Essays of a biologist

Front matter

©l|f i. 1. Hill IGtbrarg

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Preface

A PREFACE should be long, like one of Mr. Shaw's, or short. I propose the latter. The essays here collected were written on very various occasions. This must excuse the considerable overlap that will be found among them. I have not thought it worth while to attempt to get rid of this, since, though facts may be repeated, the point of view and general context are on each occasion different.

Contrary to all custom, I have put the meat courses at the two ends of my menu. If an author may presume to advise his readers, I would suggest that, after finishing the first essay, they should (if they retain a stomach for more) proceed at once to the last. This done, they will find the others all in a sense lesser variations (if I may change my metaphor) upon the same themes.

In spite, however, of the diversity of their occasions, there is a common thread running through them, a common background of ideas. I do not know whether I am justified in calling those ideas especially biological, but they are certainly ideas which must present themselves to any biologist who

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does not deliberately confine himself to the technicalities of his science.

The biologist cannot fail to be impressed by the fact that his science to-day is, roughly and broadly speaking, in the position which Chemistry and Physics occupied a century ago. It is beginning to reach down from observation to experimental analysis, and from experimental analysis to grasp of principle. Furthermore, as the grasp of principles in physico-chemical science led speedily to an immense new extension both of knowledge and of control, so it is not to be doubted that like effects will spring from like causes in biology. But whereas the extension of control in physics and chemistry led to a multiplication of the number of things which man could do and experience, the extension of control in biology will inter alia mean an alteration of the modes of man's experience itself. The one, that is to say, remained in essence a quantitative change so far as concerns the real life of man; the other can be a qualitative change. Applied physics and chemistry bring more grist to the mill; applied biology will also be capable of changing the mill itself.

The possibilities of physiological improvement, of the better combination of existing psychical faculties, of the education of old faculties to new heights, and of the discovery of new faculties altogether — all this is no Utopian silliness, but is bound to come about if science continues her current progress.

Take but one example. In the first half of last

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century, hypnotism, or mesmerism as it was then called, was in complete scientific disrepute. To-day, all the main claims of its founders have been verified, and many new facts unearthed. Every text-book on the subject will tell you that men may be made insensible to pain by hypnosis alone without any drug, many women even being delivered of children under its influence without suffering. Temperature can be changed, blisters raised, and many other processes not normally under the control of the will can similarly be affected. The mind can be raised to an abnormal sensitiveness, in which differences between objects that are completely unrecognizable in ordinary waking existence, such as those between the backs of two cards in a pack, may be easily distinguished.

If such possibilities are open to the empiricism of the hypnotist, what may we not await from any truly scientific knowledge of mind, comparable even in low degree to our knowledge of, say, electricity?

But these in a sense are all details, relevant in a way, and yet only details. There is something still more fundamental in the biologist's attitude. He has to study evolution, and in that study there is brought home to him, more vividly than to any one to whom the facts are not so familiar, that in spite of all appearances to the contrary there has been, throughout the whole of evolution, and most markedly in the rise of man from his pre-human forbears, a real advance, a progress.

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He sees further that the most remarkable single feature in that progress has been the evolution of self-consciousness in the development of man. That has made possible not only innumerable single changes, but a change in the very method of change itself; for it substituted the possibility of conscious control of evolution for the previous mechanism of the blind chances of variation aided by the equally blind sifting process of natural selection, a mechanism in which consciousness had no part.

Most of mankind, now as in the past, close their eyes to this possibility. They seek to put off their responsibility on to the shoulders of various abstractions which they think can bear their burden well enough if only they are spelt with a capital letter: — Fate — God — Nature — Law — Eternal Justice — and such like. Men are educated to be self-reliant and enterprising in the details of life, but dependent, unreflective, laissez-faire about life itself. The idea that the basis of living could be really and radically altered is outside most people's orbit; and if it is forced upon their notice, they as often as not find it in some way immoral.

Closely connected with this, in a sense its corollary, we have the fact that ninety-nine people out of a hundred are concerned with getting a living rather than with living, and that if for any reason they are liberated from this necessity, they generally have not the remotest idea how to employ their time with

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either pleasure or profit to themselves or to others.

There are two ways of living: a man may be casual and simply exist, or constructive and deliberately try to do something with his life. The constructive idea implies constructiveness not only about one's own life, but about that of society, and the future possibilities of humanity.

In pre-human evolution, the blind chances of variation and the blind sifting of natural selection have directed the course of evolution and of progress. It is on survival and the production of offspring that the process has hinged; the machinery is in reality blind, but these emerge as its apparent ends or purposes. The realisation of ever higher potentialities of living substance has happened, but only as a secondary result and slow by-product of the main process.

In human evolution up till the present, the apparent ends and aims have for the most part and in the bulk of men remained the same; it is only the methods of pursuing them that have changed. True or conscious purpose comes in and aids the unconscious biological forces already at work.

However, to most men at some time, and to some men at most times, these purely biological ends and purposes of life become altogether inadequate. They perceive the door opened to a thousand possibilities higher than this, all demanding to be satisfied. The realization of what for want of a better term we can

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call spiritual values becomes the true end of life, superposed on and dominating the previous biological values.

When civilizations and societies are organized so that their prime purpose is the pursuit of spiritual values, then life will have passed another critical point in its evolution; as always, what has gone before is necessary as foundation for what is coming, and the biological conditions must be fulfilled before the new and higher edifice can be built; but, as when the mammals superseded the reptiles, so this change of aim will mean the rise of a new type to be the dominant and highest form of life.

This can only come about so far as man consciously attempts to make it come about. His evolution up to the present can be summed up in one sentence — that through his coming to possess reason, life in his person has become self-conscious, and evolution is handed over to him as trustee and director. "Nature" will no longer do the work unaided. Nature — if by that we mean blind and non-conscious forces — has, marvellously, produced man and consciousness; they must carry on the task to new results which she alone can never reach.

Mr. Trotter, in his delightful book on the Herd-instinct, draws a distinction between the stableminded or resistive and the unstable-minded or adaptive, and points out how the destinies of society have usually been entrusted to the former — whence spring our persecutions of prophets and our neglect of innovating genius. This will continue so long as

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the accepted belief of the majority is that there exists a Providence who has assigned every one his proper place, or even (oddest whim!) ordained the present type of society; so long as they rely more on authority than experience, look to the past more than to the future, to revelation instead of reason, to an arbitrary Governor instead of to a discoverable order.

The general conceptions of the universe which a man or a civilization entertains come in large part to determine his or its actions. There are only two general and embracing conceptions of the sort (though any number which are not general, and fail because they leave out whole tracts of reality) : in the fewest possible words, one is scientific, the other unscientific; one tries to use to its fullest extent the intellect with which we have been evolved, the other does not. The thread running through most of these essays is the attempt to discover and apply in certain fields as much as possible of this scientific conception to several different fields of reality.

Of these essays, "Progress" has already appeared in the Hibhert Journal, "Biology and Sociology" in the Monist, "Us n'ont que de Tame" and Philosophic Ants" in the Cornhill Magazine, "Rationalism and the Idea of God" in the Rationalist Press Annual, and "Religion and Science" in Science and Civiliiation, this year's representative of the annual "Unity" series edited by Mr. F. S. Marvin and published by the Oxford University Press. They have all, how-

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ever, been considerably revised and enlarged before appearing in the present volume. I have to thank the proprietors and publishers for kindly permitting me to reprint these.

Oxford, April 1923.

Contents

I PROGRESS, BIOLOGICAL AND OTHER

II BIOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY 69

III ILS N ONT QUE DE LAME: AN ESSAY ON BIRD- MIND 107

II Progress

The Crab to Cancer junior gave advice: "Know what you want, my son, and then proceed Directly sideways. God has thus decreed —

Progress is lateral; let that suffice."

Darwinian Tapeworms on the other hand Agree that Progress is a loss of brain, And all that makes it hard for worms to attain

The true Nirvana — peptic, pure, and grand.

Man too enjoys to omphaloscopize.

Himself as Navel of the Universe

Oft rivets him — until he asks his Nurse, Old Nature, for the truth; and she replies: "Look back, and find support; you march with Life's main stream. Look on— be proud; her future lies within your dream."

London, Feb. 1923.

"Come out into the light of things; Let Nature be your teacher."

— W. Wordsworth.

"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, then psychology, then sociology — but always the new field was grudged to the new method, and we still have the denial to sociology of the name of science." — W. Trotter, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War.

THERE are many facile comparisons to be drawn between the facts of biology and of sociology. The most obvious is that between a whole civilized community and one of the higher animals. Shakespeare employed an age-old fable in Menenius Agrippa's Tale of the Belly and the Members in Coriolanus. With Darwin, and the establishment of evolutionary biology on a sound footing, matters took a new turn. Man was now seen to be connected with the rest of life not merely by analogies of his own mind's weaving, but by the living bonds of genetic descent; and it was at once perceived that a more rigid force than had hitherto been suspected might inhere in the comparisons between State and Organism. For, as Spencer argued, was not the State in a true sense an organism — a single biological unit composed of individual human beings just as a metazoan animal was a single biological unit composed, in the first instance, of individual cells? Further, the investigation of the evolutionary process seemed to reveal certain general laws of its march: beings of the same original constitution, exposed to the environmental forces of the same planet, had reacted in similar ways, developing along parallel lines, and arriving at similar types of organization as end-result. Thus it might reasonably be supposed that we should find the same general organization and mode of development in one type of organism as in another, in human society as in a vertebrate.

On these bases, Spencer and his followers drew elaborate comparisons of the two, and apparently believed that they were reaching the same degree of accuracy as that found in comparative anatomy when they compared the circulatory system of a mammal with the transport facilities of a State, or drew parallels between the brain and the cabinet.

It was speedily seen, however, that such generalizations were so broad and vague as not to be of much service: that the resemblances were in fact often no more than symbolical or metaphorical, instead of being based upon detailed similarity of constitution or of evolutionary development. With this, evolutionary theorizing on sociological matters fell somewhat into disrepute. The earlier jubilant certainty gave place to later doubt; and the half-century whose beginnings had roused Haeckel and Herbert Spencer to their imaginative flights closed suitably enough with that remarkable document, T. H. Huxley's Romanes Lecture, in which the greatest protagonist of Darwinism confesses to seeing between man and the rest of the cosmic process, in spite of man's genesis from that same cosmic process, an insuperable and essential opposition, a difference of aim or direction which had turned the original bridge into a barrier.^

As a result, not only did the particular comparison between society and an organism fall into disrepute, but also all attempts to draw far-reaching conclusions from biology to human affairs.

But the original contention still remains, and is logically unassailable. Man is an organism descended from lower organisms; his communities are composed of units bound together for mutual good in a division of labour in the same way as are the cells of a metazoan : he can no more escape the effects of his terrestrial environment than can other organisms. There is therefore reason to suppose that the processes of evolution in man and man's societies on the one hand, and in lower organisms on the other,

1 For a remarkable critical history of biological thought during this period, see Radl, '09.

must have something important and indeed fundamental in common, something which if we could but unravel would help us in the study of both.

The correlation of biology with sociology is important not only in itself, but also as part of a moie general correlation of all the sciences. The correlation of the sciences is of particular importance to-day for a double set of reasons. The rise of evolutionary biology and of modern psychology have not only changed our outlook on specially human problems, but have altered the whole balance, if I may so put it, of science. There was a time when the basic studies of physics and chemistry seemed not only basic but somehow more essentially scientific than the sciences dealing with life. Distinctions were drawn between the experimental and the observational sciences — often half-consciously implying a distinction between accurate, scientific, self-respecting sciences and blundering, hit-or-miss, tolerated bodies of knowledge. Biological phenomena are now, however, seen to be every whit as susceptible of accurate and experimental analysis; and indeed to present so many problems to the physicist and chemist that in fifty years or so, I venture to prophesy, the wise virgins in those basic sciences will be those who have laid in a store of biological oil.

But the main point is this — the study of evolution, of animal behaviour and of human psychology makes it clear that in the higher forms of animals at least we are dealing with a category not touched on at all by the physicist and chemist — the category of mind and mental process. Sir Charles Sherrington, with admirable lucidity, drew for us, in his recent address to the British Association, the problem of the relation between mind and matter as it presents itself to the biologist.

The great change that has come over science in the last half century, or so it seems to me, is the recognition that mind is not to be explained away as a mere epiphenomenon, but is to be studied as a phenomenon. From this point of view, biology will always be the connecting link between physico-chemical science on the one hand, and psychology on the other. There is every reason to suppose and no reason to doubt that life, which we know to be composed of the same material elements and to work by the same energy as non-living matter, actually arose from it during the evolution of this planet. There is, in the behaviour of the lower organisms, nothing which by itself would make us postulate mind: but in the higher insects, molluscs, and vertebrates, the last in particular, mental process is not only clearly present, but clearly of great biological importance; and finally the mind of man, according to innumerable converging lines of evidence, has evolved from the mind of some non-human mammal.

The principle of continuity makes us postulate that this new category of phenomena has not sprung up during the course of evolution absolutely de 7iovo, but that it is in some sense universally present in all phenomena. It is merely that we have not yet found a method for the direct detection of mental processes as we have, say, for electrical processes; but something of the same general nature, the same category as mind must, if we wish to preserve our scientific sanity, our belief in the orderliness of the world, be present in lower organisms and in the lifeless matter from which they originally sprang.

In the present state of our knowledge, the study of physics and chemistry can be pursued without any reference to mental processes. But the study of biology cannot: and that is one reason why the centre of gravity of science as a whole is shifting — ■ it is shifting for exactly the same reason that the centre of gravity of a house shifts during its construction— because the foundations have to be built first.

Our second reason is as follows. Biology is once more the link between root and flower, between physics and chemistry and human affairs, in regard to evolution. I say evolution : it would be better to broaden the idea by saying the directional processes to be seen in the universe. So far as a main direction is to be observed in physics and chemistry, it is, as all authorities are agreed, towards the degradation of energy and a final state in which not only life but all activity whatsoever will be reduced to nothing, all the waters of energy run down into a single dead level of moveless ocean. Biology, on the other hand, presents us with the spectacle of an evolution in which the main direction is the raising of the maximum level of certain qualities of living beings, such as efficiency of organs, co-ordination, size, accuracy and range of senses, capacity for knowledge, memory and educability, emotional intensity, — qualities which in one way or another lead to a more efficient control by the organism over the external world, and to its greater independence.

A direction towards more mind is visible; and this development of greater mental powers has been in all the later stages the chief instrument of acquiring control and independence. More and more of matter is embodied in living organisms, more and more becomes subservient to life.

Thus, while in physics and chemistry we see a tendency towards the extinction of life and activity, in biology we see a tendency towards more life and more activity; and this latter tendency is accompanied and largely made possible by the evolution of greater intensity of mental process — of something, that is to say, of which we cannot as yet take account in physics and chemistry.

The biologist may well ask himself the question — "Is it not possible that this evolving mind, of whose achievements on its new level in man we are only seeing the beginning, may continue to find more and more ways of subordinating the inorganic to itself, and that it may eventually retard or even prevent the attainment of this complete degradation of energy prophesied by physico-chemical science?

Is it not possible that this great generalization only applies to phenomena in their purely material aspect, and that when we learn to detect and measure the mental aspects of phenomena we may find reason to modify the universal applicability of this law of degradation?" We do not know the answer to that question: but it is clearly a legitimate and useful question to ask. In any event, we constatate two chief directions in the universe; that seen in biology is in many ways opposed to that seen in physics and chemistry; and both must be taken into account.

I have spent, I fear, a great deal of time on what will appear to many as very irrelevant prolegomena. But the complete breakdown of the older views about nature and man, of the philosophies and theologies based not on observation but on an authority'which is no authority, on unverifiable speculation, on superstition, and on what we would like to be so rather than on what happens to be so — the breakdown of all the commonly accepted basis for man's view of himself and the universe, has made it necessary to go back to fundamentals if we are to see where we stand. Secondly, the progress of the biological and psychological sciences, as I have already pointed out, has considerably altered the outlook of those who pin their faith to the newer or scientific view of nature, the view which attempts constantly to refer speculations to reality, and to build on foundations which have been tested by experiment.

The orthodox evolutionary view was that phenomena received in some degree an explanation if their origin from simpler phenomena could be demonstrated. As a matter of fact, reflection makes it clear that such an explanation is never complete. It is a very incomplete explanation of the properties of water to discover that it is composed of oxygen and hydrogen; or of those of humanity to discover that it is derived from lower forms of life. A precisely similar mistake is made by most psycho-analysts, who consider that an "explanation" of adult psychology is given by tracing in it effects of the events of childhood. In all such cases it is true that analysis is helped, but we are by no means exempted from further study of the later (and more complex) phenomena in and for themselves. Just as adult psychology is qualitatively different in various respects from childish psychology, so is man qualitatively different from lower organisms. Very few attempts have been made to carry over conceptions derived from sociology into biology.^ But the converse, as we have seen, has often been true, and numerous writers — largely because purely biological are simpler than human phenomena — have been obsessed with the idea that the study of biology as such will teach us principles which can be applied directly and wholesale to human problems. ';-.What we have just been saying shows us the correct path. Through psychology and biology, soci-

2 Morley Roberts is a recent exception. See his interesting book, Warfare in the Human Body.

ology can become attached to the general body cf science; and in so doing it can both receive and give. Since man is but a single species of organism, and, biologically speaking, a very young one; since moreover he presents a peculiar type of organization, it is clear that the broad principles underlying physiology and evolution can best be studied on other organisms and later applied to man. On the other hand, man is the highest existing organism; thus a study of the causes to which he owes his pre-eminence will be important as adding to and crowning the principles derived from non-human biology. Furthermore, not only are man's mental powers on a different level from those of other animals, but psychology can at present make by far its greatest contributions by a study of human mind, so that the psychological side of biology will for the present derive its chief information from man.

Our first affair, therefore, is to see in what important respects man is qualitatively unlike the rest of the organic world; then to investigate what general rules or principles apply equally to him and to the others; and finally to see what corrections, so to speak, must be made before these principles can be applied to the one or to the other.

The qualitative difference between man and other organisms is a cardinal fact with orthodox biology has tended to slur over or to neglect, whereas philosophy has too often tried to magnify it unduly so as to make man frankly incommensurable with his lower relatives, a creature not only unique but disparate.

Man is obviously and undoubtedly an organism of the same general nature as other organisms. He possesses the same general system of organs, working in the same way as a dog, a horse, a bird, a crocodile, or a frog; he passes through the same type of developmental cycle; he is built on the same detailed plan as other mammals; and numerous indications betray his descent from a particular branch of the mammalian stock.

But in his mode of life and type of social organization he is unique. All detailed comparisons between the communities of man and those of bees and ants are as unprofitable in the working-out as they are easy in the making. It is futile to direct the sluggard or any other human being to the ant, since the whole physical and psychical construction of ants is different from that of man, the whole organization of their communities from that of his.

His mode of life is unique because his psycho-neural mechanism is built on a new plan, new modes of connection between parts of the brain being associated with new possibilities of mind. Let us briefly run over the biologically most important points in which he differs from the lower organisms.

In the first place, he is capable of speech, and possesses a true language — not a mere repertory of sounds or signs associated with different states of mind, as in some higher organisms, but a language comprising special symbols for particular external objects, and thus making it possible to have a much more detailed knowledge and classification of the outer world. In the second place, he can frame abstract ideas or concepts, and is thus enabled to extract the general kernel from the husk of innumerable separate and different particulars. As a result of these two faculties, he possesses what we may call a new, accessory form of inheritance. True biological inheritance takes place by means of the reproductive cells. In some birds and mammals, the behaviour of the young is modified by what they learn from their parents, so that they profit by the experience of their elders; however, this profiting by experience is not cumulative, but must be repeated afresh in each generation. In man, on the other hand, speech and writing make it possible to construct a continuous tradition, by means of which experience may be actually accumulated from generation to generation. There are thus two forms of inheritance in man, two hereditary streams — biological inheritance, by means of germ-cells or detached portions of the organism, in which favourable mutations may be accumulated by selection, and "experience-inheritance," by means of tradition, in which useful experience may be accumulated by the activity of mind. By means of tradition-inheritance, man is virtually enabled to "inherit acquired characters"; thus the environment in which the latter stages of his development are passed through, and consequently his adult self, the end-product of that development, can be altered far more rapidly than in any other organism. Finally, it is possible, as is being increasingly realized, thus to accumulate experience relating to the alteration of biological inheritance, and so eventually to substitute conscious purpose for blind natural selection in man's future evolution.

Next point: by means of speech, tradition, and invention, man has been enabled to extend his biological environment — in other words, that part of the cosmos with which he stands in relation — till it has reached an enormously greater size than that of any other organism. He is learning ever more facts about the celestial bodies, studying stars that are at an inconceivable distance from him. He is able to travel at will to all parts of the globe. He can penetrate by means of tradition to remote periods of the past : as Mr. Wells has forcibly put it, a modern Englishman can know more of the world in the Classical Epoch than could the most learned Greek or Roman. And even when he can no more get into contact with ideas, he can still unravel facts: flint implements help him to the history of man, fossils to that of life, rocks to that of the globe, stars to that of the solar system. In time, as well as in space, his environment enlarges to a size that is for practical purposes infinite, whereas no other organism can penetrate beyond its own memories, or, at most, do more than profit by those of the generation immediately before it. Professor Keyser,^ in a suggestive article, has characterized this unique attribute of man by calling him "the time-binder."