to the previous environment occurs, this organ will not reappear. In
its place some other organ will form a substitute. In a word, evolution
is reversible in the sense that structures which have been gained can
be lost, but it is irreversible in the sense that, once lost, these structures
can never be regained. Since Dollo's time it has been shown that his
generalisations hold good, not only for the morphological body
structures which he elucidated, but also for numerous physiological
and biochemical adaptations.^

In explanation, Dollo himself did not go much further than a
vague appeal to the "indestructibility of the past." "In the last
analysis," he wrote, "it is, like other natural laws, a question of
probability. Evolution is a summation of determined individual
variations in a determined order. For it to be reversible, there would
have to be as many causes, acting in the inverse sense, as those which
brought about the individual variations" (mutations, as we should
say to-day) "which were the source of the prior transformations and
their fixation. Such circumstances are too complex for us to suppose
that they ever exist." This idea has something in common with the
second law of thermodynamics. The universe is always passing from
less probable to more probable states.

The position was further elaborated in the brilliant and unique
book of Lotka, who defined evolution as the history of any system
undergoing irreversible changes, and practically identified it with the
second law. But although his discussion is one of the three or four
greatest contributions to biological thought of the present century,
he never really faces the problem that the second law involves a
decrease, and the law of evolution an increase, of order. His pleasure

^ L. Dollo, numerous papers, some of the more important of which are referred to
in Biol. Rev., 1938, 13, 225.

^ By J. Needham, "Contributions of Chemical Physiology to the Problem of
Reversibility in Evolution," Biol. Rev., 1938, 13, 225.

222

EVOLUTION AND THERMODYNAMICS

at being able to unite all forms of irreversibility under one law leads
him to an undue denigration of the genuine rise in level of organisation
which evolution shows. Evolution, he rightly maintains, is not a mere
changeful sequence. Mere unlikeness of two days does not tell us
which preceded the other. It is necessary to know something of the
character of this unlikeness.

"In a vague way," he goes on, "this character is indicated by
the term 'progress,' which is associated in popular conception
with evolution. And the more rigorous scientific disciplines of
biology, too, leave us with a not very clearly defined idea of
'progression' as one of the fundamental characteristics of those
changes which are embraced by the term evolution. Such phrases
as the 'passage from lower to higher forms,' which are often
used to describe the direction of evolution, are vague, and un-
doubtedly contain an anthropomorphic element. At best they
give every opportunity for divergence of opinion as to what
constitutes a 'higher' form. If, on the other hand, it is stated
that evolution proceeds from simpler to more complex forms, or
from less specialised to more specialised forms, then the direction
is but poorly defined, for the rule is at best one with many
exceptions."^

And to this he adds in a footnote the remark of Bertrand Russell:
"A process which led from amoeba to man appeared to the philo-
sophers to be obviously a progress — though whether the amoeba
would agree with this opinion is not known." After which he proceeds
to take irreversibility as the principal character of the evolutionary
process.

But this will not do. Denial of the rise in organisational level
during evolution (and social evolution too) is not, and cannot be,
acceptable to biologists. Definitions of what this means have been
attempted above. Russell's wit is empty. It is mere verbiage (though
it might in some circumstances be poetry) to talk about the opinions
of molecules, or in that favourite phrase, "the hookworm's point of
view" when its nervous system does not entitle it to have a point of
view. Philosophers, on the contrary, are so entitled.

Here Max Planck has a relevant passage;

"The second law of thermodynamics has frequently been
applied outside physics. For example, attempts have bf m made

^ A. J. Lotka, Elements of Physical Biology (Baltimore, 1925), p. 22.

223

time: the refreshing river

to apply the principle that all physical events develop in one
direction only, to biological evolution; a singularly unhappy
attempt so long as the term evolution is associated with the
idea of progress, perfection, or improvement. The principle of
entropy is such that it can only deal with probabilities, and all
that it really says is that a state improbable in itself, is followed
on the average by a more probable state. Biologically interpreted,
this principle points towards degeneration rather than improve-
ment. The chaotic, the ordinary, and the common, is always
more probable than the harmonious, the excellent, or the rare."^

And yet, in spite of these difficulties, and the general trend towards
probable disorder, the rise in level of organisation during evolution
has in fact occurred.

Patterns in the non-living world.

We come now to certain reflections which seem to suggest rather
strongly that the thermodynamic principle of order is indeed funda-
mentally diflferent from the biological principle of organisation.
Biological organisation depends universally upon aggregations of
particles, of high complexity. The molecule of protein, to say nothing
of the paracrystalline protein micelle, is an entity so complex that
though our analysis of it has begun, we are not as yet in sight of a
clear understanding of it. Now although biological organisation, as
we have seen, depends everywhere on a continuing metabolic upkeep,
energy entering the plant as light or the animal as chemical energy
in the foodstuffs, and being degraded in combustions and dissipated
as hea-c; biological organisation is only the extrapolation of patterns
already to be found in the non-living world. We cannot make any
sharp line of distinction between the living and the non-living.
At the level of the sub-microscopic viruses, they overlap. Some
particles show some of the properties of life but not others. Some
"dead" protein molecules are much bigger than the particles of some
"living" viruses. Particles which show the properties of life can be
had in paracrystalline, and even in crystalline form. There are many
similarities between the morphology and behaviour of crystals and
living organisms.^

Among the patterns found in the non-living world, crystalline

^ M. Planck, The Philosophy of Physics (London, 1936), p. loi.

^ Cf. such books as H. Przibram, Die Anorganische Grenigebiete d. Biologic (Berlin,
1926), and F. Rinne, Grenifragen des Lebens (Leipzig, 1931).

224

EVOLUTION AND THERMODYNAMICS

arrangement, and above all the arrangement of the more complex
liquid crystals, is doubtless the most highly ordered and organised.
But below the crystalline level there is the molecular level, and below
that again the level of the atoms, some of which have a much more
complex "solar system" of elementary physical particles than others.
When crystals form spontaneously they do so in processes which
involve decreases in free energy.^ The physicist must therefore say
that disorder has increased, but the biologist, as a student of patterns,
cannot but say that there is more order and organisation in the well-
arranged crystal than in its homogeneous mother-liquor or corre-
sponding gas.2

So also in the development of our world. In its earliest stages, we
are told, there were nothing but the elementary physical particles,
and conditions were such that the atoms of the elements we know
could not exist. But as the temperature of the earth grew colder, the
atoms of the elements became stable and at last even the heaviest
ones, with their dozens of revolving electrons, were able to persist.^
Here, from the biologist's point of view, pattern and organisation
had increased, but certainly from the physicist's point of view,
order had decreased. The chaos which ensues upon the degradation
of energy cannot therefore be the same chaos which existed at the
beginning of the world before the atoms of the elements were stable.
For that chaos coincided with a maximum of free energy, and the
former accompanies its successive minima.

The point is, therefore, (a) that we cannot refuse to extend the
concept of organisation downwards to include non-living patterned
aggregations,* and (b) that since these require no continuing metabolic
upkeep for their persistence, the "metabolic" theory which asserts

^ Cf. G. N. Lewis & M. Randall, Thermodynamics, p. 122.

^ Certain writers dispute this, e.g. R. O. Kapp {Science versus Materialism, London,
1940). They see in inorganic nature nothing but particles of different sorts "flying about"
and "shaking down"; life alone introduces a plan or pattern. But may not life be the
way the proteins shake down when in conjunction with lipoids, carbohydrates and
certain other constituents ^

^ F, Wood-Jones {Design and Purpose, London, 1942, p. 55) has related how he, as
a student, was struck by the similarity between Mendeleev's table of the elements
and Huxley's table of biological types. Both have the status of evolutionary sequences.
For an account of where Mendeleev's table of the elements stands to-day, see F. A.
Paneth, Nature, 1942, 149, 565.

* It should be noted that this conclusion is also that of certain philosophies; the
emergent evolutionism of Lloyd-Morgan and others, the organic mechanism of White-
head, and the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels. It has also been finely expressed
by the eminent physiologist Otto Meyerhof, in a review which is the best account of

225 P

TIME; THE REFRESHING RIVER

that biological order and thermodynamic order are identical, but
that the former is over-compensated, should be rejected in favour of
a wider generalisation. We are led, in fact, to the second hypothesis
mentioned above, namely that thermodynamic order and biological
organisation are entirely different things.^ Only we should now
perhaps have to call the latter by some such term as "holistic" in
order to indicate that pattern is not the biologist's perquisite, but
occurs also at non-living levels.

As David Watson has well put it:

"The suggestion I wish to make is that all material organisation,
whether living or lifeless, has its roots in the same facts, and that the
symmetry and beauty of the products of the synthetic chemist, of
geological formations, of trees, of flowers, and of young girls, are
in essence traceable to the same kinds of designing agents."

Let us now return to the fundamental definition of Willard Gibbs
- — entropy is "mixed-up-ness." The opposite of mixed-up-ness is
separatedness, not organisation. From this point of view, one can see
that in the early stages of our world's development all the elementary
particles -of physics were in fact separated from one another, and free
energy was then at its maximum. But as time went on, the temperature
fell, and mixed-up-ness increased — or perhaps we ought to say that
time went on because mixed-up-ness increased. The basic miscon-
ception we have unearthed comes to light here, namely that mixed-
up-ness necessarily means chaotic mixed-up-ness; on the contrary
there may also be patterned mixed-up-ness. Indeed it is hard to see
how the most complex patterns could ever have been formed if there

thermodynamics and life from the physiological point of view (Handbuch d. Physik,
1926, 11, 238). "In unseren Augen," he says, "stellen die Lebewesen eine hohere
Organisationsform der unbelebten Materie dar, die sich etwa zur Organisation der
Molekiile (oder Atome) so verhalt, wie diese sich zu den Elektronen und Protonen,
aus denen sie aufgebaut sind. Auch das Molekiil und Atom stellt nur eine Struktur- und
Funktionseinheit dar, von relativer Stabilitat, von annahernd, aber nicht voUstandig
bestimmter Form, wechselndem Energiegehalt und numerisch bestimmten, aber
individuell unbestimmten, d.h. austauschbaren, Elementarbestandteilen. Ja, dariiber
hinaus differieren sogar die Atome eines Elements unter sich unter gleichen Umstanden,
wie die Statistik des radioaktiven Zerfalls beweist, haben verschiedene Lebensdauer und
besitzen demnach eine Individualitat." Meyerhof, however, does noc consider the problem
of evolutionary rise in organisation as opposed to thermodynamic increase of disorder.
^ This is also the standpoint of David L. Watson in an important paper (Quart. Rev.
Biol., 1931,6, 143). Probability, he says, with Lotka, is essentially a matter of classification.
An improbable event is one that is a member of a small class, and whether it is so or
not depends on our system of classification. A classification based on morphological
form and efficiency of function (means to ends) would give a different picture from
that of statistical mechanics.

226

EVOLUTION AND THERMODYNAMICS

were not a number of different elements from which they could be
formed. The world of life is a painting in full colours, not a mono-
chrome. If this is accepted, we must make a sharp distinction between
thermodynamic order or separatedness, and biological organisation
or patterned mixed-up-ness. And the general upshot would be that
the world has been moving steadily from a condition of universal
separatedness (order) to one of general chaotic mixed-up-ness
(thermodynamic disorder) plus local organisation (patterned mixed-
up-ness).

The point could perhaps be illustrated by a homely analogy.
Inside the nursery cupboard there are certain large boxes of bricks,
each box containing bricks of identical colour and shape. When they
are all tumbled out in confusion on the nursery floor we have the
highly probable universe of the thermodynamician. But when in one
comer of the room the bricks are assembled into a factory or a railway
station, we have an analogy for the organising activities of life.
There are two kinds of mixed-up-ness, indistinguishable for the
physicist, but clearly visible to the biologist who is on the look-out
for patterns.

The only thinker who seems to have arrived at somewhere ap-
proaching this position is the late J. S. Haldane.^ He clearly expressed
the idea that though with the passage of time thermodynamic mixed-
up-ness constantly increases, this mixture does not necessarily give
rise to chaotic states but on the contrary invokes much pattern and
organisation. Indeed, we may find the first traces of pattern even in
those "fortuitous concourses" of particles which gases and homo-
geneous liquids were formerly thought to be, for it is now thought
that temporary associations of particles exist in these systems, though
they are of a duration so transient that they can only be observed
by special methods. Such organisation would be around the mole-
cular level.

Thermodynamic order and Biological organisation essentially different.

We have arrived, then, at the conclusion that thermodynamic order
and biological organisation are two quite different things. But this
is not to say that there are no connections between them. What
Haldane said illustrates some of the connections. And there is another
very simple way of showing how pattern may arise where there was

^ See especially J. S. Haldane, Realist, 1930, 3, lo, and The Philosophy of a Biologisty
(Oxford, 1936), p. 25.

227

time: the refreshing river

none before, through the operation of the law of entropy. If we
return to the example given earlier of two vessels filled with gas at
different temperatures, and isolated from all other environment, we
know, of course, that with the passage of time they will come to
exact thermal equilibrium. When this point is reached it will certainly
not be possible to get any further work out of the system, but a
pattern has now appeared where it was not before. The system has
passed from asymmetry to symmetry.^

It is, of course, a far cry from this simplest possible case of sym-
metry to the extraordinarily complex patterns of symmetry produced
by living things, but it may be that this apparently jejune idea hides a
profound truth. Every stage in the thermodynamic primrose path to
the everlasting (but tepid) bonfire, has its own criteria of stability.
In the earliest stages when free energy was maximal, even the atoms
of the elements ^^re not stable. Later on the minerals of which the
earth's geography was built were stable for a long time before any
living protoplasm was stable. The fibrous proteins (essential for the
construction and maintenance of the higher forms of life^) can be
regarded as "degenerated" linear polymers of the globular proteins,
which themselves, as the work of the ultra-centrifuge school has
shown, are polymers of a small and relatively simple unit. Polymeri-
sation, too, is a notable feature of the carbohydrate group. Now
polymerisation is a process which goes on with a decrease of free
energy, just as crystallisation does, and since the most complex
morphological forms require the most highly polymerised substances,
BernaP has pointed out that this fact helps to explain for us the contra-
diction between thermodynamic order and biological organisation.

From this point of view, life could be regarded as the
characteristic stable form of the proteins.* "Life," wrote

^ So also — as showing the different possible definitions of order — an equalitarian
view might claim that when all the molecules had the same velocity the system had
attained greatest order.

^ Cf. W. T. Astbury, Fundamentals of Fibre Structure (Oxford, 1933), and J. Needham,
Order and Life (Yale and Cambridge, 1936).

^ J. D. Bernal, a paper to the Theoretical Biology Club, 1937.

* Stable, of course, only in a wide sense, including within itself a vast range of
intermediate levels of stability. O. Meyerhof (Handbuch d. Physik, 1926, 11, 240)
gives an excellent description of the fundamental bases of life phenomena: "Ebenso wie
die Atomkerne durch Einfangen von Elektronen Eigenschaften gewinnen, die die
Elementarbestandteile noch nicht besitzen, die sich aber aus deren Eigenschaften herleiten ,
so wiirden die verschiedenen Lebensausserungen — Wachstumsfahigkeit, Reizbarkeit,
Stoffwechsel, Regeneration, usw. — aus der hoheren Organisation der organischen,
Molekulen entspringen, aber diese Molekiile selbst schon Eigenschaften enthalten, aus

228

EVOLUTION AND THERMODYNAMICS

Engels^ in a famous definition, "is the mode of motion of the
albuminous substances." So also in earlier essays, I was always
deeply impressed by a fact so obvious that it never seemed to have
occurred to many biological philosophers, namely, that proteins,
carbohydrates and fats are never found in colloidal combination or
even alone anywhere outside living organisms.^ It was therefore
irrelevant to demand of biologists that they should show the
existence of similar phenomena in the inorganic world before apply-
ing the methods of physics and chemistry, as far as they would go, to
the phenomena of life.

Goethe had faced this problem:

"Wer will was lebendigs erkennen und beschreiben,
Sucht erst den Geist herauszutreiben,
Dann hat er die Telle in seiner Hand,
Fehlt leider nur das geistige Band.
' Encheiresin Naturae nennt's die Chemie,
Spottet ihrer Selbst, und weiss nicht wie."

which we might translate: "He who wishes to understand and
describe living organisms first drives their spirit out of them, and
then in his hands he finds nothing but the dead parts; the spiritual
bond which united them has disappeared. Chemistry calls this 'the
Manipulation of Nature,' insulting herself by so doing, and not even
realising she does so." The investigation of this "spiritual bond" by
the methods of natural science is the task of biology, and we have

denen jene im Fall der Organisierung abzuleiten sind. Der Bauplan der Lebewelt ware
daher schon in der unbelebten Natur vorgezeichnet. Neben der Eignung der Umwelt
nach Temperatur, Feuchtigkeitsgrad, Kohlensauregehalt, usw., ist vor alien die Elektron-
neutralitat des Kohlenstoffs wesentlich, die die Bildung der homoiopolaren Verbindungen,
das Aneinanderlagem langer und beliebig verzweigter Ketten von Radikalen veranlasst,
womit die unendliche Mannigfaltigkeit der organischen Stoffe gegeben ist. So entstehen
Molekiile von bedeutender Grosse und hinreichender Stabilitat. Ihre koUoidalen Eigen-
schaften veranlassen widerum den gelatinosen Zustand der Zellen, der einen mittleren
Grad des Diffusionsaustausche im Inneren ermoglicht; hiermit ist ein wichtiger Faktor
der Reaktionsgeschwindigkeit der biologischen Umsetzungen gegeben, usw."

Cf. also R. S. Lillie's remark, "It seems clear that the concept of form and the concept
of stability are closely allied. No form would be possible in chaos" (Philos. of Sci., 1937,
4, 220). Successive states of form in embryonic development are now treated from the
point of view of stability levels (see my Biochemistry and Morphogenesis^ pp. 112 ft.).
Consider also an animal in a vessel isolated from any environment. If the energy present
throughout the vessel were suddenly to be concentrated in the animal its temperature
would rise to, say, 10,000° and it would die. Thermodynamic order v.ould have increased
and biological organisation would have decreased.

^ F. Engels, Anti-Duhring^ p. 94.

2 Cf. SB, London, 1929, pp. 207 ft".

229

time: the refreshing river

known too many victories in the past to fall a prey now to the pessim-
ism of Mephistopheles.

It would be quite erroneous to say, therefore, that because thermo-
dynamic order and biological organisation are two quite different
things, there is any conflict between them. Only as the time-process
goes on, only as the cosmic mixing proceeds, only as the temperature
of the world cools; do the higher forms of aggregation, the higher
patterns and levels of organisation, become possible and stable. The
probability of their occurrence increases. The law of evolution is a
kind of converse of the second law of thermodynamics, equally
irreversible but contrary in tendency. We are reminded of the two
components of Empedocles' world, ^tAta, friendship, union,
attraction; and velKos, strife, dispersion, repulsion.

There remain one or two final points. First, we have not answered
the question why a metabolic upkeep becomes necessary about the
level of the beginnings of life. Basal metabolism, as it is called, that
continuous slow rate of combustion which goes on all the time when
the living organism is as much at rest as it can possibly be, is classically
described as the energy turnover required to "keep the organism in
being as a physical system," to maintain separation of phases, do
work at membranes, etc., etc. It is fair to say that basal metabolism
only appears slowly as we ascend the taxonomic scale. We hardly
know as yet whether it is a concept which can be applied to bacteria,
and there is much evidence that some forms of life, such as viruses,
bacterial spores, and even some animal eggs, can remain for long
periods of time in an inert state, consuming none of their stores and
apparently as much without metabolism as any crystal. Presumably
the higher living patterns do demand a good deal of additional energy
to keep them going.

Secondly, there is the question of measurement. The nature of
holistic organisation is certainly not susceptible of the same kind of
measurement as thermodynamic mixed-up-ness, but we have no
reason whatever for supposing that its measurement is impossible.
When such a measurement has been achieved, it would be feasible
to apply it also to human social evolution. I see no reason for doubting
the possibility of this.

Thermodynamics and Social Evolution.

Mention of social evolution brings up a few reflections which in-
escapably present themselves. If the general principles here enunciated

230

EVOLUTION AND THERMODYNAMICS

are sound, the most highly organised social communities should be

the most stable, perhaps the most long-lasting. Here the social insects

bear a testimony, for the forms of their different castes have been

identified embedded in amber many thousands of years old, but

they differ so severely from the primates in their morphology that

they have less to teach us than is often supposed. The most highly

organised social communities should also be the least wasteful. Hence

it is significant that much of the criticism directed against our existing

social order by those who wish to see a more highly organised state

of society is precisely on the ground that our present arrangements

are wasteful. Wasteful of human effort, when infinite care is devoted

to the growing of a crop of coffee, only for it to be shovelled into

locomotive fireboxes. Wasteful of energy, when heavy goods, the

tr^sport of which is not urgent, are transported by air or rail, while

for purely financial reasons canals lie unused or derelict. Is there not

a thermodynamic interpretation of justice.'^ Is not injustice wasteful.'^

Is not the failure to utilise to the maximum the available talent and

genius of men a wasteful thing? As has been acutely said; "Those

fundamental human rights which have so often been regarded as

absolute postulates — liberty, equality, fraternity — turn out to be

necessary conditions for a truly efficient productive mechanism and

for the provision of sound social environment." That great aggregation

of mankind to which we all look for^^ard, the kingdom of heaven on

earth, will be nothing if not efficient. There was a false contradiction

in Richard Baxter's immortal remark: "I had rather go to heaven

disorderly, than be damned in due order." The more truly orderly

order is the more it approximates to the heavenly and this process is

our own social evolution itself, our own history, in which it is our

duty to participate, but we must always beware of mistaking the

lesser forms of order for the greater, and, as Auden reminds us, we

must be modest in our claims.

"Great sedentary Caesars who
Have pacified some dread tabu.
Whose wits were able to withdraw
The numen from some local law,
And with a single concept brought
Some ancient rubbish heap of thought
To rational diversity;
You are betrayed unless we see

231

time: the refreshing river

No Codex Gentium we make

Is difficult for Truth to break.

The Lex Abscondita evades

The vigilantes in the glades;

Now here, now there, one leaps and cries,

'I've got her and I claim the prize,'

But when the rest catch up, he stands

With just a torn blouse in his hands."

There is only one thing more to say. The increasing mixed-up-ness
in the world gives the direction of time's arrow. Perhaps when it is
possible to measure biological organisation the increasing patterned-
ness will be found to lead to the same result. In the meantime it might
be thought that what has happened to the world is that what was
one single original pattern has split up into millions of subsidiary
patterns — all were born from

"The universe of pure extension where
Only the universe itself was lonely. ..."

The extraordinary thing is that Richard Baxter's contemporary,
Thomas Browne, said it all in a flash of intuition in his pious seven-
teenth century way three hundred years ago, as if foreshadowing
what we are thinking now: —

"All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall'
they begin again, according to the ordainer of order, and the
mystical mathematicks of the city of heaven."

232

Integrative Levels : A Revaluation of the

Idea of Progress

(Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford University, 1937)

The flower of humanity, captive still in its germ, will blossom one day
into the true form of man, like unto God, in a state of which no man
on earth can imagine the greatness and the majesty. — Herder.

It is certain we shall attain

No life till we stamp on all

Life the tetragonal

Pure symmetry of brain. — Day Lewis.

Statement of the Theme.

Disquisitions without summaries are among the worst trials of the
intellectual life. Only too often, on occasions such as the present one,
when a scientist or a philosopher has the honour to stand before
you, as now I have, forming one of a succession of plain thinkers
who offer their conclusions for comment and criticism, he is content
to leave his audience and his readers to gather his meaning as best
they may without the assistance of any summary. In this case, how-
ever, a summary shall be provided, and instead of leaving it until
the end, when your patience will have been, perhaps, severely taxed,
it shall be given at the beginning in the form of a statement of the
theme.

The theme of integrative levels is not one which we can approach
without considerable hesitation, since the field which it covers is so
wide and deep, no less than the whole nature of the world we know,
and the way in which it has come into being. No one thinker can
hope to do justice to this theme, and the only apology which may be
offered for treating of it is that interest must always attach to what a
specialist in any field of research may say when he abandons for a
moment his speciality and looks boldly out to consider the world.
Moreover, in taking the whole world for his province, your lecturer
may the more easily, though a scientist, escape the condemnation of
philosophers, who have always been rather interested in the world as
a whole. The subject, then, to which our attention is to be given is

233

time: the refreshing river

the existence of levels of organisation^ in the universe, successive forms
of order in a scale of complexity and organisation.^ This is a theme
which that great man whose name we have in mind to-day, Herbert
Spencer, the "synthetic philosopher," would at least have appreciated.^
To-day it is no longer necessary, as it was in his time, to devote any
effort to convincing people of the existence of evolutionary develop-
ment in the world's history.* The cosmological changes which
eventually produced a number of worlds, probably rather small
among the galaxies, suitable for the existence of massed and complicated
carbon compounds in the colloidal state, have become a commonplace
background of our thought. So also the conception of biological
evolution, in the course of which the many-celled animals and the
plants arose from single-celled organisms probably somewhat re-
sembling the autotrophic bacteria of to-day. A sharp change in
organisational level often means that what were wholes on the lower
level become parts on the new, e.g. protein crystals in cells, cells in
metazoan organisms, and metazoan organisms in social units. Lastly,
the anthropologists and ethnologists have familiarised all of us with
the idea of evolutionary development in sociology, where we see the
gradual development of human communities from the earliest begin-
nings of social relationships to the conception of the co-operative
commonwealth now dawning upon the world.

But this great sweep of vision needs further elucidation. First, if
we look carefully at the steps between the successive levels of organisa-

^ I am not quite sure where the term "levels" was first used in this way, perhaps in
S. Alexander's Space, Time and Deity (London, 1927, vol. ii, p. 52; ist edn., 1920).
This led to an interesting discussion among American authors (H. C. Brown, Journ.
Philos., 1926,23, 113; G. P. Conger, Journ. Philos., 1925,22, 309) which I did not know
about when this lecture was first written and printed. Nor did I know of the valuable
book of the veteran American biologist, E. G. Conklin, The Direction of Human
Evolution (New York, 1921), and that of the Manchester anatomist, F. Wood-Jones,
Design and Purpose (London, 1942), which, broadly speaking, urge the same general
viewpoint as that of the present book,

^ Something approaching a definition of organisation will be given later, see p. 258.

^ References to Herbert Spencer's own writings will be found in the footnotes as
follows :

FP, First Principles (6th edn., London, 1900).
PB, Principles of Biology (London, 1898).
PS, Principles of Sociology (London, 1876).
A, Autobiography (London, 1904).

* Though it must be remembered that Roman Catholic writers are still fighting a
rearguard action against if, and the devout engineer, R. O. Kapp, has attempted to
reintroduce special creation under new terminology in his Science versus Materialism
(London, 1940).

234

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS

tion we find that the sharp Hnes of distinction are only made all the
more sharp by the "mesoforms" which occur between them. Thus
between living and non-living matter the realm of the crystalline
represents the highest degree of organisation of which non-living
matter is capable. It approaches, moreover, quite closely to the realm
of the living in the phenomena presented by the so-called "liquid
crystals," states of matter intermediate between the random orientation
of a liquid and the almost absolute rigidity of the true crystal. These
"paracrystals," with their internal structure and their directional
properties, are closely related to living systems. Living systems,
indeed, almost certainly contain many components of a paracrystalline
nature. The viruses again, minute ultramicroscopic particles, probably
represent some kind of intermediate form between living and lifeless.^
But these forms of existence, the more clearly we understand them,
will all the more clearly serve to bring out the essentially new elements
of higher order which characterise the form of organisation we call life.
Secondly, there follows from the developmental nature of social
organisation a conclusion which some thinkers, though otherwise
clear-minded, have not been so ready to see, namely, that we have no
reason to suppose that our present condition of civilisation is the
last masterpiece of universal organisation, the highest form of order
of which nature is capable. On the contrary, there are many grounds
for seeing in collectivism a form of organisation as much above the
maniere d'etre of middle-class nations as their form of order was
superior to that of primitive tribes. It would hardly be going too far
to say that the transition from economic individualism to the common
ownership of the world's productive resources by humanity is a
step similar in nature to the transition from lifeless proteins to the
living cell, or from primitive savagery to the first community, so
clear is the continuity between inorganic, biological, and social order.
Thus, on such a view, the future state of social justice is seen to be
no fantastic Utopia, no desperate hope, but a form of organisation
having the whole force of evolution behind it. But the acceptance of
this implies a certain revaluation of the idea of progress. The idea of
progress as applied to biological and social evolution fell into great
discredit as the result of Victorian optimism. It was pointed out that
evolution has often been regressive, that parasitism has been a wide-
spread phenomenon in biology, and that before speaking of progress

'*■ See the papers by N. W. Pirie and others in the Hopkins Presentation Volume,
Perspectives in Biochemistry (Cambridge, 1937).

time: the refreshing river

in evolution we should consider "the hookworm's point of view."
Nevertheless, apart from the fact that the hookworm's nervous system
does not entitle it to have a point of view, we cannot seriously bring
ourselves to refuse to apply the concepts of higher and lower organisa-
tion to the animal world. Vertebrates are^ in general, of higher
organisation than invertebrates, mammals than other vertebrates, and
human beings than other mammals. Again, in social affairs, the vast
miseries caused by industrialisation and modern warfare were set
against the doubtfully happier conditions of ancient times, and
pessimistic conclusions adverse to the conception of progress were
easily reached. But the time-scale was here insufficient, the exceedingly
short space of time during which human civilisation has existed as
compared with the time taken in biological evolution was forgotten.
Post- Victorian pessimism mistook the development of a certain phase
for the whole of progress itself. Of a famous Edwardian statesman it
was said that he approached politics with the air of one who remem-
bered that there had once been an ice age and that it was very likely
there would be another. He was unnecessarily chilly. In the light of
biology and sociology, those who remember that there were once
autotrophic bacteria and that there will some day be a co-operative
commonwealth of humanity, are better politicians.

So much for the theme of this disquisition. We shall naturally
have to consider some aspects of Herbert Spencer's own thought as
we develop its variations. But first it may perhaps be of interest if
your lecturer takes leave to run over a few matters of personal interest,
a few points on the intellectual travels which, in one form or another,
it is everyone's fate to take. If one thing is more fundamental to the
world-view outlined above than any other, it is the importance of
the concept of Time.^ And it was your lecturer's chance to become
convinced of it in more than one major field of interest.

Time and the Theologians.

Perhaps exceptionally among students of science, he came to find
theology, and especially the history of christian theology, one of
the most fascinating of subjects. The intense persistence of so many
minds, outstanding in their generations, to give rationality to the

'^ Cf. Samuel Alexander {Space, Time and Deity, London, 1927, vol. i, p. 36 fn.):

"I should say" (in contradistinction to Bertrand Russell) "that the importance
of any particular time is rather practical than theoretical, but to realise the
importance of Time as such is the gate of wisdom."

236

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS

irrational and expression to the inexpressible, was an amazing pheno-
menon. The quarrels of theologians, orthodox and heretical alike,
over words, letters, or even accents, in their formulations, were
understandable enough, once certain premises were granted. The
wonderful poetry of the liturgies carried symbolism to a point of
daring surely hardly reached by any other great religion. Now it
so happened that in the course of time he found himself influenced
successively by two (still living) divines, W. R. Inge, the former
Dean of St. Paul's, and Conrad Noel, for many years vicar of Thaxted
in Essex.^ It is true that they were but vehicles for the teaching of
greater than they; Plotinus in the first case, Isaiah in the second.
And it was after having experienced a profound attraction for the
great tradition of christian mysticism that he came to feel, in the
light of the prophetic and apocalyptic tradition, that the former was
almost the evil genius of religion.

For the ancient Mediterranean thinkers, the world, which had
neither beginning nor ending, was growing neither better nor worse.
It has been powerfully argued (e.g. by Glover^) that the major con-
tribution of Christianity, and one of the principal reasons why it
vanquished its competitors among the religions of the Roman empire,
was precisely that it introduced change and hope into the stagnating
sameness of the ancient world. But when asceticism, probably of
Indian origin, outbalanced this new belief in the significance of time,
the Neo-platonists, whether pagan or christian, had every reason
they needed for turning away from the world and embarking on the
ecstasies of the mystical contemplation of the One. "The intelligible
world," writes Inge,^ expounding Plotinus, "is timeless and spaceless,
and contains the archetypes of the sensible world. The sensible world
is our view of the intelligible world. When we say it does not exist, we
mean that we shall not always see it in this form. The 'Ideas' are the
ultimate form in which things are regarded by Intelligence, or God.
Nods is described as at once oraGis and KivrjGLs, that is, it is unchanging
itself, but the whole cosmic process, which is ever in flux, is eternally

^ Conrad Noel's books, Byways of Belief (London, 19 12); The Battle of the Flags
(London, 1922); Life of Jesus (London, 1937); and Jesus the Heretic (London, 1939),
deserve to be even more widely known than they are, but his influence spread far and
wide by the compellingness of his preaching and the exceptional beauty and grace of
the Liturgy as celebrated at Thaxted.

^ Glover, T. R., The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire (London, 1919).

^ W. R. Inge, Christian Mysticism (London, 1921), p. 95; see also his Philosophy of
Plotinus (London, 1929).

237

time: the refreshing river

present to it as a process." A process, but not a progressive process.
Where time brings no irreversible change, time is not important. It
is strange how close to scientific thought theological thought has
often been, for here we are reminded both of the seventeenth-century
doctrine of the "general concourse," the upholding of the world by
divine power without which everything would, it was thought, fly
back into chaos again; and of the relations now understood between
time and thermodynamic irreversibility. But for neo-platonic and
hence christian mysticism, just as the sensible world is but a shadow
of the intelligible, so action is a shadow of contemplation, suited only
to weak-minded persons. This leads to what even Inge calls the
heartless doctrine that to the wise man public calamities are only
stage tragedies. It leads no less to the view that all such calamities
are punishments for sin, since any action must be wrong. The medi-
aeval saint and visionary, Angela of Foligno, congratulated herself on
the deaths of her mother, husband and children, "who were great
obstacles in the way of God."

What a profound difference there is between this ascetic Graeco-
Indian indifference to time, and the unsophisticated messianism which
runs through most of the prophetic writings of the Hebrews, and on
into the early Church, forming its other principal current. Here there
is an intuition of time's irreversibility, the accomplishment of perma-
nent gains, the belief in progressive change. Thus in Isaiah: "The
voice of one that crieth. Prepare ye in the wilderness the way of the
Lord, make straight in the desert a high way for our God. Every
valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made
low; and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places
plain; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall
see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it."^ Or again:
"The Lord God will come as a mighty one, and his arm shall rule
for him; his reward is with him, and his recompense before him."^
Or "Declare ye the former things, what they be, that we may consider
them, and know the latter end of them; or show us things for to
come."^ Or Jeremiah: "And they shall come and sing in the height
of Sion, and shall flow together unto the goodness of the Lord, for
com and wine and oil, and for the young of the flock and the herd;
and their soul shall be as a watered garden, and they shall not sorrow
any more at all. Then shall the girls rejoice in the dance, and the
young men and the old together; for I will turn their mourning into
1 Ch. 40, V. 3 fF. 2 Qi^^ ^Q^ y iQ 3 cj^ ^j^ y^ 22.

238

V

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS

joy, and will comfort them, and make them rejoice from their sorrow.
. . . There is hope for thy latter end, saith the Lord."^

Every word shows clearly a strong sense of the progressive time
process. Things have been and shall be; they have been evil, it is
promised that they shall be better.

After the period of the Gospels and in the early Church this
attitude towards time became associated naturally with the conception
of the Kingdom of God, Regnum Dei. In the later development of
this conception, it came to mean, either the Church itself as a visible
organisation, or an invisible company of the faithful, both of the
dead and the living.^ But the more your lecturer considered the
history of the concept, the clearer it became that these ideas were
later distortions, and that the primitive christians had held a much
more materialist view of the Regnum, had thought of it rather as an
earthly state of social justice which should, it was true, be brought
in by the miraculous second coming of the Lord, but to which
meanwhile all their own efforts should be tending. And in conformity
with this "socialist" interpretation of the mind of the primitive
church, he noted a number of facts to which as a rule little attention
is given. Thus the communism of the Church of Jerusalem is generally,
but inadequately, explained away by theological historians. Among
the early theological movements, some of which were condemned
as heresies or schisms, there are many traces of economic significance
to be found, e.g. the milites agonistici christi of the North African
Donatists, who seem to have been the shock-troops of an agrarian
communist rebellion.^ That there were elements of a hatred of com-
munism in the mediaeval repressions of the Albigensians and Walden-
sians is more than probable.* All through the late middle ages, the
peasant risings against their intolerable conditions were carried out
in the name of christian comradeship, and often had the support of
revolutionary clergy, as in the case of our English priest, John Ball.
There are strong grounds for suspecting a social revolutionary
element in the Lollards and the poor preachers of Wyclif.^ And when
it came to open warfare, the Anabaptists and the Taborites of the

^ Ch. 31, vv. 2-20.

^ For the historical development of the idea of the Kingdom, see Bp. A. Robertson's
Regnum Dei (London, 1901).

^ Cf. C. A. Scott, art. "Donatists" in Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics.

* R. Pascal, "Communism in the Middle Ages and the Reformation" in Christianity
and the Social Revolution (London, 1935).

^ Cf. F. Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (New York, 1926).

239

time: the refreshing river

sixteentli century^ and the Levellers of the seventeenth^ all adopted
religious language and modes of thought. It is not to be suggested
that any special significance attaches to this fact, for they had no
other language or modes of thought at their disposal. But the essential
point is that in all the best aspects of Christianity, in those directions
in which it has least turned its back upon human life and simple
human happiness, the conviction of the reality of progress in time
has been present. A time came when the old law gave place to the
new. A time came when the people would suffer no longer the oppres-
sion of unchristian princes, but actually rose against them, and for a
longer or shorter period withstood them. A time would eventually
come when the Kingdom of God would be set up on earth, and a
new world-order of love and comradeship would come into being.

With such words, we may seem to have travelled far from the cool
consideration of biological and social evolution. But in fact we are
not far removed from it, for there is a natural affinity between millen-
arism and evolutionary naturalism. Such primitive Christian ideas
do justice to time and to progress, and in wandering, as a young man,
from one theological realm to another, your lecturer came to see
that the reality of time was fundamentally important. When he then
returned to take up again the locus classicus of neo-platonic pessimism,
the essay of W. R. Inge on progress,^ it seemed to him, in spite of

^ Cf. K. Kautsky, Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation
(London 1897), and R. Pascal, The Social Basis of the German Reformation (London, 1933).
Cf. E. Bernstein, Cromwell and Communism (London, 1930).

^ "The Idea of Progress" in Outspoken Essays, voL ii (London, 1923). It must with
regret be recorded that some ten years afterwards Inge, in his Spencer Lecture for 1934,
"Liberty and Natural Rights," gave his official blessing to fascism as the best form of
human society yet devised. Opposition to the idea of progress is, indeed, a characteristic
common to all fascist philosophers. Examples are easy to find. "The materialist outlook,"
wrote Otto Strasser, "has, as is well known, the idea of progress as one of its motive
forces. There is no worse sort of fatalism than this spiritual hallucination that humanity
has for millions of years now been marching along a road which leads for ever upward,
decorated on the right and left with the milestones of development. How has this fixed
idea become possible? Surely everyone knows from his own experience that life is a
circle, not a line" (/F/r suchen Deutschland, p. 165). So also Othmar Spann: "Darwin
and Marx have done terrible harm to our civilisation by their mechanical" {sic) "con-
ception of development. For this conception of development deprives every activity
of value since today each one is overcome by tomorrow. And this has given birth to
utilitarianism, materialism, and nihilism" {sic) "which are characteristic of our time"
{Kategorienlehre, 1924, p. 211). And the Russian Orthodox Church adds its mite to the
treasury. It has an Inge of its own. "The Humanism of the Renaissance," writes Berdyaev,
"has not strengthened man but weakened him; that is the paradoxical denouement of
modem history. . . . European man strode into modern history full of confidence in
himself and his creative powers, in this dawn everything seemed to depend upon his

240

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS

all its learning, indescribably superficial. All it found to say about the
eighteenth-century beliefs in reason and human perfectibility was
that in France they "culminated in the delirium of the Terror." More
than half a century after the beginnings of agricultural chemistry,
and oblivious of modern methods of population control, it could still
take seriously the views of Malthus. Neither history nor science, it
concluded, give us any warrant for believing that humanity has
advanced, except by accumulating knowledge and experience and the
instruments of living; and the value of this social inheritance is "not
beyond dispute." Nevertheless he retained sufficient admiration for
a great, though perverse,^ scholar, to continue to regard him as on a
totally different level from Cro-Magnon man.

Time and the Biologists.

But side by side with these cogitations on the first and last things,
your lecturer was occupied in his daily work with biology in general
and biochemistry in particular. And since biochemistry is the most
borderline of sciences, it was only natural that, like most reflective
students of that subject, he should devote a good deal of attention
to its philosophical position. That chemistry should indeed be able
to cover the realms both of the inanimate and the animate, was in
fact quite sufficiently a riddle in itself. The whole history of bio-
chemistry, indeed, has been the scene of a persistent debate between
those who have taken the hopeful view that the phenomena of life
would one day be fully explicable in physico-chemical terms, and those
who have thought themselves able to see in these phenomena evidences
of some guiding influence — spiritus rector, archaens, vis formativa,
entelechy, or what you will — formally impossible to bring into
relation with chemistry. Often enough these "vitalists," as they have
been called, not content with prognostications of failure, have pur-
ported to give proofs of a more or less convincing nature, that the
phenomena of life must ever resist scientific explanation.^ During the
first three decades of the present century the majority of working
biologists and biochemists were not "vitalists" but "mechanists."

own creative powers, to which he put no frontiers or limits; today he leaves it to pass
into an unknown epoch, discouraged, his faith in shreds, threatened with the loss for
ever of the core of his personality" (The End of Our Time, 1933, p. 15). In 1940 Inge
returned to his attack on the idea of progress in The Fall of the Idols (London).

^ Another essay. Our Present Discontents (1919), will long remain a museum piece
of upper middle-class spitefulness, unworthy of a christian, still less a priest.

^ Such as Hans Driesch in his Science and Philosophy of the Organism (London, 1908).

241 Q

time: the refreshing river

About 1928 their position could fairly justly be summed up as follows:
"Mechanists do not say that nothing is true or intelligible unless
expressed in physico-chemical terms, they do not say that nothing
takes place differently in living matter from what takes place in dead,
they do not say that our present physics and chemistry are fully
competent to explain the behaviour of living systems. What they do
say is that the processes of living matter are subject to the same laws
which govern the processes of dead matter, but that the laws operate
in a more complicated medium; thus living things differ from dead
things in degree and not in kind, and are, as it were, extrapolations
from the inorganic." ^

But the nature of this extrapolation was still obscure. The question
entered a new phase, however, some ten years ago, with the publication
of J. H. Woodger's remarkable book Biological Principles.^ There
it was laid down that the term "vitalism" should thenceforward be
restricted to all propositions of the type "the living being consists of
an X in addition to carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, etc. plus
organising relations'' Recognition of the objectivity and importance
of organising relations had always been an empirical necessity, forced
upon biologists by the very subject-matter of their science, but the
issue was always confused by their inability to distinguish between
the organisation of the living system and its supposed anima. With
the abolition of souls and vital forces the genuine organising relations
in the organism could become the object of scientific study. Before
the contribution of Woodger, "organicism," as it had been called,
had necessarily been of an obscurantist character,^ since it was sup-
posed as, for example, by J. S. Haldane, that the organising relations
were themselves the anima, and as such inscrutable to scientific
analysis.* To-day we are perfectly clear (though a few biologists may
still fail to appreciate this point) that the organisation of living systems
is the problem, not the axiomatic starting-point, of biological research.
Organising relations exist, but they are not immune from scientific
grasp and understanding. On the other hand, their laws are not

^ SB, p. 247. ^ (London, 1929).

^ "Obscurantist" organicism was well castigated by N. I. Bukharin in the Marx
Memorial Volume of the Moscow Academy of Science, 1933 (Eng. tr. Marxism and
Modern Thought, p. 26).

* C. D. Broad in his The Mind and its Place in Nature (London, 1925), had argued
along lines similar to Woodger's when he rejected both "substantial vitalism" and
"biological mechanism" in favour of "emergent vitalism," but his treatment was for
various reasons imsatisfactory and did not have much influence among biologists.

242

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS

likely to be reducible^ to the laws governing the behaviour of molecules
at lower levels of complexity. It would be correct to say that the
living differs from the dead in degree and not in kind because it is
on a higher plane of complexity of organisation, but it would also
be correct to say that it differs in kind since the laws of this higher
organisation only operate there.

It may be of use to follow a little further the difference between
the older dogmatic organicism and the new point of view. Organisa-
tion is inscrutable, it was urged, since any inorganic part instantly
loses its relational properties on removal from the whole, and no
means are available for rendering wholes transparent so that we can
observe them while intact. But unfortunately these statements are
not true. Woodger^ has distinguished three main possibilities in the
relation of organic part to organic whole: (a) independence, (h) func-
tional dependence, (c) existential dependence. A part of the first sort
would pursue its normal activities independently of whether it was in
connection with its normal whole or not. A part of the second sort
would be disorganised, if so isolated, and a part of the third sort
would cease even to be recognisable. Dogmatic organicists, ignoring
these distinctions, assumed that all parts are parts of the third sort.
Yet this is certainly not the case. Liver cells synthesise glycogen and
iris cells melanin in tissue culture as well as in the body. Isolated
enzyme systems carry out their multifarious reactions in extracts as
well as in the intact cells. Even existential dependence is a difficulty
which can be overcome if means exist for making wholes "trans-
parent," as by X-ray analysis of membrances or fibres, examination
of living cells in polarising microscopes or ultra-violet spectrometers,
or by "marking" in-going molecules by substituting isotope elements
in them, such as heavy hydrogen or phosphorus.

It was a striking fact that in other countries other biologists had
been coming to similar conclusions. In Russia, under the guidance
of an elaborate philosophy at that time almost unknown here, a new
organicism had been growing up, but so little were English men of
science prepared for it that the very sensible and elaborate communi-
cations of the Russian delegation to the International Congress for
the History of Science at the Science Museum at South Kensington,

^ "Every new form of moving matter thus has its own special laws. But this enriched
form and these new laws are not cut off by a Chinese wall from those historically pre-
ceding them. The latter still exist in 'sublated form' "; Bukharin, loc. cit., p. 31.

^ Proc. Aristot. Soc, 1932,32, 117.

243

\

time: the refreshing river

London, in 193 1, were received with bewilderment.^ "The true task
of scientific research," said Zavadovsky,^ "is not the violent identifica-
tion of the biological and the physical, but the discovery of the
qualitatively specific controlling principles which characterise the
main features of every phenomenon, and the finding of methods of
research appropriate to the phenomena studied. ... It is necessary to
renounce both the simplified reduction of some sciences to others,
and also the sharp demarcations between the physical, biological, and
socio-historical sciences." Again, in a passage which indicates a
point of view closely similar to that already outlined, he writes,
"Biological phenomena, historically connected with physical pheno-
mena in inorganic nature, are none the less not only not reducible
to physico-chemical or mechanical laws, but within their own limits
as biological processes display different^ and qualitatively distinct
laws. But biological laws do not in the least lose thereby their material
quality and cognisability, requiring only in each case methods of
research appropriate to the phenomena studied." Or, in other words,
biological order is both comprehensible and different from inorganic
order. In France, similar views have been put forward, as, for instance,
by Marcel Prenant,* also in accordance with the indications of
materialist dialectics. This philosophy has been called the profoundest
theory of natural evolution,^ the theory of the nature of transformations
and the origin of the qualitatively new,^ indeed the natural method-
ology of science itself. It was striking to find that its conclusions
upon a point of the most fundamental interest to the biochemist, the
meaning of the transition from the dead to the living, should coincide
with those which he had worked out independently by sincerely
following the dictates of scientific common sense.

^ English scholars owe a debt to Lancelot Hogben, who was one of the first about
this time to try to translate dialectical materialism (more or less successfully) into English
idiom; cf. his article in Psyche, 1931, 12, 2. Certain mistakes afterwards pointed out
(P. A. Sloan, Psyche, 1933, 13, 178) do not diminish this debt. In the Aristotelian
Society's Symposium on Materialism for 1928 there had been no mention of dialectical
materialism, and a similar silence had reigned in the French symposium Le Matirialisme
Actual (Paris, 1920) to which H. Bergson, H. Poincare, Ch. Gide, and others had
contributed.

^ Art. "The Physical and the Biological in the Process of Organic Evolution" in
Science at the Cross Roads (Kniga, London, 193 1).

^ In the belief that the sense of the original is better conveyed, the word "different"
is substitiited for "varied" which actually appears in the text.

* M. Prenant, Bull. Soc. Philomath., Paris, 1933, 116, 84.

^ V. I. Lenin, "The Teachings of Karl Marx," in Marx, Engels and Marxism
(London, 1931).

^ J. D. Bernal, in Aspects of Dialectical Materialism (London, 1934), pp. 90 and 102.

244

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS

The question had always been particularly serious for those bio-
chemists who interested themselves in the problems of morphology.
The enzymes involved in metabolism may be isolated and studied in
relatively simple systems, analyses may be made of the substances
entering and leaving the living body, even the blood and tissue fluids
may be examined in relation to every conceivable bodily activity,
change or disease — but all this avoids the main problem of biology,
the origin, nature, and maintenance of specific organic structure.
The building of a bridge between biochemical and morphological
concepts is perhaps the most important task before biologists at the
present time, and it may well be long before it is satisfactorily accom-
plished. But in the course of the present century several branches of
study of great value in this connection have sprung up, particularly
in embryology, where the changing organic form is the most obvious
variable during development. Experimental and chemical embryology'-
together have made much progress towards the unification of chemical
and morphological concepts. But this impressive change of morpho-
logical form takes place along the time-axis, and just as we have seen
that in the far-away realm of the history of theology, the conviction
of the importance of time was brought home to your lecturer, so also
it was inescapable in the realm of biological science. In the develop-
ment of the individual organism, as in that of organisms in general,
progression took place from low to high complexity, from inferior

^ It is interesting that Spencer himself had something to say on chemical embryology,
in his time an almost uncharted field :

"The clearest, most numerous, and most varied illustrations of the advance in
multiformity that accompanies the advance in integration, are furnished by living
bodies. . . . The history of every plant and every animal, while it is a history of
increasing bulk, is also a history of simultaneously-increasing differences among
the parts. This transformation has several aspects. The chemical composition,
which is almost uniform throughout the substance of a germ, vegetal or animal,
gradually ceases to be uniform. The several compounds, nitrogenous and non-
nitrogenous, which v-'ere homogeneously mixed, segregate by degrees, become
diversely proportioned in diverse places, and produce new compounds by trans-
formation or modification. . . . The yelk, or essential part of an animal-ovum,
having components which are at first evenly diffused among one another, chemically
transforms itself in like manner. Its proteid, its fats, its salts, become dissimilarly
proportioned in different localities; and multiplication of isomeric forms leads to
further mixtures and combinations that constitute minor distinctions of parts. Here
a mass, darkening by accumulation of haematine, presently dissolves into blood.
There fatty and albuminous matters uniting, compose nerve-tissue. At this spot
the nitrogenous substance takes on the character of cartilage; at that calcareous
salts, gathering togetlier in the cartilage, lay the foundation of bone. All these
chemical differentiations slowly become more marked and more numerous."
FP, p. 306.

245

time: the refreshing river

to superior organisation. There had been a time when a certain level
of organisation had not existed, there would come a time when far
higher levels would appear. Time was the inevitable datum.

Time and Herbert Spencer,

We have now to give some consideration to the thought of the
great "synthetic philosopher" himself. With much of what has so far
been said, he would surely have been in definite agreement, since for
him also the importance of the time-continuum, in which the irrever-
sible world-process takes place, was cardinal.

"Evolution under its most general aspect," he wrote, is the inte-
gration of matter and the concomitant dissipation of motion; while
Dissolution is the absorption of motion and concomitant disintegra-
tion of matter."^ Sometimes the word integration as used by him
seems to mean litde more than a mere aggregation of undifferentiated
matter,^ but as soon as he comes to give examples of its function in
evolution, we see that he means much what we mean when we speak
of successive, and higher, levels of organisation. Total mass, he says,
passes from a more diffused to a more consolidated state,^ and the
same process happens in every part that has a distinguishable individu-
ality and finally there is an increase of combinations among such
parts. Less coherence gives place to more coherence.^ As his examples
he takes, of course, the formation of solar systems from nebulae,*
the development of the earth from a ball of hot gases,^ the develop-
ment of plants and animals in phylogeny and ontogeny,^ and the rise
of social relationships from primitive animal gregariousness to human
communities of lower or higher order. '^ Then with perhaps some
weakening of the imagination he goes on to say,^ "Of the European
nations, it may be further remarked, that in the tendency to form
alliances, in the restraining influence exercised by governments over
one another, in the system of settling international arrangements by
congresses, as well as in the weakening of commercial barriers and
the increasing facilities of communication, we see the beginnings of a
European federation — a still larger integration than any now estab-
lished." So throughout the range of levels, the same processes are
seen — increase in the degree to which the parts constitute a co-
operative assemblage, increase in the co-ordination of parts, increase

^ FP, p. 261. 2 pp^ pp 258, 259. ^ FP, p. 299.

4 FP, p. 281. 5 FP, p. 282. 6 pp^ p, 284.

' FP, p. 288. 8 pp^p. 290.

246

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS

in combination and juxtaposition and mutual dependence of the parts,
and of the parts of the parts.^

Side by side with integration goes differentiation; the scission of
wholes into parts, and parts into smaller parts.^ Instances of this
growing heterogeneity he finds in sidereal changes, in the changes of
the earth's crust, in ontogenetic development (cf. the passage on
chemical embryology already quoted) in phylogeny and in sociology.
He ends by his celebrated definition of evolution;^ evolution is a
change from a relatively indefinite incoherent homogeneit}^ to a
relatively definite coherent heterogeneity, accompanied by integration
of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion.* We may smile at
what we suppose to be the presumption of such a cosmic formula,
but we may find ourselves smiling on the wrong side of our faces,
if, as is not unlikely, Herbert Spencer had hold of the right end of
the stick. We should be foolish to put ourselves in the position of
the devil, who was defined by the patristic writer, Hippolytus, as
o dvT LTOLTrcov TOLs KoorfiLKoHs, he who resists the world-process.
With Spencer's attempt to elucidate the causes of this process, to say
why evolution should go on at all (the instability of the homo-
geneous^), we need not here be concerned; the important point is his
realisation of its universal scope. In reading his work to-day, we are
likely to feel that he is most right where he emphasises integration
and organisation rather than homogeneity and heterogeneity.

In Spencer's biological writings, too, there is much of great interest
for the modem biologist who cares to know how ideas familiar
to-day in science had their origin. The definition of life as the con-
tinuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations was his,^
and so too was the conception of increasing independence of the
environment accompanying increasing organisational level." "One of
those lowly gelatinous forms," he writes, "so transparent and colour-

^ FP, p. 300. 2 FP, pp. 301-14. ^ FP, pp. 351 and 367.

* It is important to note that much of Spencer's argumentation depended on assump-
tions about energy which antedated modern statistical interpretations of the second law
of thermodynamics. There is now, therefore, a certain contradiction here. The universe
is passing, it is said, from less probable to more probable states, as if a basic shuffling
process was continually at work. The word "organisation" is applied to the initial state
of the universe, so that the increase of entropy must imply progressive disorganisation.
The irreversibility of time is said to depend on this. We must, therefore, say either that
thermodynarpical organisation is quite a different tiling from crystalline-biological-social
organisation, or else that the persistent increase in the latter with time, which cannot
be gainsaid, involves a correspondingly greater decrease of organisation somewhere
else in the universe. See p. 207.

5 FP, pp. 368 and 372. « PB, I. 99. ' PB, I. 176.

247

time: the refreshing river

less as to be with difficulty distinguished from the water it floats in,
is not more like its medium in chemical, mechanical, optical, and
thermal properties, than it is in the passivity with which it submits
to all the influences and actions brought to bear upon it; while the
mammal does not more widely differ from inanimate things in these
properties, than it does in the activity with which it meets surrounding
changes by compensating changes in itself.'* When in just twenty
years' time we celebrate the centenary of Spencer's first formulation
of this rule of increasing independence,^ we shall be able to look back
upon a vast structure of knowledge in comparative biochemistry
and physiology which in many directions (e.g. osmotic regulation,^
thermal regulation,^ constancy of the internal medium,* respiratory
pigments,^ laws of nitrogen excretion,^ etc.) has verified the synthetic
philosopher's insight.

Nor was this much less remarkable in matters of embryology.
His treatment of animal development as a passage from instability to
stability has been profoundly justified in modern experimental em-
bryology, in which the restriction of potentialities which goes on
under the influence of the hierarchy of organiser-hormones bears him
out.'^ Already before 1898 he had clearly enunciated the process we
know now as ''self-differentiation" under the name "autogenous
development."^ Even the organisation-centre, with its primary
organiser-hormone, not discovered till 1924, he had adumbrated
thirty years earlier, in the guise of an analogy with a party of colonists
in new country, which forms for itself an organisation of "butty" or
"boss" and those who work under his directions.^

But Spencer's treatment of sociological problems is of most interest
for the present analysis. He has the great merit of having been among
the first thinkers to apply evolutionary concepts to sociology, and
for this we owe him a great debt.^^ Nevertheless we meet continually
with the paradox that, having spoken so convincingly of the progres-
sive integration of systems into ever higher levels of organisation, he

^ It was first formulated in a review "Transcendental Physiology" in the Westminster
Review in 1857 (A, I, 503). Whether his contemporary, Claude Bernard, who developed
the concept oi fixite du milieu interieur had any hand in it, we do not know.

^ See E. Baldwin, Comparative Biochemistry (Cambridge, 1937).

^ See A. S. Pearse & F. G. Hall, Homoiothermism (New York, 1928).

* See J. Barcroft, The Architecture of Physiological Function (Cambridge, 1934).

^ See A. C. Redfield, Quart. Rev. Biol., 1933,8, 31.

^ See J. Needham, Chemical Embryology (Cambridge, 193 1).

' FP, pp. 382 ff; see C. H. Waddington, Organisers and Genes (Cambridge, 1940).

^ PB, I. 365. 9 PB, I. 367. i« PS, I. 617.

248

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS

Stopped short at nineteenth-century England and found in its indi-
viduaHsm nature's supreme achievement. The common ownership of
the means of production, logical though it might be, did not seem to
him the necessary next step in organisation, the next integrative level.
There is thus a striking contradiction in his evolutionary thought.
By what strange arguments was he able to convince himself that the
liberal economic individualism of the mid-nineteenth century was the
high state of integration to which all cosmic development had been
tending? His life, his controversies with others, the internal evidence
of his writings, may give us the clue.

A society, he says, is an organism.^ How must we envisage its
integration and differentiation? At once arises the question of the
origin of classes and vocations, the division of labour.^ It is the
physiological division of labour, says Spencer, which makes the
society, like the animal, a living whole. Complication of structure
accompanies increase of mass, as the classes, military, priestly, slave,
etc., differentiate — a progress from the general to the special. But he
always fails to emphasise the different relationships of these classes
to the production of goods or commodities, he always regards them
with an exclusively political eye. Instead of seeking the origins of
their economic relationships he elaborates, to a degree sometimes
almost fantastic, the analogy bet^'een animal and social organisms.
Thus the superior military class of warriors corresponds to the
ectoderm, and the inferior class of cultivators, in close contact with
the mechanism of food-supply, to the endoderm.^ The origin of the
State, he thinks, was the necessity of a centralised neural apparatus
to co-ordinate the military activities of the organism-society against
other societies. The more plausible explanation, that it was required
as the instrument of domination of one class over the other, does not
occur to him. As the peasants correspond to endoderm, so the king's
council corresponds to medulla.*

In spite of this, however, Spencer was well aware of the limitations
of the analogy.^ There was, he said, a cardinal difference bet^^een the
animal and the social aggregate. "In the one, consciousness is con-
centrated in a small part, in the other it is diffused throughout; all

^ Though full of errors, both in fact and tlieory, the grandiose world history of
O. Spengler, The Decline of the West, which since its first uncritical reception, has fallen
into undeserv^ed discredit, is strikingly in the Spencerian tradition, for it delineates the
rise and fall of quite distinguishable cultural "organisms."

2 PS, I. 468, 470, 491, 495. 3 PS, I. 512.

* PS, I. 547, 552. 5 ps^ I. ^79 and 612, A, I. 504.

249

time: the refreshing river

the units possess the capacities for happiness and misery, if not in
equal degrees, in degrees that approximate." The society exists for
the benefit of its members, not its members for the benefit of the
society. But there exists also another cardinal difference not mentioned
by Spencer, namely, that once the early determinative processes of
morphogenesis have gone on, all further cell-divisions produce like
from like. Muscle-cells produce muscle-cells and neurons neurons. In
a society every point corresponding to a cell-division means a com-
pletely new genetic shuffling of the pack of inheritable characters.
Hereditary castes have thus no biological basis. Spencer shows some
appreciation of this where he points out that succession by descent
favours the maintenance of that which already exists, while succession
by fitness favours transformations "and makes possible something
better."!

It is fairly clear to-day that, if any form of society is most in accord
with what we know of the biological basis of human common life,
it is a democracy that produces experts. Consciousness, and all the
higher human qualities, are dispersed pretty evenly throughout the
world's population. But the unclearness of Spencer on this matter, it
is interesting to note, together with a thoroughly uncritical social
outlook, led in the hands of one of the most distinguished of your
lecturer's predecessors, the great biologist William Bateson, to a
striking Herbert Spencer lecture.^ It well merits a short digression.
Beginning badly by urging that biology must be the supreme guide
in human affairs (as though sociology were not a higher organisational
level than biology), it went on to say that, whereas "democracy
regards class distinction as evil, we perceive it to be essential. . . .
Maintenance of heterogeneity, of differentiation of members, is a
condition of progress. The aim of social reform must be not to abolish
class, but to provide that each individual shall so far as possible get
into the right class and stay there, and usually his children after him."^
By this mischievously misleading use of the term class, Bateson
wholly surrendered the prestige of science into the hands of the
middle-class employer and entrepreneur, assuring him that class-
stratification was biologically sound and that the public-school tie
covered all the best genes. Doubtless Bateson was referring to voca-

1 PS, II. 260.

^ The seventh; "Biological Fact and the Structure of Society" in Herbert Spencer
Lectures, Decennial Issue (Oxford, 19 16). The lecture was given in 1912.
^ Loc. cit., pp. 31 and 32.

250

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS

tional differences. He certainly underrated the genetic shuffling in
each reproductive act. But to confuse the various vocations for which
individuals should, of course, be as well suited as possible, with the
division into classes differing according to their relation with the
material means of production, some controlling these means, and
others having access to them only by the grace and on the terms of the
former, was a tragic mistake, worthy to stand side by side with the
use of the theory of natural selection as a justification for laisse^-faire
economics.^

Now Spencer's main line of distinction in human societies was
between "Predatory" and "Industrial."^ The former type was one in
which the army and the nation had a common structure, the army
being the active manifestation of the nation. The latter type, though
possessing some defence organisation, was characterised by voluntary
co-operation in commercial transactions. It is clear that Spencer
regarded the industrial type as higher than the predatory type. In
describing examples of it (more or less convincing), his sympathies
may be discerned; thus he speaks of "the amiable Bodo and Dhimals,"^
"the industrious and peaceful Pueblos,"* and the development of free
institutions in England.^ In conformity with his view, already men-
tioned, on the good of the state as against that of the individual, he
identifies the predatory organisation with the former and the industrial
organisation with the latter. In this way we arrive at the classical
position of nineteenth-century optimism, that all things work
together for good for them that love profits, and that in an economic
system where each man is for himself, the net resultant will always
be for the benefit of all.

And now appears the remarkable, almost pathetic, naivete of the
synthetic philosopher. Spencer, approving of English capitalism in its

^ On this a great deal could be written. Reference may be made to the following
discussions as valuable starting-points for investigation :

C. Bougie, art. "Darwinism and Sociology" in Darwin and Modern Science,
ed. A. C. Seward (Cambridge, 19 lo); D. G. Ritchie, Darwinism and Politics
(London 1889); J. G. Haycratt, Darwinism and Race Progress (London, 1900),
L. Woltmann, Die Darwinische Theorie u.d. Soiialismus (Dusseldorf, 1899); O.
Hertwig, Zur Abwehr des ethischen, so^ialen, und politischen Darwinismus (Jena;
1921); J. S. Huxley, Proc. Brit. Assoc, 1936, p. 81.

We know now that the results of intra-specific competition are by no means
necessarily good. As Huxley says, "tliey may be neutral, they may be a dangerous
balance of useful and harmful, or they may be definitely deleterious."

2 PS, L 577, 590. ^ PS, L 585.

' PS, L 585. fi PS, L 587.

251

time: the refreshing river

quiet home-transforming phase (the industrial type of society),
viewed with horror the rise of British capitaHsm in its imperiaHstic
phase.^ It was, he said, the retrogression of the ideal form of society
to a predatory phase. He abominated^ "the recent growth of expendi-
ture for army and navy, the making of fortifications, the formation
of the volunteer force, the establishment of permanent camps, the
repetition of autumn manoeuvres, and the building of military stations
throughout the kingdom." As his Autobiography shows,^ he was even
willing to take active part in the rather ineffective anti -militarist
movements of his day. But the nature of his position forced him to
fight on two separate fronts at the same time. He did not approve
of imperialism, but neither did he approve of socialist, anti-indi-
vidualist, legislation, favouring the working-class. By an extraordinary
extension of the word "militarism" he was able to include both
tendencies in the same condemnation. His individualism carried him
to impressive lengths. Thus the compulsory notification of infectious
diseases^ and the unification of examinations for the learned profes-
sions^ were regarded by him as unwarrantable interference with the
freedom of the industrial social unit. Municipal housing,* nationalised
telegraphs,^ public museums,^ even universal compulsory sanitary
inspection and main drainage, were all put down as "tyrannical,"
"coercive philanthropy."^ "Not by quick and certain penalty for
breach of contract," he complained bitterly, "is adulteration to be
remedied, but by public analysers."^ Deeply ingrained in his sociology
was the conception of free competition; "From the savings of the
more worthy shall be taken by the tax-gatherer means of supplying
the less worthy who have not saved. "^ Or again, in his autobiography
we find a passage^ in which, while describing one of his early essays,
he says, "Among reasons given for reprobating the policy of guarding
imprudent people against the dangers of reckless banking, one was
that such a policy interferes with that normal process which brings
benefit to the sagacious and disaster to the stupid." In such considera-
tions men of Spencer's mind never stopped to reflect that the "less
worthy" might also be the "more generous," or that "rapacious"
might have been a better word in the sentence just quoted.'

' PS, I. 60 1. 2 ps^ I. 602.

^ A, II. 329 ff., 375 fF. Spencer attributed much of his breakdown in health to his
activities in connection with a league for "anti-militancy" and "anti-aggression," which
seems to have got little public support.

* PS, I. 604.^ 5 ps^ I. 605. « A, II. 5.

' Spencer's discussion of communism illustrates this point strikingly. "State adminis-

252

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS

We have already said that Spencer saw how succession by in-
heritance was a principle of social stabiHt}^ while succession by
fitness or efficiency was a principle of social efficiency.^ Yet in his
references to periods of social crisis when the principles of stability
are challenged, when the forces tending towards a higher and hence
more efficient level of organisation struggle openly with the forces
of conservatism, he shows all the typical middle-class fear of super-
session. He can even compare such upheavals with a gangrenous
disease.^ Just as in m.orbid changes, putrefactive dissolution may occur,
so in "social changes of an abnormal kind, the disaffection initiating
a political outbreak implies a loosening of the ties by which citizens
are bound up into distinct classes and sub-classes. Agitation, growing
into revolutionary meetings, fuses ranks that are usually separated. . . .
When at last there comes positive insurrection, all magisterial and
official powers, all class distinctions, all industrial differences, cease:
organised society lapses into an unorganised aggregate of social
units." A revolutionary might have reminded Spencer that not all
dissolutions are morbid, that in the metamorphosis of insects, for
instance, though there may be a histolysis, it is but the prelude to a
new and more beautiful form of organisation.

Spencer and his Contemporaries.

The contradictions in Spencer's sociology appear again when we
examine a few of the controversies and discussions in which he
engaged. One of the most famous was that with the American soci-
ologist Henry George. In Spencer's first book, Social Statics,^ it was
contended that the alienation of the land from the people at large
had been inequitable, and that there should be a restoration of it to
the State (the incorporated community) after compensation made to
the existing landowners. "In later years," he wrote,* "I concluded

trations," lie says (PS, 11. 751), "worked by taxes falling in more than due proportion
upon those whose greater powers have brought them greater means, will give to citizens
of smaller powers more benefits than they have earned. And this burdening of the better
by the worse, must check the evolution of a higher and more adapted nature." It is
almost incredible that Spencer could have taken business success as his criterion of a
high and adapted nature. "The diffusion," he says (loc. cit.), "of political power un-
accompanied by the limitation of political functions, issues in communism. For the
direct defrauding of the many by the few, it substitutes the indirect defrauding of the
few by the many: evil proportionate to the inequity, being the result in the one case
as in the other." An invitation to think out just what this means obviates any other
comment.

1 PS, II. 264. 2 pp^ p_ ^^,_ 3 (London, 1850.) * A, II. 459.

time: the refreshing river

that a resumption on such terms would be a losing transaction, and
that individual ownership under State-suzerainty ought to continue."
George, who in his Progress and Poverty^ had quite rightly advocated
the nationalisation of the land, expecting it, however, to solve all
social problems, replied with an attack {A Perplexed Philosopher^
which Spencer much resented. To George's accusation of consorting
with Dukes, Spencer replied that it was only in a body partly founded
by himself, the London Ratepayers' Defence League ! It was a poor
defence. Another controversy was with the Italian penologist Enrico
Ferri,^ who found that Spencer "stopped half-way in the logical
consequences of his doctrine." In Ferri's view, natural selection and
the struggle for existence in human society should not be interpreted
as between individuals, but between classes. "Spencer believes,"
wrote Ferri in 1895 (loc. cit), "that universal evolution rules all
orders of phenomena with the exception of the organisation of
property, which he declares is destined to exist eternally in its indi-
vidualistic form. Socialists, on the other hand, believe that it will
itself also undergo a radical transformation . . . towards an increasing
and complete socialisation of the means of production, which con-
stitute the physical basis of social life and which ought not to, and
will not, remain in the hands of a few individuals." Spencer com-
plained bitterly in a letter to the Italian press.

With Beatrice Potter (later Mrs. Sidney Webb), the philosopher
had close intellectual contact. While occupied with her long-continued
studies on working-class conditions, she came to realise that the
sphere of economics should include "social pathology," e.g. oppressive
labour conditions. In 1886 she wrote to him putting this point as
clearly as possible. He replied that on the contrary "political economy
cannot recognise pathological states at all. If these states are due to
the traversing of free competition and free contract which political
economy assumes, the course of treatment is not the readjustment of
the principles of political economy, but the re-establishment as far
as possible of free competition and free contract." In other words,
as she points out in her autobiography My Apprenticeship,'^ political
economy is an account of the normal conditions in industry. But is
not the first step to find out just what are the normal, or rather, the
healthy, conditions in industry.^ Spencer, however, had made up his

1 (London, 1881.) ^ (London, 1893.)

^ See E. Ferri's Socialism and Positive Science (London, 1906), p. 153.
^ My Apprenticeship, by B. Webb (London, 1929), p. 292.

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS

mind a priori on this subject, and his flat refusal to question the dogma
of free competition betrays, indeed, no little unconscious prejudice.
The old man and the young woman agreed to go each on their way,
and fifty years later the publication of the Webbs' great book on the
Soviet Union^ showed where the search for health in industrial
relations had led. ^

That Spencer's sociology ended in a paradox has already been
shown. It can hardly be understood except in the light of the thought
of his contemporary, a man at least equally great, Karl Marx. Born
within two years of each other and both living in England, they had,
so far as we know, no contact of any kind.^ Yet it is only in the light
of the historical concepts of the great revolutionist in thought and
action (as the Master of Balliol calls him^) that the failure of the great
evolutionist to complete his edifice can be understood. Marx, with
his friend Engels, was the genius, it has been said,^ who continued
and completed the three chief intellectual currents of the early nine-
teenth century, classical German philosophy, classical English political
economy, and the French revolutionary doctrines which led to French
socialism. Here we can only mention his combination of materialism
with the dialectics of the Hegelian school, his economic formulations,
especially that of surplus value, and his account of the roles of social
classes in history. The former led to a philosophy, dialectical material-
ism, to which we have already had occasion to refer, which based

^ Soviet Communism, by S. and B. Webb (London, 1935).

^ In Spencer I find no reference to Marx; in the letters of Marx, however, there is
one reference to Spencer. Though a little cruel, it is too amusing to omit. Writing to
Engels on May 23, 1868, Marx says:

"Du scheinst mir auf dem Holzweg zu sein, mit Deiner Scheu, so einfache
Figuren wie G-W-G etc. den englischen Revue-philister vorzufiihren. Umgekehrt.
Wenn du, wie ich, gezwungen gewesen warst, die okonomischen Artikel der
Herren Lalor, H. Spencer, Macleod, etc. im Westminster Review, etc. zu lesen,
so wiirdest Du sehn, dass alle die okonomischen Trivialitaten so zum Hals dick
haben — und auch wissen, dass ihre Leser sie dick haben — dass sie durch pseudo-
philosophical oder pseudoscientific slang die Schmiere zu wurzen suchen. Der
Pseudocharakter macht die Sache (die an sich = O) keineswegs leicht verstandlich.
Umgekehrt. Die Kunst besteht darin, den Leser so mystifizieren und ihm kopf-
brechen so verursachen, damit er schliesslich zu seiner Beruhigung entdeckt, dass
diese hard words nur Maskeraden von loci communes sind. Kommt hinzu, dass die
Leser der Fortnighdy wie der Westminster Review, sich smeicheln, die longest
heads of England (der ubrigen Welt, versteht sich von selbst) zu sein." Marx-
Engels Gesamtausgabe, ed. Riazanov, Abt. Ill, Bd. 4, p. 58.

(G-W-G means Geld-Ware-Geld).

^ In Karl Marx's Capital by A. D. Lindsay (Oxford 1935).

* By V. I. Lenin in Marx, Engels and Marxism (London, 1934), pp- 7 ^^^ 5°*

^55

time: the refreshing river

itself upon that very evolutionary progression which Spencer described
with so much care. His successive levels of integration are allowed
for in the dialectics of nature, as in hardly any other philosophy.
The concept of surplus value, says Dickinson,^ has very unjusdy
shared in the logical discredit into which the labour theory of value
has fallen. If Marx's theoretical foundadon for it is unsadsfactory,
some other must be found. But it is an undeniable fact of observation
that the labour of men organised in society produces a surplus above
the immediate requirements of the producers, and that this surplus
may be disposed of in three main ways: (a) it may become the material
basis of social growth, either absorbed in the support of an additional
number of producers, or embodied in the increase and improvement
of the means of production, or used to maintain more complex forms
of social organisation, (b) it may appear as increased leisure or in-
creased supply of consumption goods available for society as a
whole, (c) it may be appropriated by a dominant class, appearing as
rent, royalties, dividends, interest, profit, excessively high salaries, or
various minor forms of privileged income. Here is a concept, the
lack of which one deeply feels in reading Spencer's sociology. Again
and again in his descriptions of the origins and nature of classes^ he
comes near to considering their relative economic privileges, but
never clearly describes the phenomena of class-domination and the
class-struggle. Hence he cannot realise the nature of the State; the
neuro-muscular apparatus of control developed by the dominating
class.

The history of all human society, past and present, wrote Marx
and Engels in 1848, is the history of class-struggles.^ "Freeman and
slave, patrician and plebeian, baron and serf, guild-burgess and
journeyman — in a word, oppressor and oppressed — stood in sharp
opposition each to the other. They carried on perpetual warfare,
sometimes masked, sometimes open and acknowledged; a warfare
that invariably ended, either in a revolutionary change in the structure
of society, or else in the common ruin of the contending classes."
The history of the European West can only be understood in the
light of this empirical fact. In the course of a long process extending
over some four centuries, from about 1400 to 1800, the power of the
feudal aristocracy gave place to the power of the middle-class. The

^ H. D. Dickinson, Highway, 1936, p. 82.

2 e.g. FP, p. 391.

^ Communist Manifesto, 1848; first published in England, 1850.

256

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS

work of historians, such as Pirenne^ and Borkenau,^ gives us an insight
into the first embr}^onic origins of the new form of appropriation of
surplus value which was later to be known as capitalism. Far back
in the middle ages, the beginnings of long-distance transport, especially
by sea, initiated the tradition of free finance and unlimited profit-
making which did not come into its own until in seventeenth-century
England the City of London, backing Cromwell's military force
with all its might, made our country safe for Spencer's "sagacious"
bankers. The process so brilliantly begun came to its fullness a hundred
years later in France, when the chains of feudalism were finally
broken and Europe's large-scale industries could develop in earnest.
It must, of course, be emphasised that in those earlier days the middle-
class "merchant venturers" and industrialists were the really progres-
sive class. By Herbert Spencer's time, this was ceasing to be the case.
Spencer stood just at the critical point when the middle-class was
hesitating between the old policy of Manchester light industry and
the new policy of Birmingham heavy industry. The export of finished
goods was about to yield its hegemony to the direct exploitation of
colonial countries and peoples, in a word, to imperialism. State
expenditure upon the army was 14-9 million pounds in 1873-5,
18 -I in 1893-5, and 28-0 in 1911-13. Upon the navy it was 10-4
million pounds in 1873-5, 17-6 in 1893-5, and 45*3 in 1911-13. No
wonder Spencer noted a "retrogression" from the industrial to the
predatory state. The sociology for which he stood was that of the
early nineteenth-century English middle class, favouring "cheap
production and cheap government," i.e. low wages and no social
legislation, a small army and navy, and even a moderate republicanism
since bureaucracy and royalty might be thought unnecessary expenses.
Still in the position of the early mill-owners and ironmasters, he
objected equally to the expenses of imperialism and to the pressure
towards social legislation exerted by the growing working-class
movement. His grand sweep of vision from the nebulae to man
truncated itself in the narrow prejudices of the dying class to which
he belonged. But it is none the less valuable to us, for we can draw
the conclusions he would not, and look forward to the inevitable
further onward march of the principle of progressive integration and
organisation.

^ H. Pirenne, Economic and Social History of Mediaeval Europe (London, 1936).

' F. Borkenau, Der Ubergang von feudalen ^um biirgerlichen Weltbild; Studien lur
Geschichte der Philosophie der Manufakturperiode (Paris, 1934).

257 R

time: the refreshing river

The Giant Vista oj Evolution.

Let us now take another look at the giant vista which has all along
been tlie background of our thoughts. The stage once prepared by
cosmic evolution for the appearance of life, what follows shows an
ever-rising level of organisation.^ The number of parts in the wholes
increases, as also the complexity of their structure and their inter-
relations, the centralisation and efficiency of the means of control
(whether humoral or neural) and the flexibility and versatility of
their actions on the external environment. The wholes become,
indeed, ever more independent of the external environment; by
regulation of exchanges in energy and materials an interior equilibrium
is doggedly maintained, and though death destroys it in the individual,
it continues in the species. If we run through any biological textbook,^
we find abundant illustrations of this. Although some of the para-
crystals already mentioned show a degree of complexity which seems
to approach that of the simplest living organisms, it is the autotrophic
bacteria which first exhibit the basic phenomena of the new level,
reproduction and metabolism. They were (and are to-day) able to
synthesise all the carbon compounds needed for their architecture
from the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere by the aid of energy
obtained from oxidations of inorganic substances (iron, sulphur, etc.).
The many kinds of parasitic bacteria with which most of us are more
familiar are to be supposed a regression from these primitive forms.
But all was not regression, for by another big step cells grew enor-
mously larger and the protozoa came into being. Some of these
developed the photosynthetic mechanism, others did not. The former,
when united together in colonies, became the first plants, the latter,
similarly co-operating, became the first animals.^ Then began that

^ This "preparation of the stage" presents problems of much interest, the classical
treatment of which is The Fitness of the Environment (New York, 1913), by Lawrence
J. Henderson. Consideration of the properties of water, carbon dioxide, ammonia, etc.,
shows that if anything with properties at all akin to what we know as life was to develop,
it must needs have the properties it actually did have. This reciprocal fitness of the environ-
ment greatly strengtliens our view of the unity and continuity of the evolutionary process.

^ For a student of another subject, an admirably philosophic introduction to biology
as a whole can be had in the freshly-written book of H. H. Newman, Outlines of General
Zoology (New York 1936). An excellent discussion of progress in evolution is given
by J. S. Huxley in his presidential address 10 the British Association, 1936, pp. 96 ff.

^ The beginnings of social behaviour, if not of social organisation, can be seen already
in tlie aggregations of free-living protozoa (cf. H. S. Jennings, Behaviour of the Lower
Organisms, New York, 1906; The Beginnings of Social Behaviour in Unicellular Organ-
isms, Philadelphia, 1941; and in Science, 1941, 94, 447; also W. C. Allee, Animal
Aggregations, Chicago, 1931; Biol. Rev., 1934, 9, i; The Social Life of Animals, New
York, 1938).

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS

long procession of morphological forms and physiological achieve-
ments which the biologists have charted, with all its turning-points,
the first coelomic organisation, the first endocrine mechanism, the
first osmo-regulatory success, the first vertebral column, the first
appearance of consciousness, the first making of a tool. At the point
at which social life begins, factors set in so new as to constitute a
recognisably higher level. Rational control of the environment now
for the first time becomes a possibility.

The view of mind as a phenomenon of high organisational level,
a quality of elaborate nervous organisation, is of course opposed by
all idealist philosophers and many theologians, but it has wide support
among psychologists and scientific philosophers. As examples I -^^ould
mention a striking passage of the great psycho-pathologist, Henry
Maudsley^; also the expressions of Samuel Alexander,^ and the psycho-
logists, R. G. Gordon,^ C. K. Ogden,* E. B. Holt,^ with many others.
It need hardly be said that this view of mind has no connection with
that which regards it as an "epiphenomenon." Perhaps few realise
how well Lucretius stated the view of mind as a quality of high
organisational levels in his great poem^ : —

"sed magni referre ea primum quantula constent,
sensile quae faciunt, et qua sint praedita forma,
motibus ordinibus posituris denique quae sint."

(. . . but much it matters here
Firstly, how. small the seeds which thus compose
The feeling thing, then, with what shapes endowed,
And lastly what positions they assume
What motions^ what' arrangements. . . .)

About the first beginnings of social organisation we know rather
less than about some of the earlier, biological, stages. It is doubtful
how far our consideration of humanity's problems can be assisted by
a knowledge of the phenomena of social life in ants and bees (the
social hymenoptera), for the anatomical nature of these animals, with
its exoskeleton and rather inferior nervous system, is so far removed
from our own." The behaviour of the sub-human Primates has much

^ Body and Will (London, 1883), p. 132.
^ Space, Time and Deity (London, 1927), vol. i, p. xiii.

^ Personality (London, 1926). * The Meaning of Psychology (New York, 1926).
^ The Concept of Consciousness (London, 1914). ^ De Rer. Nat. II, 894.

' Popular writers such as J. Langdon-Davies in his Short History of the Future
(London, 1936) go somewhat astray here.

time: the refreshing river

more to tell us, but even that, as Zuckerman points out,i does not
tell us much. Man's precursors probably lived a social life similar to
that of all old-world monkeys and apes and were probably frugivorous.
Probably at the beginning of the Pliocene, some twenty million years
ago, when forests were reduced and the earth became more arid, a
group of Primates with more plastic food-habits than the rest, managed
to survive by becoming carnivorous. This transfer from a grazing to
a hunting life must have had important social and sexual consequences,
for with the change of diet there had to go a sexual division of labour
in food-collection. Hence there had to be a repression of the dominant
impulses which lead to polygyny in sub-human Primates. "The price
of our emergence as Man," writes Zuckerman, "would seem to have
been the overt renunciation of a dominant Primate impulse in the field
of sex. The price of our continued existence may well be further repres-
sions of dominant impulses, and further developments^ of the co-
operative behaviour whose beginnings can be vaguely seen in our
transition from a simian to a human level of existence."

This was precisely Spencer's "blind spot." But we must take a
closer look at co-operative behaviour, the necessary foundation for
a higher order of human society. What has so far been said amounts
to this, that evolution is not finished, that organisation has not yet
reached its highest level, and that we can see the next stage in the
co-operative commonwealth of humanity, the socialisation of the
means of production.^ Among the many evidences of this, there is
space only to refer to two or three.

In the first place, the class-stratification such as we know it in all
civilised communities, modelled on the pattern of Western Europe, is

1 S. Zuckerman, article "The Biological Background of Social Behaviour," in
Further Papers in the Social Sciences (London, 1937)-

2 Italics mine.

^ For lack of space we pass here over the enormous gulf between the first beginnings
of social organisation and the inadequacies of social organisation still existing in our
own time. This emphasises the continuity of the factor of co-operation, with all the
psychological adjustments that that implies. But it is essential to realise that within the
sociological level there have been separate stages or levels, analogous perhaps to the
mesoforms which we find as we pass from true liquids to true crystals. Thus it seems
that the first attainment of an efficient agriculture was of enormous significance since
it provided a food surplus and led to the formation of classes when this surplus came
under partly or wholly private ownership. Similarly the first attainment of efficient
machinery for the production of commodities had a profound effect, in the "'industrial
revolution" and the appearance of a truly proletarian class. The problems of today pre-
suppose the accomplishment of these great changes in human social life; hence it is
useless to ask why a classless society or the conscious control of production could not
have been introduced, centuries ago.

t 260

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS

an ankylosis, a rigidity, a biological petrification, analogous in some
ways to the armour-plating in which so many extinct animals spent
their efforts. Jennings quite rightly says^ that biology does not
support democracy if democracy is defined as the belief that all
human beings are alike or equal. It takes only common sense to see
that they are each quite different from the other. But they all have
needs and desires which could be satisfied and they all have contri-
butions to make to the executive and productive power of the human
collectivity (rcr TrXripcoyia rrj? ^EKKXrjala? as Chrysostom would
have said). If democracy is defined as such a constitution of society
that any part of the mass can in time supply individuals fitted for all
its functions, then biology sanctions democracy. A democracy that
produces experts.^ Now it is painfully clear that in a class-stratiiied
society there are very grave hindrances to this free utilisation of
existing ability. There is no real equality of opportunity. Ninety
per cent of the leaders are drawn from 1 5 per cent of the community.
Geniuses and unusual types are likely to be stifled in childhood.
There is a crushing effect on the very birth of initiative and constructive
ability among the masses of the workers. "Not merely poverty and
bad living-conditions, but soul-killing cap-touching subjection to a
master class and the consciousness of toiling to produce profits for
that class, deadens initiative and rouses hostility and antagonism to
the whole industrial machine."^

But not only does society, in this lower stage of organisation, fail
to draw upon anything like the full force of good gene-combinations
that exist within it; it also fails to create as many of these as would
otherwise exist. The whole rationale of the sexual reproductive
system, from its beginning among the lower invertebrates upwards,
can only be understood as a mechanism for producing an almost
infinite diversity of qualities among the individuals of a species.
Gene packs are shuffled anew in every reproductive act. The wider
the range of individual differences the greater the chance of favourable
variations. Yet in class-stratified human societies very severe checks
are placed upon the mating-choices of individuals, a procedure quite
irrational sociologically and ripe for conscious abolition.

The fact that the class-stratification has arisen, as we have said,
from differences in the relations of men to tools and productive

^ H. S. Jennings, The Biological Basis of Human Nature (London, 1931), p. 221.

^ Jennings, loc. cit.

^ Britain without Capitalists (London, 1936), p. 48.

261

time: the refreshing river

resources, some being owners of these essential things, and others
only having access to them on the owners' terms, also brought about
a situation in which the accumulation of personal wealth is the only
recognised sign of success. In Herbert Spencer's own thought we
have had frequent occasion to remark upon it. The "sagacious," the
"more worthy," the "prudent" etc., shall prosper, the weak shall go
to the wall. Spencer was perfectly well aware that this psychological
valuation might have biological consequences; he hoped it would.
But the puzzle is that he should have been so certain that the charac-
teristics which lead men to rise economically in a class-stratiiied
capitalist society were those most desirable from a social point of view.
Where predatory rather than co-operative behaviour wins the day,
the path towards the higher social organisation is closed.^ It was
strange that Spencer could not see that the very predatoriness which
he described in primitive societies of the "military" type saturated
also even the most highly developed societies of what he called the
"industrial" type. By a curious and happy irony, however, the effects
of this high valuation of socially undesirable qualities have been
much less than might have been the case, for the birth-rate of the
socially successful groups has for long been far below that of the
socially unsuccessful, and hence relatively uneducated, workers. The
use of the expression, "survival of the fittest" for social success has
therefore attained a definitely comic level. The only Darwinian
meaning the term could have was as applied to those who send the
largest number of offspring into the next generation. The successful
capitalist, therefore, might be fittest for having a good time, but not
for transmitting his genes to posterity.

The foregoing biological arguments have shown that the higher
level of integration or organisation of the classless society would
be greatly preferable to the class-stratified society. At this point
the plain man might well object that a society with two, three, or
four classes must surely be a more complex system than a classless
one. To this, however, an obvious biological analogy provides the
answer. We might as well assert that an annelid with twenty or
thirty ganglia down its body is more complex than a mammal with
a highly developed single brain. The almost unimaginable com-
plexity of neurons, synapses, commissures, etc. in the human brain,
forms a far higher organisational level than that of the annelid

* Tliis is the theme of the classical essay of the geneticist, H. J. MuUer, "The
Dominance of Economics over Eugenics," Sci. Monthly, 1933, 37, 40.

262

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS

ganglia.^ The human brain, indeed, is the outward and visible sign
of the most fundamental of human characteristics, that by virtue of
which sociology is a higher level than biology; the possession of
consciousness. It follows that the more control consciousness has
over human affairs, the more truly human, and hence super-human,
man will become. Now the common ownership of the means of
production implies the consciously planned control of production.
No longer is production to be governed by the self-acting mechanism
of profitability; it is to be carried on for communal use. No longer, at
a given conjuncture of the world-market, will so many dozen factories
automatically go out of action in some far corner of the earth, throwing
some thousands of workers into immediate poverty, and diverting
the energies of the owners into other channels. No longer will thermo-
dynamic efficiency and geographic common sense alike be turned
upside down at the irrational dictates of a profit-making system. By
the deliberate decisions of a central planning body the production
and distribution of goods will be consciously organised. Spencer
might well have welcomed such a body as the real analogue of the
higher nervous centres for which he had to seek in contemporary
society in vain. Its rationalisation of the irrational in terms of practice
will be the precise counterpart of the rationalisation of the irrational
in terms of theory which the scientific method carries out in research
every day.

But this vast extension of conscious control could not take place
without the willing conscious co-operation of the constituent effector
persons. In Vaughan's discussion of Rousseau there is a fine passage
on the conception of the State.^ "It is of the essence of Rousseau's
theory," writes Vaughan, ''that the State is no power which imposes
itself from without; that, on the contrary, it is more truly part of
the individual than the individual himself. The change he wrought
in the conception of the individual involves a corresponding change
in the conception of the State. The bureaucratic machinery, which
had slowly fastened itself on Europe, is thrown to the winds. Its

"•^ The processes of "rationalisation" in industry offer another parallel. When the
American Railway Association reduces the number of types of axles from 59 to 5
numerical complexity decreases but organisation increases. Mere complexity has, of
course, nothing to do with organisation — it may mean confusion only — and purposed
reduction of complexity at a lower level is in the interest of activities at higher levels.
Industrial standardisation is an example which would have appealed greatly to Herbert
Spencer, the railway engineer.

^ The Political Writings of J. J. Rousseau, edited with introduction and notes by
C. E. Vaughan (Cambridge, 191 5), p. 112.

263

time: the refreshing river

place is taken by the idea of a free community, each member of which
has as large a share in determining the 'general will' as his fellows;
in which, so far as human frailty allows, the general will takes up
into itself the will of all. . . . The only State he recognises as legitimate
is the State of which the sovereign is the People." But it is evident
that none of this service which is perfect freedom can be secured
without unlimited universal education and the abolition of classes.
The matter has been put more shortly: "Every cook," said Lenin,
"must learn to rule the State."

Every transition from the unconscious to the conscious implies a
step from bondage to freedom, from lower to higher level of organi-
sation. All early agriculture and storage of food-products necessitated
more conscious control than before. Increases in the efficiency of
mechanisms of transport from the horse to the aeroplane widened
men's conscious horizons. In the realm of the individual, modern
psychology provides brilliant examples of the liberating effects of a
passage from the unconscious to the conscious, e.g. in the cure of the
obsessional neuroses. Up to the present all commercial transactions
have been the instruments of a peculiarly subtle form of bondage
which was called by Marx the "fetishism of commodities."^ Relations
such as those of exchange in the open market between commodities,
appear at first sight to be relations between things, but are on the
contrary relations between persons, the persons who produced them
and the persons who will consume them. To forget this is to be forced
to assent to the various "iron laws" of political economy, which have
in reality nothing inescapable about them, once the personal relation-
ship is grasped.^ In one of the most inspired passages he ever

^ "The commodity form, and the value relation between the labour products which
finds expression in the commodity form, have nothing whatever to do with the physical
properties of the commodities or with the material relations that arise out of these
physical properties. We are concerned only with a definite social relation between human
beings, which in their eyes, has here assumed the semblance of a relation between things.
To find an analogy, we must enter the nebulous world of religion. In that world, products
of the human mind become independent shapes, endowed with lives of their own, and
able to enter into relations witli men and women. The products of the human hand do
the same thing in the world of commodities. I speak of this as the fetishistic character
which attaches to the products of labour, as soon as they are produced in the form of
commodities. It is inseparable from commodity production." — K. Marx, Capital, tr.
E. and C. Paul (London, 1928), p. 45,

^ The realisation of the entry of personal relationships at this point gives us the
answer to the perplexity of Frederic Harrison the positivist in his Herbert Spencer
lecture of 1905. He said that, while according to "evolutionary philosophy" the un-
ceasing redistribution of matter and motion seemed to be the fundamental law, he himself

264

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS

wrote,^ Engels said that "the seizure of the means of production
by society puts an end to commodity production and hence to the
domination of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social
production is replaced by conscious organisation on a planned
basis. The struggle for individual existence comes to an end. And
at this point, in a certain sense, man finally cuts himself off from
the animal world, leaves the conditions of animal existence behind
him, and enters conditions which are really human. ... It is
humanity's leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of
freedom."

Lastly, it must be emphasised that our present civilisation is mani-
festly not a state of stable equilibrium. Tlie enormous advances in
scientific knowledge and practical technique, due themselves in a
large degree to the middle-class economic system of which Spencer
was the representative, have made that system an anachronism.
Nothing short of the absolute abolition of private ownership of
resources and machines, the abolition of national sovereignties, and
the government of the world by a power proceeding from the class
which must aboHsh classes, will suit the technical situation of the
t^^entieth century.

After all, within single human lifetimes it has sometimes been
possible to discern the advance of human society to ever more complex
unities and higher levels of organisation. To^-ards the end of his
noble autobiography,^ that great American, Henry Adams, noted
the two outstanding instances of the victory of the larger unit in his
own experience, first, the triumph of the North in the American Civil
War, secondly, the failure of the "trust-busting" period of legislation.
"All one's life one had struggled for unity, and unity had always
won." It may be illuminating to regard the present World War
(1942) as a movement of secessionism just as surely as the Civil War
which Adams lived through — not indeed from a World State already
in being, but from the idea of the World State for which humanity
is obviously ready. All dominating racialisms, at this stage of world

could be content with nothing which did not include mention of "progress," "order,"
"living for others," justice, love, etc. But these things are not something superadded
to nature, they arise within it and grow out of it. Comradeship is precisely one of the
essential conditions for high social organisation, and like all the other highest human
qualities a natural product. After Bacon's time, said Marx (in tlie Holy Family) materialism
became misanthropic and ascetic. It was rescued by the French and by Marx himself.

1 F. Engels, Anti-Diihring (London, n.d.), p. 318.

^ The Education of Henry Adams (first published by the Massachusetts Historical
Society, 1907, also London, 1928), pp. 398, 402, 500.

time: the refreshing river

history, are secessions from this wider idea. And secessionist minorities
are bound to fail because, as Seversky^ has put it, that side "with the
greatest economic strength, industrial capacity, and engineering
ingenuity will have the advantage, as always throughout history."
We may agree with the words of a Russian philosopher; "However
strong the forces of armed reaction, in the end progressive mankind
has invariably found the strength to win the victory, and to preserve
and develop the achievements of the human mind."^

Evolution and Inevitability.

Now if it has been shown that the organisation of human society
is only as yet at the beginning of its triumphs, and that these triumphs
are inevitable,^ since they lie along the road traced out hitherto by the
entire evolutionary process, is there not some danger lest the effect
of such a belief should be to withdraw our own activity from the
daily struggle for a better, because better organised, world ? If col-
lectivism* is inevitable, why not just sit and wait for it? There is

^ A. Seversky, Victory through Air Power (London, 1940), p. 140.

2 G. Alexandrov, Soviet War News, 2nd June, 1942. Cf.also "Ir will be convincingly
demonstrated that those who invoked force in violation of their obligations to a
world order were destroyed by the inherent capacity of the world order to invoke a
greater force in its own defence" (2nd Report of Carnegie Organisation of Peace
Commission, 1942, p. 163).

3 "The downfall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally
inevitable." — Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 1848.

"Once you unbridle the forces" (of world-war) "which you will be powerless to
cope with, then, however matters go, you will be ruined at the end of the tragedy, and
the victory of the proletariat will either have already been won, or will in any case have
become inevitable" : Engels, preface to Borkheim's Erinnerung, 1 887.

With these passages it is interesting to compare a christian formulation: "We believe
that there is a purpose running throughout the whole universe, a purpose and a plan;
and that if there be a purpose there must be a Purposer, whom we call God: that in
spite of the at present inexplicable mystery of pain and cruelty. He is expressing Himself
through the everyday virtues of the common people, through the heroic self-sacrifice
and service of the saints, and through Jesus, the crown of humankind, God's word and
energy who gives meaning and purpose to the age-long process. We believe that ... he
opened die gate of heaven to all believers. This gate is not only a gate into a realm be-
yond death, but into a realm which descends and is incarnated in a fair, joyful, and equal
commonwealth on the arena of this earth." — Conrad Noel, Church Militant, 1937.

* There exists a misapprehension in the minds of some, that the various forms of
fascist government embody collectivism. This, however, has been completely exploded
by many students, see e.g. G. Salvemini, Under the Axe of Fascism (London, 1936), and
R. Pascal, The Naii Dictatorship (London, 1934), or F. L. Schuman, Hitler and the Naii
Dictatorship (London, 1936), for Italy and Germany respectively. It is clear that fascism
is a screen for the maintenance and stabilisation of existing class-stratification. The
barbaric and militaristic tenets of fascism would be menacing indeed if we did not reflect
that a relapse into barbarism seems to accompany each great transformation of economic

266

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS

here a moral and psychological problem of considerable interest, to
which a whole book has been devoted by Brameld.^ How do real
alternatives arise in the world-process, if the result is inevitable? To
this question the answer of a representative communist spokesman
would be of interest. We have it in a recent paper of R. P. Dutt,
arising out of a controversy with the Dutch writer de Leeuw.^ "It is
the very heart," he says, "of the revolutionary marxist understanding
of inevitability that it has nothing in common with the mechanical
fatalism of which our opponents incorrectly accuse us. This inevita-
bility is realised in practice through living human wills under given
social conditions, consciously reacting to those conditions, and con-
sciously choosing their line between alternative possibilities seen by
them, within the given conditions. 'Man makes his own history, but
not out of the whole cloth.' We are able scientifically to predict the
inevitable outcome, because we are able to analyse the social conditions
governing the consciousness, and the line of development, of those
social conditions. We are able to analyse the growth of contradictions,
and the consequent accumulation of forces generating ever greater
revolutionary consciousness and will in the exploited majority, till
they become strong enough to overcome all obstacles, and conquer.
We are able to lay do\^^n with scientific precision that every failure,
every choice of an incorrect path, can only be temporary, because
the outcome can in no way solve the contradictions generating the
revolutionary consciousness and will. These contradictions then only
lead to renewed and intensified struggle, up to final victory. The
process is inevitable. But the human consciousness of the participants
in this inevitable process is not the consciousness of automatic cogs
in a predetermined mechanism. It is the consciousness of living,
active, human beings, revolting against intolerable evils, deliberately
with thought and passion choosing a new alternative, doing and
daring all to achieve a new world, and ready to give their lives in
the fight because of their intense desire to help by such actions to
make possible the achievement of the goal. This fighting revolutionary
consciousness is by no means a bowing to an inevitable outcome,
but is most actively a seeking to tip the balance and make certain by

structure. When feudalism was giving place to middle-class capitalism there v/ere the
"wars of religion," and the witchcraft mania, even before the English civil war and
the French revolution. The middle class will not consent to merge itself in the
comradeship of mankind without similar catastrophes.

^ T. B. H. Brameld, Philosophic Approach to Communism (Chicago, 1933).

^ R. P. Dutt, Communist International, 1935, 12, 604.

267

time: the refreshing river

action the victory of one alternative . and the defeat of another alter-
native. Every revolutionary worth his salt acts in every stage of the
fight as if the whole future of the revolution depended on his action.
And in presenting the issues of the present day to the masses, we
present them not as placid inevitabilities to contemplate like the
movement of the stars, but as a gigantic issue with the whole future
of humanity at stake, calling for the utmost determination, courage,
sacrifice, and will to conquer. This is the essence of the revolutionary
marxist understanding of inevitability."

From this passage two principal thoughts emerge. In the first
place, the marxist writer speaks of inevitability only because he is
confident that he understands die nature of human beings and their
reactions to external conditions. Their knowledge of good and evil,
pleasure and pain, will have its ultimate effect and that effect is
inevitable.

We can take our stand upon the simple, natural, healthy, human
desires of the mass of mankind, for love, for children, for socially
useful work, for fundamental decency and dignity. This is the mean-
ing of the ancient Confucian advice to rulers, in the Ta-Shioh (Great
Learning) — Min chih so hao^ hao chih; min chih so o, 6 chih; "Love
what the people love, and hate what the people hate."

If we explore more closely the mechanism of this inevitability
we see that it is connected with the contradictions which arise in
each successive stage of human history. Thus modern nationalist
states must arm their workers in their struggles with foreign imperial-
isms, yet at the same time this is to arm their destroyers. They must
engage in colonial development, but this gives rise to native m.ove-
ments of liberation. In the last resort fascist theory is brought in to
save the decaying structure, and this essays to substitute for Reason
a fantastic irrational mythology, but on the other hand modern
capitalism cannot get on without effective control over nature, and
this necessitates scientific rationality.

Secondly, inevitability once admitted, the time-scale remains only
too obscure. It is true that we might envisage a long period of stag-
nation as the outcome of our present civilisation. China is sometimes
thought (without much justice) to present a century-long spectacle of
such stagnation. But whereas this might be compatible with an
agricultural, bureaucratic, isolated community lacking good com-
munications and so able to sterilise revolutionary movements within
itself, it is much more difficult to imagine such a state of affairs existing

268

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS

in a civilisation based on scientific technology. Let us grant, however,
that some kind of scientifically stabilised stagnant class-stratified
totalitarian social organism, might succeed our own age. Hence the
great significance of the word ''temporary'" used in the passage from
the writer quoted above. Failures and set-backs and blind alleys there
may be in plenty, but though the ultimate victory is not in doubt,
it m.ust be remembered w^hat each failure may mean. It may mean
the enslavement of whole peoples for many generations, the destruc-
tion of culture and learning over a wide part of the world, the stag-
nation of social progress in such regions, the martyrdom of many
thousands of our best and noblest friends. In the ancient phrase;
"the saints under the altar cry, O Lord, how long, how long.^"
To speak of the inevitability of our higher integrative level is to say
nothing of when it will come.^

Ccncliision,

It would be a pity, however, to conclude this lecture upon a note
of sadness. Let us return to the year 1838, when Herbert Spencer
was a young man of seventeen. The youth of anyone so exsuccous
as Spencer was in his old age has always a peculiar charm. This was
the year in which Marx was toiling in Berlin at his doctoral dis-
sertation on Democritus and Epicurus, Engels was quietly acquiring
a business training at Bremen, and Dar^dn, just back from the voyage
of the Beagle^ was starting his first Notebook on the Transformations
of Species.^ Spencer, as befitted his later outlook, was in the midst
of British industry. Under Mr. Robert Stephenson, the chief engineer
of the London and Birmingham Railway, young Mr. Spencer made
measurements of embankments and cuttings, draftqd out plans, and
sketched minor inventions in his spare tim^e. To every man who much

^ Cf. the interesting analysis ot causality and determinism by H. Levy, Proc. Aristot.
Soc, 1937, 37, p. 89. "Such a form of analysis," he concludes, "will tell us how the causal
process operates, and, in terms of the qualities of subsidiary group-isolates, when a
dialectical change will occur. It cannot express the prediction in terms of time." So also
the conclusion of an acute student of the history of science — "Great men are not
absolutely essential to the progress of science, but they increase its speed." (J. G.
Crowther, The Social Relations of Science, London, 1941, p. 453.)

That moving play of Robert Ardrey's, Thunder Rock (London, 1940) gave brilliant
expression to tliis (see esp. around p. 117).

^ Comte, with his conviction that philosophy must acquire a social relevance,
his appreciation of social evolution before biological evolution was substantiated and
accepted, and his realisation that the classification of the sciences concealed a real problem,
deserves a lecture to himself. At this time he was publishing his Positive Philosophy, the
first volume of v/hich appeared in 1839 and the last in 1842.

269

time: the refreshing river

affects his fellows, there comes at one time or another in his life a
symbolic event, and some sixty-five years later Spencer described it
in language which insists upon quotation.^

"Harris and I were sent down one day early in August to
make a survey of Wolverton station, and we completed it before
evening set in. Wolverton, being then the temporary terminus,
between which and Rugby the traffic was carried on by coaches,
was the place whence the trains to London started. The last of
them was the mail, leaving somewhere about 8. If I remember
rightly there were at that time only five trains in the day and
none at night. A difficulty arose. The mail did not stop between
Watford and London, but I wished to stop at the intermediate
station, Harrov/, that being the nearest point to Wembley. It
turned out that there was at Wolverton no vehicle having a
brake to it — nothing available but a coach-truck. Being without
alternative, I directed the station-master to attach this to the
train. After travelling with my companion in the usual way till
we reached Watford, I bade him goodnight, and got into the
coach-truck. Away the train went into the gloom of the evening,
and for some six or seven miles I travelled unconcernedly,
knowing the objects along the line well, and continually identi-
fying my whereabouts. Presently we reached a bridge about a
mile and a half to the north of Harrow station. Being quite
aware that the line at this point, and for a long distance in
advance, falls towards London at the rate of i in 330, I expected
that the coach-truck, having no brake, would take a long time
to stop. A mile and a half would, it seemed, be sufficient allowance,
and on coming to the said bridge, I uncoupled the truck and sat
down. In a few seconds I got up again to see whether all the
couplings were unhooked, for, to my surprise, the truck seemed
to be going on with the train. There was no coupling left un-
hooked, however, and it became clear that I had allowed an
insufficient distance for the gradual arrest. Though the incline
is quite invisible to the eye, being less than an inch in nine yards,
yet its effect was very decided; and the axles being, no doubt,
well-greased, the truck maintained its velocity. Far from having
stopped when Harrow was reached, I was less than a dozen
yards behind the train! My dismay as we rushed through the

* A, I. 134.
270

INTEGRATIVE LEVELS ^

Station at some 30 miles an hour may be well imagined. . . .
After passing Harrow station the line enters upon a curve, and
a loss of velocity necessarily followed. The train now began
rapidly to increase its distance, and shortly disappeared into the
gloom. Still, though my speed had diminished, I rushed on at a
great pace. Presently, seeing at a little distance in front the
light of a lantern, held, I concluded, by a foreman of the plate-
layers, who was going back to the station after having seen the
last train pass, I shouted to him; thinking that if he would run
at the top of his speed he might perhaps catch hold of the waggon
and gradually arrest it. He, however, stood staring; too much
astonished, even if he understood me, and as I learned next
day, when he reached Harrow, reported he had met a man in
a newly-invented carriage which had run away with him! . . .
After being carried some two miles beyond Harrow, I began
rather to rejoice that the truck was going so far, for I remembered
that at no great distance in advance was the Brent siding, into
which the truck might easily be pushed instead of back to Harrow,
I looked with satisfaction to this prospect, entertaining no doubt
that the waggon would come to rest in time. By and by, however,
it became clear that the truck would not only reach this siding
but pass it; and then came not a little alarm, for a mile or so
further along was the level-crossing at Willesden, w^here I
should probably be thrown out and killed. . . . However, on
reaching Brent bridge, the truck began to slacken speed, and
finally came to a stand in the middle of the embankment crossing
the Brent valley."

How Spencer had to seek help to clear the line and finally got
home in the early hours of the morning, we need not here relate*
But of all the symbolic occurrences which have happened to great
men, this is surely one of the most remarkable. Spencer wanted to
stop at the intermediate station in evolutionary sociology, but in the
progress of organisation to ever higher levels, there is no such oppor-
tunity. The class of which he was the intellectual representative
wanted to stop at the intermediate station of domestic capitalism, but
the inner logic of the process demanded that expansion should go on
and the local mill-owner should give place to the trustified imperialist.
Moreover, the inevitable industrialisation of the working-class led to
demands of diametrically opposite nature, so that Spencer was driven

271

time: the refreshing river

into the position of protesting vainly against both the "degeneration"
into mihtarism, and the sociaHst movement which fought against "free
competition." His wide, and substantially correct, survey of evolution
led up only to the anti-climax of middle-class liberal economic
individualism, past which, in spite of himself, he was carried on
protesting.

But let us celebrate his noble range of vision nevertheless. The
onward progress of integration and organisation cannot be arrested.
As I write, there rages in one of the most beautiful of European
•countries a tragic and terrible struggle between the People and their
Adversary. The sound of its gunfire penetrates any College court,
no matter how peaceful it may seem. Some faith may be needed to
assert with boldness that, even if Spanish democracy be overwhelmed,
even if the great democracy of the Soviet Union itself were to be
overwhelmed, no matter what shattering blows the cause of con-
sciousness may receive, the end is sure. The higher stages of integration
and organisation towards which we look have all the authority of
evolution behind them. It is no other than Herbert Spencer himself
who contributes to this our faith, if faith it be. The devil, as Hippolytus
said long ago, may resist the cosmic process. But the last victory will
not be his.

Cambridge^
April 1 6, icfjj

272

INDEX

of hisrh
259

Abelard 19
Adams, Henry —

on the Virgin of Chartres 49

on the victories of the larger unities
265
Adler, M. J. 15, 18, 192
Aeschylus 27
Aflnogenov 66

aggregation and disaggregation 39, 191
agitators 80

Agreement of the People, The 80, loi
Albertus magnus 151
Albigensians 239
d'Alembert 1 23
Alexander, Samuel 112, 185, 234

on beings in social relation 125

on embryonic determination 197

on time 236

on mind as a property
organisational level
Alexandrian science 144, 146
Alexandrov, G. 266
altruism, social, origins of 36
Amos 51
Anabaptists 239
Anaximander 27
Andrewes, Lancelot
Angela of Foligno
Aquinas 31, 152

and Marx 90
Archimedes 48
Ardrey, R. 269
aristocratic thought and popular thought,

27

Aristotelianism —

account of causation 85 ff
twilight of 103 ff, no ff

Aristotle —

on the exercise of the spirit
on succession of souls 32,
on social classes 114
and practical science 144
audacity of 150
on form and matter 153
on the ladder of beings 1 87

art —

and the numinous 60
and religion 61

75, 77, 90, 98
238

22
114

atomism —

and capitalism 86 ff
attraction and repulsion 39, 191, 230
Auden 15, 24, 30, 31, 35, 59, 60, 65,

231
Augustine 51, 53, 138
authority and freedom 96

Bacon, Francis 105

Bagehot 114

Baker, J. R. 94, 109

Balfour, Arthur 236

Balfour, Frank 158 ?

Ball, John 239

Barcroft, Sir Joseph 213

Bateson 250

Baxter, Rich 231

Bellers 88

Benda 46

Berdyaev 72, 240

Bernal 62, 95, 190, 228, 244

Bernard, Claude 213

Biggs, Noah 103

biochemistry 17, 174 ff, 205

biological engineering 71

biologism (McBride) 161

Blake 70

Blok 59

du Bois Raymond 8

Bolshevism, Christian theology the

grandmother of 70
bondage to space-time 67
bondage to space-time 67
Bonnet, Ch. 154 ff
Borkenau, F. 169, 257
Boyle—

on heaven 13

on the aims of the Royal
Society 84

on atomism 87, 149

and scientific technique 147

on a priori and a posteriori argu-
ments 155
Broad 196, 242
Browne, Sir T. 75

on man's amphibious nature 8

on heaven 14

273

time: the refreshing river

Browne, Sir T. {continued) —

on the mutations of the world 1 5

on life and death 66

on order 232
Bruno 13
Bukharin —

on social man 23

on organisational levels 160, 243

on the history of science 54
Burnet 105
Butterfield 19
Byzantine Christianity 68 ff

Cambridge and the English civil war

99
Cannon, W. B. 115

capitalism, rise of 75

glittering prizes of 43

and atomism 86 ff, 1 86

deficiencies of 88

and imperialism 257
caste and fascism 71
Chase, S. 134
Chaucer 47
chiliasm 50
Chinese concepts —

ch'eng ching, ataraxy 9

li, right social behaviour 23

vjeng, love of mankind 23

z, social justice 23

chwing die, the scholar-hero 34

tin-rjan, Nature coming into being
by itself 55

teh, virtue 119

c/iih, "stopping" at the highest
moral good 119
Chrysostom 261
Church of Jerusalem —

communism of 239

distribution of 53
Cicero 113
Civil War —

in 17th-century England 19, 78 ff

American 265
class-stratification of society 261
Clement of Alexandria 19, 55, 64
Coleridge 1 87
Collingwood 9
Comenius —

on having a broad outlook 26

on education 1 1 1

14

committees, divine character of

Commonwealth, the 75 fif
competition —

intra-specific 25 1

capitalist 88
complexity, its relation to organisation

263
Comte 269
Confucianism —

and non-supernatural morality 10

and social evolution 52

and the essential goodness of man's
nature 139

its advice to rulers 268
Confucius 27, 56, 139
Contak'ton 66
contradictions 1 3
Cornford, John 34
Cosin, John 75
Crashaw 24, 75
creatureliness 65, 172
Cromwell 78 ff, loi, 257
Crowther, J. G. 107, 165, 217, 269
Cyprian 50

Dale, Sir Henry 94

Dalton, John 87, 199

Darlington, C. D. 94

Darwan 14, 93, 115, 163, 199, 269

Day Lewis 6, 24, 233

deatli, the problem of 66

Deborin 87

Dell, Wm. 99 ff

democracy, form of society called for
by biology 164, 250

Descartes 151, 200, 202, 203

determination, embryonic 196

devil, the, definition of 247, 272

dialectics —

in scientific thought 16

in history 19, 104

in evolving nature 189 tT

Diderot 123, 139

Digby, Sir Kenelm 85 ff, 151

Diggers 78 ff, 10 1 ff

Dimitrov 125

Dingle on daus ex aequatione 131

Dionysius the Areopagite 8

distortion of scientific ideas for re-
actionary political purposes
117

dividers and uniters 10, 27, 28

DoUo 222

274

INDEX

Donatists 239
Donnan —

on integro-differential equations

on magnification of disentropic
processes 215

dragons 39

Driesch 179, 180, 196, 200, 216

Drummond 28 ff

on the ascent of man 34
on "war" and "industry" 37

Duns Scotus 123

east and west 136 ff

Eckhardt 1 3

economics — •

rise of mechanistic 85 ff
domination of, over eugenics

166 ff, 262
and theology 46

Eddington 112, 209 ff, Z2i

Ehrenburg 60

Eisenstein 60

Eliot, T. S. 16, 67, 172

embryology 17, 18, 107, 123, 143, 147,
148, 149, 157, 245

emergence 183

Empedocles 230

empiricism and rationalism 156

enclosures 76

Encyclopaedists, the 138 ff, 142

Engels 112, 185 ff, 255

on contradictions 14, 19
I on fixed boundary-lines 20

on levels of organisation 31
on the philosophy of scientists 112
on Darwinism 115, 163
on organisation and mind 123
on the dialectics of nature 190
on the history of science 198
on form and matter 206
'^ on evolution and entropy 214

on the peasant wars 239
on freedom and necessity 265
his youth 269

engrossing 47

enmeshing the ideal in the real 119

entropy 207 ff

"envelopes" in space 184

Epicureanism —

ataraxy 9, 49
and mind 20, 124

Epicureanism (continued) —

and the spontaneity of the world-
process 55

and practical science 144
episcopacy the outwork of property 79
Eros, the task of, in social progress 25
ethics —

and politics 10

scientific 55

of a machine age 132 ff
eugenics, and economics 166 ff
evil, problem of 65
evolution 30, 31

its methods and results 36

die giant vista of 258

social 260

continuous with biological evo-
lution 160, 23 s
and thermodynamics 230
experience, forms of 8, 61
Ezekiel 119

Faraday 26

Farrington, B, 20, 113

fascism 266, 268

Fernelius 201

Ferrar, Nich. 75

Ferri, Enrico 254

fetishism of commodities 264

feudalism 48

Feuerbach —

on the Trinity 14

on social man 23

on religion and art 61
Fisher, R. A. 162
folk art 128 ff
forestalling 47
form and matter 205
Franklin 93
freedom —

and authority 96

as the knowledge of necessity 97
Freind 155

French Revolution 20, 138, 241
furies 39

87, 151

Galen 147

Gassendi

Gautama 27

genius and feeblemindedness

George, Henry 253

162

275

time: the refreshing river

Gibbs, Willard 169, 209 fF

Glanville no

Glisson 206

Glover, E. C. (psychologist) 173

Glover, T. R. (historian) 237

Goethe 19, 152, 229

gospels, theology of the 66

Gotch, F. no

Graubard, M. 167 ff

Gresham, Sir Tho. 87, 99

Grierson 60

Racket, John 75

Haeckel 8

Haldane, J. B. S. 44 ff, 93, 162, 190

Haldane, J. S. 121 ff, 204, 227

Hall, Joseph 77

Hardy, G. H. (mathematician) 55

Hardy, \V. B. (biologist and physicist)

179, 206
Harrison, F. (positivist) 264
Hardib 88
Hartsoeker 155
Harvey 98 ff, 143, 148, 151, 153 ff,

157, 206
Headlam 58
Hegel 14, 187 ff, 190
Hellenistic —

mysticism 51

science 144

world, stagnation of 237
Henderson, L. J. —

on the fitness of the environm.ent
258

on Pareto's sociology 169
Herbert, Geo. 75 _

Herder 233

Hesiod on the golden age 52
Hessen, B. 107, 145
Heylyn, Peter 76
Hickes, Geo. 114
Hill, A. V. 44 ff, 92 ff
Hippolytus 247, 272
His, W. 158
Hobbes 123
Hogben 95, 167, 244
Holorenshaw, Henry 78
Hooke, Robt., and the Royal Society

84, 92
hookworm, its point of viev/ 223, 236
Hopkins, Sir F. G. 179
Hsiin-tze 139

Huxley, Aldous 71

Huxley, Julian 23, 57, 163, 251, 258

Huxley, T. H. 8, 26, 28, 35, 179, i8i

I-Ching, the (Book of Changes) 52

ideals, unrealisable 119

Indian philosophy, probable origin of

asceticism and otherworldli-

ness 238
individual, importance of 33
individualist fallacy 23, 203
"inevitability" of social evolution 266 ff
Inge 25. 164, 218, 237 ff, 240
Inquisition, the 70
Invisible College, the 98 ff
Irenaeus 50, 52, 64, 125
Isaiah 237, 238

Jalal'ud-Din Rumi 32

Jeans, Sir J. 112

Jennings, H. S. 162, 179, 258, 261

Jeremiah 238

Jesuits 139

Jewel, John 77

John the theologian 50

Justin 50

Kautsky 240

Ken, Tho. 75

Kierkegaard 65 ff

King, Henry 75

Kingdom of God, what 43, 50 ff, 89,

239
Klages 136
Kuan-tze 97

Kung-fu-tze see Confucius
Kuo, Z. Y. 123
Kyrle, R. M. 72, 173

Laud, Wm. 75 ff
Lawrence, D. H. 62
Lenin 34

on dialectics 19, 244

on the Machians 21

on religion 57

on revolutions 69

on organisation and mind 123

on Marx 255

on cooks 264

and Lloyd-Morgan 112

276

INDEX

Leonardo da Vinci 147

Lessing 22

Levellers 19, 75*% 7S ff, 90, 125,

240
levels of organisation 30, 31, 122, 211,
233 ff
and mind 122 ff, 259
integrative 233 ff
Levy, H. —

on evolution and entropy 214
on dialectical change and time
269
Lewis, G. N. 215
Lewis, John, on the sacred and the

secular 1 1 8 ff
Liebig 38
Lilburne 34, 64, 80
Lillie, Ralph S. 215, 229
limiting factors in scientific discovery

141 ff
liquid crystals 235
Lloyd-Morgan 112, 185, 225
Lockyer, Robt. 82
Loeb, Jacques 179
Lollards 239
Longus 39
Lotka 222
Lotze 20
Lucretius 20, 71

on Venus as the goddess of union

and aggregation 40
on science freeing tlie mind from

fear 49
on the spontaneity of the world-
process 55
on the "swerve" of the atoms 124
on the dialectics of the old and the

nevv' 191
on mind as a property of high
organisational level 259
Lunacharsky 69
Lunar Society, the 106

McTaggart 126, 132

Mach 2 1

machinery, contacts between men and

127, 134
Mallock, W. H. 179
Malthus —

on population 38

on improper arts 164
Malynes, Gervase 86

manichaeism 131 ff
"marriage 173

Marson 64

Marvin, W. T. 1 80

Marx 27, 31, 53, 112, 132, 170, 185 ff,
203, 255
on contradictions 14, 19
on Liebig and Malthus 38
on changing the world 65
on religion 118
on Spencer 255
on the fetishism of commodities

264
his youth 269
and Dar5\'in 14

materialism —

mechanical 20, 122 ff, 188
"misanthropic" or "ascetic" 188
in Christianity 52, 122, 126 ff
dialectical 14, i22ff, i86ff
and God 55

Maublanc 14

Maudsley —

on social man 23, 125
on mind as a property of high
organisational level 259

Mayakovsky 59

Mead, Margaret 175

mechanics, statistical 208 ff

mechanisation of democracy 164

mechanism (biological) see vitalism

Mencius 139 ff

Mendeleev's table 225

Meng-tze see Mencius

Merejkovsky 67

mesoforms 235

metabolism and thermodynamics 220 ff

Meyerhof 225, 228

Miall, L. C. 98

Mill 65

millenniarism 5 1

and social evolution 240

Milne, E. A, 219

Milton 103, no ff

mind and matter 201

mixed-up-ness and separatedness 209 ff

moral theology, of to-day 54

More, Henry 75

More, Sir Thomas 34

morphology 205, 245

"morpholysis" 211

Muller, H. J. 113, 166 ff

Murry 57

277

time: the refreshing river

natural and supernatural 29, 200
natural selection 36

and "laissez-faire" 116,163
naturalism, scientific 20
nature —

and grace 3 1

human, not unchangeable 175
nazism 62, 266

and biology 163
Needham, Jasper 145
Needham, John Turberville 157
Needham, Joseph (i8th century) 143
Needham, Marchamont 103
Newton 70, 99, 107, 145
Nicholas of Cvisa 1 3
Noel, Conrad 14, 237 ff, 266
numinous, the —

in religion and art 60

defined 64, 125

and socialist emotion 66 ff

and the social order 1 20

M3

208 ff
220 ff

30,31,32, 122,

obstetrics
opium —

religious 65, 113

scientific 67 ff
order —

and arrangement

and organisation
organicism 242 ff
organisation —

levels in evolution

185, 192 ff, 211 ff, 233 ff, 258 ff

and energy 33, 198, 206

and mind 122 ff, 201, 259

and entropy 207 ff

definition attempted 211, 258

the two concepts of 213 ff
Origen 51
original sin 113, 138
Orphism 27, 39
Orr, SirJ. B. 176
Oru-ell 25
Oparin 191
Otto 64, 124 ff, 132
Overton, Pvich. 80 ff, 113
Owen and the Chartists 88

Papias 52 ff
Pareto 168 ff
Parker, Samuel

85

Pascal, R, 66

Pasteur 26, 34, 199

patent medicines 116

pattern in nature 212 ff, 224 ff

Pavlov —

on the subjective and the objective
123

on manual and mental work 156

on human nature 175

and mind 202
Pelagius 138
Pepys 93

pessimism, post-Victorian 236
physicism (Pareto and Bogdanov) 168 ff
Pirenne 257
Planck 23, 223
Plato 27, 114, 164
Pledge, H. T. 107
Plel-dianov 55, 61
Plockboy 88
Plotinus 237
poetry —

and science 25

of the liturgy 58
Polanyi, Karl (tlieologian), on regressive

movements in thought 136
Polanyi, Michael (physical chemist) —

on capitalism and atomism 87

on the holiness of pure science
94 ff, 1 20
Ponnet, John 98
population control 164, 171
Potter, Beatrice (Mrs. Sidney Webb)

Prenant 189, 244

Presbyterians and Independents 78 ff

Priestley 93

Pritchett 24

protestantism, capitalism and science 98

psychology and psycho-analysis 171 ff

Quakers 8 1

racialism 63, 116

Rainborough 34, 64, 80

Rashdall 25, 219

Redi 142

"reducibility" of biological fact 204

regrating 47

religion —

as the sense of the holy 23

278

INDEX

religion (continued) —

in the 17th century 42 ff

and organised religion 57 ff

of the future 59

and art 60

influences antagonistic to 63

as the opium of the people 65

evolution of 1 26 ff

as the mirror of exploitation 1 27
Roberts, Morley 115
Romanes 35
Rousseau 139, 142, 263
Roux, W. 157, 181
Rowse 65
Royal Society, tlie 83 ff, 92 ff

political background of, in the 17th
century 97 ff, 101

industrial associations of 104 ff
Russell 71 ff, 223

sacred, the, and the secular 43, 120
Scarborough, Charles 98
Schmalhausen, S. D. 172 ff
Schrodinger 220
science —

influences antagonistic to 62

and fascism 73

and tlie rise of capitalism 84, 90

pure and applied 84, 92 ff, 106,
107, 108, 109

ethical neutrality of 92

and the idea of the holy 94 ff

theoretical, in a socialist society
108

in Russia 108

and planning 109

and philosophy no

and empirical technique 143

and theology 145

and terminology 148
"scientific" socialism 188
scientific societies in tlie renaissance 145
scientific worker, position of to-day

43ff
secessionism 265

Sechenov 26, 123

Sellars, Roy W. 112,185

Seversky, A. 266

Sex 173 ff

Shaw 12

Sherrington, Sir Charles 184, 202, 206

Shirokov 189

similarity of the works of organisation
at different levels 212

Singer, Ch. 107

Smuts 112, 185

social emotions, as bonds compared with
interatomic forces 23, 35, 39,

56

society —

as an organism 113, 114 ff, 249

aim of 117
sociology —

a level of its own 33, i6o ff,
176

boundaries fixed by other sciences
176
Spaun, Othmar 115, 135, 240
Spemann 148
Spencer 28, 29, 31, 114, 233 ff

on embryonic development 245,
248

on evolution 246

on the world-process 247

on organisms and environment 247

on sociology 248 ff

on ' "predatory" and "industrial"
societies 251

on socialism 252 ft"

on social success 262

his youth 269

his adventure on the L. & B. Rly.
270
Spengler 72, 249
Spinoza 55
Sprat, Tho., and the Royal Society 84,

• 104, 145
Stalin —

on the old and the new 191

on organic mechanism 192

on Lenin 204
Stamp, Josiah 135
Stebbing 58
sterilisation, eugenic 162
Strasser, Otto 240
"succession" in time 184
superman, doctrines of 73
surplus value 256
survival of the fittest 115, 262

Ta-Shioh, the (The Great Learning)

119, 138 ff, 268
Taborites 239
Talmud, the 146

279

time: the refreshing river

Taoism —

and peace of mind 9

and the spontaneity of the world-
process 55
Taylor, Jeremy 75, 98
Tawney 77
technocracy 117
Temple, Wm. 126
Tertullian 50, 64
theology, Christian, the grandmother of

Bolshevism 70
thermodynamics 207 ff
Thomson, Geo. 27, 217
time, importance of 236 ff
Timiriazev 26, 67
treason of the scholars 46 ff
Tvrrell 60

Unwin, J. D. 173
Usury 47, 76 ff

Vaughan, C. E. (editor of Rousseau)
263

Vaughan, Henry 75

Venus, goddess of union and aggrega-
tion 40

vitalism and mechanism 18, 32, 160,
178 ff, 184, 241 ff

Voltaire 139 ff

Waddington —

on science and ethics 23

on Huxley's attitude to Nature 36

on Polanyi's conception of science

95

on authority and freedom 96

Waldensians 239

Walwyn, Wm. 80 ff

wars of religion 267

Watson, David 226

Whichcote 99 ff

Whitehead 112, 178 ff, 225

on organisms and evolution 192 ff
on organic mechanism 195 ff
on time 198

on the history of science 199
his dialectical character 200
on nature and mind 201
and the social situation 203
and metaphysics 194

William of Champeaux 19

Willis, Tho. 104

Winstanley, Gerrard 81 ff, loi ff, 113

witchcraft 267

Wolff, Caspar Friedrich 142

Wolff, Christian 140

Woodger 182, 192, 242 ff

Wootton 74

workers, mystification of, in factories
under capitalism 117

world State, arising out of the evolu-
tionary process 41

Wren, Mathew 75

Wyclif 239

Yeats —

on the thoughts of the wise in the

language of the common

people 24
on modern English poetry 25

Zavadovsky 189, 244
Zechariah 119
Zoology 143
Zuckerman 260

280