Chapter XII: Part III: Holism and the Publicist Standpoint in Philosophy (3)

To a very large extent the construction of our syllabuses will determine the method of presentation. The cultural value of all science teaching is at present hampered by a failure to emphasize the logical development of its subject matter. In the teaching of biology the facts of animal structure should only be presented in so far as they illustrate, and are strictly relevant to, an understanding of the characteristic properties of living matter. It is still customary in universities to begin the study of the anatomy of the frog by describing its external features. This is a purely architectural attitude to adopt towards an animal. If we must start with the external features of the frog, let us first study some characteristic manifestations of its ever-changing reactivity, such as colour response or mucus secretion, and having defined the experimental conditions which determine these reactions, proceed to examine their structural basis in as much detail as is relevant to our purpose. It is essential that continuity of theme should be developed in relation to a consideration of the organism as a dynamic system.

The teaching of biology for its cultural value also implies the need for the fullest co-ordination with the teaching of chemistry and physics. As every educationist will agree, this is desirable not only from the cultural standpoint, but to get the best practical results. Here there should be no difficulty for the scientifically trained teacher. Such simple demonstrations as the experiments of Lavoisier and Priestley on respiration, or of the action of a digestive ferment, will reinforce the teaching of chemistry and may even quicken an interest in chemistry and physics, where it had not existed before. If an elementary introduction to Mendel’s laws illustrated on a comparatively inexpensive scale with poultry be included in the later stages of a school course, the teacher could take the opportunity of experimentally demonstrating the elementary laws of probability. This would provide a helpful introduction to a branch of algebra which in my opinion is relegated to an unnecessarily and regrettably late stage in mathematical education. Being the youngest born, biology in the schools is the Cinderella of the sciences. Some of our headmasters appear to think that anyone is good enough to teach it. It is obvious that desirable results will not be accomplished, if biology is taught by teachers with an exclusive training in descriptive biology unfortified by the study of physics and chemistry.

The æsthetic satisfaction derived from contemplating Man’s place in Nature will itself endow the study of biology with cultural value for a few people. But as a school subject biology can make a more general appeal to consideration as the basis of a new humanism. Few things in human life, if any, are the source of more universal inconvenience than sex. The difficulty of satisfying our appetite for food does not present any special difficulty so long as society provides us with the opportunity for work with adequate remuneration. In the domain of sex the difficulty of accommodating physiological necessity to social convenience extends to all ranks of society. In the nursery rhymes of childhood, in the fiction on which our adolescence is fed we are accustomed to romantic expectations which permanently unfit us for the realities of sexual experience. In adult life religious teaching and the legal code reinforce the magical view of sexual behaviour. Even among educated people few possess a secular vocabulary with which to discuss sex intelligently. It would be better for a child never to have heard of Plato than to reach puberty without a scientific knowledge of the nature of sex. If the introduction of biological instruction into the school sweeps away the holistic idea of romantic love, and helps us to envisage the difficult problem of congenial mating as a complex of diverse and separable issues, it will achieve the greatest reform which has hitherto been made in the educational process.

§4

Science will not occupy its proper place in cultural education so long as the scientific man himself is a man of narrow intellectual interests. In the university the task of educating a scientifically trained student with a broader outlook than we are accustomed to expect must begin in the way we teach science. To a minor extent this will be encouraged by breaking up our existing -ologies into smaller units. A biologist should not be prevented from studying physical chemistry to an advanced stage because he has neither time nor inclination to devote to a tedious routine of analysis devised for those who are going to take positions in dye-works. A physicist should be permitted to know something about the nature of biological enquiry without wasting half a year cutting hand-razor sections of stems and learning the names of pressed flowers, fish-bones and beetles. But the real romance of science, the realization of scientific understanding as a great mental adventure, will only be achieved when our teaching of science is brought into much closer relation with the study of history.

There are several good reasons why the historical background of a scientific problem should always be brought into sharp relief in university and for that matter in school teaching. The student of mathematics who in the course of a single introductory lecture on the calculus completes the differentiation of the function _x^n_ might be encouraged by the knowledge that he has covered in an hour a problem which took the generation of Barrow, Newton and Leibniz about forty years to solve. I venture to think that the introduction of a little history would make the first steps to algebraic symbolism more interesting at the school stage. At present it is usual to teach one subject algebra, in which certain conventions are laid down like the rules of bridge, and another subject geometry, in which the pupil learns at a comparatively advanced stage that the proposition _a(b + c) = ab + ac_ physically corresponds to a statement about the addition of areas of rectangular figures. The child is rarely, if ever, told how, from the discussions of such geometrical problems, the Hindu rhetorical algebraists of the first six centuries A.D. were led to deduce certain rules governing the properties of numbers, and how subsequently the Arabs simplified these rules by the development of a symbolic shorthand. Most elementary textbooks of physics contain _ad hoc_ proofs of certain verifiable consequences of the inverse square law in electrostatics and magnetism. Why anyone should ever have attempted to investigate the applicability of the inverse square law to electrostatic and magnetic attractions is rarely divulged. A little information about Newton’s interpretation of Kepler’s laws and the development of the theory of gravitational attractions subsequent to Newton’s work would suffice to show how natural it was that Cavendish, Coulomb and Gauss should test out the inverse square law in electricity and magnetism before exploring other possibilities.

Sometimes for an entirely different reason a knowledge of scientific history will assist the teacher to a clearer exposition. The logical technique initially employed in elaborating new scientific generalizations is often capable of a much greater measure of simplification. The teacher who understands the history of his own branch of science will be more likely to realize this. It is generally held that electricity is a suitable branch of science to teach at the school stage. Electricity is much more directly related to the interests of the average boy than any other branch of physical science. In everyday life it is the phenomena of current electricity which we encounter chiefly. Historically, current electricity was not subjected to exact treatment till the phenomena of electrostatic attraction and of magnetism had been considerably elaborated with the aid of mathematical conventions drawn at first from the theory of gravitational attraction and later from the study of hydrodynamics. It thus happened that Ampere defined the unit of current in terms of magnetic potential. For this reason textbooks of physics usually introduce current electricity after a preliminary treatment of frictional electricity and magnetism. To-day the international unit of current is based on electrolysis. The chemical definition of current involves nothing more than the use of simple proportion. Given a generator and a chemical unit of current the definition of resistance follows empirically from studying changes in the dimensions and materials of the circuit. The idea of electromotive force can be deduced by studying the effect of changing the generator or tapping off current from different parts of a fixed circuit. Ohm’s law then emerges self-evidently in the course of the enquiry. At no point is it necessary to introduce difficult ideas imported from magnetism and beyond the range of the pupil’s mathematical knowledge. In testing out Ohm’s law, in measuring electromotive force or resistance, the galvanometer is only used as a null-point instrument. For an intelligent grasp of the meaning of current, potential and resistance it is therefore only requisite to know that magnets exist and that a suspended magnet is deflected in the neighbourhood of a current. Examination syllabuses are customarily constructed on the assumption that it is impossible to teach current electricity without first teaching frictional electricity and magnetism. There is no good reason why frictional electricity and magnetism should be introduced at an early stage. The only reason why the fundamental ideas of current electricity are made to appear so formidable is to be found in the history of the subject. The teacher who knows the history of his subject thoroughly will be more likely to realize this.

The teaching of current electricity illustrates the possibility of co-ordination in science teaching in the school. Faraday’s laws of electrolysis are generally demonstrated at a fairly early stage in the teaching of chemistry. At this point the definition of the electric current and its measurement is most appropriately introduced. In a school where biology is taught a physical model will prove valuable to demonstrate the effect of fluid friction on the flow of liquids in explaining why blood spurts from an artery and trickles from a vein. By what Dr. Wrinch calls the principle of true analogy the same mode may be used to illustrate the ideas of potential, current and resistance.

But the fundamental importance of the historical method in science teaching lies in the fact that no perspective of the relative significance of different types of scientific hypothesis, and no realization of the intellectual potentialities inherent in a scientific generalization, can be obtained without a knowledge of the kind of intellectual difficulties that new scientific ideas met with when they were first formulated. Half-hearted attempts are made to introduce historical information into scientific textbooks. They usually lay more emphasis on the outstanding contributions of individual men of genius than upon the development of ideas. If historical information is only used as a means of promoting ancestor worship, it does more harm than good. Histories of science are not invariably written by men who have a clear perspective of the general intellectual, and it might be added economic, tendencies of the periods with which they are dealing. For that reason they fail to inspire a critical and enquiring attitude in the reader. Scientific enquiry is essentially progressive. Yet scientific study does not invariably produce a progressive intellectual outlook. It is, I believe, because so few who study science attempt to envisage the generalizations of their subject in their historical perspective, that the product of a scientific type of education is often a more conservative type than the historian or even the classical humanist.

A knowledge of the historical background of science is a necessary prerequisite to an apprehension of science as an intellectual adventure and a challenge to traditional ideas. To possess such an historical background necessitates a knowledge of human history as well as a knowledge of science. The creation of a new humanism based on the claims of natural science is a task which will require a reorientation of historical and scientific studies throughout the educational system. In the school this task is being simplified by the revolt against a tradition which laid too much emphasis on purely national issues. Teachers of history are ceasing to believe that children should be taught to draw maps of the battles of Oudenarde and Malplaquet. The history of ideas is beginning to assume more prominence than the technicalities of military strategy.

In a few universities departments have been founded with the aim of studying the history of science. There are at present all too few scientists who like Dr. Singer are capable of promoting a deeper knowledge of the progress of science. The history of science is not a history of pure deduction. It is not a meaningless incident that Leeuwenhoek, a Hollander, used pepper suspensions to make the first cultures of micro-organisms. It is not a mere coincidence that Leeuwenhoek and Hartsoeker simultaneously discovered the spermatozoon. The first microscope was the signal of a new era in biological science. The invention of the microscope followed shortly after Descartes formulated the laws of refraction of light. It is a task for the historian of science to place this sequence in its proper relation to the interests stimulated by the great navigations, and the struggle for sea-power. A great measure of encouragement to the study of the history of science in the university would, I believe, infuse new ideas into the study of both history and science. It would also re-establish a vital relation between philosophy and science. Instruction in the history of scientific thought could be a nucleus for the synthesis of each fragment of the mosaic of natural knowledge into a coherent picture of the public world as we know it through the medium of scientific enquiry. The philosopher of the future may well be the historian of science.

XII. THE PUBLICIST STANDPOINT AND HOLISM

“I am no coward who would seek in fear
A folk-lore solace or sweet Indian tales:
I know dead men are dead and cannot hear
The singing of a thousand nightingales...”
James Elroy Flecker

§1

The history of philosophy has witnessed a succession of makeshifts to accommodate the utilitarian claims of science and the rival demands of what Robert Briffault appropriately calls custom thought and power thought. At every stage in the advance of scientific knowledge new territories have been wrested from the domain of custom thought and incorporated within the legitimate province of scientific method. Each new annexation has called forth some new compromise to meet the requirements of power thought. Scientific hypothesis is ethically neutral. The politician insists that his theories of human conduct must present an aspect of academic plausibility. Darwin’s doctrine undermined the complacent dualism which had kept philosophy and natural science in water-tight compartments for centuries. It produced a vigorous revolt against supernatural beliefs. In our generation unbelief has spread to all sections of the community with results that are disquieting to those who pursue the study of philosophy in the hope of rationalizing their social prejudices. It is high time for make-believe to stem the tide of unbelief. Inevitably a new compromise emerges to meet the new situation. Beneath its downy wing holism takes all that mechanistic science can offer to industry and all that statesmanship can cull from metaphysics.

“The time has now come,” writes Dr. Haldane, “for giving decent burial to the mechanistic theory of life in the same grave with the vitalistic theory.” I agree with Dr. Haldane in so far as many questions which were contested thirty years ago by those who called themselves mechanists and vitalists have ceased to be regarded as being so fundamental as the contestants imagined or even as being amenable to a final decision. Although the publicist standpoint is admittedly a rehabilitation of the mechanistic theory in the light of those biological developments which have brought into being the behaviourist standpoint in psychology, I have myself preferred to use the term _publicist_ for my own point of view. It is rather tiresome to be forced to answer for every misdemeanour of somebody else who happens to call himself a mechanist or a behaviourist. I can therefore sympathize with Dr. Haldane’s disinclination to accept the vitalistic label for his own beliefs. I differ from Dr. Haldane in thinking that we are any nearer to a final reconciliation between a difference of philosophical outlook that arises from the fact that philosophers have different temperaments. If we have outgrown the differences of statement which underlie the controversy between the older vitalistic and mechanistic standpoints, we have not outgrown the differences of temperament which underlie the existence of the two theories.

I have no disposition to state dogmatically the possibility of explaining all the properties of living matter in whatever physico-chemical terms will be employed two thousand years hence. Still less am I willing to be responsible for the billiard ball theory of matter which both Dr. Haldane and General Smuts have identified with the mechanistic conception of life. I am content to foresee enormous possibilities for the extension of physical interpretations of the properties of living matter. I fail to see how human knowledge will progress on any logical assumption but that implied by the principle of mechanism in its most general terms. I am not able to accept Dr. Haldane’s belief that the traditional methods of physiology are useless in discovering the properties of conscious behaviour, though I should hesitate to predict, except in a very tentative way, how far we shall progress in this direction. If I have seemed to exaggerate the possibilities inherent in the future of biological enquiry, my excuse must be that my aim is to stimulate interest in a new philosophical outlook. If there is such a person as the dogmatic mechanist, his views are not what I imply by the publicist standpoint.

When all this has been said, there still exists a very radical difference between the publicist standpoint and the holistic to which Dr. Haldane subscribes. That difference lies in the fact that the holist denies the possibility that a certain type of logical procedure is capable of establishing relations between certain realms of experience. Nobody denies that such relations remain at present unascertained. Any dogmatism that comes into the discussion is implicit in the holistic theory. Dr. Haldane’s position is not merely a rejection of dogmatic materialism. “I am whole-heartedly in agreement,” he writes, “with General Smuts in believing that anything which can properly be called scientific physiology is impossible apart from the assumption of what he has called holism.”

Of holism as a philosophy of biology enough has been said elsewhere. It contains within it no promise of future progress. Dr. Haldane has endeavoured to persuade us that this is not so. I am not able to follow his argument. We have wasted time, he assures us, in trying to understand the _mechanism_ of kidney secretion, when we should really have been striving to find out how the kidneys... “engage in their function of keeping normal the diffusion pressures of water and various other non-colloid constituents of the blood.” A mechanist, even if we grant that he is misguided and presumptuous in hoping to elucidate the mechanism of secretion, is equally concerned with solving the problem which interests Dr. Haldane. The physiologist who sets out to tackle it will proceed in the same way as a mechanist, whether he calls himself one or not. He will not first postulate a wholeness of the non-colloidal constituents of the blood inexplicable in terms of the individual constituents themselves.

The physiologist studies the properties of the muscle-nerve preparation because he believes, rightly or wrongly, that by so doing he will be guided to interpret how muscles and nerves play their respective parts in the behaviour of a whole animal. Dr. Haldane himself has devoted years of research to elucidating the properties of hæmoglobin. I presume, he has done so in the hope of throwing light on the way in which the supply of oxygen to the tissues is regulated. Most of his brother physiologists would agree that Dr. Haldane’s distinguished researches on the physico-chemical properties of a respiratory pigment, which is a very small part of the economy of an animal, do tell us a good deal about what to expect in the behaviour of the organism as a whole. Whatever Dr. Haldane may say on the platform he is as good a mechanist as anyone else in the laboratory. Throughout a distinguished career of research he has consistently concentrated his attention upon certain limited parts of organisms. His statement that physiology is impossible without holism must be taken as a _jeu d’esprit_. So long as biology was dominated by the Aristotelian concept of individuality it remained descriptive. Physiology began when biologists undertook the task of interpreting the behaviour of the organism as a whole by studying methodically the behaviour of its constituent parts. If it be suggested that there is any other physiology, there is no trace of its existence.

Perhaps the appeal of holism is partly due to the curious circumstance that physiologists are notoriously mechanistic about the aspects of physiology they study themselves, and hardly less often vitalistic about aspects of physiology with which they are unfamiliar. The divorce of morphology from experimental biology after the rise of the natural selection theory tended to produce the zoologist who is exclusively preoccupied with the anatomy of dead animals, and the physiologist who is exclusively preoccupied with the casualties of the hospital. In another place I have attempted to show that Dr. Haldane could find in modern genetics the clearest evidence that the biologist only progresses when he interprets his data in the same way as the physicist or chemist interprets his. In another branch of physiology, which like genetics lies outside the domain of the clinician on the one hand and the physical chemist on the other, Dr. Haldane will not find that the work of Sherrington and Pavlov provides abundant evidence that the holistic attitude is less impotent to suggest new lines of experimentation on reflex action or is more useful in promoting an understanding of the process of learning.

Laying aside the purely biological aspect of the holistic attitude, there are some more general issues which remain to be discussed. It is never easy for a hostile party to do justice to the standpoint of another school of opinion. I hope therefore that I shall not be accused of drawing a caricature of the holistic theory. To avoid doing so I shall quote freely from the writings of those who support it. Holism, as I understand it, differs from the primitive animism which sees a personal reality behind or within physical objects. It differs from vitalism which sees an essential gulf between the living and the non-living. It differs from the common-sense dualism which invokes Mind as a separate and irreducible concept in dealing with the characteristics of “conscious behaviour.” The difference lies in this, that entirely new properties emerge at _various_ levels of existence. _Between_ these levels we can operate successfully with the atomistic logic of science, interpreting the properties of a complex system from a study of the properties of its several constituents. _At_ these levels we encounter new properties “which,” in the words of General Smuts, “could never have been predicted from a knowledge merely of the parts.” General Smuts mentions under the terms Matter, Life and Mind three principal oases within this desert of uncertainty. Even these do not constitute regions within which the continuous extension of scientific method may be applied successfully. Within the territory of matter “the molecules of water and carbon dioxide are real wholes with new emergent properties.” Thus physics, chemistry, biology and psychology are in Dr. Haldane’s terminology “independent sciences.”

As far as I am able to see, there is no room for disagreement about how the scientist proceeds within these prescribed territories. Scientific generalizations are attempts to show how the characteristics of complex systems can be inferred from the properties of their constituent parts. This means, more specifically, when the problem can be reduced to mathematical symbolism, that an equation which defines the four dimensional relations of any system will contain no terms that are not present in some or other of the equations which determine the space-time relations of the constituents of the system. This procedure, admitted Forsyth (1929) in a recent paper delivered to the British Association, “is very largely justified in principle and by results.” He continued to remark, in conformity with the standpoint developed in these essays, that “the question is not that of a division of spheres or levels of existence, some of which are capable of complete explanation on mechanistic principles, while others are incapable... for there is no sphere which is not in any degree susceptible of the application to it of the terms and categories of mechanism.”

“Nevertheless,” he contends, “it is gradually coming to be
recognized that this procedure gives only a partial explanation
of _any_ natural process. There is, in any complex process, a
principle of synthesis involved, such that, instead of the whole
being the mere sum of the parts and being explicable by the mere
composition or combination of the parts, it is rather the case that
the parts can only be explained by reference to the whole, since
they are modified by their relation to it. If so, mechanism must
be supplanted, or at least supplemented, by a mode of explanation
that gives due regard to this. This principle of wholeness or unity
is exemplified in many different spheres of fact, e.g. in atomic
structure, in chemical synthesis, in the life of an organism and
even in the character of the single life-cell, in the processes
of perception and volition, and also in so-called reflex action,
in the development of personality and the attainment of social
control. Holism, then, signifies that everything in the universe is
in some form or another, and in greater or less degree, potentially
or actually, an organic whole; that as anything develops to a
fuller realization of its potentialities or a fuller perfection
of its nature, it becomes more truly such a differentiated and
yet unified whole; and that, by implication, the universe itself
is an infinite organic whole.... This involves that nothing in
nature can be explained merely as the result of preceding processes
or anterior stages of development. The lower or simpler is the
condition without which the appearance of the higher or more
complex would be impossible; but the development to higher levels
is possible at all only through the impulse to organic unity or
synthesis under the controlling influence of the infinite whole.”

There exists no difference of opinion concerning the statement that there emerge at different levels of complexity in natural phenomena specific properties which cannot as yet be deduced from a knowledge of simpler systems. Holism seems to imply the further qualification that such properties will never be interpreted in this way. If I am right in my understanding of the holistic standpoint, I am at liberty to leave the onus of proving so dogmatic a conclusion on the shoulders of those who assert it. I am prepared to go further and point out certain difficulties in the way of proving it, difficulties which, in the existing state of knowledge, appear to me to be insuperable. The first is that of explaining why, if physics, chemistry, biology, etc., are intrinsically independent types of enquiry, it happens that there exist such extraordinary similarities in their procedure. The use of the phrase “scientific method” implies that such similarities do in fact exist. Dr. Haldane’s many distinguished contributions to the advance of physiology might be cited to show how much biology has in common with physics and chemistry. A second difficulty which arises is of a different kind, and illustrates the fundamental similarity of temperament which unites the vitalistic and holistic theories. Scientific investigation is constantly shifting the levels at which new irreducible concepts must be invoked. This permits us to entertain the suspicion that _emergent_ properties are only properties about which we are ignorant. We are under no necessity to regard the present classification of the sciences as anything more than a convenience for arranging time-tables in educational institutions. Before the enunciation of the first law of thermodynamics by Mayer and Joule, heat was a branch of physics quite as separate from mechanics as is chemistry from physics to-day. Organic chemistry to Henry was not, as it is to our generation, the chemistry of the carbon compounds. It was a field in which emerged something “peculiar to animated bodies and superior to and different from the cause which has been called chemical affinity.” In the same year as that in which Henry expressed this view Wöhler succeeded in synthesizing urea. Why should we be so certain that our present classification of “independent” sciences will, like the poor and the Roman Church, be always with us? To this question I can see no appropriate reply from the holistic point of view. Unless holism can provide us with a clue that will enable us to distinguish whether an impasse in scientific enquiry is due to the imperfection of our knowledge or to the emergence of new properties as “creative” entities, its acceptance could only have the sinister effect of holding back scientific investigation.

On its negative side the holist goes much further from what might be called a centre programme than does the dogmatic mechanist. The principle of mechanism or experimental determinism is compatible with the recognition of different levels of complexity or wholes; for what is analysable is complex, and what is complex consists of interrelated parts which together constitute a whole. Holism on the other hand provides us with no explanation of why the principle of mechanism is so astonishingly successful. The logic of science is inadequate according to General Smuts. Dr. Haldane asserts that the method of the biologist is different from that of the physicist. We are not told how we can proceed to invent a new and equally successful logic. We are not told in what precise respect the method of the biologist does differ from that of the physicist. On its positive side holism leaves us waiting for a new revelation. Holism is sometimes referred to by its advocates as a category, sometimes as a principle. What the _principle_ of holism can do for us remains to be seen. Its popular appeal resides in its promise to restore to ethical values a rational basis. I suspect that this promise is a general election promise.

Though holism does not assume, like the cruder forms of vitalism, a specific élan vital or entelechy, it differs from the less explicit vitalistic theories in detail rather than essentials. In a similar way, the alternative view which I have called publicism is a modern development of the mechanistic conception of life. What I define as the publicist standpoint in philosophy is distinguished from the traditional mechanistic attitude in physiology by extending the limits of verifiable knowledge. To a large extent traditional mechanistic physiology investigated the behaviour of an organism in so far as its behaviour can be predicted, when all synchronous conditions are rigidly controlled. It adopted a frankly agnostic attitude to those characteristics of behaviour in which the antecedent situation is pre-eminently significant to the co-ordination of stimulus and response. The Vitalist school recognized the existence of a definite problem in claiming that a complete solution of the Nature of Life must take into account the problem of consciousness. They failed to indicate the precise requirements of the problem, and they therefore failed to suggest the requisites for its solution. Their assault upon the mechanistic position collapsed, because they did not state what precise characteristics of the behaviour of living systems are defined by the term consciousness. If the concept of consciousness is to be made clear, it is first necessary to state what properties of the class _living systems_ are denoted by its use. This necessitates a definition of the characteristics of conscious behaviour, and an investigation of the way in which it is possible to investigate them. Only when this task is accomplished, can we claim to have undertaken a philosophical exposition of the Nature of Life. Vitalism failed to define the concept of consciousness, because it did not make the necessary distinction between its public and private components. The characteristic of all essentially private statements is the supposition that the means is referable to the end. The characteristic of all essentially public propositions is that the end is considered in connexion with the means. Traditional mechanism disregarded the problem of consciousness. Traditional vitalism assumed that it is impossible to discuss the characteristics of conscious behaviour without introducing teleological implications. The supreme philosophical importance of the work of Pavlov’s school lies in the fact that it has inverted the traditional way of looking at the problem of consciousness.

In stating the essential features of the publicist standpoint, I shall indicate first its significance in current biological thought and second its attitude to the scope of philosophy. In its purely biological aspect the publicist standpoint recognizes the folly of stating dogmatically the possibility of reducing all the properties of living matter to physico-chemical terms. On the other hand it recognizes that biology increasingly makes use of physico-chemical concepts. It also recognizes that we can at present foresee no limit to the successful application of physico-chemical concepts to its subject matter. It recognizes the fact that there is no immediate prospect of reducing the analysis of some of the properties of living matter to the level of pure physics and chemistry. It also recognizes that biology has advanced conspicuously in those regions where the biologist adopts to the subject matter of his enquiry an attitude similar to that of the physicist in approaching the realm of inanimate nature. In particular it sees no necessity for the introduction of teleology into the study of the evolution or behaviour of living beings. It goes further than the older mechanistic outlook in explicitly renouncing the traditional dualism of mind and matter, since it envisages the possibility of indefinitely extending the study of behaviour in terms of reflex action. The publicist standpoint does not assert the possibility of disproving the validity of animistic concepts which have dominated biology in the past, and still persist in a more or less attenuated form. It relies on the increasing measure of success which accompanies the application of quantitative and experimental methods of investigating evolution and behaviour to supersede them. In biology as in physics magical views fall into desuetude, because more profitable ways of dealing with phenomena take their place.

Since philosophy itself is part of the behaviour of a particular organism, the scope of philosophy must, from the publicist standpoint, bear examination in the light of modern biological concepts. In the external world of modern physics the distinction between _substance_ and _form_ has been superseded. In the public world of science, i.e. the external world of physics enlarged to take in the subject matter of biology, the distinction between mind and matter does not remain fundamental. What is fundamental is behaviour. This public world is the domain of socialized belief. Whatever cannot be incorporated in its ever-widening territory must remain impenetrable through the medium of discourse. Only propositions that deal with behaviour in its more extended sense have the property of _publicity_ or social reality. Reality as a goal of philosophical enquiry is equivocal, since inborn temperament, digestive activity, erotic preoccupations and various other factors decide whether to a given individual the constituents of the public world or of his own private world are more real. Propositions that have publicity are ethically neutral. The hope that philosophy can find a sanction for values is therefore illusory.

§2

From the publicist standpoint the business of philosophy is to resolve the problems of human thought into their public and private components. The public component of the problem of consciousness is the analysis of the characteristics of “conscious behaviour.” The private component offers no profitable basis for discussion. Because traditional physiology has failed to recognize that the concept of consciousness has a public component, it has been natural to assume that a mechanistic explanation of consciousness is pure nonsense. Biological progress has annexed the study of conscious behaviour from the province of the private worlds. To the private worlds belong values. Though differences in values are exaggerated by differences in distribution of wealth and opportunities of education, there is no prospect that we shall reach any general agreement by attempting to rationalize them. In this sense the publicist standpoint is pluralistic. On the other hand the domain of the public world is always encroaching upon the many private worlds. In that sense the publicist standpoint tends towards monism as a limiting case. It offers no short cut to finality. It recognizes the slow accumulation of scientific knowledge as the only road to the gradual socialization of beliefs.

In providing no hope for a rationalization of ethical values, the publicist standpoint comes within the category of the somewhat diverse schools of opinion to which Bertrand Russell refers as the New Realism. If it were possible to prove that a particular set of values is the correct one, a great service could be rendered. People would then be able to argue about human conduct and artistic productions without losing their tempers. I fail to see that holism contains any promise of achieving a consummation so devoutly to be wished. Ethical systems, as Mr. Russell observes, are usually found to contain a _non sequitur_. Ethical values represent the private component of social behaviour. Whether the public component will ever come within the scope of physiology remains to be seen. Many thoughtful people have been antagonized towards the mechanistic conception of life, because they associate it with rash and superficial views about human relationships. This is an intelligible but not necessarily a logically justifiable reaction to the naïve self-confidence with which some eugenists, the “histriometers” and other schools of “intelligence” testers have drawn pretentious conclusions from the resources of immature biological theories and inadequately developed biometrical methods. With such grotesque simplicity did Descartes apply to the physiology of Man the embryo mechanics of his own time. In reality nothing inherent in the most dogmatic assertion of the mechanistic conception of life is logically inconsistent with recognizing the possibility that biology has many new truths to unfold before sociology can securely build its foundations on biological theory, the likelihood that sociology must for long pursue its independent investigation of the natural history of the human species before it is ready to draw extensively on the resources of biology. Only during the first half of the nineteenth century did the concept of Conservation of Energy initiate the era of modern physiology. Only during the latter half of the nineteenth century did physical chemistry begin to elucidate those phenomena of osmosis, colloidal solution and membrane potential now regarded as fundamental for a mechanistic analysis of the living cell. We have therefore no reason to suppose that biologists have elucidated in their own field all those principles which will assist the historian and the anthropologist to advance further in their studies. Arrogant and premature generalizations of individual biologists (not always, or even, I suspect, generally, of the mechanistic persuasion) are regrettable. They do not justify an attitude of distaste for the mechanistic conception of life. I have usually observed that the disposition to interpret the whole field of sociology in narrowly conceived biological terms is associated with a strong antipathy to the physico-chemical interpretation of vital phenomena.

In its inability to rationalize values many people will see a serious limitation of the publicist standpoint. From the days of the Schoolmen, philosophy has been the “divine science.” It has become so customary to regard philosophy as the handmaid of theology and politics, that Henry Sidgwick and others have refused the use of the term philosophical for a point of view which does not meet this requirement. We justify this by assuming that the fabric of society would dissolve, if we believed that our ethical notions contained no element of finality. It follows that the materialist is to be regarded as a bad man, and scepticism is coupled with immorality, though there is nothing in the root meaning of the word morality to suggest why this should be so. In _Science and the Modern World_ Dr. Whitehead censures the materialist philosophy of the nineteenth century, because, he declares, it “emphasized the given quantity of material, and thence derivatively the given nature of the environment. It thus operated most unfortunately upon the social conscience of mankind. For it directed almost exclusive attention to the aspect of struggle for existence.”[10] I am unable to understand why the political and ethical shortcomings of the nineteenth century should be attributed to the influence of materialistic philosophy. The number of materialistic philosophers was far less than the number of persons who responded to the appeal of the Tractarian Movement. The Lancashire mill-owners who were getting rich quickly were the type of men who attended their Nonconformist conventicles with regularity and subscribed to the London Missionary Society. Against the view that society must necessarily be based on a struggle for the means of subsistence continental Socialism appeared, rightly or wrongly, as a vigorous reaction; and continental Socialism was the only political movement which can rightly be said to have been explicitly dominated by a materialist philosophy. I cannot discern that there has been a very close historical connexion between people’s religious, philosophical and political views on the one hand and their social conduct on the other. It is not easy to explain why the French revolutionaries were anti-clerical and deistic, while the first chartists and pioneers of trade unionism in England were in close touch with the Evangelical Revival. Christianity, with its oriental insistence on the enmity between flesh and spirit and the vanity of worldly riches, would seem little fitted to provide a satisfactory rationalization of the sentiment of western civilization. Yet for long it has done so.

Educational and political institutions grow in response to the exigencies of human demands which are not necessarily influenced by any ethical considerations. This may be seen by considering the case of Mr. X, who lives in Balham and has a passion for pineapples. Mr. X, not being bothered about metaphysics, is no more disposed than the majority of his fellow-citizens in Balham to assert any final or transcendental sanction for his passion for pineapples. He accepts it as part of his modest unassuming existence. This does not prevent his writing a letter to _The Daily Mail_, when an import tax on pineapples makes it impossible for him to indulge his predilection for the fruit without forgoing other cultural amenities. Meanwhile Mr. Y, who lives in Tooting and nevertheless cherishes an earnest desire for more and better pineapples, has written to _The Daily Herald_. Mr. X and Mr. Y are now joined by Mr. Z of Whitby, whose letter appears in _The Yorkshire Post_. By this time the Press cannot resist the social pressure that is brought to bear on the pineapple policy of the party in power. The evening papers announce in headlines “Nation-wide movement against Pineapple Protection.” Mrs. J of Houndsditch is pestering Carmelite House with correspondence on the potato shortage, and Miss C of Cheltenham is writing to the Chancellor of the Exchequer about the rising price of prunes. In official circles the determination to do something which will distract attention from prunes, pineapples and potatoes takes shape. If the pressure is firm enough the tax on pineapples and prunes goes, and a promise to give the fullest consideration to the potato shortage is extracted. Alternatively a popular film-star is knighted, and the Press, equipped with better copy, announces that this correspondence must cease forthwith.

There is a difference between a predilection for pineapples and the pursuit of those amenities which are referred to by more abstract terms such as _justice_. Pineapples are less frequently a matter of life and death to those who eat them. Men and women rarely go to the stake or march to battle for the sake of more and better pineapples. They will fight for bread, and a roof over their heads and an eight-hour day. Concerning those forms of social activity which bring us most into conflict with our fellow-beings we are prone to demand some final or transcendental sanction for action. Social co-operation is perfectly realizable without recourse to any such extravagant claims. It is permissible for a professional philosopher to doubt whether there would really be more misery in the world if the ethical convictions of human beings were more lax.

In stating this possibility, I am not endeavouring to give the impression that I wish to be regarded as a “rational” person. If I aspire to a more rational outlook than that of some of the writers whose standpoint I have criticized, it is not because I have no private world of my own, but because I hope that I am more successful in separating my public beliefs from my private sentiments. I do not pretend that I have no ethical prejudices. My ethical prejudices are as strong as those of most vitalistic philosophers with whom I am acquainted. Often it happens that my prejudices about conduct are not the same as theirs. Where we differ I see absolutely no prospect of arriving at agreement through the medium of argument. I doubt whether I could ever agree with Dr. Haldane about a just remuneration for the miner. I accept without hesitation Dr. Haldane’s authoritative views on miner’s silicosis. There is a world of private values which I do not and can never share with Dr. Haldane. I have no awareness of anything in the universe which is anything like the Deity of Dr. Haldane’s Gifford Lectures. His arguments leave me as unconvinced as I was before I read them. Dr. Haldane’s Deity is part of Dr. Haldane’s private world. In general I agree with Dr. Haldane’s interpretation of the Dissociation Curve of hæmoglobin. If in any points I do not follow his reasoning, I should probably agree with him on closer examination of his evidence and inferences. Alternatively I might be able to point out objections to some of his conclusions. I believe that he would then examine my objections sympathetically, and, if he could not dispose of them, modify his views. Dr. Haldane’s Dissociation Curve for hæmoglobin is not, like Dr. Haldane’s Deity, part of Dr. Haldane’s private world. It has become part of the public world.

In my own private world the pursuit of intellectual honesty is a matter to which I attach a good deal of importance. I cannot reconcile with my notion of intellectual honesty a confusion between the ethically neutral constituents of the public world and my private convictions about conduct. When I contend that a rational philosophy must be ethically neutral, I do not pretend that I have no private world of my own. I leave open the possibility that the way in which people come to adopt different philosophical views may one day be made the subject of public discussion as a problem of human behaviour. In my own private world a sense of responsibility to other human beings impels me to refuse to let people think that I am speaking in my capacity as an expert, when I am really giving vent to my sentiments as a private citizen. I do not regard my own private world as unimportant to myself. I choose my immediate friends mainly on the basis of preferences which belong to it. I am unable to understand the disposition to confuse the two issues. It is quite possible to separate them in practice. Sir Charles Sherrington has written an authoritative work on the central nervous system, the importance of which is a public issue. He has also published a volume of verse. In my private capacity I happen to like it very much. I will go further and express the opinion that highly creative work in science, such as Sherrington’s, is not unusually associated with an intense system of private values. I admire Professor Sherrington because of the versatility that makes him both a scientist and a poet. But I admire him still more because he has not enclosed the _Integrative Action of the Central Nervous System_ and the _Assaying of Brabantius_ in one cover as a volume of Gifford Lectures. In publishing them separately, he seems to me to set an example of honesty and modesty which some of his contemporaries might well be persuaded to emulate. William Bateson was a great scientist with very strong political prejudices with which I have no private sympathy. Bateson’s intellectual honesty was of so fine a calibre that he consistently and publicly refused to associate with Eugenic Reform, lest, he explained, his eminence as a geneticist should appear to give sanction to views in forming which his personal sympathies were likely to override his judgment.

More than a century ago David Hume concluded his essay on _The Academical or Sceptical Philosophy_ by contending that “morals and criticism are not so properly objects of the understanding as of taste and sentiment.” If philosophy has advanced at all since the time of Hume, I am inclined to think that there is less immediate prospect of making politics a science and more definite information to warrant the hope that the study of morals may one day become part of an experimental analysis of how human beings behave. I can see no reason to suppose that in any other sense will it ever be possible to bring the affirmations of æsthetic and ethical experience into line with scientific beliefs. “If we reason concerning beauty,” as Hume observed, “we regard a new fact, to wit the general taste of mankind or some such fact which may be the object of reasoning and enquiry.” The rise of anthropology suggests that there are matters of fact which Hume did not actually specify. The substance of his argument remains valid. Science has advanced only when observation has emancipated itself from the affirmations of æsthetic and ethical experience. To set before us the goal which Dr. Whitehead proposes may result in hampering science without fertilizing philosophy. Ethics and æsthetics, like politics and religion, are, in Trotter’s words, “still too important for knowledge and remain subjects for certitude, that is to say, in them we still prefer the comfort of instinctive belief, because we have not learnt adequately to value the capacity to foretell.” If it was evident to David Hume, it is still more evident to-day that a “rational and modest” philosophy will aim less at providing a formula for complete agreement than at reaching a sensible understanding about matters on which we should be content to differ.

In undertaking to refute Hume’s arguments Kant assumed the validity of his conclusions in the method which he adopted. He employed _a priori_ principles to establish the existence of a “faculty of pure _a priori_ cognition.” There were at that time no available materials for a _public_ discussion of the problem which he propounded. In our generation a new epoch has been initiated by the physiology of the conditioned reflex. We can now see the correct form in which Kant’s problem must be stated, if we are to emerge from the dilemma which arises from the fact that by temperament some philosophers are extroverts and others introverts. It is no longer a question of deciding how we come to know, but how we _learn_. If we are too eager to await the solution of this problem on a purely physiological basis, we have no need to turn, like Kant, to introspective philosophy for an answer. The educational practice of Madame Montessori can throw more light on the origin of the concept of _number_ than Kant’s discussion of the proposition that seven and five make twelve.