Chapter XIII: Part III: Holism and the Publicist Standpoint in Philosophy (4)

The influence of Christianity in the western world has tended to make the impersonal detachment of science repugnant to most people. We are taught that knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth. This, of course, in its own language, expresses the ecclesiastical conviction that human nature is fundamentally sinful. Whatever we choose to regard as good or bad, from the biological standpoint human nature is neither the one nor the other. Man is a very teachable animal. For that reason it is through intelligent understanding of the springs of human action that the elimination of social discord is most likely to proceed. Those who advocate the religious appeal as the basis of social education have to provide us with an explanation of why the practical implications of revealed dogma rarely receive any recognition before the exigencies of economic necessity compel people to act in conformity to them. No one would deny that religious leaders took a prominent part in the movement for the abolition of chattel slavery. It is also a singular fact that the Protestant Churches entered no protest against the slave-trading activities of Frobisher, Drake and their fellow-heroes of sea warfare. Nor did they disturb themselves with the problem until the rise of the factory system had created conditions which promoted the growth of a different form of labour contract. If war as a means of settling international disputes is abolished in our generation, it is not unlikely that religious apologists will be telling our grandchildren about the prominent part which churchmen took in founding Peace Societies. They will probably be right. War as an institution is becoming so menacing a scourge to civilization that even religious bodies are making themselves active in denouncing it. But if war is to be denounced on the basis of some revealed and final view of human conduct, how are we to explain the fact that a negligible minority of esoteric sects have discovered so significant a conclusion during the past two thousand years of church history? Should we not rather say that the urgency of the modern problem has created a new rationalization? Must we believe that war exists because by nature human beings are sinful and delight in slaughtering one another? Can we believe that men are so constructed that they can be induced by religious conviction to love their neighbours as themselves? Is it not rather a fact that men are on the whole stupid and indifferent, and that thoughtful people regard war as an intolerable nuisance, but are not as yet clear about how it can be avoided? Is it not to patient study of the ways and means of organizing international government rather than to ethical dogma or religious fervour that we must look for the creation of permanent peace?

From a social point of view I do not think it is a demerit of any philosophy of Life that it provides no pleasant rationalizations as a guide to polite conduct. One would be more interested in discovering some way of ensuring how people can be induced to act consistently with their professions. No religious organization in recent times has succeeded in achieving this result on a large scale. Theology is not entitled to criticize a philosophy because it supplies no basis for ethical values. Theology has failed to show how human beings can be induced to behave in conformity with the ethical values which it imposes on them. For the present I shall eat pineapples in preference to prunes, whether philosophy provides me with a good reason for doing so or not. Men will not be prevented from demanding a living wage because philosophy fails to evolve an ethical theory of the state. A man may be a gourmand without first becoming an Epicurean or a masochist without embracing asceticism as a moral creed. Ethics only lie within the scope of the publicist standpoint in so far as philosophy may indicate the lines along which it is profitable to investigate how people come to articulate certain combinations of speech symbols, and how what they say about their actions is related to other manifestations of motor activity which they display.

§3

I am not unaware of a criticism of the newer mechanistic outlook which has already been made by an anonymous contributor to _Nature_ in discussing a symposium at the 1929 meeting of the British Association:

“The extreme behaviourists or biomechanists, perhaps represented at
the conference to judge from reports by Professor Hogben, will of
course refuse to take account of any process which does not admit
of physico-chemical analysis or description--a position that does
not work out well in our daily life and conversation where we have
to allow at every turn for intelligent or even rational purpose.”

The objection implied in these words is closely akin to a fallacy which is reiterated in most theories of the vitalistic or holistic type. The publicist standpoint does not imply that we do know everything about human behaviour. On the contrary it urges that we know in part and we prophesy in part. I suppose that even the most pessimistic exponent of the vitalistic school would admit the possibility that science will in the course of time modify our habits of conversation in many directions. Everyday conversation always lags behind the advance of scientific knowledge. It would not be difficult to illustrate how frequently our habits of conversation in moments of intellectual laxity are saturated with pre-Copernican and pre-Darwinian views about the universe. It is in no way remarkable that our habits of conversation have as yet failed to accommodate themselves to the advances in biological knowledge that are opening up new fields of investigation into the characteristics of “conscious behaviour.” I am prepared to be told that I have repeatedly implied traditional views about thought, memory, consciousness and the like in writing these essays. As I bring them to a close I will frankly admit the truth of the charge. The common language which I was brought up to use does not contain the words which would be suitable to a thoroughly consistent development of my present views. I give expression to them, knowing that much which I have written will appear very foolish to those who enjoy the advantage of living two thousand years after I am dead. Had I the ingenuity and astuteness to invent a completely consistent symbolism for the views I have advocated, I could entertain no likelihood that anyone now living would read what I have to say. My own inconsistencies and imperfections do not lead me to infer that human beings will always be forced in their everyday conversation to discuss the problems of human existence with all the limitations to which I am subject.

We are told by Professor Eddington and Dr. Haldane that the abstractions of physical science have taken us further and further away from Man, the starting-point of our enquiries. Experimental biology in probing into the traditional distinction between reflex and voluntary activity permits us to recognize that science is in process of taking within the scope of its method fields of intimate human interest. Mechanists of a past generation could not conceive them as capable of annexation. In bringing us back to our starting-point biology has strictly adhered to the method of enquiry which has proved successful in constructing the fruitful abstractions of physics and chemistry. We can thus look forward to a time when the method of science will claim for its field everything which comes within the scope of what people will agree to call knowledge. Because social activity lies within the realm of what Dr. Haldane calls “conscious behaviour” the older mechanistic outlook failed to provide the foundations of a comprehensive interpretation of the Nature of Life. It left Man as the peculiar province of that diffuse type of discussion which draws its sustenance from the abstract noun and comes to fruition as magical gesture. It should occasion no surprise that the new horizon revealed by the growth of biological enquiry now seems contrary to common sense and inconsistent with the language we are accustomed to use in everyday life. Man has existed on this planet for perhaps a matter of five hundred thousand years. During that period little more than five thousand years have been occupied by the building of civilized society. Of that fraction the main development of the essentially social language of science has been compressed to a very large extent within the last five hundred years. We are still the creatures of a tradition of fear, of superstition and of misunderstanding, of childish self-assertion and savage self-submissiveness to magical prohibitions handed down to us from what Professor Levy has aptly called the unsavoury past.

The majority of men are impatient towards the discipline which science imposes upon us. That impatience is a bulwark of magical beliefs. It has been well said by Trotter: “In matters that really interest him, man cannot support the suspense of judgment which science so often has to enjoin. He is too anxious to feel certain to have time to know. So that we see of the sciences, mathematics appearing first, then astronomy, then physics, then chemistry, then biology.” Because science does not flatter our self-importance, because science makes stringent demands on our willingness to face uncomfortable views about the universe, because patience with the slow advance of science requires the effort of intellectual self-renunciation, human nature, deeply rooted in its unsavoury past, is on the side of vitalistic theories. Social privilege is repelled by the mechanistic outlook because of its ethical impartiality. Age brings its impressive authority to reinforce both human nature and social privilege. When the spirit of intellectual adventure dies and with it the courage to face the austere neutrality of a universe which mocks the self-importance of our individual lives, when the ruthlessness of death and decay threatens to rob us of the few circumstances propitious to personal comfort, when the limitations of our greatest achievements are no longer assuaged by the prospect of renewed opportunities, it becomes all too easy to find the formula which provides a compromise for the conflicting claims of magic and science. Perhaps the time will come when our knowledge of the Nature of Life will provide an explanation of this circumstance.

FOOTNOTES

[1] An examination of the precise significance of this adjective is undertaken in the essay on the Nature of Life, p. 80 et seq.

[2] That a volley of afferent nerve impulses passes along the vagus nerve to the brain at each heart beat is a fact which can be physically demonstrated with the Einthoven galvanometer.

[3] British Association 1929, Section D.

[4] Professor Wildon Carr, in defending the vitalistic standpoint, explicitly states this, as quoted in a later essay.

[5] I refer to the Uniformitarian doctrine.

[6] This objection does not apply to the use of the word mutation in its strictly etymological connotation as a process in contradistinction to a type.

[7] Two quotations from his writings may be added to justify the foregoing criticism of Weismann. Concerning the essentially creative rôle of Natural Selection he wrote, “The transformation of a species as well as the preservation of its constancy are based upon natural selection, and this is incessantly at work, never ceasing for a moment.” (_Germ Plasm_, p. 414.)

Elsewhere he states that heredity and variation are coextensive. “We have seen that this transmission affects the whole organism, and extends to the most trifling details, and we also know that it is never complete, and that the offspring and parent are never identical, but that the former always differs more or less from the latter. These differences give rise to the phenomenon of _variation, which thus forms an integral part of heredity, for the latter always includes the former_.” (_The Germ Plasm_, p. 410.)

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

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

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

Transcriber’s Note: “{sic}” in the text is the transcriber’s. Simple cases of typographical error have been silently corrected. Some sections numbered “§1” were not present at chapter beginnings in the original, and have been added in order to standardize the hierarchy of headings. The book cover image that accompanies some ebook formats is original and placed in the public domain.