Chapter X: Part III: Holism and the Publicist Standpoint in Philosophy (1)

SUMMARY

When the conclusions of physicists are supplemented by the enquiries of the biologist we are led to a schematization of experience which permits us to discuss the nature of matter and life on a neutral ground. This neutral ground is the _public world_ of science. It represents what is significant for the purpose of discourse. Idealistic philosophers have assumed the nature of reality as the goal of philosophy; but the concept of reality is essentially equivocal. For the purpose of discourse we have to assume that the neutral ground is the real thing. In private we are at liberty to reject this view. Temperament decides which of these alternatives we adopt. There is therefore no hope of arriving at universal agreement in discussing the nature of reality. To the introvert reality resides in the domain of mystic experience. To the extrovert the public world is the nearest approach to a complete representation of reality which our limited range of receptor organs permits us to construct. The belief that philosophy can settle the nature of reality, and that it is possible to arrive at universal conclusions independently of the methods of science and mathematics arose in the period of decadence of Greek philosophy. It developed in modern Europe under the influence of ecclesiasticism. Freed from the bondage of clerical control, philosophy must undertake the more modest task of discussing what characteristics of belief determine their communicability or _publicity_, and indicating how the problems of existence can be resolved into their public and private components. From this standpoint educational theory must be based on a recognition of the respective spheres of _publicity_ and _privacy_. Organized religious belief and ritual is based on a confusion between the two. The same confusion exists in the pragmatist philosophy.

IX. BIOLOGY AND HUMANISM

“But the mortallest enemy unto knowledge, and that which hath
done the greatest execution upon truth, hath been a peremptory
adhesion unto authority; and more especially, the establishing of
our belief upon the dictates of antiquity. For (as every capacity
may observe) most men, of ages present, so superstitiously do look
upon ages past, that the authorities of the one exceed the reasons
of the other. Whose persons indeed far removed from our times,
their works, which seldom with us pass uncontrolled, either by
contemporaries, or immediate successors, are now become out of the
distance of envies; and, the farther removed from present times,
are conceived to approach the nearer unto truth itself. Now hereby
methinks we manifestly delude ourselves, and widely walk out of the
track of truth.”--Sir Thomas Browne, _Pseudodoxia Epidemica_

§1

Evolution does not enable us to make any spectacular predictions which can be verified here and now. Its importance lies in satisfying our curiosity about human origins in a manner consistent with the present state of scientific knowledge. It provides a philosophical framework for biological enquiry on the one hand and for our attitude to the problem of human destiny on the other. From a purely technical standpoint Darwin’s specific contribution to the evolutionary doctrine was the hypothesis of natural selection. The hypothesis of natural selection, in the form in which Darwin stated it, has been modified out of all recognition to accommodate later enquiries into the nature of heredity and variation. Such enquiries did not receive their impetus from the _Origin of Species_. They followed the course prescribed by Mendel’s experiments upon the kitchen pea. How then has it come to pass that Darwin has earned a position of pre-eminence only comparable with that of Newton in modern times? Is not the answer that Darwin is the only great natural philosopher who has emerged, since the time of Aristotle, from the ranks of the biologists? When the fullest allowance is made for the inadequacy of contemporary knowledge to meet all the demands of the evolutionary problem, what still distinguishes Darwin’s contribution from that of his numerous predecessors in the same field is the consistency and thoroughness with which he set out to explore the implications of evolution in every department of biological information available at that time. By so doing he laid the foundations of a new humanism akin to science, and created a philosophical issue whose magnitude has only become apparent since the rise of the behaviourist school in psychology. Evolution took the discussion of human affairs out of the hands of the humanistic philosophers, and brought it within the legitimate domain of scientific method.

From the dawn of philosophical controversy two opposing tendencies have competed for mastery. One is based upon confidence in the testimony of our receptor organs. The other mistrusts the evidence of the senses. One relies on patient observation. The other appeals to axioms which require no proof. One has its impulse in curiosity about Nature. The other is preoccupied with human obligations. Between the two extremes there have been many makeshifts. As one has fallen into discredit, another has taken its place. The only permanent feature of philosophical discussion is the impossibility of effecting a permanent reconciliation between those who have called themselves, at different periods of history, materialists and idealists, nominalists and realists, empiricists and transcendentalists, mechanists and vitalists, to emphasize some new aspect of a fundamental incompatibility. In the distinction between publicity and privacy it has been suggested that this antinomy does not necessarily reside in the system of nature. It arises because our curiosity exceeds our information. Up to a certain point we succeed in pooling our experiences by the method of science. In so doing we construct the public world. The method of science has achieved its most conspicuous success in dealing with inanimate objects and with the brute creation. To the few who are genuinely interested in these things the extent of our knowledge has always seemed of more importance than the magnitude of our ignorance. Hence there have always been philosophers of a type which, for want of a better term, may be called _materialistic_. The majority of people are not interested in natural objects except in so far as the knowledge which science confers contributes to their personal comfort. Man is pre-eminently interested in himself. So long as science cannot satisfy that curiosity his private and personal values assume a greater importance than the academic hypotheses of science. Philosophers who teach us to distrust the guidance of our sense data flatter our egotism, and soothe our vanity. Science cannot. On the other hand science can supply us with aviation, broadcasting and twilight sleep. Transcendental philosophy can only offer us the good life. The politician distrusts the mechanist, because Science provides no concept of divine right to fortify social privilege. He cannot go all the way with Parmenides and identify the way of the senses with the way of error, because scientists are too useful. The only philosophy for the plain man who wants a plain answer to a plain question is some sort of compromise between the standpoint of transcendental metaphysics and mechanistic science. Since the sixteenth century humanistic philosophy has been dogged by the problem of accommodating man’s interest in the world around him with his interest in his own person. Worldly interests compel civilized man to recognize the claims of science up to a certain point. Egotism prompts him to demand some supernatural sanction for the vagaries of his own social conduct. For three centuries traditional philosophy has been haunted by the possibility that science might in the end succeed in satisfying man’s curiosity about his own nature. Darwin made that possibility the explicit concern of scientific enquiry. From mediæval times all attempts to effect a reconciliation between the empirical standpoint and transcendental values have been concerned with defining separate spheres of influence in which science and metaphysics can operate without mutual interference. On that basis philosophy is still taught in our universities to-day. Darwin’s _Descent of Man_ challenged the complacent dualism which had permitted humanistic philosophy and utilitarian science to pursue an independent course from the Renaissance to the middle of the nineteenth century.

At every stage in the advance of scientific knowledge a new system has arisen to conserve some fragments from the wreckage of supernatural beliefs. There have been three outstanding attempts to effect a compromise between observation and inspiration. The systems of Aristotle, of Descartes and of Kant each exhibit features characteristic of the state of contemporary scientific knowledge. Each has a peculiarly interesting significance in the history of biological science. The system of Aristotle was the last will and testament of Greek biology. The system of Descartes was finally overthrown by the evolutionary theory. The system of Kant is predestined to a similar doom, when professional philosophers are prepared to face the disquieting consequences of modern research on the “labyrinthine organ” and Sherrington’s work on the “muscular sense.” If it is too early to predict the fate of holism, it is instructive to reflect on that of its predecessors.

§2

Aristotle undertook the task of finding a place for science in a civilization in which scientific enquiry was approaching its decline. His problem was simplified by the circumstance that the conflict between teleology and mechanism had arisen as a conflict of interest rather than interpretation. Burnet insists that the idea of purpose only emerged at a comparatively late date in the history of Hellenic science, and the more recent researches of Cyril Bailey emphasize the same aspect of the incompatibility of natural and moral philosophy in ancient Greece. Greek philosophy had inherited from the Hesiodic cosmogony the belief that Chaos was the beginning of all things, gods and men alike. It was unfettered by the Chaldean Fall and the doctrine of creative providence. Aristotle’s system was therefore an attempt to harmonize two tendencies which had come into being independently of one another. One begins with Thales. It bore fruit in the brilliant speculations of Leucippus and Democritus. It survived after Aristotle’s death in the mechanical discoveries of the Alexandrian school. In the poem of Lucretius it made a final gesture of august rhetoric. To modern civilization it bequeathed the indestructibility of matter, and the atomic concept which was revived by Gassendi in the seventeenth century. Its rival was anti-scientific and mystical. It diverted enquiry from the observation of nature to the duty of man. It was preoccupied with the good life, with the soul and with the hereafter. It began with the Eleatics and the Pythagoreans. It gave birth to the school of Plato; and its influence survived long after the extinction of Hellenic civilization. Through Philo Platonism transmitted the Logos to the Nazarenes, and at a later date the neoplatonists equipped the Church with the apparatus of the Trinitarian controversy. It completed its contribution to Western culture in the Council of Trent, when the mystery of human life, death and duty were placed for all time on a firm foundation of deductive reasoning.

The success of Platonism was assured by the powerlessness of Greek materialism to satisfy the requirements of Greek politics. The plain man wanted to know whether the wise man will obey the laws, if he knows that he will not be found out? With transparent honesty Epicurus could only reply that a simple answer is difficult to find. The benign and tolerant humanism which Epicurus grafted on the soil prepared by the atomists was ill suited to flourish in the stern climate of the military state. Like holism, Aristotle’s system was a shrewd blending of science and statesmanship. It enabled its author to combine a personal predilection for natural history with a political partiality for slavery.

Aristotle borrowed from Plato the doctrine which identifies the φυσις, or real nature with the best or most normal condition of a thing. He rejected the respect for mathematics which Plato borrowed from the Pythagoreans, and incorporated Plato’s teleology in his theory of the physical world. One disastrous effect of this may perhaps be seen in the neglect and preservation of more ancient work. Empedocles is known to have made observations on respiration and the movement of the blood. It would seem that he had recourse to experiment of a crude kind. One fragment of his writings contains a hint that he came very near to anticipating Torricelli and Harvey. The details have been lost. Empedocles also put forward a theory of vision. He held that the eye contains fire. Sight is produced when the fire within the eye goes forth to meet the object. A hypothesis so well adapted to the view which interprets life by “correlating the initiation of the activity with its end” was, as might be expected, immortalized by Plato to the calamity of physical and physiological enquiry. Science had a long road to traverse before men learned the truth of Nietzsche’s statement that “the most valuable knowledge is always discovered last, but the most valuable knowledge consists of methods.”

The fundamental incompatibility of the naturalistic and Platonic attitude to the Nature of Life is illustrated by the following passage from the writings of a contemporary philosopher, Professor Wildon Carr:

“It is wholly inadequate to classify natural objects into the inert
and the living, into objects which are not responsive and objects
which are responsive to external impressions, and then to seek to
specify the property or character which differentiates the one
class from the other. Life is a perfectly definite and distinctive
phenomenon. It is not a thing, neither is it the character of
a thing. It is a purposive activity exercised within clearly
ascertainable limits and having a definite range. I use the term
purposive without any implication of awareness. Living activity
is purposive in the meaning that it can only be understood by
correlating the initiation of the activity with the end. The nature
of the activity is plainly recognizable, however difficult it may
be to conceive the agent, agents or agency which the activity
implies.... Life is individual: it exists only in living beings,
and _each living being is indivisible, a whole not constituted of
parts_.”

The concluding remarks of this passage are somewhat reminiscent of the Athanasian creed, the germs of which were actually derived from the neoplatonists. It displays the sterilizing influence of the Platonic teaching in a peculiarly explicit form. If the words quoted in italics were actually true, experiments carried out daily by medical students in physiological and pharmacological laboratories would be impossible. The physiologist takes the living machine to pieces and studies the properties of its several parts. The experimental embryologist can put it together again. Ross Harrison grafts the head end of a tadpole of one species on to the tail end of a tadpole of another species. The progress of modern biology has been made possible by the implicit rejection of the attitude which Professor Wildon Carr advocates; and this is not merely true of the growth of experimental physiology as a quantitative science. In our generation Bergson has rehabilitated the evolutionary doctrine in teleological language. Its history very clearly shows that the rise of the evolutionary hypothesis in its modern form is traceable to the liberation of biological enquiry from Aristotelean teleology. Two centuries of research, fertilized by the experimental temper which Vesalius reintroduced into the study of medicine, paved the way for a new school of naturalists in the eighteenth century. Ray and Linnæus took up the comparative study of animal life where Aristotle had left it. At a later date Cuvier, Milne Edwardes and Owen founded a school of comparative anatomy which--unlike post-Darwinian morphology--made the issue of experiment the final court of appeal. It was thus that Darwin and Wallace brought to the discussion of Man’s place in Nature a mass of new data, accumulated in the process of displacing the teleological bias under whose influence Greek biology steadily declined. It is futile to blame Aristotle for the influence which his particular form of compromise exerted on the history of biology. In Aristotle’s time it was impossible to say: “Here is a property of living matter, the teleological attitude leads us to make such and such predictions; quantitative analysis leads us to contrary conclusions: let us submit the merits of the two methods to the issue of experiment.” Aristotelian biology was not an experimental science.

When Aristotle infused into Greek biology the teleology of Platonism, natural science had already progressed as far as it was destined to advance without coming into conflict with teleological presumptions; but the inevitability of the conflict was not yet apparent, and does not emerge as a clearly defined issue in Greek philosophy. Greek materialism, like modern science, was the offspring of secular curiosity. For this reason it is easy to trace the germs of modern hypotheses in the speculations of the ancients. It is more difficult to determine how far such analogies are merely verbal. The extent to which the Greeks had recourse to experiment has given rise to lively controversy. We are more familiar with their beliefs about nature than with the evidence on which they relied. To reconstruct the scientific knowledge of Anaximander and Empedocles from the fragments of their writings which remain is a task no less formidable than that of a future historian who has nothing but the torn pages of a Harmsworth encyclopædia to provide evidence of contemporary science. The fact remain that the scientific knowledge of the ancients lacks two features which are highly characteristic of modern enquiry. Greek science was static. Having no means of measuring short intervals of time, the Greek could make little use of dynamical notions. The mathematical technique for dealing conveniently with dynamical calculations was not evolved until Greek geometry was supplemented by the universal arithmetic of the Arabs. Galileo’s dynamics was the death-blow to Aristotelian teleology. To the Greeks time relations were philosophical enigmas. They had not as yet become objects of scientific enquiry. Modern mechanistic biology lays emphasis on _process_. Greek biology was still dominated by _structure_. This preoccupation gave rise to the distinction between form and substance which assumes a prominent place in the Aristotle of the schoolmen, and persisted in modern science, until the dynamical concept of electromagnetic mass was put forward. A second characteristic which distinguishes contemporary science from the natural philosophy of the Greeks has been emphasized less by historians of science. This may be because astronomy and mechanics were developed by the school of Alexandria in close association with mathematics. That brilliant but short-lived phase in the science of antiquity was post-Aristotelian. Astronomy was the only branch of natural science which had attained the precision of measurement in Aristotle’s time.

The distinction between Aristotelian vitalism and the modern biological standpoint is most apparent in the attitude which Aristotle adopted to quantitative investigation. “Mathematical accuracy of language,” he declares, “is not to be required in all things, but in those things that do not involve any connexion with matter. Wherefore such is not the natural (alternatively _physical_) mode of discovering truth, for perhaps the whole of Nature involves matter. Therefore first must we investigate what Nature is. For in this way also will it be evident about what only natural science is conversant, and whether it is the province of one science or many to speculate into causes and first principles.” This passage occurs in the first book of the Metaphysics. There are other passages in which the same point of view is expressed. They show conclusively that Aristotle was not content with ignoring the connexion between mathematics and science. He definitely asserted that the quantitative study of natural phenomena is not the correct one. In this he went further than Plato. While Plato despised the study of physics and biology, he recognized the vital dependence of astronomy on mathematics and valued its pursuit. The standpoint which Aristotle adopted is comprehensible. His interest in nature was mainly that of the naturalist. He did not study living creatures in the belief that by so doing he would be able to predict their behaviour. That possibility only emerged into prominence when Lavoisier and Laplace brought the thermometer and the balance to the study of respiration. By then the spectacular progress of physics had necessitated a new adjustment of the claims of moral and natural philosophy. The philosophy of Descartes liberated biology from developing within the limitations prescribed by the Aristotelian system.

Two events contributed significantly to the situation which Descartes faced at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The period which intervened between Aristotle and Descartes witnessed the rise of Christianity and the origin of a new cultural synthesis within the world of Islam. At Alexandria natural science and mathematics still flourished, when Christianity became the official faith of the Roman Empire. Five centuries after the death of Aristotle Diophantus made what seems to have been the first definite contribution to the development of algebraical analysis. Alexandrian science came to an end when “on a fatal day in the holy season of Lent,” Hypatia the expositor of Diophantus “was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the reader and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics.” Two centuries later what was spared by the religion of Cyril was consigned to the flames by the victorious armies of Islam.

While Christianity and Mohammedanism were competing to appease the deeper needs of mankind, the genius of a dark-skinned people was preparing the stage for a rebirth of European culture. Before the destruction of a second library of Alexandria the Greek learning had filtered into the middle East through the hospitality which the Persian court extended in turn to the banished Platonists, the Jews and the heretic Nestorians. In India Brahmagupta and his successors had applied themselves to the same problems which Diophantus had assailed. Half a century before the foundation of the University of Baghdad Hindu astronomical tables and the rhetorical algebra of the far East had been introduced into Persia. By the beginning of the ninth century the works of Ptolemy, Euclid, Hippocrates and Aristotle had been translated into Arabic. At the end of the tenth century the Moorish culture was firmly established in Europe. In the universities of Cordova, Seville and Toledo, the study of medicine and mathematics flourished side by side. The medical schools of Italy and France were outposts of the Moorish culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Moors extended the Alexandrian pharmacopeias; and advanced the study of anatomy. Jewish missionaries of the Moorish culture brought the tradition of dissection into Italy. From Arabic manuscripts Italy first made contact with the resources of Greek science. Arabic learning transmitted the texts from which ecclesiasticism imbibed its taste for metaphysics, and at the same time contributed two influences subversive to the Aristotelian system. It gave birth to chemistry as an experimental science, and it developed the beginnings of syncopated algebra. The invention of algebra made possible the efflorescence of physics when Greek geometry had long since completed its task as the midwife of mathematical astronomy.

From the fact-loving temper of Aristotle the naturalist Arabic curiosity had absorbed all that could be used as a basis for scientific enquiry. In the Sorbonne the Platonic ingredients of his system brought fresh grist to the mill of theological controversy. By seeking for “causes and first principles,” Aristotle in his own words had made philosophy the “divine science.” As the divine science it was pressed into the service of orthodox theology and the Protestant revolt against ecclesiastical authority. During the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries the resources of the Eastern Empire were ransacked for the rhetoricians and sophists neglected by the empirical disposition of Arabic scholarship. The political speculations of the ancients became the rationale of Protestant democracy. As the influence of Platonism on science succumbed to the success of the new experimental and quantitative methods which were gaining ground in physics, classical humanism completed the divorce of moral and natural philosophy by elevating the authority of Plato in politics: but before classical humanism had gained ascendancy in the mediæval universities, an ascendancy which became a monopoly in the grammar schools, Arab science had implanted in the oldest seats of European learning a seed destined in the fullness of time to challenge not merely the authority of church councils but the authority of print, to place the authority of experience above the authority of the written word, as Protestantism had placed the authority of the written word above the authority of church councils.

Plato would have had little use for physicists in his Utopia. To outlaw science was the last thing which Protestant rulers were prepared to do. The great navigations had made science a necessity to the mercantile interests. So long as they refrained from making themselves a nuisance, like Servetus whose inability to envisage the Trinity in its correct numerical proportions earned for him a harsher fate than that of Galileo, scientists must be left alone. The world had outgrown the Aristotelian compromise. The time had come to replace it by some new device.

The Cartesian philosophy met the new situation by defining separate spheres of autonomy for the scientist and the metaphysician. It did not attempt to mix metaphysics and science in a uniform system of nature. With his propositions and demonstrations “which establish the existence of God and the distinction between the mind and body of man disposed in geometrical order” Descartes stumbled upon the felicitous notion that God ordained the investigation of nature according to strictly mechanistic principles. “Now that I know him,” he discloses in Meditation V, “I possess the means of acquiring a perfect knowledge respecting innumerable matters, as well relative to God Himself and other intellectual objects as to corporeal nature, in so far as it is the object of pure mathematics.”

So piety prescribes that the scientist, contrary to the admonition of Aristotle, must apply mathematics to the investigation of nature. By the same process of reasoning or inspiration Descartes arrives at the conclusion that teleological hypotheses in natural science are an impious abrogation of the prerogatives of Deity. “Likewise finally,” he asserts in the _Principles of Philosophy_, “we will not seek reasons of natural things from the end which God or nature proposed to himself in their creation (i.e. final causes), for we ought not to presume so far as to think that we are sharers in the counsels of Deity, but, considering him as the efficient cause of all things, let us endeavour to discover by the natural light which he has planted in us, applied to those of his attributes of which he has been willing we should have some knowledge, what must be concluded regarding those effects we perceive by our senses; bearing in mind however what has been already said, that we must only confide in this natural light so long as nothing contrary to its dictates is revealed by God himself.”

As Descartes was prepared to concede to mechanistic science the entire brute creation, the Cartesian framework provided plenty of latitude for biological investigation. Descartes stimulated experimental physiology by his own ingenious speculations; and his influence on physiology survived after it had been superseded by later philosophical systems. In biology the Cartesian tradition has fallen into discredit through the rise of evolutionary ideas. The evolutionists persisted in following “the natural light;” and their theological contemporaries maintained that it led them to conclusions contrary to what had been “revealed by God Himself.” Since then biologists have been faced with the alternative of pressing forward to a more radically mechanistic conception of life, or abandoning it altogether. I have called the extension of the mechanistic conception the _publicist standpoint_ in contradistinction to _holism_, the most recent compromise.

In _Science and the Modern World_ Dr. Whitehead calls the period immediately before the Renaissance the Age of Reason. That which followed is the Age of Faith. The Age of Argument and the Age of Confidence might perhaps describe the difference in more significant terms. Confidence in the method of science has grown gradually with the expansion of civilization. What is called modern science has arisen, because innumerable, at first independent, lines of enquiry have coalesced. It has not come into being because the men who have pursued these separate but converging paths have had any general theory about nature as a whole, purposeful or otherwise. Curiosity has always induced some men to speculate without investigating, others to investigate without speculating beyond their terms of reference, and a good many to do both. Aristotle was neither the first nor the last scientist to write a natural history and a volume of Gifford lectures. Newton divided his time between gravitation and the prophecies of Daniel. Faraday elaborated a theory of the ether and advocated the tenets of Sandemanism. Aristotle’s natural history, Newton’s gravitation and Faraday’s ether were not the philosophical complements of their respective ethical, political or devotional beliefs. Aristotle dissected animals, Newton gazed at the stars, Faraday experimented with his electrical machine, because they were interested in living creatures and the heavenly bodies and electrical phenomena.

The pursuit of science has its personal impulse in curiosity and its social impulse in the power which science confers. The Greeks accepted or rejected as illusory the evidence of their senses. In Aristotle’s system science does not beg for a philosophical sanction. It was reserved for the piety of Descartes to introduce the singular idea that the scientist requires a licence to practice signed and stamped by the metaphysician. The idea that science requires a metaphysical justification has been revived by Dr. Whitehead who adopts a novel, and I think incorrect, view of Hume’s contribution to philosophy. When the scientist enters the field of contemporary philosophical controversy, he is confronted with a jargon whose existence has very little historical or logical connexion with the assumptions on which he works. It is not surprising that he remains, in the words of Dr. Whitehead, “blandly indifferent” to the arguments with which Hume refuted those notions of causality and inference which traditional philosophers have chosen to regard as the justification of science. The important fact about Hume’s argument is that he refuted the pretensions of moral philosophy by the same arguments which demolished the irrelevant dogmas which natural philosophy inherited from the age of scholasticism.

Starting from a purely introspective basis Descartes attempts to find a justification for the growing confidence of mankind in the testimony of the senses. The subjective empiricism of Locke is still groping after the same solution. Hume pursues this method to its bitter conclusion; and shows that it led to complete scepticism. He proves to his own satisfaction that the method of introspection cannot be made the basis of socially communicable knowledge. The theory of a public world builds upon that foundation, by examining the characteristics of questions to which a socially communicable answer is possible. The strength of Hume’s position is more apparent in our own generation than it was at the time, when he wrote. Our expectation of living has increased as we have learned to worry less about the good life and more about the good drain. That the questions with which science deals are legitimate objects of enquiry and that the method which science adopts is the most satisfactory way of answering them is tacitly accepted by everybody who avails himself of the amenities of a railway time table, the bioscope, the telegraph office, the diphtheria vaccine, the ocean liner and the air mail. If we do not attempt to answer the questions which perplexed Socrates, it is because we have at our disposal a vastly greater body of material to guide us in determining what characteristics of a question make it suitable for being asked. We cannot say whether the wise man will obey the laws, if he thinks that he will not be found out; but we are less interested in knowing the answer, because we know that it is highly probable that his finger prints will be traced. Detective fiction has familiarized us with other devices which have replaced the deathbed confession of the repentant atheist.

Hume applies the Cartesian method, demonstrates its sterility, and arrives at this attitude which he states with no uncertain sound in a passage which occurs at the conclusion of the essay on “The Sceptical or Academical Philosophy.” “When we run over libraries persuaded of their principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames. For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

In Hume’s scepticism natural science is no longer the man with the muck rake, and metaphysics is no longer the divine science. Kant’s critique now appears to salvage supernaturalism by a compromise in which the Cartesian method is reversed, and a greater confidence in scientific method is evident. He invokes science to save the soul of man. Newton’s system had made space and time the basic concepts of science. The physiology of Kant’s generation had not extended its enquiries beyond the range of the five senses with which the Greek empiricists were familiar. Kant seized upon this limitation of eighteenth-century biology to substantiate the contention that science draws upon information which is independent of sensual experience. In Kant’s idealism space and time, the basic concepts of science, appear as purely mental constructions. This was not a new point of view; but the prominence it assumed was new, and resulted from the character of contemporary science and the conclusions which Hume had advanced.

Volumes of speculation on the relation of time and space to sensual experience have been written both by physicists and metaphysicians on the assumption that the human frame possesses no means of recording its own rhythms and its orientation to the earth’s gravitational field. Mach is the only natural philosopher who has hinted at the possibility that the Kantian argument might be re-examined from the modern biological standpoint. Modern physiology is not circumscribed like the physiology of Kant by the five senses. It recognizes ten or eleven distinct types of receptor elements in the human body. Two of these are immensely significant to the attitude which we adopt to Kant’s criticism of Hume’s position. In 1828 the experiments of Flourens first demonstrated that animals are receptive to the influence of gravity. The receptive area in our own bodies is located in that part of the internal ear, sometimes called the labyrinthine organ. Just as removal of the eye prevents a fish from responding to its background by colour change, destruction of the labyrinthine organs abolishes its characteristic orientation in space, when swimming. We do not say that a cat falls on all fours, because it has a priori knowledge of space relations. It falls on all fours, because the orientation of its body as a whole is recorded by its labyrinthine organ, and the appropriate muscles are brought into play by reflex action. The possibility that orientation of individual members with reference to one another might be regulated by a self-recording arrangement is a comparatively recent discovery. Sherrington has shown that the tendons and muscles possess special structures which he calls proprioceptors. They respond to the stretching of the muscles. By virtue of those muscular rhythms which Galileo employed as his standard of reference in devising the first clock, the human body is itself a self-recording timepiece. Pavlov does not appeal to a priori knowledge of time to interpret the interval which elapses between the ringing of a bell and the secretion of saliva in a dog.

The belated discovery of the labyrinthine organ and the proprioceptors is easy to understand. We live in a world in which day and night follow one another. We can close our eyes and darken our vision. The eyes are exposed to view. Their connexion with light calls for no elaborate demonstration. The labyrinthine organ and the proprioceptors are only accessible to dissection or to the microscope. We can never get away from the influence of gravity or the rhythms of our own bodies. What we never miss, we fail to notice. This peculiarity of our corporeal nature gives a peculiar and fallacious plausibility to Kant’s contention that we can take away from a body its colour, weight or smell, all of which can be “referred to mere sensuous experience,” while “the space which it occupied still remains and this is utterly impossible to annihilate in thought.” To annihilate space is not an impossible feat of imagination for the modern biologist. In Rupert Brooke’s poem the heaven of fishes harbours the worm that never dies. If the metaphor had been pushed a little further, it would have transpired that the philosophy of fishes might well contain many axioms that are omitted in the Kantian critique. Fishes in general have no eyelids. They can be kept in a uniformly illuminated aquarium without the experience of darkness. The sharks and their allies possess a small duct by which the internal ear communicates with the exterior. It would not be an impossible operation to remove and replace the contents of their labyrinthine organs, and render them temporarily indifferent to the earth’s gravitational field. A philosophical fish confined from birth to a uniformly illuminated aquarium and subjected from time to time to this simple operation, might conceivably invert the Kantian argument. He would be shocked by the gross materialism of an undulatory theory of light; but he would be willing to be convinced about any quaint views upon space which the piscine physicists propounded.

§3

Kant’s doctrine that space and time are concepts necessarily independent of one another and of sensory experience has only come into conflict with the fruits of scientific enquiry in our own generation. In spite of this the influence of Hume has steadily increased and the influence of Kant has declined during the intervening period. Psychology, brought into existence by Kant’s appeal for a science which would define the characteristics of a priori knowledge, has betrayed its parent. In every department of human enquiry investigators are asking, does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number, does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact or experience? Mr. Bertrand Russell, an impenitent advocate of a priori knowledge in his capacity as a mathematician and an uncompromising empiricist in his capacity as an educationist, tells us that “logic must no more admit a unicorn than can zoology, for logic is concerned with the real world just as truly as zoology.” Dr. MacDougall, the most vigorous contemporary critic of the behaviourist standpoint, is devoting his energies to the breeding of genetically pure stocks of Wistar Institute white rats. A professor of political science in London University so far departs from the traditions of his discipline as to collect statistics on the number of hours which members of Parliament actually devote to their democratic activities. It was said by an old Scots balladmonger, “I care not who makes the nation’s laws, while I sing her songs.” When the modern descendant of Democritus is assured that materialism is on the decline, he may well reply in a similar vein. We all behave as if we were behaviourists nowadays.

Between Hume and Darwin, Adam Smith, Malthus, Quételet and Marx sowed the seeds of the behaviourist standpoint in the soil of the humanities. Darwin’s _Descent of Man_ precipitated a new phase in the revolution which was replacing classical humanism by a humanism which draws its inspiration from the success of natural science and looks to the scientist to supply it with the first principles of method. It was no longer possible to challenge the claim of science to the study of the brute creation. The recognition of man as a by-product of the same secular agencies undermined the last defence of the metaphysician. Hegelian philosophy was a forlorn and belated attempt to lock the stable doors after the horses had long since escaped. The piety of Descartes had conceded that animals are automata. The brutal candour of Darwin emphasized in a new light the fact that man is an animal. It was fitting that William James should arise in the fullness of time to proclaim the new gospel that philosophers are also men. If the full force of this devastating sequence was not apparent to the pragmatic apologists of the Pelagian heresy, it has acquired a new, and, I believe, epochal significance through the breakdown of the Cartesian distinction between reflex and voluntary activity in modern physiology.

To-day the influence of Hume’s empiricism and Darwin’s doctrine of descent can be seen in every branch of social enquiry. In history the materialistic bias is evident in the writings of those who would be least willing to commit themselves to economic determinism as a general hypothesis of social development. Economics has completely severed its moorings to moral philosophy, and proudly boasts that it is an ethically neutral science. The genetic aspect of human behaviour is recognized in new endowments to encourage the pursuit of social biology. If social psychology has hitherto remained immune to the influence of modern research on animal behaviour, it borrowed its equipment of instincts from the discredited speculations of the selectionists. The humanities have passed out of the hands of the grammarians in the higher seats of learning. Before another generation has passed the accomplished fact will be officially sanctioned in the earlier stages of education.

In its long apprenticeship to theological dogma classical humanism has created a type of philosophy which is inimical to the temper of scientific enquiry. This tradition has been perpetuated in our educational system by associating the study of history and human affairs in general with an exclusively linguistic rather than with a scientific training in early life. The belief that philosophy lies outside the province of science and that logic is more fundamental than science has been so thoroughly inculcated by the classical tradition that most men of science accept it with servile complacency. It is not surprising that many of them view with alarm the magnitude of the new territories which scientific method has incorporated within its domain. In every period the birth of a new tradition has made the forces of reaction more stubborn. This fact must be accepted. It is unwise to expect results of far-reaching importance in social science in the immediate future. If astronomy is the most exact of the observational sciences, it is also the oldest. It began in Babylon and Egypt about six thousand years ago. Economists and eugenists who hope to outgrow their phlogiston theories in one generation take an unduly hopeful view of the rapidity of scientific progress. New forms of compromise will come to the rescue of custom thought and power thought, before social science is able to replace the wrong way of asking a question by the right way.

It is highly probable that the next century will witness a consolidation of supernaturalistic tendencies in western Europe. It is legitimate to entertain the possibility that the rival attitude, reinvigorated by fresh triumphs of scientific method in the treatment of human affairs, will revive with greater vitality, if not in our own civilization, in that which takes its place. I am in complete agreement with Dr. Haldane, General Smuts, Professor Eddington and Dr. Whitehead, when they assure us that the materialistic tendency in philosophy, which was gaining ground under Darwin’s influence, is less popular to-day. I venture to interpret the reaction in a way with which they would not agree, and to believe that it has retreated _pour mieux sauter_. The mid-nineteenth century in Great Britain was a period of prosperity and expansion. In Huxley’s generation unbelief was the luxury of a privileged class which was not afraid of the man in the street. The period in which we live is one of ferment and disintegration. In its impetuosity to settle the problems of human conduct, it will not be content to await the slow advance of science. Mechanistic philosophy cannot offer to the privileged a supernatural sanction for the things they value most. It cannot proffer to the unprivileged the shadowy compensation of a world into which the thought of science is unable to penetrate. A mechanistic philosophy might conceivably be popular in a society in which gross inequalities of possession did not exist. To-day it can only flourish among those who have leisure to study, when their privileges are not compromised by social unrest. He who has the temerity to defend the mechanistic position need not expect any laurels from his own generation. He cannot seek sanctuary in the fearless candour of a contemporary Huxley or a contemporary Tyndall. He must extract what comfort he can glean by reflecting that the system of Aristotle triumphed over that of Epicurus, and the thought of the nineteenth century was nearer to Epicurus than to Aristotle. Scanning the new blossoms which have lately been added to the nosegay of philosophic compromise, he will say with Swinburne,

“But for me their new device is barren, the times are bare,
Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that were.”

X. PUBLICITY, REALITY, AND RELIGION

“Conscientiousness in small things, the self-control of the
religious man, was a preparatory school for the scientific
character, as was also, in a very pre-eminent sense, the attitude
of mind which makes a man take problems seriously, irrespective of
what personal advantage he may derive from them.”--Nietzsche, _The
Will to Power_.

§1

Whatever may be said against pragmatism, it served a useful purpose in calling attention to the connexion between people’s temperaments and their philosophies. William James classified philosophers in two genera, the tender-minded and the tough-minded. I believe that there exists a more fundamental distinction between two types which correspond to the introvert and the extrovert of the psychiatrist. Our attitude to the scope of philosophy is determined by whether we take an individualistic or a social view of what constitutes truth. In the one case our canons of logic will be inferred from an examination of the properties of propositions which carry conviction to ourselves individually, in the other by an examination of the properties of propositions which are best equipped to obtain general assent. For this reason I am not convinced that Bertrand Russell is right in thinking that modern logic brings the most devastating criticism to bear on traditional philosophy. Modern logic has not been devised with the aim of achieving the same results as those which constitute the goal of traditional philosophers. It is not surprising that traditional philosophers, finding its conclusions unpalatable, remain unconverted. Modern logic is the offspring of mathematics, and mathematics has developed in intimate association with science. For the last seven hundred years traditional logic and introspective philosophy have been no less intimately associated with theology. Hence has arisen the arrogant assumption that on account of its subject matter introspective philosophy is more fundamental than science. There is no reason why we should regard it in this light. If philosophy is knowledge, it is presumably something transmissible by discourse. Otherwise it is difficult to formulate any distinction between knowledge and mere opinion or superstition. We cannot therefore discuss knowledge without taking into account the people who share it. The most important characteristic of scientific beliefs is their communicability. Those who take the social as opposed to the individualistic attitude to truth will embark on their adventures by examining the characteristics of scientific judgment. To any one who is not an incorrigible individualist the results of scientific enquiry must establish the anatomy of philosophy. Whether I am by temperament an individualist or otherwise I am forced to submit to the discipline of discourse in practice. Let us suppose that two individuals N and M are engaged in public discourse concerning the Nature of Life. N states the proposition “I (N) am a conscious being.” M states “I (M) am a conscious being.” The only neutral ground for the discussion of the two statements is the more general statement “N and M are conscious beings.” In the nomenclature suggested elsewhere in these essays this neutral ground is the resultant of the public components of the two original statements which N and M make. Personal statements may be looked upon as complex variables. Philosophy is the technique of operating with the real (public) part of such statements and separating them from the imaginary (i.e. private) part. This distinction is not abolished by the fact that the temperaments of some philosophers lead them to apply the term _real_ to the private and _imaginary_ to the public component. The fact remains that in public discourse we have to operate with the public component. The public statement “N and M are conscious beings” implies our ability to define characteristics of behaviour which are denoted by the adjective _conscious_. This task which now lies within the scope of biological investigation refines the publicity in the concept of consciousness. For the performance of public discussion the term “_I_” is a member of the class denoted by “_Man_.” Anything implied in public discussion by the statement “I am conscious, etc.,” is included in the statement “Man is a conscious animal.” The significance of anything which cannot be subjected to this limitation is a purely _private_ matter. From this it follows that a discussion of the Nature of Life is complete, when we have taken into account the characteristics of conscious behaviour. On the contrary view the propositions of philosophy are not necessarily communicable.

The theory of a _public world_ suggested in a previous essay on the Nature of Life corresponds very closely with the attitude adopted by Poincaré in the following passage which occurs in his _Foundations of Science_:

“Sensations are therefore intransmissible or rather all that is
pure quality in them is intransmissible and forever impenetrable.
But it is not the same with relations between these sensations.
From this point of view all that is objective is devoid of all
quality and is pure relation.... Nothing therefore will have
objective value except what is transmissible by discourse...”

So far as it goes there is nothing essentially new in this statement. It represents an attitude common among thoughtful people with a scientific training. Professor Eddington is in agreement with it when he writes:

“For reasons which are generally admitted, though I should not
like to have to prove that they are conclusive, I grant your
consciousness equal status with my own; and I use this second-hand
part of my consciousness to ‘put myself in your place.’ Accordingly
my subject of study becomes differentiated into the contents of
many consciousnesses, each constituting a _view-point_. There then
arises the problem of combining the view-points, and it is through
this that the external world of physics arises. Much that is in any
one consciousness is individual, much is apparently alterable by
volition; but there is a stable element which is common to other
consciousness. That common element we desire to study to describe
as fully and accurately as possible, and to discover the laws by
which it combines now with one view point, now with another. This
common element cannot be placed in one man’s consciousness rather
than in another’s; it must be in neutral ground--an external
world... The external world of physics is thus a symposium of the
worlds presented to different view-points...” (p. 283, _The Nature
of the Physical World_).

How then does it come about that “a universal Mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory”? (p. 338). Or again, how are we to draw the conclusion “from those arguments from modern science that religion first became possible for a reasonable scientific man about the year 1927”? I think that we may possibly find an answer to these questions by bearing in mind that Professor Eddington’s external world is the external world of physics rather than the public world of physics plus biology. Throughout his exposition he assumes that biologists are still committed to the dualistic standpoint of the Cartesian tradition. Thus he states: “a mental decision to turn right or turn left starts one of two alternative sets of impulses along the nerves to the feet. At some brain centre the cause of behaviour of certain atoms or elements of the physical world is directly determined for them by the mental decision...” (p. 312). It is not clear why there is in what Professor Eddington calls the “mystical experiences” of different people sufficient “neutral ground” to provide the basis of a symposium with as universal a sanction as that of the external world of physics. That after all is implicit in our notion of religion. It is not difficult to see why he finds no objection to placing his external world under the direction of a universal mind, since he assumes that the teleology, which has been abandoned in dealing with non-living matter, is quite indispensable in dealing with living matter.