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THE MIND AND
THE EYE
A STUDY OF THE
BIOLOGIST’S STANDPOINT

AGNES ARBER, FRS, FLS

With an Introduction by P. R. Bell

Department of Botany and Microbiology
University College London

H
The right of the
M
University of Cambridge
to print and sell
all manner of books
i.i.l
V*4 was granted by

% P i Henry VIII in 1534.

The University has printed
and published continuously
since 1584.

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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London New York New Rochelle

Melbourne Sydney
Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 iRP
32 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022, USA
10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia

© Introduction P. R. Bell 1985

Copyright The Mind and the Eye Cambridge University Press 1954

First published 1954

Reissued as a paperback with an Introduction 1985

Printed in Great Britain by the University Press, Cambridge

British Library cataloguing in publication data

Arber, Agnes
The mind and the eye: a study of the biologist’s standpoint. -
(Cambridge science classics)
1. Biology
I. Title
574 QH307.2

Library of Congress Cataloguing in publication data

Arber, Agnes Robertson, 1879-1960

The mind and the eye.

Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Biology - Philosophy. 2. Biology - Research.
I. Title.
QH331.A7 1985 574'. 01 85-9624

ISBN o 521 31331 7 paperback

 To
D.S.R. and P.G.R.
sai quel che si tace
 CONTENTS

Preface to the 1954 edition ix

Acknowledgements x
Introduction by P. R. Bell xi

PART I

THE NATURE OF BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Introduction 3
I The biologist and his problem 6
II The mode of discovery in biology 17
III The logical background of the biologist’s problem 22
IV The biologist’s use of analogy 32
V The biologist and the written word 45
PART II

THE BASES OF BIOLOGICAL THINKING

Introduction 63
VI Biology and truth 65
VII The basic assumptions of biology 76
VIII Biological antitheses 92
IX Antitheses and dialectic 108
X The mind and the eye 115
List of books and memoirs cited 127
Index 139
 PREFACE

In the course of a period, extending over half a century, in

which my concern has been with research in plant mor¬
phology, I have found my mind dwelling more and more
upon the nature of scientific thought, and its relation to other
intellectual activities. Such ponderings have led me gradually
to realize how little I, as a biologist, could actually justify, or
even, indeed, understand, the nature of the basic assumptions
and modes of argument which, in accordance with scientific
tradition, I was taking simply as ‘given’. For the last twenty
years I have been attempting to clarify my ideas on these sub¬
jects, with the aid of such reading in metaphysics as is within
the compass of the amateur. In The Natural Philosophy of Plant
Form, published by the Cambridge University Press in 1950,
I have touched upon certain aspects of the botanist’s attitude
to his work. The present book offers a more generalized analysis
of the biologist’s approach to his own subject and to philosophy.
Of the defects and limitations of this study I am profoundly
conscious; but my hope is that its very inadequacies may
stimulate others to cast an illumination, more powerful than
my rushlight, upon the biologist’s road to reality.
Agnes Arber
Cambridge
22 May 1953

IX
 ACKNO WLEDGEMENTS

I wish to express my gratitude to those authors and publishers

who have allowed me to use quotations from the following
books: J. Clark and A. Geikie (1910), Physical Science in the
Time of Nero (Macmillan and Co. Ltd.); F. M. Cornford (1935),
Plato's Theory of Knowledge, and (1937) Plato's Cosmology (Rout-
ledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd.); E. R. Dodds (1923), Select Passages
Illustrating Neoplatonism (S.P.C.K.); Pfeiffer’s Meister Eckhart
(1949), translated by C. de B. Evans (John M. Watkins);
F. Galton (1889), Natural Inheritance (Macmillan and Co. Ltd.);
B. Jowett (1871), The Dialogues of Plato (Clarendon Press,
Oxford); C. Singer (1917), ‘The scientific views and visions of
Saint Hildegard ’, in Studies in the History of Science, vol. 1 (Claren¬
don Press, Oxford); D. W. Singer (1950), Giordano Bruno (Henry
Schuman, Inc., New York); N. Kemp Smith (1923), A Com¬
mentary to Kant's ‘ Critique of Pure Reason ’, and (1933), Immanuel
Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Macmillan and Co. Ltd.); A. Wolf
(1910), Spinoza's Short Treatise (A. and C. Black, Ltd.).
I am also indebted to Henry Schuman, Inc., and to Professor
Ashley Montagu and Dr George Sarton, for permission to
incorporate in Chapter iv the substance of an article which
I contributed to Studies and Essays offered to George Sarton (1946).
It is now forty years since the Cambridge University Press
published my first book, and I should like to take this oppor¬
tunity of offering my tribute to the Syndics and the Staff for the
inexhaustible kindness and skill with which they smooth their
authors’ way.
A.A.

x
 INTRODUCTION

The republication of Agnes Arber’s The Mind and the Eye at a

time when so much of the stress in biology is on the molecular
and genetic may seem anachronistic. This would be far from
the truth. Advances in biology continue to depend on what
Goethe (in The Theory of Vision) called ‘das denkende Auge’.
Agnes Arber’s aim in her classic work was to illustrate this
theme by an analysis of the essential steps in biological research.
Her examples may appear dated, but the principles she recog¬
nizes are not. It is Agnes Arber’s insight into the fundamental
aspects of research, arising from many years of distinguished
work in the field of plant morphology, which gives The Mind
and the Eye its enduring quality.
Particularly timely is Agnes Arber’s treatment of description
in biology. ‘Merely descriptive’ is often used dismissively in
relation to morphological and anatomical work. Frequently
the implied rebuke is deserved, but description remains an
irreplaceable element in all biological research. This is parti¬
cularly evident where new techniques are opening up wholly
new areas of observation. The problem of the causes of the two
phase changes in life cycle of the land plants (‘alternation of
generations’ in the older terminology), for example, depends
for its solution upon knowledge of the intimate details of gameto-
genesis and sporogenesis. Electron microscopy has made this
possible, and this has led to descriptive work of the highest order.
But what is the ‘highest order’? Firstly, of course, accuracy.
Secondly, the satisfactoriness with which the discoveries are
related to the structure of cells generally. And thirdly the con¬
vincingness with which the interpretation of unique structures
or unique conditions of familiar cell components is argued in
relation to current theories of cell structure and function. Only
when the researcher has constructed an intellectual framework
xi
 INTRODUCTION

of this kind can he begin to plan experiments which will be

useful, ‘useful’ in this context meaning those experiments of
which the results can be sensibly interpreted. The current studies
of self-sterility in Raphanus (radish) provide a splendid example
of how ultrastructural investigation leads to rewarding experi¬
mentation, and demonstrate the powerful role of description in
an area transformed by advances in the resolving power of
microscopy.*
Agnes Arber naturally has very cogent things to say about
the nature of hypotheses in the biological sciences. The grander
hypotheses, particularly those involving historical events, often
owe much to analogy with human experiences. Darwin’s
theory of evolution, for example, imposes upon the natural
world concepts derived by analogy with the practices of animal
and plant breeders. It has been argued extensively elsewhere,
for example by Popper, whether the theory of evolution, being
too imprecise to subject to experimental test, can legitimately
be considered a scientific theory sensu stricto. A question less
often asked, but well worth asking, is whether the analogy
between evolution and the practices of breeders is a good one.
The value of an analogy is that its quality can be assessed on a
continuous scale. If an analogy is present at all it is likely to
have some usefulness, and it may be an important stimulus to
further research. A recent example is the parallel which has
been drawn between the interaction of traffic flow? at a com¬
plex junction, and the inflow of nutrients and the outflow of
products in a plant community. The systems of matrix algebra
which have been devised to identify the controlling factors in
the first may lead to the recognition of hitherto unsuspected
interactions in ecology.
It is now commonly accepted that ‘scientific method’ is
largely an illusion, and that the logical sequence it envisages
by which a researcher reaches his conclusions is an ideal
* See, for example, H. G. Dickinson & D. Lewis (1973). Cytochemical and
ultrastructural differences between intraspecific compatible and incompatible
pollinations in Raphanus. Proc. R. Soc. Load. 183B, 21-36. Idem, The formation of the
tryphine coating the pollen grains of Raphanus, and its properties relating to the
self-incompatibility system. Ibid. 184B, 149-65.
• •

Xll
 INTRODUCTION

formulation possible only after the investigation is completed.

The procedures of the individual scientist are altogether more
haphazard. The driving force in research is of course moti¬
vation, fuelled by the intellectual fascination afforded by certain
aspects of the material with which the researcher is confronted.
The analysis of these phenomena, proceeding continuously in
the observer’s mind, gives rise to possible relationships, which
may be either causal or conceptual depending upon the nature
of the research. The researcher may ultimately become con-
*

vinced of their validity well before the evidence is in a form

which can be presented and found satisfying by his colleagues.
Agnes Arber shows how this has long been a problem with the
great, quoting the saying attributed to Gauss ‘I have had my
results for a long time; but I do not yet know how to arrive at
them’.
The presentation of evidence raises of course the question of
writing, an art in which Agnes Arber herself was so accom¬
plished. Biologists may, suggests Agnes Arber, legitimately make
more use of the literary aspects of language than is customary in
physics and chemistry. Instead of thinking of his composition
as a sequence of words, each with a precise meaning, the
biologist should perhaps pay regard to their effect as a whole,
as an organism is more than the sum of its parts. Many would
regard this as dangerous country, and would not follow Agnes
Arber in seeing the biologist’s task as set between the purely
rational approach of the physical sciences and the more imagi¬
native one of the humanities. Without denying the difficulty of
expressing some biological concepts in a precise manner (expla¬
nations of phyllotaxy, for example, frequently involve concepts
of ‘morphogenetic fields’ at the apex, a masterly cloaking of
ignorance in elegant language), the ultimate aim must surely
be to evolve concepts and systems capable of exact definition
and, where appropriate, of measurement. Since Agnes Arber
wrote, we do perhaps see electronic engineers beginning to
experience the same difficulties as biologists. As the number of
circuits imprinted on microchips increases, and the interactions
of these circuits become ever more complex, the terminology of
• • •

Xlll
 INTRODUCTION

computer science is tending to become biological. In a recent

discussion of the reliability of computer memories the author
goes so far as to speak of half chips or even whole chips
having been ‘known to go bad’. Although a technical article,
biological decay, a process involving many interacting sys¬
tems, was evidently seen as an appropriate analogy for the
failure of an intricate component within a highly developed
machine.
Language inevitably raises the topic of translation. The re¬
grettable decline of German as a scientific language has resulted
in many papers from German-speaking countries which although
grammatically correct, nevertheless lack clarity. Sometimes,
since the writing has come more from the dictionary than from
the mind, transferring the text back to German reveals the
writer’s intentions. While it is probably still better for scientists
to write in their native tongues, it has to be conceded that the
international nature of science renders this impracticable.
Indeed English is tending increasingly to become the lingua
franca of science, and those who do not publish in English run
the risk of being ignored. If English is to be accepted as the
international language of scientific research, then a standard
vocabulary and agreed rules of syntax would seem to be essen¬
tial. A parallel would be with the form of Latin which is used by
taxonomists throughout the world to describe new species of
plants. It would of course be an impoverished English, bereft of
charm and topical nuances, but it may be the price which has
to be paid for unambiguous communication between scientists
in different lands. It is a dismal prospect for those who love
language and fine writing, but there will always be oppor¬
tunities for scientists to indulge in these delights in their own
communities.
In her discussion of the ‘correspondence’ and ‘coherence’
theories of truth Agnes Arber enters waters which many
practising biologists may find unfamiliar. The ‘correspondence’
theory probably describes the approach of most biologists,
namely it is expected that what is held to be true will correspond
so far as it is possible to the observed facts. Where observations
xiv
 INTRODUCTION

depend upon measurements, the likelihood of error can often

itself be expressed in numerical terms following appropriate
statistical analysis. Where the statements are made pictorially,
as by the use of electron micrographs selected from many,
fellow scientists have to depend upon the presenter’s assurance
that they are representative. The confidence with which this
can be accepted will naturally depend upon many consider¬
ations, not necessarily directly concerned with the work in
question. The validity or otherwise of the claim will of course
ultimately become clear as other investigators enter the field.
The situation then approaches that envisaged by the ‘co¬
herence’ theory of truth, according to which truth becomes
established as it acquires ‘systematic coherence’. Agnes Arber
draws attention to the parallel with Richtigkeit and Wahrheit in
Hegelean philosophy, the first corresponding to objective
‘correctness’, and the second to an altogether more complex
notion of truth in which the bare observations, complemented
by subjective elements, acquire greater significance and value.
In this discussion, despite Agnes Arber’s persuasiveness, many
will nevertheless feel distinctly uneasy, and will not readily
accept that biological science, as distinct from physics and
chemistry, necessarily involves metaphysical concepts. It is
doubtful whether, to take Agnes Arber’s example, the structure
of an organ of a plant or animal can ever be ‘explained’ on
teleological grounds, or even that such an explanation can be
regarded as a ‘partial truth’. A teleological ‘explanation’
appears to resemble ‘ scientific method ’ in that both are
products of reasoning after the process to which they relate has
been completed, and although notionally satisfactory, neither
is an authentic representation of events as they really happen.
A physico-chemical explanation of the structure of an organ,
if it could ever be achieved, might well be predictive, in that it
would be possible to foretell, given changes in the controlling
factors involved, how the structure of the mature organ would
be modified. Attempts at this kind of analysis are to be found in
D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, where it is shown that
different physiognomies can be related by relatively simple
xv
 INTRODUCTION
' %

changes in co-ordinates. As the myriad activities of genes and

their products in differentiating cells become known it is not
inconceivable that computer modelling will make it possible to
portray how cell lineages generate complex organs. This of course
is still very far away, and a phenomenon as familiar as the
differentiation of a xylem cell has yet to be explained in toto.
Nevertheless an approach of this kind is becoming increasingly
feasible. To many biologists it would seem to be entirely in
harmony with the spirit of scientific inquiry, and notions of
teleology will seem to be altogether less cogent and belong to a
wholly different realm.
In her discussion of biological antitheses Agnes Arber touches
on the nature of ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions in biological
science. One attempts to answer ‘ how ’ questions in a mechanistic
way, although such explanations, as we have seen in relation to
stem apices, may founder in the vaguest of concepts, since the
interplay of the physico-chemical forces in the cells concerned
is often largely unknown. ‘Why’ questions are difficult to
answer, even if the intention of such questions is at all clear.
It may be that, in the context of science, ‘why’ questions are in
fact meaningless, and irrelevant to the inquiry being under¬
taken. Even if the cellular events culminating in a particular
structure were to be fully understood, it is no explanation to say
that their raison d'etre lies in the structure concerned bestowing
a selective advantage on the individual possessing it. This merely
accounts for the persistence and perfection of this structure in
the course of evolution. Function is therefore no explanation of
form; form and function are different aspects of the same thing -
a feature becoming increasingly evident as structural research
enters the realm of the molecular. Current investigations of
membrane structure, particularly of the photosynthetic mem¬
branes, are providing magnificent examples of how function
follows ineluctably from form. The analysis of the very fast
light reactions in photosynthesis shows that the electron donors
and acceptors must be arranged in a defined sequence in the
membrane, since otherwise the ordered transfer of the electrons
could not take place. Electron microscopy of an advanced kind,
xvi
 INTRODUCTION

coupled with immunocytochemical techniques and image

analysis, has now revealed the molecular symmetry of the
photosynthetic reaction centre itself, and also its asym¬
metrical placing in the membrane.* The properties of the
molecules which make up the centre and the way in which
they are arranged with respect to each other make it inevitable
that when irradiated with light of certain wavelengths the
centre behaves in a well-defined way and light energy be¬
comes transformed into chemical energy. At molecular di¬
mensions function follows the laws of thermodynamics, and at
this level teleological ‘explanations’ again appear wholly
anomalous.
Most biologists at the present time would probably regard
themselves as belonging to that branch of natural science which
deals with the organic world. They would probably regard
natural philosophy as being suspect. Nevertheless, attitudes
should not become too firm, and on many matters it is better to
retain an open mind. The form of a flower, for example, may be
assumed by a single flower, an inflorescence, or an aggregate of
inflorescences. Is this adequately accounted for by natural
selection? Can there be some kind of stability in the flower-like
form which reflects the natural resultant of the forces of growth
in the reproductive region? Evolution of the morphological
expression of the reproductive stage would then be constrained,
and its end products would tend towards visual similarity. The
concept of a ‘flower-like’ foim, towards the realization of
which the plant strives as it enters the reproductive phase, is
undeniably Platonic in nature, and yet not incapable of being
re-expressed in terms of plant physiology. The attitude of the
practising biologist towards natural philosophy should prefer¬
ably be one of caution rather than outright rejection. Just as
profitable mathematics can be done with expressions involving
the irrational ^/( — i), so too can good science emerge from
investigations in which the thinking has been metaphysical as

* See, for example, W. Stark, W. Kuhlbrandt, I. Wildhaber, E. Wehrli and

K. Miihlethaler (1984). The structure of the photoreceptor unit of Rhodopseudomonas
viridis. EMBO J. 3, 777-83.

xvii
 INTRODUCTION

well as physical. Following the conventions of experimental

science, however, the metaphysical elements will be omitted
from the published work, and the results will appear to be
‘soundly’ based on objective reasoning. It is fitting that it
should be so since the scientist, as scientist, is concerned with
the achievements of the research and the extent to which their
validity is supported by experiment and reasoning, not with
the tortuous paths which have led to them.
Biologists, as most scientists, become so absorbed in the
phenomena they are investigating that each generation tends
to forget that it is not the first to be caught up intellectually in
this kind of inquiry. Throughout the history of biology there
have been great minds that have stood aside and examined the
nature of knowledge, and the nature of the observation, experi¬
ment and reasoning which lead to its expansion. This is a
process in which there are many interacting elements, and it is
a worthwhile undertaking periodically to take stock of them.
The Mind and the Eye remains a magnificent treatment of these
themes, and its republication is to be welcomed by the reflective
in all disciplines. Agnes Arber’s erudition, unpretentious yet
awesome to many of us, never impedes the gracious flow of the
writing, and we are reminded again that the attempt to under¬
stand the natural world has a long and distinguished history.
The individual biologist’s self-esteem will not be wounded by
seeing himself as part of a scholarly tradition and realizing that
he is but one of many who have turned, and will continue to
turn, their intellectual energies to probing the mysteries of living
organisms. In recent years the spectacular advances in mol¬
ecular biology have generated such excitement that there has
perhaps been a tendency for organisms to be overlooked.
Biology must nevertheless remain ‘organismic’, and the re¬
searcher who loses the concept of organisms seriously weakens
his claim to be a biologist. It does not follow that a biologist
cannot happily research in the molecular domain. The situation
of many of today’s biologists is expressed succinctly and time-
lessly in Goethe’s lines
Willst Du Dich am Ganzen erquicken
So muss Du das Ganze im Kleinsten erblicken.
xviii
 INTRODUCTION

The same sentiments apply to Agnes Arber’s careful dissection

of the biologist’s manner of thinking and working. Although we
may argue about some of the details, we emerge from The Mind
and the Eye with an altogether enhanced appreciation of the
richness of biological science.

XIX
 PART I

THE NATURE OF
BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH
 PART I

INTRODUCTION

A BIOLOGIST, asked to formulate the aim of his studies

in the broadest and most general terms, might answer that
- he wanted to know, and above all to understand, the form,
structure and behaviour, of living things; the chemical and
physical factors in their functioning; their development, repro¬
duction, and genetics; their relation to the non-living environ¬
ment and to one another; and their race history. He would, of
course, make the reservation that his acquaintance with most of
the labyrinthine detail of this enormous field could not be more
than second-hand, derivative, and sketchy; his first-hand know¬
ledge could relate only to a strictly limited region. For the
purpose of offering some contribution of his own to science, still
further limitation would be demanded, and he would have to
choose, out of the area on which his interest mainly concentrated,
some place where he felt there was a certain obscurity—con¬
cerning facts, or their interpretation, or both—which he could
hope to enlighten. He might be fortunate enough to turn his
attention to some point where either a clear-cut question could
at once be put to Nature, or where, if he could achieve a more
exact description of the facts, some individual inquiry might
eventually emerge and formulate itself. This brings into view
the research worker’s first objective—the choice either of a specific
question, or of some problematic area of biological thought from
which, under the stimulus of factual study, he can hope that
a distinct question will gradually crystallize. The finding of
a genuine problem is indeed of fundamental importance. The
mind languishes when faced with an enigma which lacks con¬
tent, but, confronted by a problem worthy of its steel, it often
displays powers which were previously quite unsuspected.1
When the researcher has arrived at a definite question, he
1 Cf. Meyerson, (1931), vol. n, pp. 615-17.

3
 PART I. INTRODUCTION

hardly ever finds the facts, which he needs for the solution of his
problem, ready to his hand; in order that they may be facts for
him, he has to acquire them for himself, from his own standpoint.
The second stage is thus the observational or experimental
search for relevant data, and an attempt to organize them. After
this comes the third stage—the endeavour to interpret the
marshalled facts. The data may prove to fit neatly into the
existing framework of scientific explanation, or they may demand
a reconstruction of this framework before they can find their
place in it.
If the programme has been carried successfully through these
three stages, some sort of solution of the initial problem will have
been reached, and the biologist comes to the fourth phase of his
work—the attempt to test the validity of his solution; in other
words he has to do what is commonly described as 4 proving ’ its
truth.
The first four phases just enumerated have had only an in¬
ternal reference, but, in the next, the researcher has to turn his
gaze outwards; for he has now to consider how to communicate
the course of his investigations, and the conclusions to which he
has come, to his fellow-students, who cannot know what it is all
about, except through the medium of his skill with pen, and
sometimes with pencil.
In these days of specialization, the biologist who hopes to add
anything to science is bound to confine his attention during the
greater part of his working life to these five stages. Nevertheless,
most workers occasionally, and those of a contemplative tem¬
perament more frequently, are conscious of an urge to pass on
to a further stage—the sixth in the sequence we are tracing. In
this the biologist stands back from the individual jobs to which
he has set his hand, in order to see them in the context of thought
in general; to criticize their presuppositions and the mode of
thinking which they employ; and to discover how the intellectual
and sensory elements, which they include, are interconnected.
This urge is more likely to supervene late in life, since the con¬
templative spirit then gathers a force that it could not collect in
earlier years, when the mind, in its fresh receptivity, concen-

4
 PHASES IN BIOLOGICAL THINKING

trated its attention upon the delightful detail of the factual

multiplicity of living things. This terminal stage of biological
thinking may take more than one form. The worker may attempt
to realize his own individual findings in relation to those far-
reaching problems which are common to the various fields of
thought; his activities at this level will then extend into the
territory of philosophy. On the other hand, if it is the visual
rather than the purely intellectual aspect of his problems which
enthrals him, and affords him a glimpse of wider horizons, he
may discover that his reaction to his experiences is, in the long
run, that of the artist rather than the philosopher. Vesalius is
a cogent example of a great biologist, who did not think in terms
of intellectual concepts, but was essentially a creative artist-
naturalist.1
The pattern of the present book is so disposed as to follow, in
general outline, the ascending scale suggested by the six stages
here recognized. The chief stress will be laid upon the ultimate
grade, in which, in the writer’s personal view, the previous phases
all find their end and their justification.
1 On the position of Vesalius in biology, see Singer, C. (1925); Nordenskiold,
N. E. (1950); and Singer, C., and Rabin, C. (1946).

5
 CHAPTER I

THE BIOLOGIST AND HIS PROBLEM

S INCE the first step in biological research involves the

decision as to the question on which to concentrate, the
researcher is at once put upon his mettle, for the full
recognition and appreciation of a problem may task him even
more severely than its solution. It is undoubtedly true that the
“difficulty in most scientific work lies in framing the questions
rather than in finding the answers”;1 an unerring instinct for
the valid problem is likely, indeed, to be the ripened harvest of
the scientific life, rather than its first-fruits. In practice, however,
the paradox, that the thinker needs to have reached the end
before he can make an effective beginning, must be ignored; for
full preparedness for the start never comes until the time for
starting has long gone by. So the biologist must begin without
tarrying for full equipment, making shift from the first to pose
his own question as best he may. It is true that the difficulty
may be side-tracked temporarily, since the young worker, during
his apprenticeship, is often supplied with a ready-made problem
by his supervisor. Such tutelage is inevitable, if the student is to
be put in possession of the traditional mode of approach and the
existing technique. As a strictly ephemeral phase, it should not
undermine originality—it may, on the contrary, assist it, for no
man can create a new offshoot from tradition, or break with it
to advantage, unless he knows precisely what it is that he is
developing or discarding. The fact that spoon-feeding with
imposed problems sometimes lingers on into later years, owing
to the exigencies of team-work, may seriously impede intrinsic
development; for each biologist ought to be able to say to him¬
self, like Descartes, that his intention is to build upon a founda¬
tion that is all his own.2 It was Descartes, again, with his sturdy
1 Boycott, A. E. (1929), p. 95.
2 “de bastir dans un tons qui est tout a moy” [Descartes, R.] (1637), p. 16;
(1947), p. 15. Translation, Haldane, E. S., and Ross, G. R. T. (1911-12), vol.i,p.90.

6
 PROBLEMS AND THE ‘ZEITGEIST’

individualism, who held that the only help that can be given to
a researcher is to defray his needful scientific expenses, and then
to ensure that no one filches his leisure.1
When we consider problems in the light of history, we find that
they are, in one aspect, suprapersonal; for what particular bio¬
logical questions excite special interest at any given period is a sign
of the general intellectual focus of that period; contemporary
topics and those of the past are thus seen through quite different
spectacles. One becomes acutely conscious of this divergence
in looking over old volumes of research journals; they are filled,
in the main, with articles in which the authors tackle, with
enthusiasm, problems which have now simply lost their interest
for us. It is not by any means always that these problems have
since found their answers, and that they have been built into the
structure of the science; often they have been shelved rather than
solved, yet the notion of pursuing them evokes in us now nothing
but ennui. This feeling may have a sound basis, for a problem
put aside in one period must have the right interval of dor¬
mancy before awakening, freshened, to an unforced solution,
when the time is naturally ripe. In the history, for instance, of
such a subject as psychology, which is relatively modern as a self-
conscious and autonomous science, we can see how many starts
have been made in different directions, and have afterwards
been set aside in favour of other lines.2 It seems safe to prophesy
that future generations will, from a more advanced standpoint,
return to reap a harvest from some of these now forsaken
beginnings. That there is a time for everything, and a season for
every purpose under heaven, is indeed continually exemplified
in the history of science; the general intellectual atmosphere of
any given moment has an effect upon this history which is com¬
pulsive to a humiliating degree. In every period certain classes
of beliefs and ideas have been actively distasteful, and even
workers of some independence of mind are found to have shrunk

1 “ . . . fournir des frais des experiences dont il auroit besoin, et du reste empescher
que son loisir ne luy fust oste par 1’importunite de personne” [Descartes, R.]
(1637), p. 73; (1947), p. 73. Translation, Haldane, E. S., and Ross, G. R. T.
(1911-12), vol. 1, p. 127. ,
2 Cf. the history of a century of psychological study in Flugel, J. C. (1933).

7
 I. THE BIOLOGIST’S PROBLEM
\ x

from them as if they were tabooed. In the literature of biology

one may occasionally detect a hint of an untrodden and un¬
authorized way, which held out a prospect of a fresh view-point;
but the man, who had glimpsed it, too often proceeded to turn
his back upon it, reverting to the familiar beaten paths, where he
could absorb confidence from the reassuring society of his fellow-
workers. The tyranny of the Zeitgeist is obvious enough to us in
the scientific writing of fifty years ago, whereas we are less aware
of it in that of this year, because we are always too much be¬
dazzled by contemporaneity to judge the present fairly; half
a century hence, biologists will, no doubt, find as much tedium
in the general approach of to-day as we do in that of a time which
is to us equally long past. It is sad that it should be so, for we
lose a great deal if we discard the conceptions of past generations
indiscriminately, because the swing of the pendulum of fashion
makes us react against them.
In every field of biological research, the intellectual climate
and the general beliefs of the time cannot but be especially and
rightfully influential where the beginner is concerned. He will
best ‘ find himself5 in his work if he embarks upon a task which
he can realize as a part, even if a minimal part, of some attempt
much larger than itself, which is a tributary of the main thought-
stream of the period. If, for instance, he is a taxonomist, aiming
only at dealing with the affinities of a single form, he will make
the best job of his attempt by viewing it as a microcosm of the
comprehensive subject of relationship in the whole living world,
as seen on the background of existing classificatory ideas. Later
on, he may profoundly modify, or discard these ideas, but mean¬
while the natural thing will be to begin by putting them to the
test of use, so that, when he departs from them, it will be for
well-knit reasons.
The work of the taxonomist, like that of the morphologist, is
sometimes slighted as being purely ‘descriptive’, and hence of
no theoretic interest; but this criticism is based on an inadequate
notion of what the term description should mean in biology. By
rights it should come into quite a different category from mere
mechanical representation in words. To begin with, what is to be
8
 DESCRIPTION AND THEORY

described is not fortuitous, but demands preliminary selection,

involving theoretical implications; otherwise the observer would
be lost in a chaotic nightmare of phenomena clamouring on all
sides for his attention. Moreover, every description exists on
a background of biological theory, to which it is intimately
related—whether this relationship is expressed or merely under¬
stood. In so far as description includes this element of related¬
ness, it may be held to be contributing its mite towards testing
the assumption that there is coherence between the different
parts within Nature.1 Work that is seemingly a descriptive study
of the most pedestrian type may thus, on closer scrutiny, be seen
to have also some theoretic function. At a higher level, the ideal
of scientific research appears to be most nearly approached when
delicate and detailed practical investigation is employed in
a conscious attempt to solve theoretic questions of the broadest
kind. Conspicuous examples of such work are seen in the still
young study of what is called ‘fine structure’—the realm of
organization between individual molecules and microscopic
structures2—and in the related ‘chemical geography’ within
the cell.3 Here we have a factual analysis of perceptual data
obtained by a highly evolved technique, associated with con¬
ceptual synthesis of an abstract type. The study of form is
thus raised to a plane above, but including, pure empiricism.
One of the factors determining the choice of a researcher’s
problem is whether the trend of his mind is towards the descrip¬
tive, or the more definitely theoretical. In science, almost
as much as in art, tastes have to be reckoned with; for the
researcher’s choice of a field cannot be satisfying unless both
feeling and intellect converge upon it. No one, indeed, can reach
a creative solution of a problem which he does not approach con
amore. Scientific men, of a non-analytic turn, when catechized
as to why they do their work, often give elaborately altruistic
reasons for their devoted concentration; but those who are more
introspective confess that, in reality, they do it simply because
they like it, and (in the Cornish sense) it ‘ belongs ’ to them to do
1 See Chapter vn, pp. 82-8, of the present book.
2 Cf., for example, Picken, L. E. R. (1950).
s Bradfield, J. R. G. (1950), p. 81.

9
 I. THE BIOLOGIST’S PROBLEM

it; they recognize that Kant was right when he pointed out that
the pleasurableness of advancing knowledge easily gives it the
appearance of being a duty.1
Another question of a highly personal kind, confronting the
researcher, concerns the relative size of problem which can fitly
be taken in hand. The idea that scale is of special significance in
biological mechanics, has been fully realized only in recent
times; a corresponding principle plays its part in mental life.
No biologist can do his best work unless the scale of his problem
is duly proportioned to the height of his powers and the width of
his vision. For a man of considerable mental calibre, a problem
with strictly limited range may prove hopelessly inhibiting,
through giving a frustrating sense of lack of scope: Hercules was
probably rather ineffectual with the distaff, during his servitude
to Omphale.2 By the ablest workers of all, however, this draw¬
back is sometimes overcome, since, under their hands, what
seemed to be a trivial question, may reveal unsuspected depths of
significance. Originality will out; the Arab writers, who held
themselves to be mere commentators upon Aristotle, were in fact
producing a philosophy rich in new elements.3 The many who
are less gifted, may find, however, as Locke recognized long ago,
that “ ’ tis Ambition enough to be employed as an Under-Labourer
in clearing the Ground a little, and removing some of the
Rubbish, that lies in the way to Knowledge”.4 When, however,
a researcher, who might have been happily and usefully em¬
ployed on a minor undertaking of this kind, tries to struggle with
a major question which dwarfs him, such powers as he can claim
are paralysed, and he is prevented from doing the service to
science that in him lies; or else his reaction takes the form of
whittling and paring down the subject, until he can bring it
within his competence by rejecting its essential difficulties. He
then congratulates himself on the facile conquest of his problem,

1 “Die Annehmlichkeit, welche die Erweiterung des Wissens begleitet, wird

sehr leicht den Schein der Pflichtmassigkeit annehmen.” From Traume eines Geister-
sehers (1766), in Kant, I. (1902-38), vol. 11 (1905), p. 369. For a study of this essay
see Caird, E. (1889), vol. 1, pp. 146 et seq.
2 Cf. Coleridge, S. T. (1817), vol. 11, p. 152.
3 Cf., for instance, Renan, E. (1852), pp. 66-7.
4 Locke, J. (1690), Epistle to the Reader.

10
 PROBLEM CHOICE

forgetting that he induced it to disarm before he tried to over¬

come it. Indeed, the best of which a man is capable can be
achieved only when his powers, and the theme on which he
exercises them, are fitted to one another without discrepancy.
This happy consummation may be attained only after a long
and exacting process of trial and error. The difficulties and
failures of the scientist in his search for the right topic, can be
paralleled in other spheres. Coleridge (as a prose writer) and
Samuel Johnson come into one’s mind as men, who, despite their
gigantic capacity, were helpless when it came to constructing
an adequate and integrated framework for their own abilities;
their mental activity thus never reaped its due harvest. One can
recall instances of others who, though they eventually sur¬
mounted this initial difficulty, did so only after deliberate and
prolonged search for a theme. In the three years before Gibbon’s
choice of The Decline and Fall was determined, he considered and
rejected ten other historical subjects,1 while Milton brooded over
nearly one hundred alternatives before he finally decided upon
Paradise Lost,2 which gave him the very field his genius needed.
Problem choice is only a minor part of a wider intellectual
discipline—the art of rejection. Confronted with a limitless field
for possible inquiry, the researcher is bound to neglect, for his
special purposes, all but a selected finite fragment. A choice is
always a sacrifice;3 but it is true, though paradoxical, that there
is much that is positive in the way of negation. This idea seems
to be more native to the oriental than to the occidental mind.
The Chinese, for instance, excel in their recognition of the
positive value of empty spaces in pictures,4 and one of their poets
pointed, long ago, to the essential significance, in the works of
man, of such negative features as the hollow of a clay vessel, or
the central vacancy of the hub of a wheel.5
When the biologist, having reached the preliminary formula¬
tion of his problem, turns to the second stage—the acquiring of
1 Gibbon, E. (1896); see autobiographical and journal entries between 14 April
1761, and 15 October 1764, pp. 193 et seq. and 302.
2 Masson, D. (1874), vol. 1, p. 44.
3 Cf. Poincare, H. (1908), p. 307; Scott, G. (1914), p. 163.
4 Binyon, L., in Fry, R., and others (1935), p. 12.
5 Waley, A. D. (1934), p. 155-

11
 I. THE BIOLOGIST’S PROBLEM

data which may give a clue to the answer to his question—he

embarks upon a troubled sea. To arrive at new facts, or even to
direct some new light on to those already recorded, is, in itself,
a task of extreme difficulty. Heraclitus, some five hundred years
before the birth of Christ, said that “Nature loves to hide”.1
This is even more conspicuously true to-day than it was then,
for, now that so many aspects of plant and animal life have
already been induced to reveal themselves, the utmost refine¬
ments of methods and technique are often needed before any¬
thing fresh can be elicited. The work of the biologist does indeed
require a many-sided equipment, since it demands both a talent
for delicate manipulation, and for the technician’s skills, in
addition to the power of abstract thought—capacities which are
rarely developed to the full in one personality. There is, however,
so close an association between fingers and brain, that to circum¬
vent this difficulty by handing over either the technical or the
interpretative side of the research to another worker cannot but
mean a serious loss of integration.
Apart from the internal hindrances, on a few of which we
have just touched, there are often external obstacles, formidable
enough to induce despair of ever arriving at the facts. When we
think, for instance, of the imperfect state of the evidence for the
past history of living creatures—all this evidence depending upon
relatively rare and sporadic fossil remains, often consisting
merely of detached and mutilated bits and scraps of debris—it
seems a miracle that palaeontologists should have succeeded in
acquiring all the detailed knowledge that is now available.
Their success awakens one to the vast treasure-trove waiting to
be uncovered by intensive study of even the most unpromising
records. The difficulty of fragmentary evidence, and its trium¬
phant conquest, are not peculiar to biology. A perfectly com¬
parable situation arises in studying, for instance, the pre-Socratic
philosophers. Such work has given results of the utmost signi¬
ficance, despite the fact that it is based, necessarily, upon
evidence as fragmentary, and often as poorly preserved, as that

1 Bywater, I. (1877), frag, x, p. 4, <pv<ns Kpumeadai <piAel; see also Patrick, G. T. W.

(1888), p. 683, or (1889), p. 124, and Burnet, J. (1920), p. 133.

12
 TECHNICAL ADVANCES

of the palaeontologist. Of the actual writings of Anaximander,

for example, apparently only a single sentence has survived,
transmitted at second-hand, but it has been described by a
scholar in this field as “ a jewel precious beyond estimate”.1 The
biologist may perhaps be permitted to amuse himself with the
fancy that the whole, to which such a sentence affords a clue,
may be compared to an extinct plant or animal, the nature of
which has to be deduced from a single fossilized scrap of the
dismembered organism—a fragment teeming, however, with as
much significance for him, as this sentence of Anaximander for
a student of the pre-Socratics.
All direct evidence concerning biological questions depends
upon the data the mind obtains from sense impressions. These
data are greatly increased in scope and accuracy by technical
advances, which not only have their obvious direct bearing, but
also produce indirect results of the most essential kind. They
often reorientate the mind towards natural things; this re¬
orientation in its turn educates the senses, which are far more
dependent upon the mind than is sometimes assumed. In the
seventeenth century, Henry Power,2 in the first flush of en¬
thusiasm for the microscope, wrote of the “minute Bodies and
smallest sort of Creatures about us”, as having been in the past
“but sleightly and perfunctorily described, as being the dis¬
regarded pieces and huslement of the Creation”; but when,
with the aid of magnification, it was discovered, “how curiously
the minutest things of the world are wrought ”, the mind became
aware of unplumbed depths of complexity in organisms, and this
awareness stimulated the eye to do its work more effectually than
ever before.
The value of continually advancing technique is inestimable,
so long as it is not allowed to become an end in itself, and thus
to foster delusive industry of a pointless kind. The mechanical
pleasure, for example, of cutting endless microtome sections,
may lull the mind into serene inaction and comfortable passivity
in regard to the problem to be solved. Equivalent side-tracking
has to be guarded against in fields other than science. It was
1 Jaeger, W. (1947), p. 34. 2 Power, H. (1664), Preface.

J3
 I. THE BIOLOGIST’S PROBLEM

painting that Sir Joshua Reynolds1 had primarily in mind when

he wrote of “A provision of endless apparatus, a bustle of
infinite enquiry. .. employed to evade and shuffle off real labour,
—the real labour of thinking”.
Another difficulty of a slightly different kind arises out of the
biologist’s tendency to concentrate his efforts on a limited region
of the ‘not known’, just outside the boundary of the ‘known’.
The result is that, when he succeeds in putting this unexplored
region on to the map of the ‘ known ’, he is apt to take a dis¬
proportionate view of its import, in relation to that of the whole
known field, of which it is, in fact, merely an insignificant
marginal area. He might be compared to an antiquary, who,
having in a remote comer of a vast cathedral unearthed a frag¬
ment of early masonry, invests his ‘ find ’ with an historic value
out of all proportion to that of the corpus of previous knowledge
about the building.
For convenience in handling, we have hitherto referred to the
researcher’s problem as if it could be considered in isolation;
but, in so doing, we have oversimplified the issue. There is no
such thing as a problem, just as there is no such thing as a fact or
a thought. The questions which the biologist puts to Nature are
integral parts of that living reticulum which is the intellectual
life of the time; they cannot be seen truly except on the back¬
ground of that reticulum, from which their vitality is drawn.
Furthermore, we have not only been thinking of problems in
too isolated a fashion, but we have also given the word too narrow
a connotation. It is true that the problems of a man’s apprentice
years will probably be straightforward questions, to which
answers in familiar terms can be found; but the problems of his
maturity should be something more than this. They may well
involve the reconstitution of the frame of reference to which his
specific questions are orientated, rather than any access of new
knowledge; and the result may be a change of standpoint, from
which fresh vistas, demanding exploration, are brought into
view. Such work then falls into a category comparable, for
instance, with that of Lavoisier—the great chemist, who also
1 Reynolds, Sir J. (1797), Discourse xii, 10 December 1784, vol. 1, p. 247.

14
 SERIAL NATURE OF PROBLEMS

advanced biology by throwing light upon the respiratory pro¬

cess; he is said to have instilled a new spirit into his science,
without ever having discovered a new substance or a new
phenomenon.1 Such work in its method approaches the philo¬
sophical disciplines, in which the area studied remains broadly
the same from generation to generation, while all that changes
is the point of view. To the biologist, who is too often dis¬
tracted from mental work by the insistent demands of manual
technique-—from which the philosopher is free—such general
reorientation of thought is as difficult as it is rare. Special re¬
orientation, related to one particular problem, is, however,
a common experience. Hitherto we have spoken as if a question,
once selected, remained constant to itself; but this is by no means
always the case. During the hunt for a solution, the problem
changes under the worker’s hand, and may altogether outgrow
its first formulation. It is, indeed, one of the marks of a man born
for research, that his problems do not remain static, but come to
life, and quietly themselves assume the direction of his work.
Seen as a series, the problems, which any biologist sets before
himself, must be considered not only in connexion with the
thought of the time, but also in relation to his own individual
development. If the personality is fully integrated, these prob¬
lems are not a sporadic group of discrete efforts, but form a
sequence showing a transition from juvenile to mature phases,
as continuous as the developmental history of a plant or animal.
Even when this analogy appears to break down, and the worker’s
output, especially in his youth, seems to be an erratic and dis¬
connected jumble, an onlooker of sufficiently penetrating insight
might detect, underlying these superficial vagaries, a move¬
ment, however circuitous, towards the eventual goal. This is
even more recognizable in the work of philosophers than of men
of science. For instance, a writer, who has made a special study
of Leibniz’s intellectual life in his earlier years,2 has come to the
conclusion that his whole system is traceable to five fundamental
concepts, all of which had already found distinct expression in
the work which he achieved as quite a young man. In the case
1 Nordenskiold, N. E. (1950), p. 265. 2 Kabitz, W. (1909), pp. 3, 127-34.

*5
 I. THE BIOLOGIST’S PROBLEM

of Kant, again, prolonged and intensive study shows that, in

spite of apparent inconsistencies and discrepancies in his suc¬
cessive writings, there is, in fact, an unbroken continuity in the
movement of his thought as a whole.1 The same continuous
progression of the individual mind is seen still more clearly in
the field of art. In poetry, for instance, though literary taste of
the more primitive kind appraises a writer by those few works
which are supposed to be his masterpieces, and have found their
way into anthologies, serious critics treat a man’s poetic output
as an organic whole, and each individual work is assigned its
place in a meticulously traced chronological sequence, which is
often unexpectedly significant.
Few people are fully aware of the stages of their own mental life
while they are passing through them; and it is only in the latter
part of his career, if ever, that the biologist himself is likely to
recognize the relation which the different phases of his work have
borne to one another—a relation which depends upon his indi¬
vidual outlook, and is stamped with the impress of his whole life
and thought. Indeed, in the choice of his successive problems—
unless he has an unusual gift for introspection—he is wise to trust
that his instinctive urge will point him to the road that is, at that
moment, the right one for him, rather than to attempt a self-
conscious analysis of his own past in relation to his possible
future. Such analysis is apt to be too much like tearing up a seed¬
ling, and anatomizing its damaged roots, in order to encourage
it to grow. As Meister Eckhart said, more than six hundred
years ago: “A man ought not to work for any why. . .but only
for that which is his being, his very life within him.”2 If the
researcher relies upon his inner intelligence, it will—deploying
itself beneath, or perhaps above, the level of his actual aware¬
ness—so direct him that an organic pattern, to which his pro¬
duction as a whole has conformed, will eventually come into
view.
1 Caird, E. (1889), vol. 1, p. ix.
- Pfeiffer, F. (1924, 2nd imp. 1949), J. Eckhart’s Serm. lxv, p. 163. It must
be noted, however, that some of the writings that pass under Eckhart’s name are
now held to be of doubtful authenticity; see Clark, J. M. (1949).

l6
 CHAPTER II

THE MODE OF DISCOVERY

IN BIOLOGY

H ITHERTO we have spoken about the solution of

problems in an externalized way. It remains to see
whether we can get any nearer the heart of the matter
by attempting to examine what the process of discovery—the
third"stage in our sequence—actually means within the biologist’s
mind. It is true that, in additions to purely factual knowledge, the
mental aspect is relatively unimportant; the limiting case would
be, for instance, the finding of a plant or animal new to science
by someone who was unprepared for anything of the kind and
who brings home his trouvaille almost accidentally. At the other
extreme, in interpretative research, mental activity obviously
must predominate.
The whole question of the nature of biological discovery is
merely one facet of a much more extensive subject, that of the
provenance of ‘ creative ’ work in philosophy, literature, and the
arts, as well as in science. Data concerning this question have
been assembled on a considerable scale,1 chiefly on the basis of
a rather uncritical acceptance of anything which those who have
achieved ‘original’ work of any kind have vouchsafed to dis¬
close about how they did it. A study of such records leaves one
feeling, however, that the people who are most vocally informa¬
tive about their own procedure, are often just those for whose
work the expression ‘creative’ is a mere courtesy title. More¬
over, even where a stricture of this kind does not apply, such
autobiographical statements can be accepted only with reserva¬
tions. It is doubtful whether the most conscientious attempts of
any man to analyse the thought-processes involved in the more
original parts of his own work, are likely to be fully authoritative.2
1 See for instance, Montmasson, J.-M. (1931), and Harding, R. E. M. (1948).
2 Cf. Meyerson, £. (1930), p. 387.

17
 II. THE MODE OF DISCOVERY

It seems, as a rule, to be beyond the capacity of the man himself

to compel into his consciousness the events that, in the normal
course, pass unperceived in the hidden penetralia of his own
mind; he can observe only their consequences, so far as they
emerge into awareness, and at their grounds he merely guesses.
The most we can hope is that his description may give us faint
hints and glimpses of what has actually happened.
As regards scientific work, the classic statement of how dis¬
covery is conceived and bom in the mind is still that of Henri
Poincare.1 While recognizing the intrinsic suggestive power of
Poincare’s lucid account, one may, however, regret that there
has been a tendency to accord to it a more universal status than
he himself claimed for it. His description was derived from what
he observed retrospectively of the genesis of his own mathe¬
matical discoveries. When he looked back upon the paths by
which his results had been reached, he was struck by a certain
general parallelism in the course of events. He noticed, broadly,
that in each example there was first a period (or periods) of
intensive conscious work, which apparently failed to lead to any
conclusion. Secondly, there was a change from conscious work.
This change might take various forms: he instances either simple
rest, or else a variation of place or pursuit, diverting the attention
for a time to other matters. It was after such a period, in which
the subject on which his mind had been bent was dismissed
temporarily from the field of consciousness, that a third stage—
in which the question he had been pondering passed from
darkness into full light—suddenly supervened. This illumination
put him into possession of a ‘ roughed out ’ solution of his problem
which carried with it, at least for the time being, an irresistible
conviction of truth—une entiere certitude. This certainty did not,
however, invariably survive critical examination, and, to put
the whole thing on a sound basis, a fourth stage was required—
another period of conscious work, in which the conclusions

1 Poincare, H. (1908). For an illuminating study of mathematical discovery,

see also Hadamard, J. (1945). This book came into the writer’s hands only after
the present chapter had been completed; it should be consulted especially for
a further account, with references, of the views of Poincar6 and other more recent
writers.

l8
 POINCARE ON DISCOVERY

reached were studied, exactly formulated, and subjected to

methodical scrutiny and testing.
When we review these stages, we see that there is nothing
unexpected about them, except the fact that a phase charac¬
terized by the absence of conscious work precedes the final
illumination, which gives birth to the hypothesis. Poincare’s own
explanation of the whole process is that the essential factor is the
combination—partly unconscious—of ideas whose capacity for
forming a fertile union had not previously been recognized.
Something of this rather obvious notion has been recurrent in
the history of thought. Sir Joshua Reynolds, for instance,
writing on art in the eighteenth century, declared that “Inven¬
tion, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of
those images which have been previously gathered and deposited
in the memory”.1 Poincare’s special contribution lay in hinting
at a type of mechanism which might implement this process.
He supposed that the elements in the mind, through which
discoveries may come, are like the hooked atoms of Epicurus;
but he warns the reader that this comparison is bien grossiere.
These elements, when the mind is completely at rest, are, so to
speak, attached to the wall. The first period of conscious work
results in freeing and setting in motion a number of such atoms,
selected as possible components of future unions. The conscious
mind makes various tentative trials with these mobilized atoms,
and induces them to form a variety of contacts and attachments,
but these experiments are resultless. When the effort is given up,
and the conscious mind is put to sleep, or else the attention is
turned elsewhere, the atoms do not immediately revert to
quiescence. They continue their unresting dance, in an auto¬
matic fashion, and they may—while consciousness is not, as it
were, looking on—form innumerable further combinations at
haphazard. The majority of these never gain entrance to the
conscious mind at all; it becomes aware only of those which
succeed in passing the scrutiny of what Poincare calls the
sensibilite esthetique—that sense of harmony and elegance, which
fills so conspicuous a role in the work of the mathematician.
1 Reynolds, Sir J. (1797), Discourse 11, 11 December 1769, vol. 1, p. 20.

19
 II. THE MODE OF DISCOVERY

According to Poincare, it is only from amongst the combinations

which appeal to this special sensibility, that the solution of the
problem can arise.
It is dangerous to accept unreservedly this picture of the
actual ‘how’ of discovery, dependent as it is upon the postulated
performances of a metaphorical apparatus of‘hooked atoms’—
an invention which Sir Isaac Newton stigmatized in another
connexion as “begging the Question”.1 Poincare’s attempt to
provide visual images of mental processes, which are, in fact,
non-picturable, cannot have more than a suggestive value,
but—apart from this—we have to consider how far the external
descriptive features of his account are applicable to discovery
in fields outside mathematics. Biologists, as well as mathema¬
ticians, would no doubt agree that successful hypotheses can
only come into being after a preparatory period of conscious
intellectual work. A great teacher of ancient China was voicing
something cognate when he spoke of “the long expenditure of
strength, and then one day, in a flash, everything becoming
linked up together”.2 In those branches of biology, however,
which deal primarily with form and structure, it is doubtful
whether the succeeding phase, which Poincare describes, is at
all characteristic—the phase, that is, in which withdrawal of
attention from the subject precedes the advent of the hypothesis.
This difference is probably due to the fact that, in morphological
work, visual impressions, immediate or remembered, play a part
which cannot be paralleled in the more abstract quantitative
disciplines.
When a biologist looks to his own experience, instead of
trying to apply, in his very different field, the interpretation
which the mathematician is justified in using in his own subject,
he may find that he can either confirm or refute a suggestion as
to the origin of biological discovery, which seems to the present
writer to meet the case. It is that new hypotheses come into the
mind most freely when discursive reasoning (including its visual
component) has been raised by intense effort to a level at which

1 Newton, Sir I. (1931; reprint of 4th ed. 1730), bk. in, quest. 31, p. 388.
2 Chu Hsi of the Sung Era, quoted in Fung Yu-lan (1947), p. 216.

20
 EMOTIONAL ELEMENT IN DISCOVERY

it finds itself united indissolubly with feeling and emotion. When

reason and intuition attain to this collaboration, the unity into
which they merge appears to possess a creative power which was
denied to either singly. It is not possible to offer strictly scientific
evidence for the idea that not only reason but emotion has
a function in biological discovery, as it admittedly has in creative
work in the arts; we can only point to slight indications which are
at least compatible with its truth. It is recognized, for instance,
that the moment at which a fruitful combination of ideas enters
the awareness, is often charged with a peculiar feeling of joy,1
which precedes and seems independent of, the rational satisfac¬
tion of goal-attainment. Such instantaneous delight is fully
congruent with Spinoza’s definition of pleasure as “the passion,
by which the mind passes to a higher state of perfection”.2 This
emotional element in discovery is perhaps the factor which
makes it so elusive, and so refractory to organized control.

1 Cf., for instance, Varendonck, J. (1921), p. 282; Wallas, G. (1926), p. 97.

2 [Spinoza, B. de] ‘B.D.S.’ (1677), Ethices, pars 111, prop, xi, Scholium, p. 105:
“Per Laetitiam. . .intelligam passioneni, qua Mens ad majorem perfectionem transit.”

21
 CHAPTER III

THE LOGICAL BACKGROUND OF THE

BIOLOGIST’S PROBLEM

I n the preceding chapter we touched upon the very core of

problem-solution—the actual process of discovery, or, in
other words, the origin of hypotheses. We have now to turn
to the fourth stage of the biologist’s work—the testing of his
interpretation. This means that we must look at his activities
afresh, on the background of logical thought, and inquire in
what way, and to what extent, they stand related to it.
The first question, to which the biologist needs an answer, is:
What, exactly, is meant by logic? The broader definitions—
culminating in such a view as Joachim’s, that it is “the science
of knowledge-or-truth”1—cover such an extensive field that
logic ceases to be distinguishable from certain other philo¬
sophical disciplines.2 On the other hand, Kant’s conception3—
that logic is limited precisely to the formal rules of all thought,
and has no concern with the content of knowledge—is somewhat
unsatisfying. For the scientific worker, definitions that may
make a stronger appeal are that logic is “the reflection of know¬
ledge upon itself”,4 or that it is “the science of implications”,
and that its “one aim... is to make our meaning clear, both with
regard to what is meant and to what that meaning implies”.5
There has been, indeed, a tendency to revolt against the chain¬
like character of the reasoning sanctioned by rigid logic, as
1 Joachim, H. H. (1948), p. 20; for another, less exaggeratedly broad definition,
see Johnson, W. E. (1921-4), pt. r, 1921, p. xiii.
2 Walsh, W. H. (1947), p. 5, footnote.
3 Kant, I. (1902-38). Bd. 111, 1904, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2nd ed., 1787,
Vorrede, p. 8, “die Grenze der Logik aber ist dadurch genau bestimmt, dass sie
eine Wissemchaft ist, welche nichts als die formalen Regeln alles Denkens. . .
ausfiihrlich darlegt und strenge beweiset.” Translation, Smith, N. Kemp (1933),
p. 18; see also Einleitung, p. 80: “Also ist das bloss logische Kriterium der
Wahrheit. . .zwar die conditio sine qua non, mi thin die negative Bedingung aller
Wahrheit: weiter aber kann die Logik nicht gehen.” Translation, Smith, N. Kemp
(1933), P- 98.
4 Bosanquet, B. (1911), vol. 1, p. 3. 6 Mackenzie, J. S. (1917), pp. 102-3.

22
 LOGIC IN BIOLOGY

confining the mind too narrowly to the conventional linear

concept of thought.1 In the view of certain idealist philo¬
sophers, the logician’s concern is not with isolated chains of
reasoning, but with the detection of the relations of any special
problem to the surrounding nexus, and thence, ultimately, to
the whole of reality.2
With so much difference of opinion among experts, the student
of biology can hardly be expected to adopt, blindly, the rules of
text-book logic in his own procedure; but it may help him, in
testing his conclusions, to analyse the methods, which he himself
has used, in their relation to those general logical principles on
which there is fair agreement. It is true that the biologist’s results
have, in fact, seldom been attained by the use of those rules with
which he afterwards finds that his reasoning harmonizes; he
may, indeed, have been quite unaware that such rules had been
formulated, and yet his argument, when examined, may fall
readily into place in the framework which they provide. Though
it is true that the biologist can no more penetrate the mystery of
discovery by the help of logical rules, than the painter can learn
how to create a picture from the art critic’s painstaking analyses,
yet, in research, the logical framework is not without its under¬
lying significance. It is fully accepted that manipulative tech¬
niques must be learned, but the idea that we also have to learn
how to think effectively is somewhat alien to the scientific
temperament. Though the biologist, in his undergraduate days,
has, to some extent, to submit to this educational process, much
of its value is obscured for him by the fact that he passes through
it unwittingly. The upshot of such unconscious study is liable to
be patchy and inadequate; its result sometimes suggests that
the conscious discipline of a training in logic might have had the
effect of clarifying the biologist’s thought, which is liable to be
clogged by those elementary confusions which the logical scalpel
could have removed with ease. One such confusion,3 which
at times vitiates biological argument, is that of asserting the

1 See Chapter iv, pp. 45, 46, of the present book.

2 Bosanquet, B. (1920), and Metz, R. (1938; reimpression, 1950), pp. 349-50.
3 Johnson, W. E. (1921-4), pt. 1, 1921, ch. v, pp. 54 etseq., and Hobhouse, L. T.
(1896), p. 409. Cf. also Woodger, J. H. (1929), p. 322.

23
 III. THE LOGICAL BACKGROUND

antecedent on the ground of the consequent. This comes about

because it is not always realized that it is far more difficult to
deduce a cause from an effect, than to see what effect a particular
cause will produce; for the cause to which we ascribe an effect
may, indeed, be one of a number of possible causes, but not
necessarily the one that actually operated. For instance, we
might claim with justice that z/'Natural Selection has governed
the past development of the organic world, animals and plants
to-day will show adaptations to their environments. Further we
may observe, rightly, that animals and plants are adapted to
their environments. It is not justifiable, however, to conclude
from these two statements that Natural Selection has, as a matter
of history, controlled the development of the organic realm. All
we can say is that Natural Selection is one of antecedent factors
which might have produced this effect; but our reasoning gives
no guarantee that this effect has not been, in fact, brought about
by other causes, perhaps of a totally different kind. St Thomas
Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, when discussing astronomy,
recognized a corresponding logical crux. He pointed out that
the notion of eccentrics and epicycles was accepted because it
accounted for the observed movements of the heavenly bodies,
but he considered that this did not amount to proof, since it was
possible that some different hypothesis might serve equally to
save the phenomena.1 He is referring here to the familiar Greek
phrase, oxp^eiv tcc cpaivopeva,2 which Milton translated, “To
save appearances”, when he put it into the mouth of the
Archangel Raphael in his discourse to Adam of astronomical
theories.3 Saving the phenomena may be regarded as a key expres¬
sion, indicating a certain difference, rather in relative stress than
in method, between classical and modem science.4 The scientist
to-day starts with the phenomena, and, step by step, arrives at his
theoretical interpretation. The Greeks of Plato’s period, on the

1 Aquinas, St Thomas, in Migne, J. P. (1845, etc.), vol. 1, p. 741, Summa Theol.

1, quest. 32, art. 1; “Sicut in astrologia ponitur ratio excentricorum et epi-
eyclorum, ex hoc quod hac positione facta possunt salvari apparentia sensibilia
circa motus coelestes.” Translation in Aquinas, St Thomas (1911, etc.), 1, no. 2,
pp. 60-1. For a further account of Aquinas’s views on hypothesis, see Brodrick, J.
(1928), vol. 11, pp. 330-1. 3 Burnet, J. (1914), p. 11.
3 Paradise Lost, vm, 81. 4 Wightman, W. P. D. (1950), p. 35.

24
 INDUCTION IN BIOLOGY

other hand, paid attention primarily to theory, and only

secondarily to facts. They tended to begin with a generalized
idea; if they found that the particulars were not incompatible
with this idea, they considered the phenomena to be £ saved \ At
the present day we realize, in a way that the Greeks could not
have done, how indescribably complex, and difficult to interpret,
the appearances are; and we are able to see that an individual
hypothesis can hope only to £ save ’ a certain group, in the sense
of demonstrating its coherence; from this group, by the process
of induction, some further generalization may then be evolved.
This method is Aristotle’s enayooyr), ££the approach from par¬
ticulars to the universal”.1 It may be regarded as, in the strict
sense, scientific, since it is a common, shareable process,2 while
£ discovery ’, which is typically the intuitive work of a single mind,
is akin to art rather than to science. Induction takes its start
from an individual fact, observed in some particular case. For
example, it might be noticed that, in the petiole of the peltate
(shield-shaped) leaf-blade of a garden nasturtium (Tropaeolum),3
the vascular skeleton is approximately radial (stem-like). Further
observations would show that this is true, not only of other
leaves of the same plant, but also of any leaf belonging to the
same species, of which one chose to cut sections. Furthermore,
petiole structure on an identical plan is also to be found in
peltate leaves belonging to other families. The scrutiny might,
moreover, be extended to the peltate leaves which sometimes
occur as an abnormality in families in which the leaves are
ordinarily non-peltate; these exceptional peltations will be found
to show a similar construction. Observations of this kind, if they
could be distributed over a wide enough field, lead to the induc¬
tive conclusion that, in any example, as yet unexamined, a peltate
leaf-blade would be found to be borne on a petiole with radial
anatomy. Such inductive reasoning from observations, as
Sir Isaac Newton long ago pointed out, is ££no Demonstration of
general Conclusions; yet it is the best way of arguing which the
1 Cornford, F. M. (1935), p. 185.
2 This view of the nature of science is expounded, for instance, in Dingle, H.
(I931)-
3 Cf., for instance, T. majus L., Troll, W. (1935, etc.), vol. 1, p. 1205.

25
 III. THE LOGICAL BACKGROUND

Nature of Things admits of”.1 Inductive reasoning, at the best,

can never, indeed, lead to certainty; a high probability is the
utmost it can offer.2 It can, however, be tested to a limited
extent by application of the other primary procedure of logical
reasoning—deduction. This, in contrast to induction, is essen¬
tially a movement from the general to the particular. In the
classification of the living world, for instance, the process of
arranging organisms into successively more inclusive groups
(e.g. individuals into species, species into genera, and so on)
may be called inductive; it works from below upwards. On
the other hand, if we begin with a large synthetic group, and
analyse it downwards, into smaller groups, we are proceeding
deductively.3
In its logical form, deduction is typified by the syllogism. If,
in our botanical example concerning peltate leaves, we use the
conclusion, which we have reached inductively, as the major
premiss of a syllogism, we can deduce results from it which are
capable of being tested by observation. Our inductive con¬
clusion was that the petioles of peltate leaves have a radial anatomy.
Treating this as the major premiss, we may then choose a number
of species, A, B, C, etc., with peltate leaves (not included among
those from which the evidence for the original induction was
drawn), and use the statement, the leaves of A, B,C, etc., are peltate,
as the minor premiss. From these two statements we deduce
the conclusion that the petioles of A, B, C, etc., will show radial
anatomy. If we afterwards find by actual observation that this is
true, it affords, as far as it goes, evidence for the probability of
the statement to which induction led us. All this argument does
not, however, give the biologist much help, for the procedure
we have outlined is precisely that which common sense dictates
to the investigator, and which he uses as a matter of course,
1 Newton, Sir I. (1931; reprint of 4th ed., 1730), bk. in, quest. 31, p. 404.
2 On induction and probability, see Keynes, J. M. (Lord) (1921), Williams, D.
(1947), and, for detailed and highly technical treatments, Wright, G. H. von
(1951) and Wisdom, J. O. (1952). From the standpoint of the biological sciences,
special interest attaches to Kneale, W. (1949), from which (cf. pp. 22 and 214)
it becomes clear that the type of probability which concerns the biologist must be
distinguished from the measurable probability which the mathematician studies
in connexion with chance.
3 On synthesis and analysis in classification, cf. Zimmermann, W. (1930), p. 5.

26
 INDUCTION AND HYPOTHESES

without ever thinking of it under the grandiloquent terminology

of logic. For the same reason, the various more elaborate tech¬
niques, which logicians recommend, are apt to offer little to the
p'"'

biologist beyond a nomenclature and a detailed discrimination

of the tools with which his hand is already familiar. We might,
for instance, apply Mill’s Method of Agreement and Method of
Difference1 in order to arrive at a general statement about dorsi-
ventrality in a leafy shoot. We might either compare among
themselves those outgrowths from shoots, which are essentially
dorsiventral (i.e. leaves)—Method of Agreement; or we might
compare these dorsiventral outgrowths with others that are
essentially radial (i.e. lateral shoots)—Method of Difference. This
is undoubtedly a sound procedure, but it is just what any
observer, who was seeking for light on dorsiventrality in shoot
outgrowths, would adopt, even if it had never occurred to him
to direct his thinking according to the rules of logic. The biologist,
indeed, cannot but feel that a self-consciously logical approach
would often hinder rather than promote his work. It is true that
inductive reasoning, tested deductively if possible, is the means
in science whereby the passage from observation to a generalized
statement, of some degree of probability, is achieved; but further
than this induction cannot go.2 Even Bacon, notwithstanding
his fervent advocacy of the inductive method, says that, after the
“Presentation to the Intellect of all known Instances. . .we think it
useful to grant permission to the Intellect... to gird itself up and
attempt the Interpretation of Nature in the Affirmative”.3 This last
phrase may well point, as Kneale4 has suggested, to the method
of discovery in natural science which involves hypotheses. In¬
duction by itself can afford no clue to the significance of the
generalizations which it achieves. Taking the example, which
we have already been tracing, concerning the association of
a peltate leaf-blade with a radial petiole, we find that we cannot

1 Mill, J. S. (1843), vol. 1, p. 450. Duns Scotus distinguished these two methods
of induction 650 years before Mill; see Carre, M. H. (1949), p. 147.
2 Wisdom, J. O. (1952) came into the writer’s hands after the present chapter
was completed; in this book Wisdom states his conviction that “induction plays
no part whatever in science” (Preface, p. vii).
3 Bacon, F. (1620), Novum Organum, bk. 11, aphor. 11 and 20; for translation,
Kitchin, G. W. (1855), pp. 125, 155. 4 Kneale, W. (1949), p. 53.

27
 III. THE LOGICAL BACKGROUND

understand its inwardness except through the process of in¬

tuitive discovery. It is this process which resulted in the hypo¬
thesis that leaves are ‘partial-shoots’, with a tendency to
develop ‘whole-shoot’ characters.1 An example of this urge is
seen in the peltate leaf, for a leaf of this type shows a radiality
of form which recalls the ‘all round’ symmetry of the shoot,
rather than the dorsiventrality of an ordinary leaf. This trend
is not only revealed externally in the shape, but also internally in
the radial anatomy of the petiole. The hypothesis in question
thus links together facts, which, if viewed on inductive lines
alone, seem unrelated. We may say, in general, that induction
establishes the probability that certain features will be found
associated, but it is not concerned with the raison d'etre of this
association. An hypothesis2 has a contrasting function, since it
aims at disclosing the underlying significance of the factual
associations certified by induction. In other words, the hypo¬
thesis resolves a statement, which induction has left as a mere
factual juxtaposition—inorganic, and thus incapable of further
growth—into an organized living whole. It is clear that such
a claim as this can be maintained only for those hypotheses which
will endure critical scrutiny—and such hypotheses are relatively
rare. Though the modem investigator uses less picturesque forms
of expression, he may sympathize with Robert Boyle’s com¬
parison of the “noble Experiments ” of scientists, to the wealth of
“ Gold and Silver and Ivory”, which King Solomon’s navigators
carried from Tarshish; and he may also share Boyle’s regret that
the explanations offered, often show, on the other hand, a
triviality analogous to that of the rest of the cargo, since they are
“Theories which either like Peacocks feathers make a great
shew, but are neither solid nor useful; or else like Apes, if they
have some appearance of being rational, are blemish’d with some
absurdity or other”.3 To-day, as much as in the seventeenth
century, a method is needed for distinguishing between hypo¬
theses of lasting value, and Solomon’s apes and peacocks, with
their undoubted but delusive charm. In the physico-chemical
1 Cf. Arber, A. (1950), chs. vi-viii.
2 On the historic origin of the hypothesis concept, see Robinson, R. (1941).
3 Boyle, The Hon. R. (1680), pp. 433-4.

28
 BIOLOGICAL HYPOTHESES

sciences, and in the type of biology which shares the technique

of these disciplines, valid hypotheses can often be distinguished
from those that are inadequate by the test of quantitative con¬
firmation. Newton’s dictum that the “main Business of natural
Philosophy is to argue from Phaenomena without feigning
Hypotheses”,1 does not mean that he rejected hypotheses in
general, but that he was unwilling to admit any which were not
susceptible of experimental proof.2 In the region of biology
most remote from physics and chemistry, however, the very
nature of the hypotheses employed prevents their being tested on
any mathematical-experimental system, such as Newton had in
mind. Such biological hypotheses represent ways of looking at
Nature, so that, like artistic creations, they cannot be assessed
by any simple and easily defined procedure. They resemble the
interpretations which an artist sets down, which are disengaged
from his visual impressions without any conscious ‘discursive’
thought.3 As Plotinus said long ago, “the artist reasons only
when he is at a loss; when all goes smoothly, his art is controlling
him and doing his work”.4 Biological hypotheses of the more
creative kind have, like the painter’s interpretations, to be
estimated by indirect methods. The key to such testing is the
fact that an inadequate or erroneous hypothesis leads, as it
were, an isolated existence, and is united imperfectly, if at all,
to a surrounding nexus of thought. In terms of the ‘coherence’
theory of truth,5 we may say that, when an hypothesis, which
offers a solution of a particular problem, has been reached, its
status must remain uncertain until it has revealed a capacity
for extending in all directions, everywhere showing natural and
inevitable connexions with valid interpretations of other parts
of reality. It can then be visualized as “conformable to the
nature of things” (kcctcx (poem;).6 When any hypothesis has thus
1 Newton, Sir I. (1931; reprint of 4th ed., 1730), bk. in, quest. 28, p. 369.
2 Cf. Andrade, E. N. da C. (1947), p. 13; see also Wright, G. H. von (1951),
PP- 22-3.
3 ‘Discursive thought’ passes, by a rigidly logical process, from premiss to
conclusion. It is Hamlet’s “discourse of reason” (1. ii) which Milton’s Raphael
contrasts with intuition (Paradise Lost, v. 488).
4 Dodds, E. R. (1923), Plotinus, Enn. iv. iii, 8, p. 90.
3 See Chapter vi, pp. 70 et seq., of the present book.
G Whittaker, Sir E. T. (1946), p. 57.

29
 III. THE LOGICAL BACKGROUND

justified its place, it has achieved graduation into a theory, which

may be defined as a broad view or insight, relating phenomena
comprehensively. When a theory is well established, and can
claim a high degree of generality, it is often called a ‘ law5; but,
at least in the biological field, it is doubtful whether the bestowal
of this title can be justified. Originally the expression, ‘laws of
nature’, when used in science, referred to those direct edicts of
the Almighty, which were held to control material things; in this
sense there was a close analogy with human law, so that the
term was fully applicable. In modern writing, however, in
which a ‘law’ of nature stands for a “theoretical principle
deduced from particular facts”,1 the word ‘law’, which suggests
compulsion, is obviously out of place.
If we turn from the problem-solutions that succeed to those
that fail, we find that the path of thought is littered with hypo¬
theses that have either been functionless from the first, or have
served for a time, and then have yielded place to some new
generalization. It is often a misfortune that such hypotheses are
liable to be swept out of sight by the instinctive tidiness of system¬
atic thinking, on the assumption that to pay attention to them
would be a waste of time and energy. This assumption is a mis¬
take, for the truth or falsity of hypotheses is not absolute, but
relative, and even those that fail to find acceptance may yet have
their own value. Orientation to a question may be markedly
changed by the review of a number of suggested solutions; even
if they all have to be rejected as inadequate, they may be able
to contribute some elements of truth to a later hypothesis.
Much is lost if we attend only to the currents which have led
straight on to what we are pleased to regard as the enlightened
conceptions of our own period. If we look carefully at hypo¬
theses discarded in the past, we find that, like dormant buds,
they are sometimes capable of initiating new branches of thought,
after the vitality of the main trunk, which once overshadowed
them, has become exhausted.
Even hypotheses which in the long run deservedly lose their
status, may for a time have had their function in co-ordinating
1 Cf. definition in Oxford English Dictionary.

3°
 HYPOTHESES AND ‘PROOFS’

facts. For instance, the hypothesis used by Claudius Ptolemy

(second century a.d.), that the earth is the fixed centre of the
universe, to us to-day is a misapprehension, but in the past it
was found to ‘ work5 with startling effectiveness; on the Ptolemaic
system,1 astronomers, until the sixteenth century, accounted
with considerable success for the apparent motion of the heavenly
bodies.
The acceptance of an hypothesis, and its resulting adoption
as a theory, do not mean that it is ‘proved’; and it is at least
a possible view that it is to ‘authenticate’, or to ‘justify’,2 rather
than to ‘prove’, which should be the biologist’s aim. These
terms have their use in suggesting an approach towards verifica¬
tion, which is not necessarily empirical,3 but which reveals the
full implications of hypotheses, and exposes any inconsistency
between themselves, or with thought in general.4 In the purely
biological, and thus autonomous, aspects of science, we are,
strictly speaking, outside the pale of logic, and there can be no
question of certainty or proof. We cannot even reach proba¬
bilities expressible in mathematical terms; we can look only for-
psychological probability.5
When we review, broadly, the relation of logic to the biologist’s
thought, we are left feeling that it can never be more than ancil¬
lary. As John of Salisbury recognized in the twelfth century,
though logic can further other studies, it cannot by itself quicken
the soul to yield fruit of philosophy.6
1 For a brief summary of the Ptolemaic system, see Wightman, W. P. D. (1950),
pp. 40-1; and Singer, C. (1941), p. 84, and Fig. 40, p. 87.
2 Cf. Wright, G. H. von (1951), pp. 20 et seq.
3 Cf. Urban, W. M. (1939), pp. 213 et seq.
4 Cf. Stace, W. T. (1932), chap. xiii.
5 Johnson, W. E. (1921-4), pt. 1, 1921, p. xxxix.
6 Poole, R. L. (1920), pp. 185-6.

*
31
 CHAPTER IV

THE BIOLOGIST’S USE OF ANALOGY1

I N considering the logic of problem solving, we have thought

about the use and limitations of induction as a scientific
process, but we have still to consider the rights and wrongs
of a cognate method of using inference from sampling2—the
argument from analogy. This is a topic which should not be
approached on narrowly specialist lines- it cannot be discussed
effectively except in relation to thinking in general. Everyone
agrees that, in our mental workshop, one of the tools, which is
most constantly employed, is the perception of likeness. This
tool, indeed, is one for which we often have an undue craving,
because of the degree of emotional satisfaction which its use
affords. The “pleasure which the mind derives from the per¬
ception of similitude in dissimilitude”, was stressed by Words¬
worth3 in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, while, long before,
Francis Bacon had warned the scientist that “The Human
Intellect, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater
uniformity and equality in things than it really finds... it feigns
parallels, correspondents, and relations which do not exist”.4
Nevertheless, despite these dangers of wishful thinking, we can¬
not reject the evidence of similitudes, for the claim that analogy
is a staff of the mind, and that even mistaken analogies may be its
stepping-stones,5 is well founded. Bacon himself, though he was
so convinced an exponent of strictly inductive methods, supple¬
mented them by many suggestions derived from analogy.6 He
1 The substance of Arber, A. (19466), is, by permission of the editor and
publisher, incorporated in tlus chapter; see Acknowledgements, p. ix.
2 See Whittaker, Sir E. T. (1946), p. 37.
‘J Wordsworth, W. (1800), p. xxxii; Wordsworth may have had in mind the
“intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars”, to which Aristotle refers;
see By water, I. (1909), p. 71.
4 Bacon, F. (1620), Novum Organum, bk. 1, aphor. 45; for translation, see Kitchin,
G. W. (1855), P- 21.
5 Gregory, J. G. (1945), pp. 247-8; as an example of the value of analogies in
scientific study, see Farber, E. (1950), which deals with their use in chemistry.
0 For a study of Bacon’s use of analogy, see Fischer, K. (1857), pp. 125-39.

32
 SIMILITUDE AND PROBABILITY

urged inquiry into the subject, since he held that analogies unite
nature, and are fundamental for the sciences.1 In the eighteenth
century, Berkeley stressed a corresponding view, holding that
natural philosophers were distinguished from other men by
“a greater largeness of comprehension, whereby analogies, har¬
monies, and agreements are discovered in the work of Nature”.2
Jevons, again, who was born 150 years later than Berkeley, was
even more emphatic about the outstanding importance of simili¬
tudes. He wrote that “In every act of inference or scientific
method we are engaged about a certain identity, sameness, simi¬
larity, likeness, resemblance, analogy, equivalence or equality
apparent between two objects”.3 It is indeed true that thought
cannot proceed without laying hold on similitudes. We arrive
at general ideas by assembling similar phenomena, and reaching
thence to concepts or ‘universals’, of which the phenomena are
individual expressions. In scientific thought, especially, the
perception of likeness and unlikeness is perhaps the most in¬
dispensable of all clues for unravelling problems of widely
different types. No doctrine of probability, for example, can be
established without its help; as Butler wrote, “That which
chiefly constitutes Probability is expressed in the Word Likely,
i.e. like some Truth, or true Event; like it, in itself, in its Evidence,
in some more or fewer of its Circumstances. For when we deter¬
mine a thing to be probably true... ’tis from the Mind’s re¬
marking in it a Likeness to some other Event, which we have
observed has come to pass.”4 Though Butler’s special emphasis
on the relation of similitude and probability was all his own,
cognate ideas had been expressed long before. Plato set peculiar
store by resemblance and the ‘likely’, holding, as he did, that
the visible world is “a changing image or likeness (eikon) of an
eternal model.... The inference is that no account that we or
anyone else can give of it will ever be more than ‘likelyThis

1 Bacon, F. (1620), Novum Organum, bk. n, aphor. 27; “Itaque convertenda

plane est opera, ad inquirendas et notandas rerum Similitudines et Analoga. ..
Illae enim sunt, quae Naturam uniunt, et constituere Scientias incipiunt.”
2 Berkeley, G. in Jessop, T. E. (1949), Principles of Human Knowledge (1st ed.,
1710), pt. 1, 105, p. 87.
3 Jevons, W. S. (1877), 2nd ed., p. 1.
4 Butler, J. (1736), Introduction, p. ii. 6 Comford, F. M. (1937), pp. 23-4.

33
 IV. THE USE OF ANALOGY

implies an inevitable relativity in all accounts of the universe,

and any man of science, whose sympathies are with Plato, will
feel that he can be on sure ground only when his work takes
the form of comparative thought within the framework of some
‘likely’ account, for which no absolute validity is claimed. In
physics, a typical instance is summarized in D’Arcy Thompson’s
aphorism: “Newton did not shew the cause of the apple falling,
but he shewed a similitude between the apple and the stars.”1
In biology, it is by consciously or unconsciously following Plato’s
suggestion that research workers have established those branches
of the study which are in essence comparative. It has been
claimed2 that Vicq d’Azyr first employed the term ‘ comparative
anatomy’ in the eighteenth century, but the expression can in
reality be traced much further back. Thomas Willis3 used it in
1664 in his Cerebri anatome, while Nehemiah Grew employed it in
relation to roots in his book of 1673,4 and in 1681,5 he applied it
also to animal organs. As Charles Singer has pointed out,
a serious disservice was done to science when—after Vesalius
and other early workers had set human anatomy on a broad
comparative basis—Spigelius made a reactionary separation
between this study and that concerned with animal bodies, thus
bringing down human anatomy to the level of a technical
discipline.6 The purely comparative aspect of the sciences of
plant and animal form was emphasized in the days of Goethe
and A. P. de Candolle, but fell somewhat into abeyance in the
post-Darwinian period, when the passion for tracing phylogenies
was at its height. In botany the comparative method has been
rehabilitated in the twentieth century by the school of mor¬
phologists headed by Wilhelm Troll.7
Even the simplest pure description is basically comparative.
This relativity may be concealed by the introduction of units of
measurement, but, when traced to their origins, these prove to

1 Thompson, Sir D’Arcy W. (1917), p. 6.

2 Thompson, Sir D’Arcy W. (1942), p. 9, footnote.
3 Willis, T. (1664), p. 66; cf. Schmid, G. (1935), p. 597.
4 Grew, N. (1673), pt. 11, p. 54, The Comparative Anatomy of Roots.
5 Grew, N. (1681).
6 Singer, G. (1931; 2nd ed. 1950); cf. chap, vi, pp. 202 et seq., Rise of Com¬
parative Method. 7 Cf. Troll, W. (1935, etc.)

34
 COMPARISON

be themselves comparative. The comparative method is indeed

inescapable, but its value is apt to be underestimated, not
because of any flaw inherent in its own structure, but because of
the way in which it is liable to be abused. As the stranger from
Elea says in Plato’s Sophist, “a cautious man should above all be
on his guard against resemblances; they are a very slippery sort
of thing ” d A frequent danger is the tendency for comparisons—
especially those which ring true only under some special thought-
aspect—to become mechanical cliches. The warning note struck
in Shakespeare’s sonnet, “ My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the
sun”, is still as necessary as it was when it was uttered, for con¬
ventional language continues to belie everything which it touches
“with false compare”. In science, similes which—so long as
they were firmly welded with the thought that prompted them,
had a certain merit, are apt to outlive that thought and sink
into mere counters. Botanical text-books, for instant, are given
to noting a routine parallel between a carpel and a foliage leaf,
without any rigorous analysis of the content of this simili¬
tude, thus destroying such value as the comparison originally
possessed.
A subtler and more insidious defect in the use of comparison
arises out of the very structure of language. Running through
both spoken and written thought, there is a linear time sequence,
which gives a certain significance to the order of words. When
we say, “The portrait is like the sitter”, there is no doubt as to
which term is the standard of comparison, but even if we merely
say, “A is like B”, the order of the words carries the implication
that B is the standard to which the comparison is referred. This
difficulty may be avoided to some extent by saying, “A and B are
alike”, instead of “A is like R”. We need, indeed, to bear
constantly in mind the distinction between irreversible com¬
parisons, in which one term is definitely the standard, and
reversible comparisons, which are applicable equally in either
direction. This necessity is illustrated in the botanical simile
already cited. If we say, “The carpel is like the foliage-leaf”,
the sequence of the sentence hints at a prejudgement in favour of
1 Cornford, F. M. (1935), p. 180.

3-2
35
 IV. THE USE OF ANALOGY

the hypothesis that the foliage-leaf is the original model to which

the carpel conforms.
Modern scientists tend to shun the word ‘explanation’,1 and
to speak rather of “tracing relations between phenomena”;2
such tracing of relations carries us beyond mere similitude and
resemblance to the further concept of analogy. The term analogy
(avaAoyia) has been used in every variety of signification, down
to simple similitude, and it has hence become a tempting word
for each man to define in his own way; but it seems best always to
bear in mind its original meaning of proportion, which is also one
of the meanings of Aoyos. It is thus limited to cases in which
resemblance of relations, rather than similarity, pure and simple,
is the point to be emphasized. It is upon analogy, in this
relational sense, that the whole of science has been built up.
Since only a few of the countless phenomena in the universe
can actually be observed, reliance must, in the last resort, be
set upon the belief that the relations, which we are debarred
from observing, are analogous to those in the field which is open
to our perception. Without analogy, no wide generalizations
could ever be formulated. Butler recognized this when he wrote:
“It is then, but an exceeding little Way, and in but a very few
Respects, that we can trace up the natural Course of things
before us, to general Laws. And it is only from Analogy, that we
conclude, the Whole of it to be capable of being reduced into
them; only from our seeing, that Part is so. It is from our finding,
that the Course of Nature, in some Respects and so far, goes on
by general Laws, that we conclude this of the Whole.”3
In the Middle Ages, the argument from analogy was not used
merely in Butler’s restrained sense, but it permeated the general
thought of the period to an almost startling degree. It found its
focal point in the theory that man himself could be understood
by analogy with the scheme of things as a whole, and vice versa.
Basing our statement on Meyer’s definition,4 we may say that
this theory is the doctrine that man, in state, characteristics, and
1 On explanation, see also Chapter v, pp. ^8-q, of the present book.
2 Dingle, H. (1937), p. 26.
3 Butler, J. (1736), pt. 11, chap, iv, sect. 111, p. 189.
4 Meyer, A. (1900), pp. 1, 2, etc.

36
 MICROCOSM AND MACROCOSM

conditions of existence, represents the state, characteristics, and

conditions of the whole world; that he is a picture of the world;
an epitome of the all; the world in miniature; the microcosm.
On the other hand, the world-whole—the macrocosm—is to be
conceived as a picture of man; an animated being equipped with
a soul; a human organism writ large; a magnified man. Meyer
contends that the expression ‘microcosm and macrocosm’ is
inexact, and owes its currency to its alliteration; he maintains
that, strictly speaking, the contrasting term to microcosm (small
world) should be makranthropos (large man). It is doubtful,
however, whether such a change in terminology would represent
the medieval view accurately. It could be justified only if the
comparison were held to be completely reversible, but in early
thought it seems rather to be the macrocosm which was the
primary idea—an idea which is imitated and illustrated in man.
When man is regarded as the microcosm, it is his sharply
delimited finiteness which is stressed, not the innumerable con¬
nexions which make him part of the universe as a whole.
A thinker who visualizes the universe as framed microscopically
in an individual man, resembles an artist who translates his vision
of a whole landscape in terms of a small rectangle of canvas. By
thus isolating, artificially, a fragment of reality, the painter
achieves a special microcosmic quality which would be lacking
in a comprehensive panorama without defined boundaries.
The doctrine of the relation of man to the universe being that
of microcosm to macrocosm, was far from new in the Middle
Ages; it was foreshadowed in ancient China,1 and among the
Greeks2 by the Pythagorean school, from which Plato adopted
the idea of this “mimetic relationship between the individual
and the universe of which he is a part ”.3 In his myth of creation
in the Timaeus, Plato expresses this relationship pictorially. He
tells us that the Demiurge, in order to compound the immortal
part of the souls of men, “turned once more to the same mixing

1 Waley, A. D, (1939), p. 253.

2 The history of the theory among the Greek, Arabic, and Jewish philosophers,
and its relation to the thought of Spinoza, is traced in Wolfson, H. A. (1934),
vol. 11, pp. 7, 8, etc.
8 Tredennick, H. (1933), Introduction, p. xxi.

37
 IV. THE USE OF ANALOGY

bowl wherein he had mixed and blended the soul of the universe,
and poured into it what was left of the former ingredients,
blending them this time in somewhat the same way, only no
longer so pure as before”.1 Thus, according to Plato, the relation
of macrocosm to microcosm involves marked contrast as well as
likeness; the macrocosm is everlasting, but in the microcosm it
is the divine reason alone which is the imperishable element.2
Seneca (d. a.d. 65) may be cited as a later classical writer,
whose view of the world was strongly influenced by the doctrine
of the microcosm and macrocosm. In his Quaestiones Naturales he
wrote: “My firm conviction is that the earth is organized by
nature much after the plan of our bodies.... So exactly alike is
the resemblance to our bodies in nature’s formation of the earth,
that our ancestors have spoken of veins ( = springs) of water.”3
Among those who, in the medieval period, made the doctrine
of the macrocosm and microcosm their own, was the scholar-
mystic, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1180) ;4 she developed and
elaborated it, stamping it with the impress of her powerful
personality. She saw permeating the universe—as the soul per¬
meates the individual man—a single vital spirit, which she
unveils in terms instinct with poetry: “ I am that living and fiery
essence of the divine substance that glows in the beauty of the
fields. I shine in the water, I bum in the sun and the moon and
the stars.... I breathe in the verdure and in the flowers, and
when the waters flow like living things, it is I.... I am Wisdom.
Mine is the blast of the thundered Word by which all things
were made.... I am Life.”5
Another medieval document, in which the theory of the micro¬
cosm and macrocosm finds expression, is the Book of Nature,
generally called by the name of Konrad von Megenberg, who
translated it into German in the fourteenth century from a Latin
text, compiled in the thirteenth century by a pupil of Albertus
Magnus. The first section of the book begins with an account of
the nature of humanity. We are told that God fashioned man
1 Cornford, F. M. (1937), Timaeus, 41 d, p. 142.
2 Cornford, F. M. (1937), pp. 38-9.
3 Clarke, J., and Geikie, Sir A. (1910), p. 126. 4 Singer, C. (1917).
6 Modified from the translation in Singer, C. (1917), p. 33.

38
 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE UNIVERSE

on the same lines as the world as a whole, and, as the sun is set
in the midst of the planets, so man’s heart is set in the midst of
his body; from the likeness of man to the world, he is called in
the Greek speech the microcosm or little world—thus, within
one man’s coat, the whole cosmos stands revealed.1
The idea of the spirit of the universe as something comparable
with that of man, was expressed in more recent times by Kepler,2
in whose writings medieval and modern views of the world
jostle one another strangely.3 Later in the seventeenth century,
Leibniz held that each soul is so constructed as to represent the
universe in its own manner.4
Mystical apprehension of the relation between man and the
Whole, by no means exhausts the medieval conception of micro¬
cosm and macrocosm, which was applied to minutiae as well as
to broad generalities. Hildegard, for instance, gives an account
of the human body, comparing its organs to the constituent parts
of the universe. Her work epitomizes the science of her time,
which she fits with extreme ingenuity into the framework set by
the theory.5
-Though the over-elaborated belief in the microcosmic nature
of man led to many absurdities, it sometimes opened the way to
new and sound conclusions. It has been shown,6 for example,
that Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood (1615-19)
was based, consciously, upon two Aristotelian tenets—that of the
perfection of circular motion, and that of parallelism between
the macrocosm and the microcosm. Harvey regarded the cir¬
culation of the blood as the reproduction, on microcosmic lines,
of a pattern which is revealed also in the universe as a whole.
It is not surprising to find that Harvey’s younger contem¬
porary, Sir Thomas Browne, came to accept the doctrine of the
macrocosm and microcosm, for it was exactly suited to his turn
of mind—understanding it, as he did most things, in a sense of
his own. He wrote in the Religio Medici: “to call ourselves

1 Pfeiffer, F. (1861), pp. 3-4.

2 Kepler, J. (1858-70), vol. v, 1864, Harmonices Mundi, 1619, p. 266.
3 Cf. Singer, C. (1941), pp. 200 et seq. 4 Carr, H. Wildon (1930), p. 162.
5 Singer, C. (1917), pp. 30-5.
0 Pagel, W. (1951); see especially p. 28.

39
 IV. THE USE OF ANALOGY

a Microcosm, or little World, I thought it only a pleasant trope

of Rhetorick, till my neer judgment and second thoughts told me
there was a real truth therein. For first we are a rude mass, in
the rank of creatures which onely are, and have a dull kind of
being, not yet priviledged with life. . . ; next we live the life of
Plants, the life of Animals, the life of Men, and at last the life
of Spirits, running on in one mysterious nature those five kinds
of existences, which comprehend the creatures, not onely of the
World, but of the Universe.”1 Elsewhere he summarizes the
doctrine in the aphorism, “There is no man alone, because every
man is a Microcosm, and carries the whole World about him.”2
Sir Thomas Browne’s ideas had, indeed, diverged widely from
those of the Timaeus myth, for, to him, even the macrocosm in its
greatness has become subordinate to man. As he wrote in one
of his supreme passages: “whilst I study to find how I am a
Microcosm, or little World, I find my self something more than
the great. There is surely a piece of Divinity in us, something that
was before the Elements, and owes no homage unto the Sun.”3
In such utterances as these of Sir Thomas Browne, analogy is
the handmaid of poetry rather than of the more rigid disciplines;
but, as we have seen, it has its use also in science, in offering
suggestions for hypotheses. It has a value, moreover, in the
process of exposition; it may illuminate a problem, without
actually serving as a technical instrument for solving it. Some¬
times an illustrative analogy may transcend the reasoned con¬
clusions of the man who offers it, and may thus constitute an
advance which is none the less real because it may come, in
part, from a region outside conscious awareness. The genius of
a biologist may indeed show itself more clearly in his choice of
the analogies under which he views his problems than in his
orthodox scientific procedure. A case in point is Gabon’s sym¬
bolic description of ‘particulate’ inheritance,4 which he put
forward some little time before the rediscovery of Mendel’s work,
and which foreshadowed certain twentieth-century accounts.
He wrote that “many of the modern buildings in Italy are
1 Browne, Sir T. (1928-31), vol. 1, Religio Medici (written 1635; 1682 ed.), pt. 1,
sect. 34, p. 43. 2 Ibid., pt. 11, sect. 10, p. 90.
3 Ibid., pt. 11, sect. 11, p. 91. 1 Galton, F. (1889), pp. 7-9.

40
 ANALOGY AND IDENTITY

historically known to have been built out of the pillaged struc¬

tures of older days. Here we may observe a column or a lintel
serving the same purpose a second time.... I will pursue this
rough simile just one step further, which is as much as it will
bear. Suppose we were building a house with second-hand
materials carted from a dealer’s yard, we should often find
considerable portions of the same old house to be still grouped
together.... So in the process of transmission by inheritance,
elements derived from the same ancestor are apt to appear in
large groups.”
Galton had a special penchant for analogies, and the passage
just quoted was not the only example in which, by using them,
he “budded better than he knew”. Another instance is that of
stable forms or groupings in inheritance, which he elucidates by
comparison with the features of governments, crowds, cookery,
etc., in all of which he finds that a limited number of charac¬
teristic groupings are recurrent.1 Such expository use of analogy
is a great help, provided we never forget that the analogies,
which the human mind perceives, have an almost universal
trend towards vitiating abstract relations by presenting them in
terms of sense-relations; we cannot help craving for the relief
from mental effort which is provided by ‘picture thinking’. To
a great extent proverbs are the outcome of this tendency. When
we use such expressions as, “Strike while the iron is hot”, or
“The watched pot never boils”, we are objectivizing and thus
falsifying, a state of mind. Another, and more dangerous pitfall,
is hidden in the very nature of analogies themselves. Every grade
can be traced between remote analogies, and analogies which
are so close that they pass into identities, and—paradoxically
enough—it is often the remote analogies which have the greatest
value,2 while it is the close analogies of which we have to beware.
The misuse of an analogy by pressing it to the point at which it
is confused with an identity, is one to which biological thought
is peculiarly liable. It beset the comparison between animals
and plants, which was a sheet anchor of Greek biology3—a

1 Galton, F. (1889), p. 22. 2 Cf. Mill, J. S. (1843), vol. ir, p. 429.

3 Cf. Arber, A. (1950), pp. n-14.

41
 IV. THE USE OF ANALOGY

comparison which would have been helpful if it had been kept

in its place,'but which was carried so far that it led to serious
misunderstanding of vegetable structure. Marcello Malpighi, in
the seventeenth century, was one of those who placed too much
reliance upon this resemblance. Having met with great diffi¬
culties in the anatomical study of the higher animals, he turned
to plants, in the hope that these simpler creatures would reveal
clues to animal anatomy. Though he failed to unravel his puzzles
by this means, his results showed how valuable even a mistaken
analogy may be, for, in pursuing it, he founded, incidentally,
the science of plant anatomy. Nehemiah Grew, Malpighi's
English contemporary, summed up the limitations of the plant-
animal analogy in the words: “If any one shall require the
Similitude to hold in every Thing; he would not have a Plant to
resemble, but to be, an AnimalP1
The failure to distinguish between an analogy and an identity
has recurred again and again in the history of the evolution
theory. One of the earlier writers on the subject, Lamarck,
rightly perceiving a certain analogy between the individual and
the race, concluded that the well-known effects of use, and of
environmental factors, upon the structure of the individual,
could be postulated also for the race.2 His theory, however,
broke down, because he did not realize that, though such effects
may last for life in the individual, they are not passed on from
generation to generation. In other words, the error in Lamarck’s
interpretation was due to the fact that the analogy between
individual and race was less complete than he assumed it to be.
Other examples of too facile an acceptance of this analogy are
the idea that evolutionary phases are recapitulated in embryonic
development, and the notion that there is a racial senescence
comparable with individual senescence.
Darwin’s theory of natural selection, again, depends largely
upon an analogy—that between the controlled breeding of
domestic animals and plants, and the whole historic develop-
1 Grew, N. (1682), p. 173; on Grew and Malpighi, see Arber, A. (1941, a, b,c)
and (1942).
2 It is not easy to do justice to Lamarck’s views in a brief summary; for a study
of his work, see Nordenskiold, N. E. (1950), pp. 316-30, etc.

42
 FAILURES IN ANALOGY

ment of the organic world; one of the weaknesses of his theory

lies in his failure to recognize the degree of incompleteness of
this analogy. Another evolutionary thinker of a slightly later
date, whose mind was unduly subject to the influence of simili¬
tudes, was Samuel Butler. His analysis and comparison of
memory and heredity is a brilliant performance, but his theory
is unsound because he mistakes the analogy between them for
actual identity. The mechanistic theory of the organic world is
rooted in the same misapprehension. The relation, for instance,
between a living being and a machine, is typically the relation
between a man and the contrivances which he has himself
constructed, as it were in his own image, to reinforce and supple¬
ment his neuromuscular equipment. There is thus a natural
parallelism between such machines and the organism of whose
activity they form an extension. It is only in a strictly limited
sense, however, that the idea of a machine, a derivative of the
living creature, can be used in interpreting the characteristics
of that creature. The analogy is obviously incomplete, but it
may well provide demonstrations which bring the working of
certain aspects of vital activity into a clearer light.
An analogy rejected as valueless because it is wrongly equated
with an identity, sometimes contains a hidden truth, which may,
later on, be seen for what it is. An example may be found in
the resemblance between ‘simple5 and ‘compound flowers5—
a resemblance carried, not infrequently, into the minutest details
of form and coloration. In the early days of botany, ‘ compound
flowers’ were regarded as being just ‘flowers5. When increased
knowledge revealed that the compound flower was an in¬
florescence, the idea of an analogy between the two types was
discarded altogether, and for a time the striking resemblances
between ‘simple5 and ‘compound flowers’ were neglected and
ignored as meaningless. Recently, however, the analogy between
them has again been brought into the light, and shown to have
a significance of a much subtler kind than that at first attributed
to it.1

1 Troll, W. (1928); for an account of Troll’s theory, see Arber, A. (1937)?

pp. 179-82, or (1950), pp. 144 et seq.

43
 IV. THE USE OF ANALOGY

The present tentative sketch of the part played by analogies

in the service of science, seems to show that, so long as their
peculiar character is borne in mind, they are irreplaceable tools;
but the essence of this character is imperfection. When it is for¬
gotten that “no simile can be effective without an awareness of
dissimilarity”,1 and when this forgetfulness leads to a handling
of analogies as if they were complete and perfect, they grade
into identities, and thus lose their raison d'etre. It is their very
imperfection which sets them in the boundary region of scientific
thought, where they can exercise their unique power of acting as
connecting links with other worlds of experience.
1 Daiches, D. (1940), p. 54.

44
 CHAPTER V

THE BIOLOGIST AND THE

WRITTEN WORD

W E have now to consider the fifth stage of the biologist’s

labours—the process whereby he hands over to the
common stock what he has seen and thought, so
that it becomes part of the “comprehensive universe of dis¬
course”.1 The arts can be conveyed from generation to genera¬
tion, and from one nation to another, without the use of
words, but, though biological understanding can, to a certain
degree, be communicated through direct visual channels, it is
kept alive and transmitted essentially by means of language.
The biologist, in the more advanced stages of his work, is thus
bound to take upon himself the function of a writer, whether he
will or no.
In setting his findings into a permanent verbal mould, the
research worker meets with various initial difficulties. One of
these is a certain hesitation to submit his ideas to the testing
ordeal of the pen, which often reveals unsuspected confusions of
thought; the child who said, “How do I know what I think till
I hear what I say ? ”,2 had got to the root of the matter. Many
biologists must have had the experience of echoing, ruefully,
Descartes’s confession: “souvent les choses, qui m’ont semble
vrayes, lorsque i ’ay commence a les concevoir, m’ont paru fausses,
lorsque ie les voulu mettre sur le papier”.3
Another hindrance, not peculiar to science, is that, by the
limiting convention both of tongue and pen, words can be placed
only in simple linear sequence, temporal in speech, but trans¬
lated into spatial order in writing. The experience of one’s own
thinking suggests that it moves, actually, in a reticulum (possibly

1 Adler, M. J. (1927), p. 200. 2 Blanshard, F. B. (1949), P- 76-

3 [Descartes, R.] (1637), p. 66; (1947), P- 66. Translation, Haldane, E. S., and
Ross, G. R. T. (1911-12), vol. 1, p. 122.

45
 V. THE WRITTEN WORD

of several dimensions), rather than along a single line. Even

those who cannot accept the reticulum metaphor, might agree
that thinking is like a river, which includes eddies and still
backwaters, though, considered as a whole, it progresses in one
direction. Neither a reticulum nor a river can be symbolized
adequately in a linear succession of words. A written account is
a mere thread, spun artificially into a chain-like form, whereas,
in the weft of thought from which it is derived, the elements are
interconnected according to a more complex mode. Haller
recognized this nearly two hundred years ago, when, in speaking
of relationships within the monocotyledons, he said: “Nature
has linked her kinds into a net, not into a chain; men are in¬
capable of following anything but a chain, since they cannot
express in words more than one thing at a time ’h1 The incapacity
which Haller regretted, is occasionally overcome in non-scientific
literature. Laurence Sterne, and certain modern writers in¬
fluenced by him in their technique, have visualized, and tried
to convey in language, the complicated, non-linear behaviour
of the human mind, as it darts to and fro, disregarding the
shackles of temporal sequence; but few biologists would dare to
risk such experiments. Recognition of the non-linear character
of thought in general, is exemplified in Bosanquet’s2 attempt
to substitute ‘implication5 for the serial, chain-like mode of
argument characteristic of conventional logic and ‘ discursive5
reasoning.3 With this attempt biologists may well feel some
sympathy; it probably accords better with their views than with
those of physicists and chemists.
A grave difficulty of another kind, which closely affects the
biologist, is that his mode of exposition, if it is to be at all lucid,
has to follow lines distinct from those on which his results have
been reached in practice.4 This is analogous to the difference, of
which Aristotle was aware, between the very nature of a thing,

1 Haller, A. von (1768), vol. n, p. 130: “Natura in reticulum sua genera

connexit, non in catenam: homines non possint nisi catenam sequi, cum non
plura simul sermone exponere.” 2 Bosanquet, B. (1911), (1920).
3 Walsh, W. H. (1946), p. 62; on the nature of ‘discursive’ reasoning, see
Chapter in of present book, p. 29, footnote 3.
4 The difference between the process of discovery and that of demonstration is
emphasized in Singer, C. (1941), pp. 227-8, etc.

46
 DEMONSTRATION VERSUS DISCOVERY

and the way in which an origin for it may be represented. He

writes, of his contemporaries at the Academy: “they say that in
describing the genesis of the world they are doing as a geometer
does in constructing a figure, not implying that the universe ever
really came into existence, but for purposes of exposition facili¬
tating understanding by exhibiting the object, like the figure, in
process of formation55.1 The shape of a sphere, for example, is
best understood, when it is described as arising by the rotation of
a semicircle, even though it was not, in reality, actually produced
by this method. In the same way the gesture is justified, when
a man, asked what a spiral staircase is, explains it by a spiral
movement of his hand, though no one imagines that it originated
by means of any such motion. In biology, a case comparable
with those just cited would be a botanist’s description of a carpel
as ‘ resulting5 from the infolding of a leaf, or of a gamopetalous
corolla as ‘arising5 from the fusion of free petals. Neither struc¬
ture, in fact, ‘ became5 in this way, but the character and relations
of the ultimate product can be visualized better when this
manner of expounding them is used.
The profound difference between the mode of discovery and
that of exposition is far from being peculiar to biology; in many
other fields of the intellectual life conclusions are reached in¬
tuitively, and it is only afterwards that a public highway to them
is constructed. The matter is put in a nutshell in a saying attri¬
buted to Gauss, the great mathematician—“I have had my
results for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive
at them55.2 It appears, correspondingly, that the geometrical
form, which Newton used in expounding the Principia, bears no
resemblance to the mental processes by which his results came
into beii^g.3 In philosophy, again, the artificiality of Spinoza’s
demonstration of his ideas, ‘ more Geometrico has been noticed
repeatedly; it is impossible to suppose that it represents the
route which he himself followed on the way to his conclusions.
Similarly it is hard to imagine that Hegel did, in fact, reach his
1 Cornford, F. M. (1937), p. 26, quoting Aristotle, De caelo, 279, b. 33.
2 Quoted in Nelson, L. (1949), p. 89, and Beveridge, W. I. B. (1950), p. 145;
the present writer has been unable to trace this dictum to its original source; cf. also
Wright, G. H. von (1951), p. 22. 3 Keynes, J. M. (Lord) (1947), pp. 28-9.

47
 V. THE WRITTEN WORD

conception of the Absolute by starting from Being, and pursuing

the long dialectic path which he signposts for his readers.1
The biologist’s need to ‘ put ’ his work differently, in order that
it shall be understood by other minds, means that the whole
research has to be reshaped in thought, before it can take written
form. This is indeed a sheer necessity; if the worker tried to detail
all the blind-alley routes which he essayed before finding his
eventual path, the reader would be lost in the intricacies of
a tortuous maze, and would give up the attempt to follow him.
This need for a switch-over of method, from the work to its
exposition, may be in part the explanation of the reluctance and
distaste biologists often experience when the time comes to
‘write up’ their work, however much they enjoyed it in the
doing; for the process of setting pen to paper is liable to seem
alien and even disingenuous. There is no escape, however, from
the compulsive truths that the biologist must write, and that
writing is an art, and, moreover, a highly symbolic art. The
biologist’s picture of what he has observed, and his thoughts
about it, can be imparted only by rows of little conventional
marks on paper—a limited repertoire, the significance of which
depends entirely on an agreed tradition. The verbal or pictorial
formulation of scientific thinking is conditioned, as is any other
kind of expression, by its chosen instrument. Whether a biologist
is describing an organism in words, or drawing it, he has the
same object before him, and in either case his intention is
identical—that of delineating it in a way that will communicate
his view of its character to other minds; but the portrayal in
these two media is entirely different. Each is, on the one hand,
limited, and, on the other hand, endowed with its own special
significance, by the nature of the craft. The verbal medium in
itself presents great inherent difficulties, but scientific workers
have a way of turning a blind eye to these obstacles, and of
failing to realize that to acquire command of writing demands
a more exacting mental discipline than to become expert in the
most refined laboratory technique. By many of us, mastery of
1 Hegel, indeed, makes it clear that the final result of the process is also its
logical ground, present in it all along; cf. McTaggart, J. McT. E. (1922), pp. 63-4,
etc. On Hegel’s dialectic, see also Chapter ix, p. 109-11, of the present book.

48
 ORGANIC NATURE OF DISCOURSE

the verbal medium can be attained only by severe and prolonged

effort; but no one who has to read scientific literature can doubt
the worth-whileness of even the heaviest price paid by its authors
as their dues for full initiation. Yet many biologists seem to look
upon the process of writing as a tiresome mechanical task, to be
slurred over with the minimum of exertion. The results are
lamentable for the author as well as for the reader; chaotic
language reacts upon thinking and reduces it, also, to chaos.
That thought and its expression could not be separated was felt
with special keenness by William Blake, though he was far from
being a pedantic slave of language. “ I have heard many People
say ”, he wrote, “‘ Give me the Ideas. It is no matter what Words
you put them into ’.” To this he replies, “ Ideas cannot be Given
but in their minutely Appropriate Words”.1 This dictum is as
true for science as for the humanities, and it might well be
inscribed on the walls of every biological laboratory.
When Plato made Socrates declare that any discourse ought
to be a living creature with its members in due proportion,2
he laid his finger on the crucial quality of scientific writing.
Coleridge must have had this passage in mind when he alluded
to “that surview which enables a man to foresee the whole of
what he is to convey, and arrange the different parts according to
their relative importance,... as an organized whole ”.3 Imagina¬
tive writers sometimes feel that what they have penned has
developed an independent vitality of its own. In Dante this
feeling rises to white heat; he personifies his odes, addressing
them as living creatures. Biological writers, at their best
moments, may in a small way, on their humble plane, have an
inkling of the delightful consciousness that what they have
written has come alive under their hands—indeed, unless this
happens, there is little chance of the result forming an organism
rather than an artefact. It is a misfortune that the ultra¬
objective attitude, which scientific tradition encourages in the
biologist, often militates against the vitalizing of his work into
an organic whole. ‘Facts’ loom so large, and there is so much
1 Blake, W., in Keynes, G. (1935), p. 101 (pp. 60-2 of the Rossetti note-book).
2 Towett, B. (1871), vol. 1, Phaedrus, 264, p. 599.
3 Coleridge, S. T. (1817), vol. n, p. 58.

49
 V. THE WRITTEN WORD

justifiable fear of the personal element in interpretation, that

what is offered is frequently a mere heap of juxtaposed data,
rather than something characteristically alive, in which all the
parts are related both to each other and to the whole. A record
of research should not resemble a casual pile of quarried stone;
it should seem “not built, but born”, as Vasari said in praise of
a building.1 As in architecture, so likewise in creative scientific
work, the expression should have a content extending beyond
the writer’s own direct vision. The architect of a cathedral,
however vividly he may visualize the final outcome of his art,
cannot possibly know beforehand exactly what impression the
whole, or its individual parts, will convey from every standpoint,
and under every future condition of light and atmosphere. It
may well be that those who visit it in later years may detect
aspects, exquisite in quality, which, though they are due to the
architect’s genius, never actually entered his awareness. Bio¬
logical writing, also, may occasionally reach a level transcending
the writer’s consciousness, but this can happen only when the
factual material is fused in the crucible of thought, a process
demanding severe mental effort, not always congenial to the
researcher, whose highly trained skill of eyes and fingers makes
restless demands for employment, and tends to sap the energy
needed for the more exacting activity of pure brain-work.
By what means the organization of the results of research is to
be accomplished, is a knotty problem. After the main skeletal
system has been, as it were, hewn out, there must be a further
process of moulding subsidiary material into adequate relation
with this skeleton, before the whole thing can come to life. The
method which Thomas Hobbes followed in writing his Leviathan
(1651) can be paralleled in the practice of biologists, who have to
wrestle with their ideas in the crude mass, and to transform them
into a significant whole. This method may have been suggested
by the ways of his friend, Francis Bacon, who had liked in former
years to dictate his thoughts to Hobbes in the “delicious walkes
at Gorambery”. Hobbes, we are told, first drew “the Designe
of the Booke”, and then “walked much and contemplated, and
1 “non murato ma veramente nato.” Quoted in Scott, G. (1914), p. 221.

50
 CAPTURING NOTIONS ON THE WING

he had in the head of his Staffe a pen and inke-home, carried

always a Note-book in his pocket, and as soon as a notion darted,
he presently entred it into his Booke, or els he should perhaps
have lost it... . Thus that booke was made.551
One of the factors inimical to organic wholeness in biological
writing is the excessive use of quotation. An attempt, for
instance, to set forth the present position of any controversial
question, or to deal with a problem on historical lines, is apt to
degenerate into a series of heterogeneous citations, on which the
reader can scarcely fix his attention, and which give the impres¬
sion of a lifeless compilation of detached notes. The extensive
use of sheer quotation, though it seems at first sight a sign of
modesty, is actually a self-protective device of the work-shy
mind, which hankers to transfer mental labour from itself to its
audience.
Hobbes not only realized, as we have seen, the essentialness
of setting every thought in its due place in the organized whole,
but he also saw that, before this could be done, each of these
notions must be captured on the wing. Here the scientist has
little to learn from others. The card-index habit, and the rule of
immediately recording every observation or idea that possibly
may be relevant, are commonplaces of scientific method; the
notion, once caught and pinned down, can then be evaluated
at leisure. More than a hundred years after Hobbes, Samuel
Johnson, who showed other evidences of a latent capacity for
scientific work, was most insistent on the importance of noting
observations at the moment, and on the spot. He says, indeed,
what a modern biologist might say, if he clothed his ideas in
superb eighteenth-century language: “He who has not made
the experiment, or who is not accustomed to require rigorous
accuracy from himself, will scarcely believe how much a few
hours take from certainty of knowledge, and distinctness of
imagery; how the succession of objects will be broken, how
separate parts will be confused, and how many particular
features and discriminations will be compressed and conglobated
into one gross and general idea.”2
1 Aubrey, J. (1950), pp. 150-1. 2 Johnson, S. (1775), pp. 239-40.

51
 V. THE WRITTEN WORD

The recognition of the value of immediacy is not the only

feature in which scientific writing need not fear comparison with
other forms of literature. A second no less admirable quality is
that, at its best, it consists essentially of verbs and substantives,
the sinews and bones of language. Few scientists produce work
“overgarnished with Rhetorical Tropes, which like Flowers
stuck in a Window.. .create a darkness in the place”.1 In
a research worker’s writing, simplicity and freedom from ex¬
traneous ornament arise naturally, because he has little tempta¬
tion to write at all unless he has something to say; he is not just
‘a writer’, looking about for a subject on which to exercise his
pen. This is fortunate, since, in Renan’s words, “la regie fonda-
mentale du style est d’avoir uniquement en vue la pensee que
l’on veut inculquer, et par consequent d’avoir une pensee”.2
Scientists sometimes evince a contempt for ‘style’, because they
do not understand it in Renan’s sense, but regard it as a sort of
superficial ‘ literary ’ decoration, to be added in the final stages;
but, in truth, style is the very essence of the work. If the thought
is shaped with delicate economy, and has become strong, clear-
cut and supple, and if the words materialize it with absolute
precision, so that matter and manner are indissolubly fused,
the elusive quality called style is won without wooing; but this
recipe is as difficult to follow as it is easy to enunciate.
When he compares other intellectual disciplines with his
own, the biologist may well feel that the literature of his subject
excels in the stress laid upon the meticulous citation of authori¬
ties ; even if this is sometimes carried to an absurd length, it is
a fault in the right direction. In reading books on philosophy,
for instance, he cannot but be struck by the way in which authors
of the present day often make little attempt to distinguish what is
original in their own writing from what is derivative. The result
is that the student has to labour through much that is a mere
reproduction—sometimes an inadequate one—of views expres¬
sed by others long ago, before he can sift out what is new. No
1 Sharrock, R. (1672), p. 3. (This, which is the second edition, is quoted
because, in the only copy of edition 1, 1660, available to the writer, the cor¬
responding page is missing.)
2 Renan, E. (1883), p. 220.

52
 THE SPOKEN AND THE WRITTEN WORD

doubt the nature of the topics treated makes this, up to a point,

inevitable, but the biologist, who has been brought up in the
tradition of indicating exactly how much he owes to his prede¬
cessors, cannot but feel that a less high-handed method than
that of the philosopher is more helpful to fellow-students.
Apart from those major hindrances in conveying his meaning,
upon which we have already touched, the biologist has to
negotiate certain obstacles of a minor kind. One of these lesser
traps is that, being generally accustomed to express himself in
lecture form, he is liable not to make adequate allowance for the
fact that the written word is necessarily shorn of nuances, such
as those conveyed by variations in pace, tone, and emphasis,
which help so much towards the comprehension of speech. In
writing, these nuances may be in part translated into terms of
punctuation. Since lucidity of expression is the biologist’s chief
need, he often finds the ‘heavier’ system of stopping the more
useful. In this system it may be said, roughly, that the stops are
used to indicate such pauses as a good reader would make in
trying to ‘ put across ’ the meaning as intelligibly as possible. In
the written version of speech, however, the order of the words,
and the internal and external balance of sentences, are even
more serviceable than punctuation in supplying the place of
renounced vocal subtleties. As Sir Kenelme Digby wrote in the
mid-seventeenth century: “And such an effect as the manner of
gesture and earnestnesse worketh in speaking, the like doth the
manner of couching the sense, and the phrase, in writing.”1
For the biologist yet another source of solicitude reveals
itself—the difficulty inherent in the very nature of words. In
the physico-chemical disciplines, and in those aspects of biology
which are modelled on their lines, words tend to be treated as
sharply differentiated and fixedly definable entities. Such dis¬
continuity and limitedness accords ill with the quality of the
living thing, which is not only always changing, but has a border¬
land or aura, shading off from the core of its own individuality
into the environment.2 There is no reason, however, why the

1 Digby, Sir K. (1654), Dedicatory Letter To the Lady Digby.

2 Smuts, J. C. (1926), p. 18.

53
 V. THE WRITTEN WORD

biologist should not, for his own purposes, make more use of the
literary aspects of language than the physicist finds necessary.
Instead of thinking of his writing as a mosaic of separate words,
each with its rigid and inescapable denotation, he may recognize
that the whole should dominate the elements into which it may
be analysed, and that individual words, if dissected out of this
totality, lose their value through the mutilation due to their
uprooting. He is at liberty, also, to use the enriching overtones
of associative meaning, which can be called into play to evoke
complex vistas of thought, and to “insinuate further meanings
then the meer words barely considered, do seem to imploy55.1
The biologist’s task is set in the debatable country between
physical science and the humanities, and, while taking all he
wants from the language of humane literature, he must also use
sharply defined scientific terms. Unfortunately, when these are
not new words, they are often adapted to this special use by
discarding their atmospheric overtones, and also by paring away
some of the fullness of meaning which they have acquired by
organic growth in the course of age-long development. When,
for instance, to form a new biological term, a word is adopted
from common speech, its connotation is generally narrowed.
Such ancient folk-names as ‘leaf5, ‘seed5, or ‘root5, each covers
a much wider field in the mother tongue than when used in
a strictly botanical sense; scientifically a grain of wheat ceases
to be a ‘ seed ’, and a rose leaf is not (except in a certain hypo¬
thetical sense) a ‘leaf5. The meaning of a word which becomes
a scientific term may be reduced in depth, also, as well as in
width; the word ‘species5, for example, is less significant to-day
than it was in the pre-scientific phase, in which it related to the
eternal ‘Form5 incarnated in each individual.2
The sequence of phases, through which scientific language
passes historically, is fraught with meaning. Man’s first observa¬
tions of natural things cannot but have been couched in his
primitive current vocabulary. Then, as the scientific outlook was
gradually extended and defined, a technical terminology became

1 Digby, Sir K. (1654). Dedicatory Letter To the Lady Digby.

2 Cornford, F. M. (1932), p. 78.

54
 LANGUAGE IN BIOLOGY

a necessity, and thus the subject entered on a phase in which it

ceased to be ‘ understanded of the people ’; but this was merely
transitional. When the language, in which science finds expres¬
sion, is incomprehensible except to the initiated, it is a sign that
the mode of thought is not yet at the maximum. By the time
the subject reaches its high-tide mark, its largest generalizations
transcend technical limits, and can again find expression in
common speech: “The wheel is come full circle”. We may per¬
haps detect a symbolic parallel to this rhythm in the stages of
initiation described for Zen Buddhism.1 Before a man tries to
understand Zen, mountains are mountains to him, and waters
are waters. Then, when he is gaining insight through intensive
study, mountains cease to be mountains and waters to be waters;
but at the last, when the aspirant has reached the goal and is at
rest, he sees mountains again as mountains and waters as waters.
In such a sequence as this, and also in the growth of scientific
language, words gradually shed the cramping limitations of the
phase succeeding the novitiate, and gain significantly in depth.
Thus ‘mountains’ and ‘waters’ mean incomparably more at
the end than at the start.
In assessing the qualities of biological literature, the paradox
must be accepted—however reluctantly—that sometimes poor
writing may serve certain scientific purposes more effectively
than writing which is intrinsically better. The biologist does not
write for his own countrymen alone, but, equally, for those whose
native tongue is other than his. He thus wishes his work to be
both comprehensible to the foreigner who reads his language,
also to be translatable for those who are not acquainted with it.
Generally speaking, one condition for good writing is the control
of an extensive vocabulary, provided with a wealth of alternative
words, fitted to express different shades of meaning; another
condition is complete command of idiom. It is unfortunate,
however, that both a rich vocabulary and an idiomatic style are
serious obstacles to comprehension by a foreign reader. The
student, for instance, who is beginning to cope with German
scientific work, will often find it easier to start with an author,
1 Suzuki, D. T. (1927), p. 12.

55
 V. THE WRITTEN WORD

who writes in that tongue without belonging to a German¬

speaking country, and whose language is thus less copious and
less idiomatic than that of a native. Again, when translation is
in question, writing not of the first quality is easier to transmute
into the speech of another race. Nevertheless, to lay much stress
on being easily understood may be a fatal mistake, for the sort of
clearness which helps towards easy translation, and which is
indeed demanded, by general consent, by the lay public which
reads scientific books, may, when viewed closely, prove to be
a pseudo-simplicity, due to sacrifice of essentials. A sketch of
a landscape in pen-and-ink outline may be much clearer than
a corresponding water-colour, but, in the painting, mistiness, and
effects of hue and light, which can only be hinted at in a black-
and-white drawing, can be given their full significance. The
water-colour thus comes nearer to full representational truth
than the sharply definite ink outline. The translation of a land¬
scape into black-and-white demands a method which recalls,
where writing is concerned, an unsparing technique of
pruning and rejection, which eases matters for the audience
by focusing upon a few selected factors; this process is liable
to degenerate into skeletal abstraction, in which reality, in its
concreteness, fades out of sight.
Extreme lucidity may, moreover, defeat its owtl ends, not only
by over-pruning, but also by eliminating too completely those
rough places, which keep the reader awake, and stimulate him
to make an effort at understanding. Especially in French scien¬
tific literature, smooth clarity of language is apt to give the
student so little to brace himself against, that, after running his
eye agreeably over the pages for some time, he may become
suddenly and distressingly aware that his attention has been so
far beguiled by the limpid flow of words, that he has failed to
grasp the meaning of what he has read.
The risks arising from over-lucidity and over-simplification
are most conspicuous in popularizations of science. The trend
of the present day is all towards the attempt to express at least
the main results of scientific work in a form which those who
have never worked at the subject will imagine that they can

56
 BREVITY IN BIOLOGICAL WRITING

understand. It may be recalled that this is an aim which

Sir Isaac Newton set before himself in a certain connexion, but
which he afterwards abandoned. He first intended to write
Book hi of the Principia (which demonstrates the frame of the
System of the World) in such a manner that it might be read by
many, but he finally decided to reduce this Book, in the mathe¬
matical way, into the form of propositions comprehensible only
to those who had mastered the principles established in the first
two Books.1 He thus guarded against the insidious dangers of
an easy exposition, which deceives the reader into fancying that
he has reached, by a primrose path, conclusions which cannot
in reality be approached except by the long and toilsome
struggle of a prepared intelligence.
The biological writer is not only expected to offer clarity,
regardless of what it costs, but also to meet the cognate demand
for extreme brevity, especially in scientific journals. The obliga¬
tion to be brief may, it is true, have great advantages; Coleridge,
whose prose tended to diffuseness, often achieved concentrated
expression in the marginal notes wherewith he decorated his
own (and his friends’) books, since here he had no choice but to
submit to confinement of space.2 In scientific writing, however,
brevity is often harmful rather than helpful. The literary man
may sometimes aim at producing a gem-like aphorism by
ruthless lapidary work, and may rejoice to watch it grow “small
by degrees and beautifully less”; but such absolute brevity is
a dangerous technique for the biologist to adopt—for him,
verbal parsimony can never have more than a relative value.
Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it can never be the soul of
science. In general it can be attained only by sacrificing many
details, and many qualifications of statements, which ought to
form part of the record, even if they are in themselves dull and
boring. If all such elements are eliminated, what the author
has to say is expressed by what might be called short-cuts across
country, whereas the goal of his thought can often be appreciated
more fully if it is reached by a longer route which gives the mind

1 Newton, Sir I. (1803), vol. 11, pp. 159-60.

2 Muirhead, J. H. (1930), p. 258.

57
 V. THE WRITTEN WORD

of the reader a chance of acclimatization on the way. The

student of biology has reason to be grateful to such a man as
Btitschli, ‘Architect of Protozoology’, who believed that it was
better to write too much rather than too little, and who therefore
produced his monumental work (1889) on so comprehensive a
scale that it has been said by a recent authority in this field still
to hold its place as an indispensable source book, despite its age.1
The question of brevity in scientific writing is linked with that
of the size of books. It has been suggested2 that the ‘conven¬
tional 5 limitation as to the amount that can be included in any
one work exercises a potent influence upon its content. It is
true, though within tolerably wide limits, that books comply
with the demand for a certain average size, convenient for
standardized bookcases; but it is doubtful whether the factor of
word-number, to which book-size is closely related, can be
called merely ‘conventional’. Ideally the author of a book,
which is not purely a work of reference, should write as much as
(and no more than) the reader can make his own, at a normal
pace, within a reasonable period. The treatment of the author’s
material is thus conditioned by the anticipated reactions of the
reader, which depend, in their turn, upon the physical limita¬
tions of the human eye, and, even more, upon the restricted
capabilities of the human brain.
Scientific writing, even at its most factual and descriptive,
always involves a certain element of interpretation, so that the
biologist finds himself confronted constantly with the problem
of what ‘explanation’ really means in scientific work. Almost
as many answers have been given to this question as there are
writers who have attended to the subject.3 Physicists appear to
regard the unveiling of material and efficient causes as being, in
itself, ‘explanation’. The physico-chemical aspects of science
often, indeed, lend themselves to such an account, but biology,
being less abstract and less conventionalized, remains inex¬
plicable, if the word ‘explanation’ is used so narrowly. The
1 Dobell, C. (1951). 2 Collingwood, R. G. (1924), p. 10.
3 As a mixed sample of the possible meanings attached to the term scientific
explanation, see Westaway, F. W. (1919), p. 242; Campbell, N. R. (1920), p. 113;
Stace, W. T. (1920), p. 65; Thompson, W. R. (1937), p. 125.

58
 ‘EXPLANATION’ IN BIOLOGY

biologist may well feel more sympathy with Bosanquet’s broader

view, according to which, to explain a thing “is to think it in
terms of the whole”.1 Since we believe that biology is intelligible
(though not explicable in physico-chemical terms) what we re¬
quire is a notion of explanation which has a greater richness of
content than one which has been prearranged for the inanimate.
As a personal opinion it may perhaps be hazarded that the
biological explanation oj a phenomenon is the discovery of its own intrinsic
place in a nexus of relations, extending indefinitely in all directions. To
explain it is to see it simultaneously in its full individuality (as a whole
in itself), and in its subordinate position (as one element in a larger whole).
On such a definition, classification is treated as one of the corol¬
laries of explanation.2
In complete isolation a phenomenon is merely ‘brute fact’,
which from its very nature, can never be grasped mentally, but,
when ‘explained’, this raw datum is transmuted into an ‘intel¬
ligible ’ entity—that is to say, into a relational form which is no
longer alien to the mind.3
1 Bosanquet, B. (1911), vol. 11, p. 305.
2 Bosanquet, B. (1911), vol. n, p. 198.
3 Cf. on philosophical explanation, Joachim, H. H. (1948), pp. 37-8, 51, etc.

59
 PART II

THE BASES OF
BIOLOGICAL THINKING
v'
 PART II

INTRODUCTION

I N the first part of this book we considered five of the stages

into which the biologist’s work may be analysed, tracing it
from the selection of a problem for research, through the
processes of acquiring and marshalling factual data; the forma¬
tion and testing of hypotheses; and the communication of the
results to fellow-workers. We have now reached the sixth and
final stage, which we have called that of contemplation. It must,
however, be emphasized that the separation of the first five
phases from the ultimate phase is a matter of convenience, rather
than an essential distinction, for meditation should play its part
in the biologist’s work from its beginning to its end. We turn
now, however, to that particular type of contemplation which
demands energy which is not set free until the detailed work is
finished (so far as any scientific work can ever be described as
finished). The biologist should then be in a position to go beyond
his individual observations and conclusions, and to assess his
general mode of thought, and the relations of his work in
a broader context. In so doing, he has to penetrate into the
significance of various conceptions, which, up to this point, he
has taken at their face value; he may, for example, brace himself
to ask what, precisely, he has been meaning by ‘ truth ’. He must
also undertake the heavy task of unearthing his basic assump¬
tions and their consequences; bringing them into full daylight;
and subjecting them to unprejudiced criticism. Moreover, recog¬
nizing how easy it is to slip from scientific balance into partisan¬
ship, he must focus upon the various antithetic ways of viewing
biological reality, and satisfy himself that his ideas have not been
distorted by an exclusive adherence to one or other of two partial
conceptions, such as ‘form’ and ‘function’. Furthermore, he
may try to understand how far the many antitheses of this kind
can, in fact, be synthesized, or whether they must be left as

63
 PART II. INTRODUCTION

irreducibly opposed. Finally, he must envisage the relation of

his own thinking to the more abstract procedure of logic and
metaphysics, and consider what biological thought may be able
to offer in return for the often unrecognized largesse which it
has received, throughout the ages, from philosophy.
If, after such considerations, he finds that he has arrived at
something possibly worth saying, he is faced with even more
taxing problems concerning the written word, than those he
met with when setting forth the straightforward scientific results
of his research. Difficult, however, as it may prove, he cannot
shirk the task of expression, for, though some monastic contem-
platives are satisfied with a wholly interior life, no biologist is
likely to find such a withdrawn existence adequate. The scientific
tradition, of full sharing of thought and experience, is happily
compulsive; as one of the research fraternity, the biologist is
committed, not only ad contemplandum, but also contemplata aliis
tradendum.1

1 Cf. Aquinas, St Thomas, in Migne, J. P. (1845, etc.), vol. 111 (1841), p. 1377,
Summa Theol. n/11, quest. 188, art. 7; translation in Aquinas, St Thomas (1911,
etc.), ii/ii, p. 283. (The writer is indebted to Mrs E. A. Bulloughfor the source of
this quotation.)

64
 CHAPTER VI

BIOLOGY AND TRUTH

ALL that we have said hitherto has been informed by the

ZJk obvious idea that the biologist’s aim is to arrive at the
_Z JL truth. Truth is, indeed, the concept in which all science
centres, as well as all philosophy. Thought itself has even been
defined by a logician as “mental activity controlled by a single
purpose, the attainment of truth”.1 The same writer holds that
the adjectives ‘true’ and ‘false’ represent standards imposed by
the thinker upon himself, since they correspond respectively to
the imperatives, ‘to be accepted’, and ‘to be rejected’.2 The
research worker may be prepared to accede to these statements—
with the probable proviso' that they seem to him to be plati¬
tudes—but he may well feel that they merely postpone his
difficulties, since he is left in the dark as to the criteria which
the thinker should use in determining what to accept and what
to reject; and this is, after all, the crux of the matter. Before the
biologist can feel satisfied with his own research procedure, he
has still to face the insistent question, ‘What is truth?’, even if
he can hope to arrive at nothing more conclusive than the hint
of a suggestion of the possibility of an answer.
So much modern work is founded—though often in complete
unconsciousness—upon Spinoza’s scheme of things, that, in
trying to tackle any difficult subject, it is well to make a start by
recalling what he wrote about it. In following, from one of his
works to another, his view of truth, we find that it underwent
change and development, and that the sequence of its phases
offers a framework which we can use. In his early essay, the
Short Treatise, he says that’“ Truth is an affirmation (or a denial)
made about a certain thing, which agrees with that same thing;
and Falsity is an affirmation (or a denial) about a thing, which

1 Johnson, W, E. (1921-4), pt. 1, p. xvii.

2 Johnson, W. E. (1921-4), pt. 1, pp. 7-8.
 VI. BIOLOGY AND TRUTH

does not agree with the thing itself”.1 Kant, again, regarded
truth as the agreement of knowledge with the object.2 This is,
indeed, the common-sense meaning still attached in ordinary
parlance to the phrase, ‘telling the truth’; it is the conception
generally known as the ‘copy’ or ‘correspondence’ theory of
truth. Why it should be called a theory, is difficult to see; it
would be more accurately described as a definition, or (as it is
sometimes called) a doctrine; a modern writer has stated it as
the ‘congruence’ between the meaning of a proposition and
a factual situation.3 The ‘copy’ doctrine is applied instinctively
by the biologist to the records of his observations, in which he is
dealing with what are known as ‘contingent’ truths. This term
is used for truths of which the opposite is not inconceivable.
Suppose, for instance, that a botanist, examining a plant tissue
under the microscope, observes that its cells contain starch
grains; this is a contingent truth, since it is conceivable that the
tissue might have contained none.
It is clear that the biologist’s first aim should be so to formulate
his statements that they ‘correspond’, as far as is humanly
possible, with the observed facts. Here the physico-chemical
disciplines have an advantage, for, if a result can be expressed
metrically, it is often possible to indicate the margin of error,
and thus to mark the degree of accuracy that has been attained.
In the biological sciences, the necessity for such precision was
realized relatively late. It is recorded,4 for instance, that Charles
Darwin had no idea of the need for critical accuracy in instru¬
ments; he used rough scales and rules, and did his measurements
of capacity with an apothecary’s measuring glass, which was,
in fact, badly graduated.
Even when the importance of numerical exactness is realized,
biological observations are often not such as to lend themselves
to an expressible margin of error. The degree of exactitude can,
however, be indicated, up to a point, by an account of the kind
1 Wolf, A. (1910), pt. 11, chap, xv, p. 102.
2 “ Ubereinstimmung der Erkenntniss mit dem Object Wahrheit ist. ” Kant, I.
(1902-38), Bd. hi, 1904, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2nd ed; 1787, Elementarlehre,
Th. 11, Abt. 1, Buch. 2, Haupst. 2, p. 169; translation, Smith, N. Kemp (1933),
p. 220.
8 Wood, L. (1940), p. 239. 4 Darwin, F. (1888), vol. 1, pp. 147-8.

66
 THE ‘CORRESPONDENCE’ THEORY

and amount of evidence on which any statement is based. For

example, the best modern work on the anatomy of any plant
organ makes it entirely clear how many series of sections have
been examined; exactly where they were located in the member
in question, with particulars as to its age and size; and what is
the actual distance between the individual sections figured. In all
such studies, the advent of the automatic microtome in the latter
part of the nineteenth century raised the standard of descriptive
work, since it rendered possible a degree of spatial precision
which was outside the range of the old hand-section technique.
A difficulty of a more subtle kind than that of making accurate
observations, arises out of the fact that the biologist’s ‘copy’ or
record is, in its actual nature, something very remote from the
original. He has either to use the symbolism of words—remem¬
bering always that they are “wise mens counters”, but “the
mony of fooles”1—or else some form of visual representation;
each of these methods involves the translation of his perception
into another medium. Since the biologist depends primarily on
words to convey his results to others, he needs the warning
which Hobbes gave three hundred years ago: “a man that
seeketh precise truth, had need to remember what every name
he uses stands for; and to place it accordingly; or else he will
find himselfe entangled in words, as a bird in lime-twiggs; the
more he struggles, the more belimed”.1
The ‘correspondence’ doctrine of truth seems at first sight to
be a simple copy-book maxim, easy to apply; but its apparent
simplicity is due to its deficiencies. One of these is that it
emphasizes unduly the objective side of truth, thus suggesting
a hard-and-fast separation between the object and the perceiving
subject. The subjective aspect of truth cannot, however, be
ignored with impunity. No truth is truth for any man until he
has rethought it for himself; it has, indeed, been argued that
truth is not truth at all, except in so far as it is the living ex¬
perience of a mind.2 The Chinese philosopher, Mencius—who
1 Hobbes, T. (1651), pt. 1, chap, iv, Of Speech, p. 15.
2 Joachim, H. H. (1939), pp. 13-14; cf. also Bosanquet, B. (1920), p. 150,
“truth. . .is reality as it makes itself known through particular minds in the form
of ideas”.

67
 VI. BIOLOGY AND TRUTH

was almost exactly contemporary with the first great European

botanist, Theophrastus—voiced the same idea when he said,
“ Having-it-in-self is called true”.1 A truth, even if derived
originally from an external source, when rethought, can become
organically one with the thinker; if, however, he merely appro¬
priates it, without working it into the texture of his mind, it
bears as little living relation to his thinking as the bizarre, alien
bits and scraps, with which the caddice-worm bedecorates its
case, bear to the creature itself. Since what is true for a man is
thus inseparable from his whole personality, the ‘truth5, even
of a relatively simple object, may seem entirely different to two
different observers, even if they are endowed with equally acute
senses and intelligence; what is truth for either of them depends
upon his individual field of interest, and the channels in which
his mental life naturally flows. A Japanese artist once said that,
after concentrating on the painting of the bamboo for many,
many years, there was still a technique for the rendering of the
tips of the leaves that eluded him.2 A drawing of his would
have been inspired by a conception of truth diverging widely
from that of the Western botanical draughtsman, who would
have produced a business-like delineation, faithfully showing the
recognized specific characters, but who would not have given
any special consideration to the question of how the subtle,
individual play and curvature of the delicate leaf-tips could best
be generalized. The same thing is constantly brought home to
any biologist who is studying the literature relating to a par¬
ticular topic. Again and again, on hopefully reading a memoir
on the subject which is in his mind, he fails to find just the facts
he needs, because the author’s field of interest does not coincide
with his own.
In addition to its undue objectivity, another defect of the
‘ correspondence5 doctrine is that it is not easily reconciled with
the continual flow of things. Plato in the Timaeus indicated that,
because the visible world is a changing image or likeness of an
eternal model, there can never be a science of Nature, since such

1 Richards, I. A. (1932), Appendix, p. 43.

2 Coomaraswamy, A. K. (1934), p. 41.

68
 ORGANIC DEVELOPMENT OF TRUTH

a science would involve a final statement of exact truth about an

ever-changing object.1 It is improbable that any biologist would
accept without reservation the Platonic opinion of science, but
few would dispute that, in reaching it, Plato had seized the
essential fact that any scientific system of explanation has a certain
static finality, and hence must be imperfectly compatible with
the unceasing flux of Nature. He is putting us on our guard
against the dangers of system-making, and emphasizing that the
attainment of truth is a process which has no end. The biologist,
when trying to express his own vision of reality, has no choice
but to represent development and change by means of static
statements. This method does no harm, so long as he never
forgets that it is merely a necessary convention. His actual
procedure is to adopt a stance, which is truth for him for the
moment, and then to pass through it to a further standpoint,
without, however, renouncing the conscious possession of earlier
positions.2 His progress thus resembles that of an advancing
army, which, moving forward from point to point, is concerned
primarily with the standing ground most recently achieved, but
also retains control of all positions previously gained. Progress
of this kind can be illustrated only by analogies drawn from life.
It is incompatible with the mechanical metaphor that sees each
addition to scientific truth as an individual brick added to
a permanent fabric. The development of scientific truth is, on
the contrary, like that of an organism; it does not grow by
accretion of ready-made parts, as a building does. In passing
from phase to phase, it suffers transformation from within, like
an animal proceeding from the embryonic stage to maturity. No
conclusions in science can be immortal—they serve their season,
and, if they survive at all, it is in the form of offspring theories,
in which certain of their characters live again in a new guise.
We began this study of truth by adopting, for the moment,
the doctrine which we have just discussed, that the validity of
a statement can be tested by its ‘ correspondence ’ with empirical
data; this is the opinion indicated in Spinoza’s earliest work, but

1 Cf. Cornford, F. M. (1937), pp. 23-9.

2 Cf. de Ruggiero, G. (1921), p. 120.

69
 VI. BIOLOGY AND TRUTH

in later writing1 he passed beyond views of this type, and, though

not rejecting such cogency as the correspondence theory can
actually claim, he assayed truth afresh by the different method of
following out all the implications of the statement in question.2
This method of testing truth is akin to the spontaneous procedure
of the biologist, when he estimates some hypothesis by subjecting
the deductions which can be drawn from it to experimental
trial.3 He attempts, that is to say, to discover how satisfactorily
his hypothesis can hold its place in the general network of
thought; for any valid hypothesis should be able to withstand the
trial of exposure to a context of relations within relations. As the
context widens in ever-increasing circles, so the hypothetical
thought establishes its place in worlds of truth which are more
and more inclusive. This conception of the meaning of truth has
become known as the ‘coherence5 doctrine. It has been studied
and elaborated in more modern times especially by Joachim,4
who turned to it after scrutinizing and rejecting the ‘ correspond¬
ence 5 notion. He shows that the fact of correspondence is not
truth itself, but is “at most a symptom of truth55;5 and he passes
to the ‘ coherence5 theory, which he expresses as the assumption
that “Truth in its essential nature is that systematic coherence
which is the character of a significant whole”.6 This definition
stands or falls with the idea of the Uniformity of Nature.7
It may be well, at this point, to try to get a little closer to the
problem of what kind of truth the biologist envisages, and how
it should be related to philosophical concepts. A difficulty that
has to be faced at the outset is that the elusive word, truth,
includes several gradients of meaning. Two of its principal con¬
notations have been distinguished by Hegel8 as Richtigkeit and
Wahrheit. Richtigkeit, which may be translated as ‘correctness5,

1 [Spinoza, B. de] ‘B.D.S.’ (1677), Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, pp. 375-6;

for translation, see White, W. Hale, and Stirling, A. H. (1899), pp. 32-3.
2 Roth, L. (1924), pp. 54, 55, etc. 3 See Chapter in of the present book.
1 Joachim, H. H. (1939), first published 1906; see also Bosanquet, B. (1911),
vol. 11, chap, ix, pp. 263-94. 5 Joachim, H. H. (1939), p. 28.
6 Joachim, H. H. (1939), p. 76; cf. also the ‘consilience’ of Hobhouse, L. T.
(1896), p. 414; a clear account of this is given in Metz, R. (1938; reimpression,
1950), p. 161.
7 On the Uniformity of Nature, see Chapter vii, pp. 82-8, of the present book.
8 Wallace, W. (1874), Sect. 172, pp. 262-3; anc^ Mure, G. R. G. (1940), p. 165.

70
 ‘CORRESPONDENCE’ AND ‘COHERENCE’

is the contingent truth of the empirical sciences, to which

the correspondence test can generally be applied. It is that
towards which the biologist has to struggle in the first place,
and, since factual accuracy is so hard to attain, he may well feel
that, having achieved it, he is justified in resting upon his
laurels. Nevertheless, the contemplative element in his mind
will not let him remain satisfied, in the long run, with truth
that is merely provisional; as soon as he passes beyond this, he
gets a distant glimpse of Hegel’s Wahrheit—that truth in which
the thought content is in agreement with its own essential
character. The difference between Richtigkeit and Wahrheit may
perhaps be made clearer by an example. A sketch of a landscape
may claim Richtigkeit if it fulfils the requirements of correctness,
both in being an accurate ‘copy’ of the landscape, and also in
conforming to certain orthodox principles of landscape painting;
but it may, despite this, be wholly inadequate as a picture. If,
on the other hand, the artist sets aside ‘ photographic ’ representa¬
tion, and, while faithful to the intrinsic nature of paint as
a medium, portrays his own direct reaction to the visual aspect
of the landscape, he cannot but achieve truth as Wahrheit.
Broadly speaking, the natural sciences, in the strict sense, and
primarily the physico-chemical disciplines, live in the dry light
of Richtigkeit; philosophy, on the other hand, looks to the very
different illumination of Wahrheit. This antithesis between scien¬
tific and philosophical thought is to some extent synthesized by
‘natural philosophy’, if we may reserve this term for the mode
of thinking which relies on both kinds of searchlight in order to
irradiate the borderland region connecting science with philo¬
sophy. That aspect of biology, which cannot be brought under
the sway of physico-chemical methods, finds its appointed home
in natural philosophy.1
While Richtigkeit is connected closely with the ‘correspon¬
dence ’ notion of truth, Wahrheit bears a definite relation to the
‘coherence’ doctrine, when this is carried to its highest pitch.
On this view, if the relations of a true idea are examined, they
are found to extend in an ever-increasing network, until, with
1 On biology as a branch of natural philosophy, see also pp. 76, 125, 126.

71
 VI. BIOLOGY AND TRUTH

no break in the reticulation, they finally pass beyond our limited

ken, and embrace the whole of reality. Since the Whole can
never be reached by discursive1 thought, “all instances of truth
will be relations... all truth, except truth of the thing itself, is
conditional ”, as Lord Herbert of Cherbury said in the seventeenth
century.2 Equivalent ideas find frequent reiteration in modern
thought.3 The ‘coherence’ doctrine, developed as far as reason
is able to take it, is thus necessarily imperfect, and we are left
with the knowledge that the fullest truth that science can hope
to achieve is truth which is relative, but extends by implication 4
beyond its own limits.
It has often been held that the sharp distinction marked by
Kant between the Phenomenon and the Noumenon represents an
antithesis which is in its very nature unresolvable. The terms of
this so-called antithesis can be transformed, however, into
gradients in a series, if we regard the Phenomenon as being the
Thing-in-itself, seen as in a glass darkly by the limited and fitful
illumination of relative truth, while the Noumenon is the same
Ding-an-sich, which can be fully revealed only by the light of that
absolute truth which is beyond our finite compass.
The idea that scientific truth is inevitably partial and relative,
brings us to the consideration of error and falsity. Error must
not be confused with meaninglessness; as Hobbes wrote in 1651,
“ if a man should talk to me of a round Quadrangle... I should not
say he were in Errour, but that his words were without meaning;
that is to say, Absurd ”.5 If then we set aside statements that are
without significance, and consider the category of actual falsity,
we find much reason to accept Spinoza’s dictum that erroneous¬
ness is not a positive quality, but that it consists simply in priva¬
tion of knowledge.6 From this point of view, error is truth in
an imperfect and incomplete form ;7 and there is thus no duality
1 On the term discursive, see Chapter in, p. 29, footnote 3.
2 Herbert, E. (Lord Herbert of Cherbury) (1937), p. 88; see also p. 24.
3 Cf. Bradley, F. H. (1922), vol. 11, p. 675.
4 On implication, cf. Bosanquet, B., Letter to Vivante, 1922, in Muirhead, J. H.
(1935), p. 270.
5 Hobbes, T. (1651), pt. 1, chap, v, Of Reason and Science, p. 19.
0 [Spinoza, B. de] ‘B.D.S.’ (1677), Ethices, pt. 11, prop, xxxv, pp. 72-3.
“Falsitas consistit in cognitionis privatione”; translation in White, W. Hale, and
Stirling, A. H. (1930), pp. 80-1. 7 Cf. Bradley, F. H. (1930), pp. 169 et seq.

72
 RELATIVE TRUTHS

of truth and falsity to reconcile, since we are left with a graded

series of ‘truths’, beginning with those so imperfect and partial
that they are classed as errors, and passing upwards through
every gradation of conditional truth. This conception of error
accords well with certain phases of scientific thought. The con¬
nexion between relative truth and falsity is brought home to us
when we meet with two incompatible hypotheses concerning
the same matter, each of which is supported by an amount of
evidence which seems sufficient to guarantee the probability of
its truth. For example, the structure of some organ of a living
creature may be explained on purely mechanical grounds, as
arising through physical and chemical necessity, or it may be
explained teleologically, as formed for the express purpose of
accomplishing some definite function. It is obviously impossible
to dismiss either of these hypotheses as baseless, and to say that
the other expresses the full truth. The most rational opinion
appears to be that each of them is true, but incompletely so.
Though such relative truths seem to us now mutually exclusive,
at a higher level of cognition they may eventually reveal them¬
selves as divergent aspects of the same reality. They will then
both be included in a synthetic truth, approaching nearer to
absolute truth than either of them individually. Compared with
this eventual truth, either of the partial truths, which meet in it,
may be called an error; they are falsifications of reality, but only
in so far as they are incomplete. Moreover, this synthetic truth
itself remains only relative, and will pass at last into a series of
still truer stages. The final question is whether it is possible to
reach beyond all these relative truths and to attain the kind of
truth which is the goal of the ‘coherence’ process. Spinoza,
having, as we have seen, lived through phases in which the
‘correspondence’ and ‘coherence’ doctrines were compatible
with his thought, finally transcended them both, and, in the
work of his maturity—the Ethic—he reached the ultimate posi¬
tion that truth cannot be tested by either of these two criteria,
but that it is its own standard—veritas sui sit norma;1 William

1 [Spinoza, B. de] ‘B.D.S.’ (1677). Ethices, pt, 11, prop, xliii, Schol., p. 80;
translation in White, W. Hale, and Stirling, A. H. (1930), p. 90.

73
 VI. BIOLOGY AND TRUTH

Blake was visited by a kindred thought when he said: “Truth

can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ’d.”1
Truth being its own norm, it follows that the true idea, when
once attained, is, as Spinoza said, beyond the reach of doubt.2
In this conception he was echoing Plotinus, who had declared,
fourteen hundred years earlier, that “the veritable truth is
consistent not with an alien Reality, but with itself; it affirms
nothing other than itself; it is, and what it is, that it affirms.
How then might such truth be 'tested’?. . .For there can be
found no Reality truer than the truth.”3 Such absolute truth
can be achieved only through direct apprehension, or, in philo¬
sophic language, 'immediately’; it is vouchsafed only to minds
prepared to receive it by long effort in discursive thought. If
the emotions also are finely tempered, such minds may acquire
what Newman called the Illative Sense.4 By this expression he
indicates a certain subjective capacity for grasping truth—
a capacity based, not on reasoning alone, but on the personality
as a whole. It may perhaps be identified with that special form
of perception which, according to Lord Herbert of Cherbury,
has the power of greeting truth with a ready and direct response.5
Newman compares the illative sense to taste in art, which,
however inborn it seems, owes much to accumulated knowledge,
so completely digested, and so fully fused with emotional ele¬
ments, that the certainty of discrimination, which it gives, has
the appearance of being instinctive. When the illative power is
lacking, one may easily persuade oneself that an idea bears the
stamp of truth, when it does not. A flash of apparent intuition
may be merely a pathological phosphorescence, simulating an
absolute insight; but this false idea masquerading as truth
should reveal its inadequacy when sanely and dispassionately
scrutinized. A genuine and well-based intuition, on the other

1 Blake, W., in Keynes, G. (1925), vol. 1, p. 186.

2 [Spinoza, B. de] ‘B.D.S.’ (1677), Ethices, pt. 11, heading prop, xliii, p. 79:
“Qui veram habet ideam, simul scit se veram habere ideam, nec de rei veritate
potest dubitare.”
3 Plotinus, Enn. v, v, 1, 2, in Dodds, E. R. (1923), p. 50.
4 Newman, J. H. (1870); chap, ix, pp. 346 et seq.; cf. also Metz, R. (1938;
reimpression 1950), p. 190.
5 Herbert, E. (Lord Herbert of Cherbury) (1937), p. 148.

74
 RELATIVE AND ABSOLUTE TRUTH

hand, will emerge unscathed from the most rigorous criticism

which discursive thinking can apply to it.
It cannot be too much emphasized that, whenever the mind
uncurtains something lying beyond relative truth, it is not by
means of any magical sleight of hand; it is, on the contrary, the
end result of the severest wrestlings of rational thought, stimu¬
lated yet controlled by disciplined emotion. We see this clearly
in Plotinus and Spinoza, whose illumination was associated
with intellectual effort so intense and so vitally irradiated by
feeling, that in its incandescence it afforded them a distant
glimpse of truth as absolute.

75
 CHAPTER VII

THE BASIC ASSUMPTIONS OF BIOLOGY

W HEN the biologist has finished some specific task,

and sets himself to see his results in a larger context,
he may be compared to an artist of a reflective turn
of mind, who, finally laying aside his palette and brushes, stands
back from his easel, considers his picture, and focuses his inner
gaze upon those initial agreed conventions without which his
work could not have come into being. Hitherto he has taken
these conventions for granted, and has concerned himself merely
about whether his picture is good of its kind. Now that the time
for alteration and retouching is over, he may feel that, within the
limits of its kind, this is the best he can do; but, in this moment
of thoughtful detachment, the question whether the kind itself will
endure a critical scrutiny possibly arises in his mind. He may, for
instance turn his thoughts to the evaluation of that symbolism
by means of which he has translated his impression of a three-
dimensional landscape into a two-dimensional form, or he
may speculate on his own purely artificial allocation of a
rectangular outline to his work. It may be objected that such
considerations belong to the province of the art critic rather
than to that of the artist, and that, correspondingly, the
biologist, who anatomizes his own work in order to lay bare its
basic assumptions, is leaving his own province and intruding into
that of the philosopher. It is indeed true that the painter may
not become a better artist through donning the critic’s mantle;
the unearthing of basic principles is, on the other hand, more
closely cognate with the daily work of the biologist than of the
painter. Though intellectual labours of this type may fall outside
the narrower definitions of natural science, they find their place
in the broader and more humanistic world of natural philosophy,
into which, in the last resort, biological science is resolved.1
1 See pp. 71, 125-6, of the present book.

76
 FOUNDATION PRINCIPLES

No one can dispute that what suppositions are chosen for

acceptance is of the utmost importance in deductive reasoning,
since the stages of such an argument represent merely the un¬
ravelling of the significance of those principles with which the
thinker starts; it may, indeed, be held that all systems of
philosophy are methods of unfolding the implications of their
own postulates. In the words that Plato puts into the mouth of
Socrates, “ every man should expend his chief thought and atten¬
tion on the consideration of his first principles:—are they or are
they not rightly laid down? and when he has sifted them all the
rest will follow”.1 Men of science, on the other hand, may say
that these considerations do not apply to them, since they are
prepared to accept Aristotle’s dictum that our knowledge goes
back to premisses which are incapable of demonstration.2 Dante
was accepting this edict when he wrote in the Convivio, “no
Science demonstrates its own subject, but presupposes it”.3 It
is true, however, in science as well as in philosophy, that to
refrain from criticizing first principles is often fatal. Obvious
examples of the effect of a false basic assumption are to be found
in such old paradoxes as that of Achilles and the tortoise. If it is
supposed that duration is divisible into units, Achilles never can
pass the tortoise, but since, in fact, he does, the fault evidently
lies in this primary supposition.4 In biology many apparently
stable superstructures have collapsed sooner or later, because
the assumptions, on which they were founded, proved to be
unsound. It is not until the student of living things has satisfied
himself as to the solidity of his foundations, that he will find
a foothold—the ttou crrco that Archimedes demanded as a
prerequisite for putting his forces into action.5 No foothold,

1 Jowett, B. (1871), vol. 1, Cratylus, 436, p. 711; see also vol. 11, Republic, vi,
51 U PP- 346~7> and vii> 533> P- 369-
2 Mure, G. R. G. (1926), Analytica posterior a, bk. 1, 3, 72 b.
3 Dante in Giuliani, G. (1874), p. 142, Tract. 11, cap. xiv, “perocche nulla
scienza dimostra lo proprio suggetto, ma presuppone quello”. Translation, in
Jackson, W. W. (1909), pp. 105-6.
4 Cf., for instance, Pollock, Sir F. (1899), pp. 169 et seq. and Burnet, J. (1914),
p. 84.
5 “Give me a place to stand on and I move the earth”, 66$ uoi ttou cttoo Kal
kivco Trjv yrjv, Archimedes, quoted in Pappus, viii; see Hultsch, F. (1876-8),
vol. hi, tom. 1, p. 1060, 1-4.

77
 VII. BASIC ASSUMPTIONS

however, can be more than temporary, for scientific work is in

its essence fluid and progressive, and from time to time it out¬
distances the principles which formerly it had assumed as basic.
It is thus necessary to scrutinize them repeatedly, and, if need
be, to subject them to drastic revision; but it is a matter of great
difficulty to overcome the natural disinclination to allow one’s
foundations to be probed and disturbed. As Kant wrote in the
eighteenth century, “It is, indeed, the common fate of human
reason to complete its speculative structures as speedily as may
be, and only afterwards to enquire whether the foundations are
reliable. All sorts of excuses will then be appealed to, in order
to. . . enable us to dispense altogether with so late and so dan¬
gerous an enquiry.”1 Though this is true in general, to some
adventurous minds the excitement of possibly shattering their
scheme of things to bits, adds an attractive spice of risk to the
search for flaws in those first principles which they have been
accepting as incontrovertible. Kant had himself the courage
necessary for uprooting his own convictions and inspecting them
dispassionately; after he was awakened from his ‘dogmatic
slumber’, and was led to criticize his basic principles, his
researches in the field of speculative philosophy took a new
direction.2
Basic assumptions may be regarded in two ways. They may
be thought of metaphysically, in which case it is taken for granted
that they are universally true, or they may be thought of
methodologically.3 This second alternative means that the biologist
does not commit himself to their truth, but merely uses thefn as

1 Kant, I. (1902-38), Bd. 111, 1904, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2nd ed. 1787.
hi,
Einleitung, p. 32; “Es ist aber ein gewohnliches Schicksal der menschlichen
Vernunft in der Speculation, ihr Gebaude so friih wie moglich fertig zu machen
und hintennach allererst zu untersuchen, ob auch der Grund dazu gut gelegt sei.
Alsdann aber werden allerlei Beschonigungen herbeigesucht, um uns. . .eine
solche spate und gefahrliche Priifung lieber gar abzuweisen.” Translation, Smith,
N. Kemp (1933), p. 47.
2 Kant, I. (1783), p. 13. Prolegomena zu einer jeden kiinstigen Metaphysxk: “die
Erinnerung des David Hume war eben dasjenige, was mir vor vielen Jahren
zuerst den dogmatischen Schlummer unterbrach, und meinen Untersuchungen
im Felde der speculativen Philosophic eine ganz andre Richtung gab”. Elsewhere,
however, Kant accounts differently for his awakening, see Caird, E. (1889),
vol. 1, p. 162.
3 Cf. Woodger, J. H. (1929), p. 28; for a somewhat different approach see
Stace, W. T. (1932), pp. 405-6.
 ‘GIVEN’ FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS

convenient devices for purposes of research; the procedure is

then to study what happens when they are treated as if they were
true. If deductions from these assumptions cohere, and offer
a rational picture, the resulting glow of satisfaction sometimes
dazzles the biologist into forgetting that these deductions are
valid only if the initial assumptions are themselves true. For
example, he may choose to make the methodological assump¬
tion that, among living creatures, a group of species, if they
closely resemble one another, must have a common ancestry.
On this basis he may draw up a phylogenetic scheme showing
the probable interconnexions and relationships of the individual
species, and this, within its limits, may provide a useful working
plan. Nevertheless this plan has absolute value only if the basic
assumption as to the monophylesis of the group represents actual
historic truth. If, however, the similarities between the species
in question are due in reality to parallelism and convergence of
lines of descent from different sources, the basic assumption is
demolished, and the phylogenetic scheme, erected on the strength
of it, fails to pieces.
Each basic conception underlying the reasoning of a working
biologist, may be compared to one of his pieces of apparatus,
such as a microscope. The average biologist takes his microscope
for granted and uses it as a tool. His interest is concentrated, not
on it, but on what he sees with it. A maker of optical apparatus,
on the other hand, would cast a connoisseur’s eye upon the
microscope itself; he would criticize and appraise it as an
instrument, without concerning himself especially about the ob¬
servations which the biologist happened to have achieved with
it. Passing from laboratory to study, the biologist may base the
theoretical side of his work upon some accepted assumption,
which he himself takes for granted as he does his microscope,
without considering it his duty to search for evidence which
might support or rebuff it. A philosopher, on the other hand,
would be interested primarily in the biologist’s underlying
assumption. He would refuse to take it as ‘given’, but would
examine it, and try to assess its validity, in and for itself, irrespec¬
tive of the use to which the biologist was accustomed to put it.

79
 VII. BASIC ASSUMPTIONS

The biologist, if asked why he narrows down his procedure by

taking both his microscope and the fundamentals of his thinking
for granted, might reply that life is so short that, if he attempted
to become an expert in scientific instruments, and also a trained
philosopher, no time would be left in which to pursue his own
metier, in which neither the scientific instrument maker nor the
philosopher could replace him. There is obviously a good deal
in this argument, but a compromise is possible. Some technical
knowledge of the microscope, and some scrutiny of the philo¬
sophic bases of his conceptions, might prove helpful to the
biologist, even within the limits of his own work, though he could
not hope to reach the expertise of the specialist in microscopes, or
of the professional philosopher. The philosopher, as we have
already noticed, claims, and with some justice, that it is one of his
functions to criticize the basic notions which science takes for
granted.1 The biologist, however, may shrink from handing
over his primary ideas unreservedly for the philosopher’s adjudi¬
cation, because the true inwardness of these ideas, in relation to
the study of life, is likely to elude anyone who is not an initiate in
that particular scientific field. Moreover it must not be forgotten
that each philosopher starts with certain first postulates of the
non-proven kind, and that these postulates sometimes strike the
scientist as being singularly arbitrary. After all, though every
one of the innumerable schools of philosophic and scientific
thought is engaged in seeking the truth, the riddle of the universe
remains unsolved; and, so long as this is so, it ill beseems any one
group of thinkers to dictate de haut en bas to the rest.
In the mid-nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill held that
the whole problem of the investigation of nature was compre¬
hended essentially in the question, “What are the fewest assump¬
tions which being granted, the order of nature as it exists would
be the result?”2 This pronouncement strikes the biologist of the ,
present day as unduly dogmatic, but it has a real meaning from
the point of view of the methodology of science. The reduction
of basic assumptions to a minimum is indeed a help towards
progress, since, being unanalysable ‘givens’, they oppose a blank
1 Stace, W. T. (1920), p. 3. 2 Mill, J. S. (1843), vol. 1, p. 560.

80
 RATIONALITY OF THE UNIVERSE

wall to scientific investigation. In a world offering data of this

impervious type alone, science could not carry on its work. As
a single example, from biology, of something which was long
held, without adequate reason, to come into the category of the
‘given5, and to be thus immune from inquiry, we may recall
the affirmation that the leaf is a basic unit of the plant body in
the angiosperms. So long as this was assumed, any effort to
understand the morphology of the leaf was forbidden; the leaf
was a concept which one could not, as it were, get behind. When,
however, the ban was lifted, and the leaf lost the privileged
position accorded to it as an organ sui generis, the way was
opened towards interpreting it. It might then be regarded, for
instance, as an incomplete form of shoot,1 an interpretation
which—whether or not it is accepted ultimately—is at least an
attempt to render the leaf-concept intelligible by placing it in
a nexus of relations, instead of leaving it as an isolated fixed
datum.
When we reflect, in general, on the various assumptions which
are commonly regarded as basic for natural science, we see that
the most fundamental of them is that the universe is intelligible
to reason ;2 this is equivalent to saying that the universe is itself
entirely rational, and penetrable to the intellect.3 Such an
assumption obviously involves a certain belief in the validity of
the sense-impressions, and of the normal working of the human
mind;4 unless indeed, this belief is held, not only scientific
thought, but all intellectual work of any kind, comes to a stand¬
still. Despite the general consensus of opinion that Nature is
intelligible, there exists also a recurrent tendency to doubt
whether the universe can in fact be rationalized completely, or
whether, in the last resort, an irreducible element of brute fact,
or ‘necessity5, is left—an element which is altogether refractory
to reason.5 Plato evidently felt a degree of cogency in the latter

1 On this theory, initiated by Casimir de Candolle, see Arber, A. (1950),

chap, vi, pp. 70 et seq. 2 Muirhead, J. H. (1931, reimpression, 1939), p. 231.
3 Meyerson, £. (1931), vol. 1, pp. 176 et passim.
4 Thompson, W. R. (1937), p. 26.
5 For an interesting consideration of the rationality or irrationality of the
universe, see McTaggart, J. McT. E. (1922), pp. 169 et seq., or 1st ed. (1896),
pp. 172 et seq.

8l
 VII. BASIC ASSUMPTIONS

view, for he seems to have considered that there is something

permanently chaotic within the cosmos.1 Moreover, it is con¬
ceivable that certain features of modern physics hint at a basic
irrationality underlying statistical uniformity. With this idea,
however, the biologist is not concerned; within his particular
world—which in scale is neither infinitesimal nor astronomic¬
ally enormous—the principle of the rationality of Nature can
be used, as an instrument of method, for working purposes.
When we come to inquire further into the meaning of intel¬
ligibility, we discover that it represents the mental realization of
unity permeating the world of multiplicity. In other words, if
intelligibility be accepted as a character of the universe, this
signifies a recognition of the Unity or Uniformity of Nature. Of
this Uniformity, the four primary ‘Laws of Thought5 have been
regarded as the formal or mental aspect.2 These Laws may be
epitomized, albeit crudely, as: the Law of Identity {A is A); the
Law of Contradiction (A is not both A and not-T) ;3 * the Law
of Excluded Middle (A is either B or not-R); and the Law of
Sufficient Reason (every consequent has a ground from which
it necessarily follows). In the nineteenth century there was
a tendency to reduce the principle of Uniformity simply to an
inadequate version of the Law of Ground and Consequent, and
to represent this Uniformity as limited to an inviolable sequence
of cause and effect on the temporal plane. Such a conception
is, however, unsound, since it assumes the possibility of analysing
the multitude of phenomena into causes and effects arranged in
chains—more or less parallel, though frequently entangled. It is
supposed that these chains are isolable in thought, and that they
can be imaged as consisting of discrete but firmly soldered links,
each of which is the result of its predecessor, and bears a causal
relation to its successor. This picture is strangely remote from
the universe as we know it. Such imagery merely represents an
effort at ‘stringing out5, in terms of time, that reality which

1 Cf. Cornford, F. M. (1937), p. 361, etc.

2 Cf. Bosanquet, B. (1911), vol. 11, p. 216; for a general discussion of the Laws
of Thought, see also pp. 209-16.
3 The Laws of Contradiction and Excluded Middle are, obviously over¬
simplifications; see chap, ix, pp. 109-10 of the present book.

82
 UNIFORMITY OF NATURE

cannot be seen as it is except sub specie aeternatitis} The word

‘cause’ is itself an unfortunate one; it apparently originated as
a legal term,2 and its scientific use tends to be distorted by
associations which still cling to it from its forensic source.
Although it is less than justifiable to equate the idea of Cause
and Effect with that of the Uniformity of Nature, causation
has a primary place in the methodology of science; exactly how
it should be ranked, we will consider later in this chapter.3
A profound conviction of the unity and uniformity of Nature
has been expressed by many thinkers at different periods.
Beatrice tells Dante of the mutual order which all things observe,4
and this conception was echoed, centuries later, by those who
have held, as Leibniz did, that “l’Univers, quel qu’il puisse
etre, est tout d’une piece, comme un Ocean”.5 Newton, again,
accepted the same idea when he wrote that “Nature is very
constant and conformable to her self”.6 In the nineteenth
century it was received as an unquestioned certainty. W. K.
Clifford, for instance, said in 1872 that the instrument of
scientific thought is “an observed uniformity in the course of
events”. By the use of this instrument, thought “gives us
information transcending our experience, it enables us to infer
things we have not seen from things that we have seen; and the
evidence for the truth of that information depends on our
supposing that the uniformity holds good beyond our ex¬
perience”.7 Whereas Clifford thus makes the validity of the
principle of uniformity depend upon induction from observa¬
tions, John Stuart Mill, who believed that “every induction may
be thrown into the form of a syllogism by supplying a major
premiss”, concluded that the uniformity of the course of nature
is “the ultimate major premiss of all inductions”.8 Thus, while

1 Cf. the discussion of Spinoza’s idea of cause in Pollock, Sir F. (1899), pp. 149-51.
a Kneale, W. (1949), p. 61. - 3 "See pp. 87-8.
4 “le cose tutte e quante
Hann’ordine tra loro;”
Paradiso, canto 1, 103, 4. Dante Alighieri (1900), p. 362.
5 Leibniz, G. W. (1875-90), vol. vi, 1885, Essais de Theodicee, p. 107, sect. 9
(first published, 1710).
6 Newton, Sir I. (1931) (reprint from 4th ed. 1730), Opticks, bk. 111, quest. 31,
P- 376.
7 Clifford, W. K. (1879), pp. 131-2. 8 Mill, J. S. (1843), vol. 1, p. 372.

83
 VII. BASIC ASSUMPTIONS

Mill regards the principle of uniformity as the basis of induction,

Clifford regards it as a conclusion from the same process; this
incompatibility has continued to find expression in scientific
thought, even to the present day.
If we look back to a time two hundred years before Clifford’s
pronouncement, we find Spinoza writing that Nature’s “laws
and rules, according to which all things are made and are
changed from form to form, are everywhere and always the
same”.1 We can appreciate how it was that Spinoza came to this
view, if we recall that he founds his maturest work, the Ethic,
on the conception of an absolutely perfect Being,2 of whose
Attributes two alone are known to men. These are Extension
and Thought—that is to say, on the one hand, the familiar
world of things, extended in space, and, on the other hand,
the mental world. It is on the foundation of this monistic view
that Spinoza develops his whole argument, and it follows in¬
evitably that he treats the uniformity of nature as ‘given’.3
In modern times a conception akin to that of Spinoza has been
voiced by Charles Singer, who, writing as an historian, describes
science as engaged upon a constant search for law and order in
the universe.4 Metaphysicians, also, sometimes speak of their
own discipline in closely similar terms; it has been said, for
instance, that philosophy “seeks to view the entire universe in
the light of the fewest possible general principles, in the light, if
possible, of a single ultimate principle”.5 Such interpretations
of science and philosophy imply a confidence that a state of law
and order exists, but that it is an unanalysable datum, which
man’s thought cannot penetrate, but may only reveal and make
explicit. This belief is essentially intuitive; it recalls Einstein’s
opinion that the possibility that the regulations valid for the

1 [Spinoza, B. de] ‘B.D.S.’ (1677), Ethices, pars in, p. 94, “naturae leges, et
regulae, secundum quas omnia fiunt, et ex unis formis in alias mutantur, sunt
ubique, et semper eaedem”. The translation is corrected from White, W. Hale,
and Stirling, A. H. (1930), p. 105.
2 It is pointed out in Joachim, H. H. (1901), p. 116, that though Spinoza seems
to start with definitions of simple elements, and to construct the whole out of them,
he is in reality arguing analytically from the whole.
3 For an opposed view, which Spinoza also expressed, see pp. 85, 86.
4 Singer, C. (1941), p. 2.
6 Stace, W. T. (1920), p. 3.

84
 4ORDER’ IN NATURE

world of existence are rational, is a faith springing from the

sphere of religion.1
Even from the few dicta which we have cited, it becomes
apparent that the status of the premiss regarding the uniformity
of nature is singularly uncertain. It cannot be called self-
evident, or a necessary truth; neither can it be proved induc¬
tively, because nothing short of a complete enumeration and
study of every process in the universe, past, present, and future,
could give it final verification. It is true that there is a large
amount of evidence which appears to support it, but it is possible
to put another interpretation upon this evidence. It is remark¬
able that Spinoza, in spite of having, in his final work,2 enun¬
ciated and accepted the idea of uniformity, elsewhere in the
same treatise took a different view, and said that the order,
which we, in our ignorance, think we discern in Nature, is
not actually an element in Nature herself, but resides in our
‘imagination’.3 In the next century Kant expressed a related
view when he said, “The order and regularity in the appear¬
ances, which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce. We could
never find them in appearances, had not we ourselves, or tlxe
nature of our mind, originally set them there 4 In interpreting
this contention, it must be remembered that man is, in fact, an
integral part of Nature—not an outsider and an alien—and, if
order is implicit in the structure and functioning of his mind
(using this term in a broad sense to include percepts as well as
concepts) it is probable that order is implicit in the Whole of
which he forms a part. Long ago, Lord Herbert of Cherbury
denied the antithesis of Man and Nature, and his treatise, De
Veritate (first published in 1624) has for its central conception
“the organic relation between the impulse of Nature and

1 Einstein, A. (1940), p. 605.

2 See p. 84.
3 [Spinoza, B. de] ‘B.D.S.’ (1677), Ethices, pars 1, Appendix, pp. 37-8; for
translation, see White, W. Hale, and Stirling, A. H. (1930), pp. 43-4.
4 Kehrbach, K. (1919), Kant, L, Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Text der Ausgabe
von 1781, Elementarlehre, Th. 11, Abt. 1, Buch 1, Hauptstiick 11, p. 134. “Die
Ordnung und Regelmassigkeit also an den Erscheinungen, die wir Natur nennen,
bringen wir selbst hinein, und wiirden sie auch nicht darin finden konnen, batten
wir sie nicht, oder die Natur unseres Gemiiths urspriinglich hineingelegt.” For
translation, see Smith, N. Kemp (1933), p. 147-

85
 VII. BASIC ASSUMPTIONS

human thought ”.x Notwithstanding his reservations, in practice

Spinoza based his work upon the same belief, for he held that
he could approach the truth about the Whole by the path of
ordered argument, and he maintained that men’s actions and
appetites could be discussed as if they were as undoubtedly
subject to rational law as lines, planes, and bodies.1 2 The fact
that he did, nevertheless, consider the possibility that Nature
may include an element of irrationality, is perhaps merely a sign
that he knew that the Principle of Uniformity could not be
treated as proven. As we have seen, it is not open to any final
inductive proof; and it is also evident that it cannot be proved
deductively, since there is no more general principle from which
it can be derived.3 If, on the other hand, it is treated as a ‘ given ’
mystical intuition, it is seen as an assumption the basis of which
falls outside the biologist’s field of criticism. From the scientific
standpoint, another approach is, however, possible; it may be
suggested that the statement that Nature is uniform should
be treated neither as a datum, nor as a conclusion from an
argument, but as an hypothesis. That it should have its basis in
intuition would then be natural; we found, in discussing the
sources of discovery, that hypotheses often take their rise through
processes including but transcending discursive thought.4 We
have already seen that hypotheses are not susceptible of actual
proof; they advance merely to higher and higher degrees of
probability as they are found to ‘work’. This is what happens
when we regard the Unity or Uniformity of Nature as an
hypothesis; it is then visualized as being tested without inter¬
mission in innumerable pieces of scientific observation and
experiment. It may, indeed, be permissible to think of the work
of scientific research, in its totality, as a team-work attempt to
discover whether experience altogether can be ‘saved’ on the
hypothesis that there is a unitary Whole; or, in other words,
whether the conception of the One, as opposed to the Many, is

1 Carre, M. H., in Herbert, E. (Lord Herbert of Cherbury) (1937), p. 66.

2 [Spinoza, B. de] ‘B.D.S.’ (1677), Ethices, pars 111, p. 94, “humanas actiones,
atque appetitus considerabo perinde, ac si Quaestio de lineis, planis, aut de
corporibus esset”. Translation, White, W. Hale, and Stirling, A. H. (1930), p. 105.
3 Stace, W. T. (1932), pp. 349-50. 4 Cf. Chapter 11, pp. 20-1.

86
 THE CAUSAL PRINCIPLE

justifiable. On this view, the conviction that Nature is Uniform

comes to the individual worker as one of the ultimate rewards
of the scientific life, instead of being a facile preconception.
A danger that must be faced, however, is that a scientist is often
so deeply committed, from the start, to the idea of order in the
universe, that it is difficult for him to test the hypothesis of the
Uniformity of Nature with any impartiality. Surreptitiously,
but unconsciously, he may have inserted the element of order
into the basic formulation of his problem; when this has hap¬
pened, it is not surprising if, at the end, he triumphantly finds
it there.
Earlier in this book,1 it was suggested that the biological
explanation of a phenomenon involves the discovery of its own
intrinsic place in a texture of relations. Such a definition assumes
that phenomena in general are not disposed casually in an
unorganized chaos, but in a nexus, which is an ‘ordered whole’2
of experience; this definition must thus rank as a corollary to
the hypothesis of the Uniformity of Nature.
We have noticed3 that the theory of causality is so closely
related to the principle that Nature is intelligible and uniform,
that it has sometimes even been identified with this idea. The
various meanings that have been attributed to the causal prin¬
ciple recall the differing interpretations of Uniformity. Whereas
Hume4 held that we can detect only succession, and that the
belief in a causal relation springs merely from the observation
of customary sequences, Kant,5 on the contrary, regarded this
belief as an internal necessity of thought. This difference cor¬
responds with that between those who consider that the results
of observation do not preclude the existence of a chaotic element
in the universe, and others, who find that the Principle of
Uniformity is an inalienable constituent of their own minds,
and hence of the Whole. There is, indeed, so much parallelism
between the notions of uniformity and causality in nature, that,
1 See Chapter v, p. 59. 2 Cf. Bosanquet, B. (1920), p. 10.
3 See pp. 82-3 of the present chapter.
4 See, for instance, Hume, D. (1854), vol. 1, A Treatise of Human Nature, bk. 1.
Of the Understanding, pp. 120-2, 328-9, etc.; on Hume’s conception of causation,
see Hibben, J. G. (1910), pp. 90 et seq.
0 Cf. Smith, N. Kemp (1933), pp. 223 et seq,

87
 VII. BASIC ASSUMPTIONS

if uniformity is relegated to the rank of an hypothesis, it seems

reasonable to give the same status to causality. It is indeed
possible that not only uniformity and causality, but also all the
other basic assumptions of science, which are treated in general
as ‘ given5 and indubitable, might with advantage be transferred
to the category of hypotheses; their claim would then be to
relative, not to absolute truth.1
We have already referred to the recognized fact that the
reduction of basic assumptions to the least possible number
expedites scientific study.2 A parallel methodological rule is the
so-called ‘simplicity postulate’, which is sometimes treated as
a basic assumption, but which should rather be reckoned as
a practical criterion of selection from among ‘ final inexplicables
This principle of ‘frugality’ or ‘economy’ in thinking can be
traced back to classical sources,3 but it was in medieval philo¬
sophy that it played its most conspicuous part. It has been known
as ‘Occam’s razor’, since it is implicit in the work of William
of Occam (Oakham),4 who flourished in the early fourteenth
century; but the first to express it in the familiar form, Entia
non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatemp appears to have been
a seventeenth-century commentator on the Franciscan philo¬
sopher, Duns Scotus (b. c. 1270), who had made use of the
principle. Dante, who was a contemporary of Duns Scotus,
also accepted this idea, when he said that “everything super¬
fluous is unpleasing to God and to Nature”.6 Sir William
Hamilton in the mid-nineteenth century, drew special attention
to this “law of parsimony”, as he called it, “which prohibits,
without a proven necessity, the multiplication of entities, powers,
principles or causes”.7

1 Cf. Chapter vi, p. 72. 2 Cf. pp. 80-1 of the present chapter.
3 Cf. Thompson, Sir D’Arcy W. (1942), pp. 356-7, on the principle of least
action.
4 Carre, M. H. (1946), p. 107; on the use of this principle by Peter Aureolus,
who flourished somewhat earlier than William of Occam, see Curtis, S. J. (1950),
p. 231.
5 Thorburn, W. M. (1918), p. 350; see also Harris, C. R. S. (1927), vol. 1,
p. 167.
6 Dante Alighieri (1916), De Monarchia, cap. 1, 14, p. 348: “Et quod potest
fieri per unum, melius est per unum fieri quam per plura. . .omne superfluum
Deo et Naturae displiceat.”
7 Hamilton, Sir W. (1852), p. 590.

88
 THE SIMPLICITY POSTULATE

The history of modern thought seems to show that the sim¬

plicity postulate is more convincing to those concerned with the
physico-chemical disciplines, than it is to biologists; this is not
surprising, since these disciplines are closely connected with
mathematics, which deals with a universe simplified by abstrac¬
tion and rejection; with such a universe the simplicity postulate
harmonizes admirably. Sir Isaac Newton accepted the idea
that Nature “affects not the pomp of superfluous causes”, and
he gave, as one of the rules of reasoning: “We are to admit no
more causes of natural things than such as are both true and
sufficient to explain their appearances”.1 In our own time Sir
Harold Jeffreys has shown that “general propositions with high
probabilities must have the property of mathematical or logical
simplicity”.2 Biologists would not think of disputing the mathe¬
matical validity of such a conclusion, but there is no reason to
suppose that it is applicable outside mathematics. We have
already noticed that the measurable probability of the mathe¬
matician falls into a different category from the biologist’s
probability.3 Two different terms are really needed for these two
conceptions. It may perhaps be suggested that mathematical
probability, as an abstraction from probability in the broad
sense, is comparable with measurable time, as an abstraction
from duration.
It is obvious that in biology, as well as in other fields of non-
mathematical thought, the simplicity postulate, like the causal
hypothesis, is a convenient instrument of method, in that it
reduces the multifariousness of reality to a form with which the
human mind can grapple; but it needs cautious use, since it
contains an element of that kind of tidiness which simplifies
existence by consigning all potentially troublesome documents
to the waste-paper basket. We no longer possess that superb
nineteenth-century assurance, which led Herschel to state that,
the moment we contemplate nature as it is, “we never fail to
recognize that sublime simplicity on which the mind rests satisfied
that it has attained the truth”.4 On the contrary we have

1 Newton, Sir I. (1803), vol. 11, bk. 111, p. 160. 2 Jeffreys, Sir H. (1937), p. 7.
3 Cf. Chapter hi, p. 26, footnote 2. 4 Herschel, J. F. W. (1831), p. 361.

89
 VII. BASIC ASSUMPTIONS

learned to-day that it is far from safe to proceed on the naive

assumption that simplicity is equivalent to validity. The biologist
especially, faced with the unutterable complexity of living things,
cannot but feel that the apparent successes of the simplicity
postulate are liable to be achieved by throwing some of the main
cargo overboard, under the mistaken impression that it is merely
ballast.1
A situation that in practice sometimes arises, is that the
biologist has before him two alternative hypotheses,2 one of
which is simpler than the other. It is a convenient expedient to
adopt the simpler hypothesis provisionally, but, even if it ‘ works ’,
it should not be accepted at once on the strength of the sim¬
plicity postulate, but the more complex hypothesis should also
be studied and tested, as there is the possibility that it may rise
to a higher level of truth than its simpler rival. We must accept
the fact that, if we are led to give preference to an hypothesis on
account of its simplicity, this is “non parce qu’elle est la plus
vraie, mais parce qu’elle est la plus commode et la plus
intelligible”.3
When we come to ask ourselves how it is that we have a con¬
viction of the truth of certain basic assumptions used in science,
which are admittedly neither proven nor provable, the answer
can be found nowhere but within our own selves. The mind
undoubtedly experiences an intense craving for uniformity or
intelligibility, and also for simplicity. By sheer natural necessity
the intellect, like the body, seeks in the universe for that which is
so far conformable to itself that it can be integrated into its very
texture. If we may accept the Protagorean saying that “Man
is the measure of all things”, it is open to us to believe that such
a craving in man, the microcosm, is an indication that in the
universe, the macrocosm, there is a corresponding element which
the mind searches after and finds. Unfortunately the profound
influence of Descartes in biology has tended to neutralize this
natural and inherent urge; he impressed a surgical cleavage so
persuasively and so effectually upon scientific thought, that the
1 Cf. Woodger, J. H. (1929), p. 18. 2 Cf. Stace, W. T. (1932), pp. 113-14.
3 Couturat, L. (1901), p. 269, footnote 2; cf. also Thorburn, W. M. (1918),
P- 352.

90
 MIND AND EXTERNAL NATURE

breach he made has never been satisfactorily closed.1 This un¬

natural fission sets mind and external nature in opposition to
one another, as if they were incommensurables; but it is, in fact,
the harmony between the mind and the ‘not-self’ which renders
the ‘not-self’ comprehensible to man, and those who have seen
most deeply into things, have generally found themselves im¬
pelled to believe in the existence of this concord. Even the
sceptical Hume, in his final revision of the Dialogues, added in
1776, a cautious passage in which he accedes to the “somewhat
ambiguous, at least undefined proposition, that the cause or causes
oj order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human
intelligence”.2 In the same year, Sir Joshua Reynolds, ap¬
proaching life not as a philosopher or scientist but as an artist
and man of letters, said that his notion of nature comprehended
not only externals, but also the “internal fabrick and organiza¬
tion. . .of the human mind and imagination”;3 Plotinus, long
before, had enshrined a kindred thought in his aphorism—
“none walks upon an alien earth”.4

1 For a criticism of Descartes’s dualism see the Introduction to Ritchie, A. D.

(1936); see also Chapter vm, pp. 98-9, of the present book.
2 Smith, N. Kemp (1947), pp. 21, 227.
3 Reynolds, Sir J. (1797), Discourse vir, 10 December 1776, vol. 1, p. 136.
4 Plotinus, Enn. v. viii. 4, in Brehier, E. (1924-38), vol. v, 1931, pp. 139-40;
Dodds, E. R. (1933), p. 225, for translation.

91
 CHAPTER VIII

BIOLOGICAL ANTITHESES

I N studies of the theoretical aspects of biology, we frequently

meet with pairs of ideas set in opposition to one another,
because they have some mental connexion, but yet appear to
be antagonistic. They are generally called antitheses—a term
whose connotation is difficult to define, since it covers concepts
which stand to one another in relations which are far from being
identical. Sometimes such antitheses are sheer alternatives, of
which one or other must be erroneous. The primary antithesis
between the conceptions of the universe as a completely ordered
Cosmos, and those which see in it at least an element of Chaos,
probably come into this category. We need not consider this
antithesis here, since we concluded in the preceding chapter that
the rational order (or Uniformity) of Nature is that hypothesis
which is tested, consciously or unconsciously, in all scientific
research. Turning now to those antitheses which are specially
the concern of biology, we find that they are not usually simple
alternatives, but are of the type in which thesis and antithesis
do not necessarily exclude one another. We can detect this
feature in such examples as mechanistic explanations of pheno¬
mena, contrasted with interpretations in terms of purpose; pre¬
formation contrasted with epigenesis; body contrasted with
mind; and so on. It may be well to review a few examples of
these paired concepts, in order to see if any light can thus be
thrown upon their general position in biological thinking. To
begin with, we must put aside those apparent antitheses which
are based upon misconceptions; an instance is the opposition of
matter and form. When the ‘form’ of a living thing is discussed
as if it were something imposed upon passive ‘matter’, a mis¬
taken analogy is implied. It is true that the shape of a coin is
impressed upon a piece of metal from the outside, so that the
ultimate form is not an outcome of the nature of the metal itself,

92
 FORM AND FUNCTION

but is something stamped upon it by the agency of man. The

living creature, on the other hand, does not consist of passive
material upon which form is bestowed by an external cause.
The analogy of the coin does not hold, because the metal would
have to compose itself spontaneously into coin shape, if it were
to be comparable with the fertilized egg cell, which develops,
gradually and by inner impulsion, into the form of the mature
organism. In plants and animals there is, in reality, no dis¬
junction between the formal and material cause; these causes
are divorced only in man’s artefacts, and, even here, what we
might call a remarriage supervenes in the most consummate
works of art, in which the form seems almost to be the self-
expression of the medium.
Form and Function again, ought never to have been set asunder.1
The older morphologists do not seem to have separated these
concepts with as much rigour as later writers, if we may judge
from a remark of de Candolle’s, who wrote of the organized being
as composed of the intimate combination of junctions, thus
showing that to him ‘function’ and ‘organ’ must have been
interchangeable ideas.2 E. S. Russell has drawn attention to
the integral relation of instinctive behaviour and bodily develop¬
ment, and has shown that they are merely two aspects of phases in
the life cycle.3 In the field of philosophy it is significant that an
acute thinker4 should choose to call his work, Logic or the Mor¬
phology of Knowledge, explaining that he was borrowing the term
‘morphology’, not in the sense of a science of external shape
which is antithetic to the science of vital function, but rather as'
referring to that science of life which unites the essence both of
morphology (in the narrow sense) and of physiology. Thus,
approaching biology in the light of another mode of thought,
he recognized clearly that form and function are mere abstrac¬
tions from the organized whole. A resolution of their apparent
antagonism is hinted at when biochemists show us how it may be

1 Cf. Russell, E. S. (1936), p. 9, and Arber, A. (1950), p. 3; on the historic

relations of the two concepts, see Russell, E, S. (1916).
2 Candolle, A. P. de (1813), p. 93.
3 Russell, E. S. (1934), p. 121.
4 Bosanquet, B. (1911) (1st ed. 1888), vol. 1, pp. 1-2.

93
 VIII. BIOLOGICAL ANTITHESES

possible to understand “the significance of form in terms of

chemical composition or metabolic function and vice versa”.1
Another antithesis which is, from the biological point of view
more apparent than real, is that between subject and object. At
the present day we mean by ‘subject’, him who knows, and by
‘object’, that which is known—the-nature of the ‘object’ being
regarded as unaffected by the thinker whose mind is employed
upon it.2 In all knowledge worthy of the name, this antithesis
is resolved ultimately, for we cannot know anything in a full
sense until it becomes, as it were, part of the mind. As Spinoza
wrote long ago, “it is never we who affirm or deny something of
a thing, but it is the thing itself that affirms or denies, in us,
something of itself”.3 It is only by transcending the subject-
object antithesis that man enters into his heritage, and comes at
last to be at home in the universe.4 Such ideas may seem at first
glance remote from the day-to-day work of the biologist, but they
have in fact a special relevance to the visual thought employed
in his branch of science.5
Yet another antithesis, that of deduction and induction,6 though
a subject of concern to the logician, as a rule troubles the
biologist but little. In actual practice, as a student of living
things, he often works with the two processes simultaneously,
and succeeds in interweaving them happily.7
When we turn from the somewhat questionable antitheses,
which we have been enumerating, to those paired ideas whose
antagonism seems more genuine, we often find that there is
a strongly subjective element in their opposition. A cogent

1 Bradfield, J. R. G. (1950), pp. 80-1.

2 For an account of the change of meaning these terms have undergone between
the medieval and modern thought-periods, see Prantl, C. (1855-70), vol. hi,
1867, xix, Dans Scotus, p. 208; and White, W. Hale, and Stirling, A. H. (1930),
pp. vii, viii.
3 Wolf, A. (1910), Spinoza, Short Treatise, pt. n, chap, xvi, p. 109.
4 Cf. J. B. Baillie, in Hegel, G. W. F. (1931), p. 39.
5 This point is considered in connexion with biological illustration in Chapter x,
pp. 120-21. 6 See Chapter in, pp. 25, 26.
7 The unconvincing character of this antithesis has also been recognized from
the philosophic side; cf. Adler, M. J. (1927), p. 244, “deductive and analytical
processes are involved in any instance of complicated empirical discovery or
research”; and Mure, G. R. G. (1932), p. 28: “The fact is that a severance of
deduction and induction save in the way of emphasis, is a mark of unsound logical
theory. ”

94
 ‘HOW?’ AND ‘WHY?’

example is that of the antithesis of mechanistic and teleological

views of the universe; for there is a psychological difference
between those biologists who5 confronted with some given set of
phenomena, are inclined simply to ask, 'How?5, and those who
are not satisfied with 'How?5, but want also to know ‘Why?5.
The question, 'How?5, can often be supplied with a clear-cut
answer on materialistic lines, but ‘Why?5, can find a response
only in the much less accessible world of abstract thought. As an
instance from botany, the meaning of the distribution of the
young leaves at the shoot-apex may be cited. Spatial and bio¬
chemical explanations can reveal how it comes about that the
leaf rudiments are placed as they actually are, in relation to one
another and to the shoot-apex, but the more elusive question—
“ Why do these spatial and biochemical factors come into play?55
—remains untouched. Again, a plant with an abbreviated
underground axis tends to develop long leaf-stalks, which lift
the leaf-blades well above the level of the soil. This may be
interpreted mechanically as a growth correlation, the shortening
of the internodes encouraging the elongation of the petiole; or
teleologically, as an adaptation to ensure access of the leaf-blade
to the necessary sun and air. In both these botanical examples
we are left still asking whether the notion of a purposive reason
is, in reality, to be entertained, and in what way such a reason
could be related to the ‘How?5 of mechanism. Again—to take
a human instance—when a man writes, the action of his hand,
the flow of ink from his pen, and so on, can (in principle, at least)
be analysed on purely mechanical lines. If this were done
exhaustively, we should know the ‘ How?5 of the writing process,
but we should still be in the dark about the reasons which induced
the action, and the ends at which that action aimed. Yet the
botanical and the human concepts* which we have taken as
examples, each had a conspicuous unity before we tried to
dissect it analytically; in the initial ideas of leaf distribution
and form, and of the process of writing, the mechanistic and
teleological aspects existed in harmony. In analysing them
out of the primary concept, we have destroyed their relation,
and it is this relation which was the guarantee of the original

95
 VIII. BIOLOGICAL ANTITHESES

unity.1 No one can doubt that analysis is an essential tool of

biology, but it is also, alas, a lethal weapon. It is arguable that
proneness to analysis may be a symptom of panic fear. To man’s
limited mind, the Whole presents itself as utterly overwhelming;
self-defence urges us to dissect it into little bits, with which we
can cope individually, and thus to circumvent its terrors. In
analysing or abstracting, however, we are tearing asunder some¬
thing which is homogeneous in its own nature; when we try to
reconstruct the whole by putting together the elements thus
surgically separated, we find that they have become refractory
to being again united. When two different abstractions have
been derived from one notion—for instance, the abstractions
of mechanism and that of purposive development, from the
single concept of the living being—it is impossible to rebuild the
integrated concept of the organism as a whole, by juxtaposing
these two products of analysis.
So far we have been speaking of antithetic pairs as if they
were obvious and easily recognized abstractions from a single
whole; but this is by no means always the case. It has been
stated by an historian of science that “ there are an increasing
number of antitheses in the world of our experience which
science exhibits no sign of resolving”.2 On the face of it, this
dictum may commend itself, and it has, indeed, been main¬
tained that the universe is basically dualistic,3 so that the
opposition of antitheses, or rather of pairs consisting of thesis and
antithesis, is fundamental and irreconcilable. Deeper insight is
revealed in a view which Coleridge expressed; recognizing the
existence of antitheses, he yet was able to see them as the
‘coincidence of contraries’.4 He distinguished, on the one hand,
“The Identity of Thesis and Antithesis” as “the Substance of all
Being”, and, on the other hand, “ their Opposition”, which is “the
condition of all Existence, or Being manifested ”.5 In less technical
terms, we might say that the antithetic pairs, which necessarily
1 Cf. Bradley, F. H. (1914), p. 193, Appendix to chap, vi: “Is there in the end,
such a thing as a relationship which is merely between terms? Or, on the other
hand, does not a relation imply an underlying unity and an inclusive whole?”
2 Singer, G. (1931; 2nd ed. 1950), p. viii. 3 Cf. Sheldon, W. H. (1918).
4 Cf. p. 110.
5 Coleridge, S. T. (1818), vol. 1, Note to Essay xiii, pp. 155-6.

96
 BIPOLAR UNITY

show as dual in the world of phenomena, to which we have

access through the senses, are each fused into a unity in the world
of thought, to which the mind has the key. We must be clear,
however, about the precise significance of‘fusion’ in this sense.
It does not mean that dualism is swallowed up in monism, or
vice versa, but that thesis and antithesis are included in a further
concept, which does justice to both; this concept may be
described equally well as a unity which includes dualism, or as
a dualism in which unity is implicit. As an illustration we may
think, metaphorically, of partners facing one another in a dance;
they are opposite, but not opposed after the fashion of the paired
antagonists in a boxing match. The dance partners show as
a duality when they are separated, and as a unity when the
evolution of the dance brings them together. They offer an
example of what may be called a bipolar unity, representing
simultaneously both diflference-in-identity, and identity-in¬
difference. We are reminded of Groce’s interpretation of Hegel’s
dialectic as “ a thinking of reality as at once united and divided ”;1
and of the dynamic view of “that rhythm of tension and release
which Goethe, . .felt to be the very pulse of the universe”, and
which he visualized as polarity.2 The biologist must, indeed,
often feel a consciousness of such essential rhythm in his own
work. George Eliot entered into the researcher’s standpoint
when she made Lydgate voice the recognition that “there must
be a systole and diastole in all inquiry”, and that “ a man’s mind
must be continually expanding and shrinking between the
whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass”.3
It is conceivable that, in the mental world, the idea of
bipolarity may be out-distanced, since unified thought might
be visualized as multipolar; but the mind clings to the simpler
bipolar concept, ingrained into our thinking, perhaps in correla¬
tion with the dual symmetry inherent in man’s bodily structure.
In the relation between bipolar and (possibly) multipolar
thought, a parallel may be traced to Spinoza’s doctrine of the
Infinite Attributes of the Whole, of which, however, two only—-

1 Croce, B. (1915), pp. 19-20. 2 Wilkinson, E. M. (1949), p. 309.

3 Eliot, G. (1871-2), vol. iv, bk. vii, chap, lxiii, p. 6.

97
 VIII. BIOLOGICAL ANTITHESES

Extension and Thought—are within the compass of the human

understanding, which thus reduces the Infinite to bipolarity.
However this may be, for the general purposes of the biologist,
bipolarity is an adequate concept, symbolizing something which
meets him recognizably at every turn. The fact that each
organism is both a unity intrinsic to itself, and also an integral
part of the nexus which is the Whole,1 informs it with a basic
duality. The organism is thus polarized in one directional sense
towards the Whole, and in the other directional sense towards
the core of its own innermost being. A second somewhat
different form of polarity is that between a man’s mind and his
body. This may be regarded as a special case of Descartes’s
antithesis of thought and extension.2 Descartes was of opinion
that ‘body’ and ‘mind’ were contrasted and entirely separate
entities,3 temporarily conjoined during the earthly life; he
seems, indeed, to have been the first philosopher to maintain
that there is a complete and essential heterogeneity between
mind and body.4 In order to justify this rigid separation, he
had to limit the term ‘ mind ’ to the reasoning faculty, which he
held to be denied to other living things.5 6 This hard-and-fast
limitation of the intellectual field has an inhibiting effect on
interpretations. It is more enlightening to define the mind in
a broad sense, as annexing other parts of our thinking, as well
as the restricted region which employs merely abstract reasoning.
The term, ‘mind’, should include, for instance, the artist’s and
biologist’s visual thought, as well as other forms of mental
activity associated, not only with the roof-brain, but also with
the senses. Unlike Descartes, Spinoza treated the concepts of

1 This statement can be provisional only, since it depends upon the hypothesis
of the Uniformity of Nature.
2 Descartes, R. (1644), P- 20> Pars L princ. liii (marginal title), “Cujusque
substantia unum esse praecipuum attributum, ut mentis cogitatio, corporis
extensio”. Translation, Haldane, E. S., and Ross, G. R. T. (1911-12), vol. 1,
p. 240.
3 Descartes, R. (1641), Synopsis, p. 3, “substantiae diversae, sicuti concipiuntur
mens et corpus, esse revera substantias realiter a se mutuo distinctas”. Translation,
Haldane, E. S., and Ross, G. R. T. (1911-12), vol. 1, p. 141.
4 Cf. Coleridge, S. T. (1817), vol. 1, p. 128; and Coburn, K. (1951), pp. 63-4
(Coleridge’s unpublished sketch for an Essay on the Passions).
6 [Descartes, R.] (1637), p. 58; (1947), p. 58. Translation, Haldane, E. S.,
and Ross, G. R. T. (ign-12), vol. 1, p. 117.

98
 MIND AND BODY

body and mind as both referring to the same reality; this reality
was, however, held to assume an entirely different character
according to the ‘attribute’—extension or thought—under
which it was considered. (As a crude comparison, illustrating
the nature of ‘attributes’, we may visualize the different aspects
which the same landscape presents, according to whether it is
seen at noon or midnight.) Whereas Descartes’s view of body
and mind offers an unresolvable antithesis, on Spinoza’s theory,
the antagonism is in part overcome.1 Perhaps we may modify
Spinoza’s view so far as to think of the body as the individual
considered under the aspect of multiplicity, since the body may
be seen, from one standpoint, as consisting of component parts
whose structural and functional variety beggars description;
we should then regard the mind as the individual contemplated
under the contrasting aspect of unity;2 but the realization of
relatedness may offer a bridge between these conceptions.
Though we may choose deliberately to think of the elements
of the body in isolation, this can be done only by a process of
artificial abstraction; actually they are intimately and funda¬
mentally interwoven, even when this is not, at first glance,
obvious. Bodily multiplicity, in its ultimate organic relatedness,
becomes unity, and this unity is the mind-body individual. Far
from being a bare unity without variety, it comprehends in
itself all multifariousness and all the strands of interrelatedness
which connect the wealth of discrete details. Multiplicity and
change exist on the background of space-time, while unity and
changelessness are free from the limitations of duration and place,
since, in their very nature they belong to the eternal things. The
body is the individual considered sub specie temporis et loci, while
the mind is the same individual seen under the opposed aspect
of eternity; but in order to relate these two aspects, we need
to go beyond this limited and one-sided conception of eternity, by
enriching it to include all multifariousness and all temporality.
1 On Spinoza as conciliator, see Wolf, A. (1922).
2 Descartes, R. (1641), Med. vi, p. 109, “nam sane cum hanc considero, sive
meipsum quatenus sum tantum res cogitans, nullas in me partes possum dis-
tinguere, sed rem plane unam et integrant me esse intelligo”. Translation,
Haldane, E. S., and Ross, G. R. T. (1911-12), vol. 1, p. 196; “When I consider the
mind. . .1. . .apprehend myself to be clearly one and entire.”

99
 VIII. BIOLOGICAL ANTITHESES

A slightly different expression of the same point of view is

found in Leibniz’s suggestion that “Minds act in accordance
with the laws of final causes... . Bodies act in accordance with
the laws of efficient causes”.1 To regard the living thing under
the aspect of efficient causes, is equivalent to regarding it in the
context of temporal and spatial succession—that is to say, as
part of‘extension’, if we may broaden this term to include time
as well as space. So looked at, the living thing is 4body’. On the
other hand, if we think of it in terms of formal and final causes
alone, we are seeing it from the standpoint of eternity—using
this word, however, in the narrow sense in which it is antithetic
to space-time. The individual is then regarded simply as 4 mind ’;
but we can reach beyond these contrasting positions, if we realize
that causality, in its ordinary meaning, can only be thought in
connexion with time. Whether we regard this causality as
material-efficient (mechanistic:4 How? ’) or as formal-final (teleo¬
logical :4 Why ? ’), depends on the time-sequence, and the 4 sense ’
in which we pursue its direction. If, on the one hand, we pass
mentally from past to future, the material-efficient causes dis¬
close themselves; if, on the other hand, we start with the future
and think back to the past, the formal-final causes are revealed.
If we eliminate the reference to time, we can synthesize these
two types of cause, seeing them as complementary aspects of
one whole, and we thus reach the concept of the mind-body
individual, seen sub specie aeternitatis—eternity here being given
its fullest connotation.
These considerations about body and mind show that their
opposition may be treated as a special case of a wider biological
antithesis—that between the mechanistic and vitalistic theories
of the animate world. The mechanist, starting from the physico¬
chemical standpoint, interprets the living thing by analogy
with a machine. The vitalist, on the other hand, supposes
a guiding entelechy, which summons order out of chaos; he thus

1 Leibniz, G. W. (1930), sect. 79, pp. 184-5: “Les ames agissent selon les lois des
causes finales par appetitions, fins et moyens. Les corps agissent selon les lois
des causes efficientes ou des mouvements. Et les deux regnes, celui des causes
efficientes et celui des causes finales, sont harmoniques entre eux.” Also, on
Aristotle’s four causes, see Arber, A. (1950), p. 199.

IOO
 EPIGENESIS AND PREFORMATION

adopts a dualistic attitude. The elements of truth in both these

views are recognized, and their opposition is resolved in the
organismal approach to the living creature. This approach is
conditioned by the belief that the vital co-ordination of struc¬
tures and processes is not due to an alien entelechy, but is an
integral part of the living system itself.1 This notion has kinship
with Spinoza’s doctrine of the conatus, or urge of the creature
towards self-maintenance-^-an urge which he equates with
the actual essence of the thing itself,2 and with its very life.3
Organismal theories differ from the vitalistic in much the same
way that Aristotle’s view of the ‘forms’, as being inherent and
immanent in things, differs from Plato’s conception of these
‘forms’ as having a separate existence in a supersensible world.
Vitalism and mechanism, as one of the antitheses of general
biological thought, may be correlated with epigenesis and pre¬
formation,4 as an antithesis in the study of embryology. William
Harvey in the seventeenth century followed Aristotle in up¬
holding epigenesis; he believed, that is to say, that the organs were
gradually and successively differentiated from the undifferen¬
tiated embryo; these organs were not originally present in
miniature, but the germ possessed the power to form them anew.
In the same century there was a revival of the contrasting
Hippocratean5 theory—-that of preformation, according to which
the apparently undifferentiated embryo had within itself “a
complicated machine-structure corresponding with the visible
structure of the adult”,6 which needed only to become explicit.
Biologists as a rule reck little of formal logic, but it may be
noticed that there is a close, albeit unconscious, parallel between
1 Russell, E. S. (1930), pp. 190, etc.; Bertalanffy, L. von (1933), pp. 177, etc.;
Wheeler, R. H. (1935), pp. 344, etc.
2 It has been suggested that the essence of individual life is described more
accurately as, in Aristotelian terminology, the “drive towards the actualisation
of potentialities, to which self-maintenance is a means”, Russell, E. S. (1945),
P- r9K
3 [Spinoza, B. de] ‘B.D.S.’ (1677), Ethices, pars in, prop, vii, p. 102; Vloten,
J. van, and Land, J. P. N. (1882-3), v°l- 11 > P- 487 (Spinoza’s Cogitata metaphysica,
pars 11, cap. vi); cf. also Arber, A. (1950), p. 77.
4 Cf. Nordenskiold, N. E. (1950), pp. 117-18, 170, etc.; Russell, E. S. (1930),
pp. 26-7.
5 Cf. Mure, G. R. G. (1932), p. 100; it thus seems that the preformation theory
had an earlier origin than Russell suggests.
6 Russell, E. S. (1930), p. 27.

IOI
 VIII. BIOLOGICAL ANTITHESES

certain contrasting views of logical inference and these two con-

tending views about embryology. The idea that the adult is
preformed in the embryo, and needs merely, as it were, to
unfold, maybe compared with the view that formal inference does
not lead to new discoveries, but only exposes knowledge which was
already present in the premisses. On the other hand, epigenesis
corresponds to that view of inference which regards it, not as a
mere analysis of premisses, but as creative, in the sense that the
relations which it brings light to were not, strictly speaking,
present originally in the premisses, but are emergent from them.1
As vitalism and mechanism are synthesized in the organismal
theory, so epigenesis and preformation are, to some extent,
synthesized in certain modern theories of embryology, which,
while mainly stressing epigenesis, yet do not lose sight of the
physico-chemical mechanism of development.2
In plants, unlike animals, within the developmental history
of the individual, we may meet with two antithetic stages—a
vegetative phase, which is essentially juvenile, and a repro¬
ductive phase, which is characteristic of maturity. Their an¬
tagonism is revealed, for instance, in the excessive vegetative
growth of many aquatics, which tends to replace sexual repro¬
duction;3 on the other hand, in land plants, flowering may be
associated, as in certain bamboos,4 with the death and destruc¬
tion of the vegetative parts. In the asexual phase, the urge
to individual self-maintenance is dominant, while, in the
reproductive phase, this urge is overcome by the urge to race-
continuance. We have here what seems at first sight to be an
insoluble antagonism, but we discover a hint as to how this
opposition may be transcended when we remember that the
individual is bipolar—in one aspect it is unique, but in the
opposite aspect it represents the race. Reproduction is self¬
continuance, interpreted in the broad sense that redeems the
maintenance of self from egoism.5
1 On these two views of inference, see Walsh, W. H. (1947), p. 46.
2 These are discussed in Russell, E. S. (1930), chap, vi, pp. 76-94; on Y. Delage,
as combining these interpretations, see p. 79.
3 Cf. Arber, A. (1920), pp. 210-26.
4 Cf. Arber, A. (1934), pp. 100-1.
5 On reproduction as the goal of self-continuance, see Arber, A. (1950), pp. 20,78.

102
 THE ONE AND THE MANY

A further antithesis, of a different type, is that between the

organism and its environment. It has been suggested that this
antithesis is a genuine and irremovable one,1 and emphasis has
been added to this antagonism by stressing the power of the
living creature to maintain its organization in the teeth, as it
were, of the environment.2 On the other hand, a contrary
view has been recognized—namely, that the reaction of the
higher animals to their environment as a whole is an involve¬
ment, as we might call it, rather than an opposition; there is,
indeed, a capacity in the central nervous system which enables
the animal “to react to a unified ‘world’ instead of to a series of
discrete stimuli”.3 The same line of thought has been extended
by a physiologist,4 who has urged that co-ordination is as fully
maintained between organism and environment as between the
parts of the organism itself, and that we cannot, even mentally,
separate the phenomena of life from those of the environment.
Hitherto we have been considering the antitheses which are
most obviously bound up with biology, but, as a sequel, it may
be worth while to glance at the more general question of the
antithesis of the One and the Many, which is indeed fundamen¬
tal for metaphysics. This far-reaching antithesis has, in fact,
a special relevance to the work of the scientist, since it is related
to the hypothesis of the Uniformity, or Ultimate Oneness, of
Nature, in which the Many find union. The contrast of the
One and the Many was stressed by the pre-Socratics; in the
Parmenides Plato reviewed earlier opinions, and analysed the
various senses in which ‘the One’ can be understood.5 When
we consider the One as a Whole of Parts, it is One if we em¬
phasize the word Whole, while it is Many if we focus attention
upon the word Parts* Various thinkers have believed that,
broadly speaking, it is to the intellect that we owe the recogni¬
tion of identity or unity, while the senses give us diversity;7 it
may, indeed, be held that the unity of consciousness is the mind
1 Woodger, J. H. (1929), p. 332. Woodger’s discussion of this and other anti¬
theses should be compared with their treatment in the present chapter.
2 Robson, G. C., and Richards, O. W. (1936), pp. 352-3; Young, J. Z. (19386),
p. 515. _ 3 Young, J. Z. (1938a), p. 192. 4 Haldane, J. S. (1935), pp. 45-6.
5 Cornford, F. M. (1939). 6 Taylor, A. E. (1918), p. 611-12.
7 Cf. Meyerson, (1931), vol. 11, pp. 574, 579 etpassim.

IO3
 VIII. BIOLOGICAL ANTITHESES

of man.1 Those who lean to synthesis, and in whom non-sensuous

contemplation predominates, thus look instinctively for the
identity and unity of the Whole, while those of an analytic turn,
for whom the senses and perceptions offer the primary road to
reality, are more alive to the innumerable many-faceted phe¬
nomena of the world around them, and are less inclined to look
for an abstract unity. This distinction to some extent corre¬
sponds to that between the votaries of philosophy and of natural
science, but it is far from absolute. In its application to students
of different disciplines, it is merely an example of those con¬
trasting inborn trends towards one or other pole of the world of
experience, which differentiate personalities. This tempera¬
mental contrast is exemplified in the history of biology in the
grievous and protracted polemic, between Cuvier and Geoffroy
Saint-Hilaire, about the significance of structural relations in
the animal kingdom.2 Cuvier’s clear intellect, reinforced by
immense factual knowledge based on countless dissections, led
him to the appreciation of differences rather than resemblances,
so that he regarded as unbridgeable the gaps between the main
types of animal organization. On the other hand, Geoffroy’s
mentality—in its mysticism, Teutonic rather than Gallic—was
drawn irresistibly towards comprehensive views, centering in the
idea of universal unity; he thought of TAnimalite’ as “etre
abstrait, qui est tangible par nos sens sous des figures diverses”.3
Actually there was some truth in the views of both men, and
the philosophic basis of their disagreement was delusive; for to
create a hard-and-fast cleavage between the senses, as the
medium for the multifariousness which appealed to Cuvier,
and the mind, as the source of the unity for which Geoffroy
craved, is to mistake a difference, which has only relative
validity, for an absolute distinction.
Of the multiplicity of phenomena, we have at least hints and
samples of a mental picture, but the idea of the unified Whole4
1 Cf. Caird, E. (1889), vol. 1, p. 19.
2 For an account of this controversy, see Nordenskiold, N. E. (1950), pp. 341-3;
and for a detailed and documented study of Cuvier, with incidental reference to
fitienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, see Daudin, H. (1926), vol. 11, pp. 71-109.
3 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, fi. (1830), p. 22.
4 For a stimulating historical study of science and monism, see Wightman,
W. P. D. (1934).

IO4
 UNITY AND WHOLENESS

is more recondite, and defies pictorial thinking. The revelations

of anatomy and physiology offer, however, some faint sugges¬
tion as to how Wholeness may be built anew by the brain out of
the heterogeneous material which it receives. In the case of the
higher animals, the concentrated central nervous system renders
possible the correlation of perceptions from the different senses,
as well as other co-ordinations, thus providing a mechanism
which is capable of organizing functional multifariousness into
unity.1 It is, moreover, a possible view that this organization
is implemented by the warfare of opposites. The unity of the
tissues of the body may be, not a unity of simple peace, but an
armed neutrality, in which equipoise is secured by stresses and
strains which balance one another.2 This conception, of a unity
based on conflict, is applicable to organs as well as to tissues. The
final harmonious symmetry of the plant body, for instance, may
take its origin in competition between the members, each shoot-
generation showing an urge to dominate, or even to replace its
parent; the rhythmic patterns of various kinds of sympodial
growth arise in this way.3
When we try to trace the concept of wholeness, as it develops
in a man’s mind, we realize that, as an infant, his vision of the
surrounding world possesses a certain primitive unity, since,
in a sense, it forms a whole, not yet discriminated into com¬
ponents. At the opposite pole is the kind of unity achieved by
mature thought, in which fully analytical observation of indi¬
vidual things, and the differentiation of individual ideas, has
been followed by a synthesis which has reconstructed unity from
diversity. Between these two poles—the first, unconscious,
and the second, self-conscious—lies the whole developmental
sequence of the intellectual life.4
If the antithesis of the One and the Many is to be resolved
effectively, due value must be given to both terms. Unfor¬
tunately, since the thinkers most interested in this synthesis
1 On this subject, see Young, J. Z. (1938a). 2 Cf. Roberts, M. (1920).
3 Cf. Arber, A. (1950), chap, vn, pp. 93 et seq.
4 For an account of unity which suggests this view, see Schiller, F. C. S. (1931),
pp. 281-2; cf. also Coleridge, S. T. (1895), p. 53 (11 December 1803): “The dim
intellect sees an absolute oneness, the perfectly clear intellect knowingly perceives it.
Distinction and plurality lie in the betwixt.”

IO5
 VIII. BIOLOGICAL ANTITHESES

generally possess that reflective habit of mind which leans to

the One rather than to the Many, they tend to turn an unseeing
eye upon the multifariousness of existing things. Goethe, for
instance, was disposed to grasp too precipitately at Oneness, and
to shrink from the conception of detailed Manifoldness.1 It is true
that, to see things in their reality, we have to apprehend them sub
specie unitatis,2 but this unity must be that Unity-in-plurality, or
Singleness-in-complexity,3 which includes multiplicity while
transcending it, and which may be distinguished as Totality.4
Indian thought seems to have recognized the need to pass beyond
the naive conception of Oneness, more fully than Western philo¬
sophy,5 though Heraclitus, writing before the birth of Socrates,
realized that the Unity of all things is not simple Oneness, but
is the tension of opposites; unity in the manifold; the harmony
of strife; order within change.6 Other European thinkers have
followed him. For instance, in the Renaissance period, when
Bruno said: “It is Unity that doth enchant me. By her power
I am. . .quick even in death”,7 he was visualizing the Infinite
One, not as bare Oneness, but as containing and enfolding the
manifold conclusions of scienza naturale.8
When we come more closely to grips with the relation of the
One and the Many, we are confronted with the question as to
whether the Many are to be conceived as emanations from the
One, or whether the idea of the Many has priority, as the source
from which that of the One is derived. In other words, we have
to consider whether there is more truth in the Platonic tradition
that the Whole precedes the Parts, or in the Democritean view
that the Whole is achieved through the Parts. We can only
1 Cf. Arber, A. (1946 a), pp. 80, etc.
“ Cf. Muirhead, J. H. (1931; 2nd imp., 1939), p. 417.
3 Cf. Joachim, H. H. (1948), p. 217.
4 Cf. Kant, I. (1902-38), Bd. in, 1904, Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 2nd ed. 1787.
Elementarlehre, Th. 11, Abth. r, Buch 1, Hauptstiick 1, pp. 93 and 96. Categories
of Quantity—Einheit (Unity), Vielheit (Plurality), and the category repre¬
senting the previous two in combination—Allheit or Totalitat (Totality).
5 Cf. Guenon, R. (1945), p. 154; Hiriyanna, M. (1949), pp. 162, etc.
0 Patrick, G. T. W. (1888), p. 618, or (1889), p. 59; cf. Burnet, J. (1920), p. 143.
7 Singer, D. W. (1950), p. 229; Bruno, G. (1923-7), vol. 1, 1925, p. 270, “una
che m’innamora; quella per cui son. . .vivo ne la morte” (1584).
u 8 Singer, D. W. (1950), p. 101; Bruno, G. (1923-7), vol. 1, 1925, p. 144;
“Quivi, come nel proprio seme, si contiene ed implica la moltitudine de le con-
clusioni della scienza naturale” (1584).

I06
 ‘THE ONE IN THE MANIFOLD’

accept the Platonic position if we suppose that priority in being

and priority in time are two different things, so that, in the order
of reality, the Whole precedes the Parts.1 Broadly speaking,
this is the view that the metaphysician accepts. He starts from
Unity, and deduces the multiplicity of existing things—that is
to say, he is committed to the perilous, if not impossible, task of
deriving the Many from the One. This is, in fact, what he is
trying to do, even if, like Hegel, he seems to reach the Absolute
only as the culmination of his dialectic. It is characteristic of
the biologist, on the other hand, to start with the multiplicity
of the world of living things, and to generalize his experience
step by step, until he eventually comes within sight of Unity.
Rather than Plato, he is following Aristotle, who seems to have
held that perception itself contains an element of the universal,
and that thus, from the perception of particular things, we can
make the transition to higher and higher grades of universality.2
When we grasp the universal implicit in the particulars, we may
be said to be proceeding from the Many towards the One. The
biologist’s conception of the One, achieved in this way through
the study and apprehension of the Many, is summed up in the
motto engraved on Richard Owen’s signet ring, which sym¬
bolized the unity of plan in the vertebrate skeleton—“The One
in the Manifold”.3 Such a conception may perhaps claim
a greater richness of intellectual content than the metaphysician’s
intuitive postulation of the same unity. These two modes of
approach have, however, more in common than may appear at
first glance. The metaphysician, who takes the Ultimate One as
the basis of his world picture, has at least a subconscious aware¬
ness that this unity is something which he has, in actual fact,
disengaged from the endless plurality of the universe. The
scientist, on the other hand, would never have the heart to
struggle through the successive painstaking stages in his laborious
inductions, if he were not moved thereto by an instinctive
underlying bias towards a belief in the Uniformity of Nature,
and hence in the unity of all things.

1 Cf. Muirhead, J. H. (1931; 2nd imp., 1939), p. 418.

2 Ross, W. D. (Sir D.) (1937), cf. pp. 54-5. 3 Owen, R. (1894), voi. 1, pp. 387-8.

IO7
 CHAPTER IX

ANTITHESES AND DIALECTIC

T H E irreducible opposition of certain biological concepts

may sometimes be ascribed to their relevance to different
levels of thought—those limited ‘universes’ of ideas,
within the conceptual universe as a whole, which de Morgan
long ago distinguished.1 In the physico-chemical region of bio¬
logy, for instance, one case may at the same time be susceptible
both of a mathematical and also of a biochemical interpretation.
For example, Dormer’s2 demonstration that the arrangement
of the parts in certain flower-buds is an expression of geo¬
metric necessity, does not preclude a biochemical reading of
this aestivation, according to which the position of the rudi¬
ments of floral parts is held to be regulated by chemical inhibi¬
tions exerted by previous members. Such mathematical and
biochemical theories may eventually find a synthesis on a plane
higher than either. Physiological and morphological problem-
solutions, also, may appear very different from one another, but
they can sometimes be seen as together constituting a ‘two-level ’
theory. Wardlaw3 has suggested, tentatively, on the basis of
experimental work of a delicate and convincing kind, that the
dorsiventral symmetry of leaves may be related, in part, to the
inhibiting influence of the apical cell-group of the shoot. This
affects the faces of the rudiments nearest to itself, checking full
radial development, and thus inducing the characteristic flat
leaf structure. Other rudiments, however, which are more
remote from the centre of inhibition, are not prevented from
forming themselves into radial structures, and becoming shoots.
A morphogenetic theory of this type in no way conflicts with
Casimir de Candolle’s purely morphological idea that the leaf
is a partial shoot, reduced to dorsiventrality by the atrophy

3 de Morgan, A. (1847), p. 41. 2 Dormer, K. J. (1948), pp. 653-4.

3 Wardlaw, C. W. (1950), p. 16.

I08
 SYNTHESIS OF ANTITHESES

of its adaxial face;1 each of these theories is valid on its own

plane.
When we pass in review the antitheses which confront the
biologist, we see that, in general, they cannot be called examples
of strict alternatives of the ‘either. . .or. . . ’ type. They belong,
to the ‘ both. . . and...3 category, for they tend, as we have
shown, to be pairs of partial truths, which seem opposed because
of their incompleteness, but are capable of being brought
together in a statement of a higher order, approaching a degree
nearer to the full truth than either of them does singly. This
principle was one which Kant recognized as basic to his own
philosophic procedure. In a letter of 1771 he wrote: “You
know that I do not approach reasonable objections with the
intention merely of refuting them, but that in thinking them
over I always weave them into my judgments, and afford them
the opportunity of overturning all my most cherished beliefs.
I entertain the hope that by thus viewing my judgments impar¬
tially from the standpoint of others some third view that will
improve upon my previous insight may be obtainable”.2
This may seem to be a commonplace sentiment, to which
every single-minded research worker would, in theory, sub¬
scribe; but there is more in it than meets the eye. It was the
principle underlying these remarks of Kant’s which formed the
skeletal system of the Socratic type of argument;3 moreover,
after Kant, Hegel4 developed it as the basis of his whole
dialectic, which consists in the progressive transcending of

1 On this theory and its modern applications, see Arber, A. (1950), chaps,
vi-vm, pp. 70-131.
2 Kant, I. (1902-38), vol. x, 1900, pp. 116-17. Letter to Marcus Herz, 7 June
1771: “Dass vernunftige Einwurfe von mir nicht bios von der Seite angesehen
werden wie sie zu wiederlegen seyn konten sondern dass ich sie iederzeit beym
Nachdenken unter meine Urtheile webe und ihnen das Recht lasse alle vorgefasste
Meinungen die ich sonst beliebt hatte liber den Haufen zu werfen, das wissen sie.
Ich hoffe immer dadurch dass ich meine Urtheile aus dem Standpunkte anderer
unpartheyisch ansehe etwas drittes herauszubekommen was besser ist als mein
vorigtes.” Translation from Smith, N. Kemp (1923), p. xxii. For an expansion
of this Kantian principle, see Caird, E. (1889), vol. 1, pp. 7-8.
s On the Socratic type of argument from this standpoint, see Mure, G. R. G.
(1932), pp. 28-9.
4 Hegel acknowledged his indebtedness to the triplicity of Kant’s system; see
Hegel, G. W. F. (1931), p. 107; J. B. Baillie’s Introduction to this translation
summarizes the general Hegelian attitude.
 IX. ANTITHESES AND DIALECTIC

antitheses.1 In each triad of his argument, thesis is opposed to anti¬

thesis, and then these two are fused into an emergent synthesis,
which is nearer the truth than either of its components. This is not,
however, the end. Hegel shows that in each case the antithesis
is implied by the thesis; moreover, the synthesis, though itself on
a higher plane than either thesis or antithesis, is still an imperfect
truth, and contains in its core the seeds of another opposition.
This degrades it into the position of a thesis, from which a further
antithesis emerges. This new thesis and antithesis are resolved
on a higher level; but the synthesis so obtained shows im¬
perfection in its turn, thus descending to the status of a thesis.
The scheme is hence repeated time after time. In this way, by
the continuous movement of his dialectic, Hegel passes from
Being, his first thesis, until he reaches the final synthesis of the
Absolute, in which the sequence terminates.
Very few philosophers to-day would accept Hegel’s scheme
of things entire, but most thinkers might grant that he did an
essential service in securing a renewed recognition of the 4 coinci¬
dence of contraries ’—the fact that it is possible for 4 A ’ to be
‘both A and not-T’. This idea, which has suffered periods of
dormancy and of recurrence throughout the ages, was stressed
by Nicolas of Cusa in the fifteenth century, and, later, by
Giordano Bruno, under Cusan inspiration. Bruno held, for
instance, “that contraries do truly concur; they are from
a single origin and are in truth and substance one”.2 It is clear
that, if such a point of view be accepted, the pursuit of truth
becomes an infinitely more complex matter than if we are
contented with the naive notion that ‘A is either A or not-T’.
The coincidence of contraries undermines the simple 4 either. ..
or... ’ solution of any knotty problem, because no continuous
linear sequence of thought can do justice to truth, if its multi¬
faceted character is appreciated fully,

1 Among the many books which aim at enlightening the student about Hegel’s
dialectic, Stace, W. T. (1924), is particularly useful to the amateur. McTaggart,
J. McT. E. (1922), will be found most stimulating, though it must be borne in
mind that it sometimes stresses the author’s own views rather than those of Hegel.
t l Singer D. W. (1950), p. 101; Bruno, G. (1923-7), vol. 1, 1925, p. 144,
“s’apportano gli segni e le verificazioni per quali gli contrarii veramente concor-
reno, sono da un principio e sono in verita e sustanza uno” (1584).

110
 THE DIALOGUE TECHNIQUE

The core of Hegel’s dialectic seems to lie in a graded approach

to reality, implemented by what might be described as ‘tacking’
from side to side. This process to some extent corresponds to
the unravelment of a problematic topic by means of dialogue.
Indeed, the method of discourse or disputation between dif¬
ferent interlocutors, or between the mind and itself, permeates
the whole process of philosophy. The expression, ‘discursive
thought3, means essentially thought expressed in discourse,
while ‘ dialectic ’ is that which belongs to discourse or argument.
Plato’s dialogue technique was completely suited to express the
varied nuances of a subject; to mark their differences; and to
suggest their possible reconcilement. The structure of the
Platonic dialogues represents, in fact, a transition to the full
dramatic mode—that mode in which Shakespeare formulated
the innumerable aspects of his own vision. In no other way can
incompatibilities and harmonies find so effectual a medium.
Every speech, written or spoken by one person, suffers under the
disadvantage of being a simple sequence of words, linear in
time or space; the dramatic form, on the other hand, gives
opportunity for a number of sequences instead of one. Not only
Plato, but many later thinkers, have found that dialogue
supplied them with exactly the framework their thought needed.
It serves to reveal the multifarious facets of reality, as seen
through the windows of differing personalities; like Shelley’s
‘ ‘ dome of many-coloured glass ”, it tempers the ‘ ‘ white radi ance ’ ’
which the eye of man cannot face in its purity. The dialogue
form served Bruno well in his high speculations, for instance in
his work On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1584).1 Descartes,
also, in his study of the search after truth by means of the light
of nature,2 put what he had to say in the form of a discussion
carried on between three men of varied character and attain¬
ments. British writers have used the same convention with
striking effect; for instance, Robert Boyle in The Sceptical Chymist
1 De VInfinito Universo e Mondi, in Bruno, G. (1923-7), vol. 1, 1925, pp. 267-418;
translation in Singer, D. W. (1950); for Bruno in English see also Greenberg, S.
(195°)‘
2 La
• • • „ , 0
recherche de la verite par la lumiere naturelle, in Descartes, R. (1897-1910),
vol. x, 1908, pp. 495-527; translation in Haldane, E. S., and Ross, G. R. T.
(1911-12), vol. 1, pp. 305-27.

111
 IX. ANTITHESES AND DIALECTIC

(1680),1 George Berkeley in Three Dialogues between Hylas and

Philonous (1713),2 and David Hume in Dialogues concerning Natural
Religion (1779).3 It has been suggested4 that the marked recur¬
rence of the dialogue form in the eighteenth century may be
associated with that era’s character as the Age of Conversation;
in this respect it faintly recalls the Athens of the time of Socrates,
in which discourse with their fellows was a natural mode of
self-expression for freemen. Among the Greeks, even when
dialogue was not being used ostensibly, philosophic writing
might show the impress of this form. Some of the incompatible
statements in Aristotle’s treatises5 may be compared with the
different views of the same subject-matter, which Plato assigns
to different characters in the dialogues, thus avoiding the
personal inconsistency which Aristotle disregarded. Kant,
again is far from being steadily consistent throughout his
work; but posterity may be grateful to him for deliberately
giving varied but progressive expositions of his problems,
almost as though they were seen through the minds of different
people.
Written correspondence may be grouped with dialogue, as
offering, from its to-and-fro quality, some of the same advan¬
tages ; this was evident in the pre-modern period when, for men
of learning, communication by letters, which were then passed
from hand to hand and discussed, held the place of the present
exchange of off-prints from journals. The questions and criti¬
cisms of Spinoza’s correspondents, for instance, sometimes give
a fresh orientation to the subjects under discussion.
That Plato expressed his philosophy in dialogue form, enabled
him to refrain from any final ex cathedra pronouncement, so that
it cannot at the end be said with decision that Plato himself
thought this or that. On the other hand, in science to-day, an
author is expected to adopt, and to outline firmly, a single
definite view, expressible in as few words as possible, and to

1 Boyle, The Hon. R. (1680). 2 Jessop, T. E. (1949), pp. 147-263.

3 Hume, D. (1854), vol. 11, pp. 408-540; Smith, N. Kemp (1947).
4 Jessop, T. E. (1949), p. 155.
6 Those of Aristotle’s works which were in dialogue form have not survived;
see Mure, G. R. G. (1932), pp. 254-5.

I 12
 INCONCLUSIVENESS OF SCIENCE

conclude his treatise with a neat summary, readily compre¬

hensible, and easy to remember. All this undoubtedly means
a gain in clarity, but it generally involves a corresponding
sacrifice of truth. For Renan’s query1—“Qui sait si la finesse
d’esprit ne consiste pas a s’abstenir de conclure? ”—is as relevant
to biology as to any other branch of the intellectual life. The very
nature of scientific conclusions is to be inconclusive, and it is
impossible for any biologist to hope, for one moment, that his
own pronouncements will remain the last word. On a scientific
question no deliverance from any one individual can ever be
permanent and decisive, for, in this as in other regions of thought,
one man’s personality could never provide an adequate medium
of formulation for a complete and harmonious synthesis. At first
sight this may seem an inhibiting idea, but actually it contains
a hint of encouragement. When the biological notions of the
present day are envisaged broadly, they show7 as a heterogeneous
medley, often groupable in such antithetic pairs as those at
which we have been glancing; but this medley—-though it may
revolt the mind that craves for a rigid system—perhaps offers
in toto a closer approximation to the truth than can be afforded
by any clear-cut scheme attempting universality. When we are
thinking about the work of artists, we do not complain because
each of the individual painters, even in one period, gives us,
from his own particular angle, his own kind of truth; if the points
of view of these artists could be somehow amalgamated, the
upshot would be the utter sterility of a composite photograph.
Science and art are far more closely related than is generally
realized, and it is hard to see why biologists should be forced to
accept one unvarying communal outlook, to the neglect of all
other possible approaches, wdiile artists are free each to take his
own individual line.
Though dialogue and its variants are of the utmost value in
interpreting and criticizing thought, the same cannot be claimed
for polemical controversy, which, as John Norris of Bemerton
said in the seventeenth century, is “a thing of great Labour and

1 Renan, E. (1852), p. v; for a study emphasizing the essential inconclusiveness

of dialectic, see Adler, M. J. (1927).

A ME 8
113
 IX. ANTITHESES AND DIALECTIC

but little profit. . . a Litigious wrangle, proceeding. . . from men’s

mistaking or misstating the thing in Question, from mis¬
understanding of the Point, of themselves, and of one another”.1
Gontroversy, indeed, in the long run, offers as many certain
evils, to set off against its doubtful benefits, as the so-called Holy
Wars with which history is chequered. Modes of argument
expressible in military metaphors need vigilant and critical
scrutiny. The experience of most biologists cannot but lead them
to feel that the best course is to put their energies into the con¬
structive search for truth, in the confidence that fallacious
views, if left to themselves will die of inanition, whereas the
stimulus of combat may revive them. The polemical spirit
encourages the cowardly and wasteful practice of attempting to
refute a system by attacking its feebler aspects, and ignoring
whatever truth other facets might reveal; as Mill2 said, long ago,
it is the most reasonable rather than the absurdest forms of
a wrong opinion with which one ought to grapple. If this is
done, some truth, may be wrung even from theories that at first
sight seem unpromising; but this can be achieved only if these
theories are grasped, as Jacob grasped the Angel, with the
determination, “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me”.
Aristotle understood this. He has been described as seeking to
recommend any solution of a problem, which he has to offer, by
showing the extent to which, in its light, the opinions opposed to
it could be interpreted as partially true, rather than as wholly
mistaken.3
1 Norris, J., Spiritual Counsel; or, the Father's Advice to his Children, sect. 43, quoted
in Powicke, F. J. (1894), p. 24.
2 Mill, J. S. (1843), voi. ii, p. 539; see also Renan, E. (1852), p. 105.
3 Stocks, J. L. (1938), pp. 93-4.
 CHAPTER X

THE MIND AND THE EYE

ANY of the antitheses of biology can be traced to

modifications of the primary antithesis between Thought
. and Extension—to use the terminology of Descartes and
Spinoza. If we concentrate attention, for example, upon the
Unity of thought, as compared with the Multifariousness of the
things which compose the extended world, we see that, in its
widest development, this antithesis expands into the general
relation of the One and the Many, which again can be narrowed
to an individual instance in the antithesis of Intellect and Senses.
In the work of the biologist, visual impressions play a more
significant role than those from the other sense organs; we
may thus treat the antithesis of Mind and Eye as epitomizing
the much broader subject of the relation of the intellect to the
senses in general. It will be convenient to consider this antithesis,
first, from the standpoint of the mind, and, secondly, from that
of the eye; after this has been done, we shall be better able to
see whether these apparently antagonistic positions can be
synthesized.
Though the visual stimuli transmitted to the brain have been,
in the first place, received by the eye, it is continually brought
home to us, in the affairs of everyday life, that whatever we see
is seen with the mind} We can often, for example, decipher a page
of badly written manuscript without conscious effort, although,
on focusing on the details of the script, it may be found that there
is hardly a letter in it which is adequately formed, while many
are even slurred over altogether. Yet from the retinal images of
these distorted and imperfect symbols, the mind has leaped at
once to an exactitude of elaborate meaning. Again, in looking
at a landscape, we form a single mental picture, including

1 For an account, by a psychologist, of vision as due to the co-operation of eye

and brain, rather than to the eye alone, see Thouless, R. H. (1938).

“5
 X. THE MIND AND THE EYE

foreground and remote background; but since the eye, as a

mechanism, cannot receive clear impressions from different
focal distances simultaneously, it can be only the mind which
draws together this series of optical imprints, and fuses them into
a unified whole.
We are too apt to think of pictorial images in the mind as if
they had a quality of literal 'correspondent’ truth to external
objects; in actual fact they are based not merely upon the ‘raw’
retinal mosaic, but upon this mosaic as played upon and made
into an image or pattern1 by sensory organization. Such a pat¬
tern is a symbolic model, fashioned by the mind from materials
supplied by the eye, rather than a photographic replica received
passively by the mind.2 Mental images of this kind have perhaps
more in common with expressions of modern ‘abstract’ art,
than with the familiar ‘ representational ’ art based on the 5 copy5
theory.3 The mind, moreover, has the power, not only of
modifying but of rejecting the data offered to it. When the whole
mental attention is concentrated upon an individual object, we
are scarcely conscious of‘seeing’ anything else, though actually
the sensory impression itself also includes the surroundings of
whatever happens to be primary for us at the moment—sur¬
roundings which the mind deliberately ignores.
That we see through the eyes, rather than with them, is a point
upon which Plato seems to have had little doubt, for he makes
Socrates and Theaetetus agree that it is so.4 The same idea is
traceable in medieval literature. The philosopher-mystic, Meister
Eckhart (d. c. 1327) said; “Subtract the mind,. . .and the eye
is open to no purpose, which before did see”; and, again,
“ Before my eye can see the painting on the wall, this must... be
borne into my phantasy, to be assimilated by my under¬
standing.”5 Five centuries later, William Blake wrote: “ I ques¬
tion not my Corporeal. . . Eye any more than I would Question
a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro’ it & not with it.”6
1 Russell, E. S. (1932), p. 168. 2 Rivaud, A. (1937), p. 297.
2 For a study of this distinction, see Blanshard, F. B. (1949).
4 Cornford, F. M. (1935), p. 103.
s Pfeiffer, F. (1924; 2nd imp., 1949); J. Eckhart’s Tract, in, p. 288, and
Serm. xli, p. 111. (See note 2, Chapter 1, p. 16, in the present book.)
8 Blake, W., in Keynes, G. (1935), p. 135.

116
 UNDERSTANDING AND THE VISUAL MECHANISM

Every biologist must be able to confirm from his own ex¬

perience that perception depends upon preparedness of mind,
as well as on actual visual impressions. As a trivial instance, the
writer may recall having been acquainted with Queen-Anne’s -
Lace (Anthriscus sylvestris Hofm.) for half a century, without
noticing that the pattern of its growth is such that the main axis
almost invariably terminates in a reduced inflorescence, which,
in association with the grouping of the lateral shoots below it,
gives the plant a highly distinctive facies.1 When that visual fact
had at last succeeded in forcing its way into the mind, any plant
that came under observation was found to show this salient
feature so strikingly as to leave the observer bewildered and
humiliated at having been totally blind to it year after year.
How great a part the understanding plays, in comparison
with the visual mechanism, when biological memoirs are being
illustrated, comes home to one especially in looking at the
simplified kind of figure which is so frequently used. In a black-
and-white drawing, for example, it is evident that the visual
impression actually received, which can have been only a
mosaic of coloured patches, has been translated into a system
of black marks on a white ground—marks which have no
existence, as such, in Nature. This process is essentially sym¬
bolic and diagrammatic; it is an interpretation rather than a
representation.
A symptom of the craving of the mind to mould sense impres¬
sions into a form consonant with itself, is the pleasure which
mankind takes in symmetry.2 This pleasure arises from the
satisfaction of the characteristic mental urge to reduce the
chaotic multifariousness of sense impressions to some unity of
design. An urge of this type is illustrated by Coleridge’s analogy
of the kaleidoscope.3 Into the toy, a medley of objects is intro¬
duced, which as a casual group can give the mind’s eye no
satisfaction—oddments such as bits of coloured glass, steel filings,
scraps of silk, and cuttings of twine. The kaleidoscope transforms
their meaningless jumble into a succession of harmonious phases;

1 Arber, A. (1950), p. 185 and Fig. 42, p. 186.

2 Cf. Lovejoy, A. O. (1948), p. 146. 3 Snyder, A. D. (1929), p. 122.
 X. THE MIND AND THE EYE

as an instrument it thus creates a symmetry which has no

existence in the actual congeries of objects. Examples of the
free but disciplined type of symmetry that the mind imposes,
may be recognized in certain landscapes by Chinese artists.
The delicate and subtle sense of rhythm which these pictures
reveal, is not derived simply from sense impressions, but is
inspired by a mental awareness of the complete unity of man
with the universe, which Western painters seldom realize so
intensively.1
One may be fully convinced of the immense importance of
the mind in seeing, and yet feel that many philosophers have
stressed its dominance in a partisan fashion, which has led to the
belittlement of the visual aspect of thought. This unbalanced
attitude found extreme expression in the writings of Giordano
Bruno, who said that the use of the senses is “solely to stimulate
our reason”, and that “truth is in but very small degree
derived from the senses”.2 Kant, with characteristic insight,
undermined such a standpoint as this in a famous passage. He
wrote that “The light dove, cleaving the air as she freely wings
her way, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that her
flight would succeed a great deal better in airless space. In the
same way, Plato, relinquishing the world of the senses, as setting
such narrow limits to the understanding, ventured out beyond
it on the wings of the ideas into the void space of the pure
intellect. He did not perceive that he made no advance by all
his efforts”.3 Few thinkers would regard this criticism as justly
1 Binyon, L., in Binyon, L., and others (1935), p. 5; see also Richards, I. A.
(1932) on the non-separation of human and external nature in Chinese thought.
2 Bruno, G. (1923-7), vol. 1, 1925, Dialogue 1, De Vlnfinito Universo e Mondi,
p. 289: “Ad eccitar la raggione solamente,. . .Onde la verita, come da un debile
principio, e da gli sensi in picciola parte, ma non e nelli sensi.” For translation,
see Singer, D. W. (1950), p. 251.
3 Kant, I. (1902-38), Bd. rn, 1904, Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, 2nd ed. 1787,
Einleitung, in, p. 32: “Die leichte Taube, indem sie im freien Fluge die Luft theilt,
deren Widerstand sie fiihlt, konnte die Vorstellung fassen, dass es ihr im luftleeren
Raum noch viel besser gelingen werde. Eben so verliess Plato die Sinnenwelt,
weil sie dem Verstande so enge Schranken setzt, und wagte sich jenseit derselben
auf den Fliigeln der Ideen in den leeren Raum des reinen Verstandes. Er bemerkte
nicht, dass er durch seine Bemiihungen keinen Weg gewonne, denn er hatte keinen
Widerhalt gleichsam zur Unterlage, worauf er sich steifen und woran er seine
Krafte anwenden konnte, um den Verstand von der Stelle zu bringen.” Translation
modified from Smith, N. Kemp (1933), p. 47, and Meiklejohn, J. M. D. (1934),
p. 29.

Il8
 PRIMARY AND SECONDARY QUALITIES

applicable to Plato himself, but it is a valid comment on the

speculations of many later writers. The biologist may perhaps
venture to hope that it is by the infusion of the spirit of his own
science into philosophy that the balance of the senses and the
intellect may be redressed. Coleridge was an example of what
Kant regarded as the Platonic extreme, when he wrote that it is
essential for the achievement of abstract thought “To emanci¬
pate the mind from the despotism of the eye”.1 To speak of
‘despotism’, in this connexion, prejudices the case from the
outset; it is an unfair word, since the eye is, rather, the servant
of the mind, to which it offers all its data for interpretation; or
it might perhaps be better to call the eye the ‘junior partner’
of the mind—the partner to whose vitality the firm owes much
of its vigour. It is fortunate for the biologist that, whatever
flight he may take into the empyrean, he is always bound to
return to the solid ground of his own sensory data. All his
instincts and principles incline him to an attitude towards the
universe which does not discount things in favour of abstract
thought; indeed an essential condition of worth-while biological
work is the chastening of the mind through the discipline of the
eye. So simple an example as the comparison of a well-stained
section, seen under the microscope, with the best representation
of it in black-and-white, reveals at once to the biologist how many
subtleties, seizable by the eye, have been discarded from the
intellectualized and impoverished drawing. One of the factors
which have encouraged a certain depreciation of the visual ele¬
ment in intellectual processes, is the distinction drawn between
‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities of bodies. This distinction
is an ancient one, which was recognized by certain pre-Socratic
philosophers;2 among more recent writers, Locke3 emphasized
it strongly. He enumerates the “primary Qualities” as “Solidity,
Extension, Motion or Rest, Number and Figure ”. On the other
hand, he held that “ Colours and Smells,.. . Tastes, and Sounds,
and other the like sensible Qualities” are ‘Secundary\ being “nothing

1 Snyder, A. D. (1929), p. 126; see also Coleridge, S. T. (1817), vol. 1, pp. 107-8.
2 Burnet, J. (1914), pp. 196-7.
3 Locke, J. (1690), bk. 11, chap, viii, pp. 56 et seq.
 X. THE MIND AND THE EYE

in the Objects themselves, but Powers to produce various Sensa¬

tions in us”, and that these powers depend upon the primary
qualities. It was Berkeley1 who detected the flaw in Locke’s
reasoning, and showed that the arguments, which led him to
hold that secondary qualities exist only for the percipient, might
be used equally well to prove that primary qualities, also, have
no existence of their own. Although Locke’s distinction between
the two types of quality is no longer an accepted canon of the
theory of knowledge, in residual form it still haunts philosophic
thought, and is in part responsible for the unfortunate prejudice
that allows only an inferior status to visual impressions.
Another factor which cramps the biologist’s visual thinking
is his tendency to share the general egoism which leads to con¬
centration upon the human element in the universe, so that when
he looks at an animal or plant he is liable to see it, not as it is in
and for itself, but from an anthropocentric standpoint. The
result is that the visual impression does not yield its full content,
since it can offer this only to the mind that becomes one with
what it sees, thus breaking down the rigid subject-object anti¬
thesis. Aquinas recognized this fact when he wrote that
“Vision is made actual only when the thing seen is in a certain
way in the seer”.2 Dante, St Thomas’s younger contemporary,
expressed the same conviction in the dictum, “Who paints the
shape of ought, unless himself can be it, cannot set it down”.3
The oriental mind seems to Teel itself’ more naturally than the
occidental into forms of life other than humanity; this is con¬
spicuous in the work of Chinese and Japanese artists,4 who often
identify themselves, as it were, with a bird or a flower, thus
revealing its individual character with an intuitive insight that
1 Berkeley, G., in Jessop, T. E. (1949), vol. ir, The Principles of Human Knowledge,
pt. 1, 15, p. 47; on Bayle’s anticipation of Berkeley, see Luce, A. A. (1934), pp. 55,
6l2 Aquinas, St Thomas, in Migne, J. P. (1845, etc.), vol. 1, p. 538, Summa Theol.
1, quest. 12, art. 2, “non enim sit visio in actu nisi per quod res visa quodammodo
est in vidente”. Translation in Aquinas, St Thomas (1911, etc.) 1, no. 1, p. 122.
3 “Poi chi pinge figura
Se non puo esser lei, non la puo porre.”
Dante Alighieri. Convivio, Ode 111, 3. Giuliani, G. (1874), P- 4°3>
4 On this aspect of Chinese painting, see Binyon, L., in Binyon, L., and others
(J935), p. x, and pp. 5-6; and Fry, R.. in Fry, R., and others (1935), p. 4; see also
p. 118 of the present chapter.

120
 BIOLOGY AND THE VISUAL ARTS

the European seldom achieves. In a modest way the biologist

may occasionally feel a faint hint of such self-identification with
the living thing which he is attempting to depict. An experience
of this kind is indeed a precondition of any really happy por¬
trayal, and it may be equated with that “faculte intuitive, qui
ne se communique point, mais qui s’acquiert, jusqu’a un certain
point, par la grande habitude de voir”.1 When this latent power
is awakened, drawing becomes an intensified form of visual
perception, in which the pencil, as well as the hand and the
eye, is organically one with the brain. The artist’s claim, that
“learning to draw is learning to see”, finds an echo in bio¬
logical practice; it was a saying of Julius von Sachs to the
students in his laboratory, that “Was man nicht gezeichnet hat,
hat man nicht gesehen ”.2 It is generally recognized that mathe¬
maticians are often gifted musically, while, from biographies of
zoologists and botanists, one gathers the impression that biology
has a corresponding relation to the visual arts. It might be
interesting to subject this thesis to the test of large-scale statistical
study.
It has been pointed out3 that in European languages every
word belongs to one of the ‘parts of speech ’, and that we have no
‘ germinal ’ or ‘ ore-like ’4 terms, each of which can convey, in the
form of a single symbol, a sentence not differentiated into
nouns, verbs, etc., but enclosing, as it were ‘in the bud’, the
synthetic significance of these elements. Indeed, the expression,
‘ parts of speech ’, itself involves the idea that ‘ speech ’ is primary,
and that its analysis into words is merely secondary. When the
biologist meets the difficulty of the lack of germinal words, he
can sometimes circumvent it by transmitting his unanalysed
meaning through illustrations. Artistic expression offers a mode
of translation of sense data into thought, without subjecting
them to the narrowing influence of an inadequate verbal frame¬
work; the verb, ‘to illustrate’, retains, in this sense, something
of its ancient meaning—‘to illuminate’.

1 Turpin, P. J. F. (1820), p. 14. 2 Scott, D. H. (1925), p. 10.

3 Bosanquet, B. (1911), vol. 1, p. 104.
4 Cf. the use of‘ore-like’ in Richards, I. A. (1932), p. 4.

12 I
 X. THE MIND AND THE EYE

An example of a modern movement of biological thought, in

which the eye has come into its own, is the renaissance of
botanical morphology which has taken place in twentieth-
century Germany under the influence of Wilhelm Troll. The
adherents of his school regard the concept of the flower (in the
Gestalt sense), not as a totality of parts united according to
a certain plan of organization, but as the totality of the flower
itself, as it appears to the eye.1 The eye, in this connexion, dominates
discursive reasoning. The approach here is through Goethe’s
Anschauung, a term which has no equivalent in our language,
but which may be interpreted as intuitive knowledge gained
directly through contemplation of the visible aspect.2
Hitherto we have dwelt separately upon the two roads
to reality open to the biologist—the way of the intellect and
the way of the eye. We must now come to closer grips with
the relation between these two approaches, in order to see if
there is any possibility that, however distinct they may seem
at a casual glance, they may prove, finally, to be one and
indivisible.
It can scarcely be denied that the use of pictorial imagery in
thinking is a fundamental need of the human mind. Though
philosophers have often inveighed against it, as vitiating abstract
thought, it cannot possibly be discarded from our mental tool-
chest. Indeed, to employ it can do no harm, provided we never
lose sight of what it is that we are about when we handle it.
A statue of his god may be helpful to a worshipper who sees
it as a symbol. There is, however, the risk that he will take it at
its face value, when it becomes an idol; for, if we may set
a construction other than his own upon the words that Plato
puts into the mouth of Socrates; “There are few who, going to
the images, behold in them the realities.”3 Our whole language
is, moreover, permeated with metaphor, but this is misleading
only if we forget that such pictorial expressions are merely
symbolic.
1 Troll, W. (1928), p. 88; on Gestalt morphology, see Arber, A. (1950),
pp. 144-61.
2 Cf. Arber, A. (1950), pp. 209-11; see also Arber, A. (1946a), p. 85.
3 Jowett, B. (1871), vol. 1, Phaedrus, 250, p. 584.

122
 CONCEPTUAL AND PICTORIAL THINKING

Kant1 pointed to a bridge between abstract and sensuous

thinking, when he showed how images representing percepts
could be replaced in abstract thought by ‘schemata’ of con¬
cepts. These are mental portrayals of the Platonic ‘forms’ of
objects, rather than of individual objects. The schema of the
triangle exists in thought alone, and is adequate universally for
triangles, whereas the image of a triangle can never attain to this
universality.
The more one considers the matter, the clearer it becomes
that sense perceptions cannot be separated from mental activity.2
This was recognized in the seventeenth century by Descartes,
who—according to one of his modern interpreters—regarded
V entendement (conceptual thinking) and Vimagination (pictorial
thinking) as indissolubly united in perception, of which con¬
ceptual thinking is the form, and picture thinking, the matter.3
The mind, indeed, at once seizes on the material which the
visual apparatus offers to it, and forms a ‘ perceptual judgment ’,4
in which the sense impression and the interpretative work of the
intellect are inextricably blended. This union recalls Hegel’s
conception of reason as the synthesis of intuitive sensation and
discursive thought,5 and Bosanquet’s “reason in the form of
feeling”.6 Walter Pater, again, approaching the subject rather
from the standpoint of literature and art than from that of
philosophy, called the same faculty the imaginative reason,
“for which every thought and feeling is twin-bom with its
sensible analogue or symbol”.7
The fallacious notion of a sharp disjunction between mental
and visual thinking, has its physical basis in the conception of
brain and sense organs as discrete entities; but there is no such

1 Kant, I. (1902-38), vol. in, 1904, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2nd ed., 1787, Ele-
mentarlehre, Th. 11, Abth. 1, Buch 2, Hauptst. 1, pp. 133-9, V°n der Schematismus
der reinen Verstandesbegriffe. Translation in Smith, N. Kemp (1933), pp. 180-7,
and Meiklejohn, J. M. D. (1934), pp. 117-22.
2 Cf. Joachim, H. H. (1948), p. 83.
3 Leveque, R. (1923), p. 24; Leveque bases his view on Descartes, R. (1641),
Med. 11, pp. 25 el seq. For translation, see Haldane, E. S., and Ross, G. R. T.
(1911-12), vol 1, pp. 154 et seq.
4 Johnson, W. E. (1921-4), pt. 1, pp. xvi, xvii.
5 Walsh, W. H. (1947), pp. 27, 28.
6 Bosanquet, B. (1911), vol. 11, p. 236.
7 Pater, W. (1888), The School of Giorgione, p. 144.

123
 X. THE MIND AND THE EYE

severance in reality, though there is differentiation and division

of labour. The whole nervous system, including the brain, is
a unity though an inexpressibly complex one. This is true on the
plane of ‘extension’, and equally so on the plane of‘thought’;
the activities of the sense organs, and the thinking of the brain,
are all parts of an indivisible whole. When Donne, writing at
the end of the sixteenth century, not as a physiologist but as
a poet, said:
For if the sinewie thred my braine lets fall
Through every part,
Can tye those parts, and make me one of all;1

he was recognizing intuitively that the heterogeneous com¬

plexities of the body are unified by the brain and nervous system.
The close interlocking and interweaving of the data gained
directly through the senses, with the concepts of pure thought,
are peculiarly marked in the biologist’s sphere of work. He may
with conviction echo Kant’s words: “The understanding can
intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through
their union can knowledge arise.”2 At an even earlier date,
Diderot, in his Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature, had stressed
the continual to-and-fro movement between the senses and
reflective thinking. “Tout se reduit”, he wrote, “a revenir des
sens a la reflexion, et de la reflexion aux sens; rentrer en soi et
en sortir sans cesse.. . .”3
Some of those workers for whom the physico-chemical dis¬
ciplines occupy the centre of the stage, define science in a way
that excludes any other approach than that used in these
subjects in which visual thinking is at a discount. It has been
said, for instance, that “the making of science, and science itself,
as a living enterprise, is inductive”, and it has been suggested
that its concern is “the prediction of the unperceived from the
perceived”.4 Though this may be true of physics and chemistry,
1 [Donne, J.] ‘J.D.’ (1635), The Funerall, p. 51.
2 Kant, I. (1902-38), vol. nr, 1904, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2nd ed. 1787,
Elementarlehre, Th. 2, Trans. Log., Einleitung, 1, p. 75: “Der Verstand vermag nichts
anzuschauen und die Sinne nichts zu denken. Nur daraus, dass sie sich vereinigen,
kann Erkenntniss entspringen.” Translation in Smith, N. Kemp (1933), p. 93.
3 Diderot, D. (1875-7). Pensees sur V interpretation de la nature (1754), vol. n,p. I4(ix).
4 Williams, D. (1947), pp. 12-13.

124
 NATURAL PHILOSOPHY

and of those phases of biological study in which physico¬

chemical methods predominate, it does not, for example, in¬
dicate adequately the goal of pure morphology, which might be
described as the visual and conceptual interpretation of the perceived,
rather than as the conceptual prediction oj the unperceived.
The morphological approach to biology is through structure
viewed as form. Structure is a relational category, which may
be defined as the arrangement or organization of parts within
an integrated whole.1 Problems of pure morphology cannot be
solved by the methods of analytical science. The contemplative
treatment of comparative form, rather than its analysis from
the standpoint of cause and effect, becomes the morphologist’s
aim; he desires to see form, both with the bodily eye and with
the mind’s eye, not only in itself, but in its nexus of relations.
This process of mental visualization differs essentially from the
thought-techniques of the physico-chemical disciplines. The
morphologist’s standpoint is set midway between that of the
mechanistic sciences and of the arts, so that his work should offer
a synthesis of intellectualist logic and sensory apprehension.
In other words, he brings into use Aristotle’s conception of the
objects of our senses as ‘immattered form’, through which the
contrast is bridged between “pure thought and the empirical
study of individuals”.2 In this respect, the view point of
Aristotle—the Father of Biology—combines that of Democritus,
for whom sensation was primary, and that of Plato, who laid his
chief stress upon conceptual thinking.3 There is much to be said
for the suggestion that, whereas Metaphysics studies ‘being’ as
such, and Natural Science (of the physico-chemical type) treats of
the corporeal world, Natural Philosophy may be so defined as to
link the two; it would then connote that mental activity which
ceaselessly weaves connexions between the planes of intangible
‘essence’ and tangible ‘existence’.4 Long ago Coleridge rea¬
lized that natural science, though beginning with material

1 Wood, L. (1940), p. 180. 2 Jaeger, W. (1948) cf. pp. 340-1.

3 Aquinas, St Thomas, in Migne, J. P. (1845, etc.), vol. 1, pp. 1162-3, Summa
Theol. 1, quest. 84, art. 6. Translation, Aquinas, St Thomas (1911, etc.), 1, no. 3,
p. 170 et seq.; see also Hawkins, D. J. B. (1947), p. 78.
4 This idea is a version of that expressed by Thompson, W. R. (1937)) PP- I3I_2.

*25
 X. THE MIND AND THE EYE

phenomena, is transformed, finally,, into natural philosophy.1

It is to this synthetic discipline that biology, in its autonomous
aspect, belongs;2 its function is fulfilled when it offers its mite
towards the ultimate fusion of metaphysical and scientific
thinking.

1 Coleridge, S. T. (1817), vol. 1, p. 258.

2 See also Chapter vi, p. 71. After the first draft of the present book was
completed, Beveridge, W. I. B. (1950), came into the writer’s hands. In Beveridge’s
work some of the topics, discussed in the preceding pages, will be found treated
from a contrasting standpoint, since biology, as he understands it, is a branch of
pure Natural Science, and essentially experimental, rather than a part of what has
been distinguished here as Natural Philosophy.

126
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Adam, C.; see Descartes, R. (1897-1910).

Adler, M. J. (1927). Dialectic. London. [Pp. 45, 94, 113.]
Ainslie, D.; see Croce, B. (1915).
Albertus Magnus; see Digby, Sir K. (1654).
Andrade, E. N. da C. (1947). Newton, Royal Society, Newton Tercentenary
Celebrations. Cambridge. Pp. 3-23. [P. 29.]
Aquinas, St Thomas, in Migne, J. P. (1845, etc.), Patrologiae cursus completus
Ser. sec. [Pp. 24, 64, 120, 125.]
Aquinas, St Thomas (191 i,etc.). Summa Theologica. Trans, by Fathers of the
English Dominican Province. London. [Pp. 24, 64, 120, 125.]
Arber, A. (1920). Water Plants: a study of Aquatic Angiosperms. Cambridge.
[P. 102.]
Arber, A. (1934). The Gramineae: a study of Cereal, Bamboo, and Grass.
Cambridge. [P. 102.]
Arber, A. (1937). The interpretation of the flower: a study of some aspects
of morphological thought. Biol. Rev. vol. xn, pp. 157-84. [P. 43.]
Arber, A. (1941c). Tercentary of Nehemiah Grew (1641-1712). Nature,
vol. cxlvii, pp. 630-2, May 24. [P. 42.]
Arber, A. (1941/)). The relation of Nehemiah Grew and Marcello Malpighi.
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Arber, A. (1941c). Nehemiah Grew and Marcello Malpighi. Proc. Linn.
Soc. Lond. Session 153, pt. 2, Nov. 21, pp. 218-38. [P. 42.]
Arber, A. (1942). Nehemiah Grew (1641-1712) and Marcello Malpighi
(1628-1694): an essay in comparison. Isis, vol. xxxiv, pp. 7-16. [P.42.]
Arber, A. (1946 c). Goethe’s Botany. Chronica Botanica (Waltham, Mass.
U.S.A.), vol. x, no. 2, pp. 63-126 (separate publication). [Pp. 106,
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Roberts, M. (1920). Warfare in the Human Body. London. [P. 105.]
Robinson, R. (1941). Plato’s Earlier Dialectic. Cornell University Press,
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Robinson, R.; ^Jaeger, W. (1948).
Robson, G. C., and Richards, O. W. (1936). The Variation of Animals in
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Ross, G. R. T.; see Haldane, E. S., and Ross, G. R. T. (1911-12).
Ross, W. D. (Sir D.) (1937). Aristotle. 3rd ed. London. [P. 107.]
Roth, L. (1924). Spinoza, Descartes and Maimonides. Oxford. [P. 70.]
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Russell, E. S. (1916). Form and Function. London. [P. 93.]
Russell, E. S. (1930). The Interpretation of Development and Heredity: a study in
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135
 LIST OF BOOKS AND MEMOIRS CITED

Russell, E. S. (1934). The Behaviour of Animals. An Introduction to its Study.

London. [P. 93.]
Russell, E. S. (1936). Form and function. A historical note. Folia
Biotheoretica, ser. B, no. 1, 12 pp. Leiden. [P. 93.]
Russell, E. S. (1945). The Directiveness of Organic Activities. Cambridge.
[P. 101.]
Saint-Hilaire, G. £.; see Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, IL (1830).
Schiller, F. C. S. (1931). Formal Logic. 2nd ed. London. [P. 105.]
Schmid, G. (1935). Ueber die Herkunft der Ausdriicke Morphologie und
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Scott, G. (1914). The Architecture of Humanism. London. [Pp. n, 50.]
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Sharrock, R. (1672). The History of the Propagation and Improvement of
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Sheldon, W. H. (1918). Strife of Systems and Productive Duality. Harvard
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Singer, C. (1925). The Evolution of Anatomy. London. [P. 5.]
Singer, C. (1931). A Short History of Biology. Oxford. (2nd ed. 1950,
A History of Biology. London.) [Pp. 34, 96.]
Singer, C. (1941). A Short History of Science to the Nineteenth Century. Oxford.

[pP* 3l> 39> 46> 84.]

Singer, C., and Rabin, C. (1946). A Prelude to Modern Science. Being a
Discussion. . .of the ‘ Tabulae anatomicae sex’ of Vesalius. Cambridge.
[P* 5.]
Singer, D. W. (1950). Giordano Bruno: his Life and Thought. With Annotated
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Smith, N. Kemp (1923). A Commentary to Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’.
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Smith, N. Kemp (1933). Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Translation.
London. [Pp. 22, 66, 78, 85, 87, 118, 123, 124.]
Smith, N. Kemp (1947). Ed. Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.
2nd ed. London and Edinburgh. [Pp. 91, 112.]
Smuts, J. C. (1926). Holism and Evolution. London. [P.53.]
Snyder, A. D. (1929). Coleridge on Logic and Learning. New Haven, U.S.A.,
and London. [Pp.117, 119.]
Spampanato, V.; see Bruno, G. (1923-7).
[Spinoza, B. de] ‘B.D.S.’ (1677). Operaposthuma. (Noplace-name.) [Pp. 21,

7o? 72, 73> 74> 84, 85, 86, 101.]

Spinoza, B. de; see Vloten, J. van, and Land, J. P. N. (1882-3); White,
W. Hale, and Stirling, A. H. (1899), (1930); Wolf, A. (1910).
Stace, W. T. (1920). A Critical History of Greek Philosophy. London. [Pp. 58,
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136
 LIST OF BOOKS AND MEMOIRS CITED

Stace, W. T. (1924). The Philosophy of Hegel. A Systematic Exposition. London.

[P. no.]
Stace, W. T. (1932). The Theory of Knowledge and Existence. Oxford. [Pp. 31,
78, 86, 90.]
Stephen, L.; see Clifford, W. K. (1879).
Stirling, A. H.; see White, W. Hale, and Stirling, A. H. (1899) and

(i930)-
Stocks, J. L. (1938). Time, Cause and Eternity. London. [P. 114.]
Sturt, H.; see Metz, R. (1938; reimpression, 1950).
Suzuki, D. T. (1927). Essays in Zen Buddhism (First Series) London.
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Tannery, P.; see Descartes, R. (1897-1910).
Taylor, A. E. (1918). The philosophy of Proclus. Proc. Arist. Soc., N.S.,
vol. xvm, pp. 600-35. [P- io3-]
Thompson, Sir D’Arcy W. (1917). On Growth and Form. (2nd ed. 1942).
Cambridge. [Pp. 34, 88.]
Thompson, W. R. (1937). Science and Common Sense. London. [Pp. 58, 81,
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Thorburn, W. M. (1918). The myth of Occam’s Razor. Mind, vol. xxvn,

PP- 345-53- [Pp- 88, 90.]
Thouless, R. H. (1938). Eye and brain as factors in visual perception.
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Toynbee, P.; see Dante Alighieri (1900).
Tredennick, H. (1933). Aristotle. The Metaphysics, I-IX. Translation.
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Troll, W. (1928). Organisation und Gestalt im Bereich der Bliite (Monogr. wiss.
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Troll, W. (1935, etc.). Vergleichende Morphologie der hoheren Pflanzen. Berlin.
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Turpin, P. J. F. (1820). Iconographie Vegetale. In Poiret, J. L. M.,
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Urban, W. M. (1939). Language and Reality. London. [P. 31.]
Varendonck, J. (1921). The Psychology of Day-dreams. London. [P. 21.]
Vloten, J. van, and Land, J. P. N. (1882-3). Benedicti de Spinoza Opera.
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Waley, A. D. (1934). The Way and its Power. A Study of the Tao Te Ching and
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Waley, A. 0.(1939). Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China. London. [P.37.]
Wallace, W. (1874). The Logic of Hegel. Trans, from the Encyclopaedia of the
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Wallas, G. (1926). The Art of Thought. LQndon. [Pr 21.]
Walsh, W. H. (1946). Hegel and Intellectual Intuition. Mind, vol. lv,
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Walsh, W. H. (1947). Reason and Experience. Oxford. [Pp. 22, 102, 123.]
Ward law, C. W. (1950). Organogenesis in ferns: evidence relating to
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 LIST OF BOOKS AND MEMOIRS CITED

Westaway, F. W. (1919). Scientific Method. 2nd ed. London. [P. 58.]

Wheeler, R. H. (1935). Organismic vs. mechanistic logic. Psychological
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White, W. Hale, and Stirling, A. H. (1930). Benedict de Spinoza. Ethic.
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Whittaker, Sir E. T. (1946). Space and Spirit. London and Edinburgh.
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Whittaker, Sir E. T.; see Newton, Sir I. (1931).
Wightman, W. P. D. (1934). Science and Monism. London. [P. 104.]
Wightman, W. P. D. (1950). The Growth of Scientific Ideas. Edinburgh and
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Wilkinson, E. M. (1949). ‘Tasso—ein gesteigerter Werther’ in the light of
Goethe’s principle of ‘ Steigerung’. An inquiry into critical method.
Mod. Lang. Rev. vol. xliv, pp. 305-28. [P. 97.]
Williams, D. (1947). The Ground of Induction. Harvard Univ. Press, Cam¬
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Willis, T. (1664). Cerebri anatome. London. [P. 34.]
Wisdom, J. O. (1952). Foundations of Inference in Natural Science. London.
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Wolf, A. (1910). Spinoza's Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-being.
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Wolf, A. (1922). Spinoza the Conciliator. Chron. Spinozanum, vol. 11,
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Wolfson, H. A. (1934). The Philosophy of Spinoza. 2 vols. Harvard Univ.
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Wood, L. (1940). The Analysis of Knowledge. London. [Pp. 66, 125.]
Woodger, J. H. (1929). Biological Principles. A Critical Study. London.
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Woodger, J. H. ; see Bertalanffy, L. von (1933).
Wordsworth, W. (1800). Lyrical Ballads. 2nd ed. vol. 1. London. [P.32.]
Wright, G. H. von (1951). A Treatise on Induction and Probability. London.
[Pp. 26, 29, 31, 47.]
Young, J. Z. (1938a). The evolution of the nervous system and of the
relationship of organism and environment, pp. 179-203 in Evolution.
Essays on Aspects of Evolutionary Biology, pres, to E. S. Goodrich on his
seventieth birthday. Ed. by G. R. de Beer. Oxford. [Pp. 103, 105.]
Young, J. Z. (1938^). Contribution to discussion on the mechanism of
evolution (Brit. Ass. Adv. Sci., Aug. 19, 1938) Nature, vol. cxlii,
Sept. 17, p. 515. [P. 103.]
Yu-lan, Fung; see Fung Yu-lan.
Zimmermann, W. (1930). Die Phylogenie der Pflanzen: ein Uberblick iiber
Tatsachen und Probleme. Jena. [P. 26.]

138
 INDEX

(For those authors’ works noi included in this index, see page references in
List of Books and Memoirs Cited, pp. 127 et seq.)

‘Abstract ’ and * representational ’ art, 56, Archimedes, ttoO err65, 77

116 Architects, comparison of their work
Achilles and the tortoise, 77 with that of biologists, 50
Actualization of potentialities (E.S. Aristotle, circular motion, 39; com¬
Russell), 101 n. 2 bining views of Democritus and Plato,
Adam and Raphael {Paradise Lost), 24, 125; contemporaries at the Academy,
29 n. 3 47; difference between actual origin
Adaptation and natural selection, 24 and its representation, 46, 47; dis¬
Aims and scope of biological study, 3 regard of inconsistency, 112; epi¬
Albertus Magnus, 38 genesis, 101; immanent ‘forms’, 101;
Analogy, 32-44; dvccAoyia, 36 ‘immattered form’, 125; indemon¬
Analysis, 95, 96, 104, 105, 125, et passim strable premisses, 77; induction
Anatomy, 34; and see ‘Comparative (£uaycoyf)), 25; microcosm and
anatomy ’ macrocosm, 39; nature of perception,
Anaximander, 13 107; reconciling opposing theories, 114
Anthriscus sylvestris Hofm., 117 Art, ‘abstract’ and ‘representational’,
Antitheses, biological, 92-114; body and 56, 116; agreed conventions, 76
mind, 92-9; deduction and induc¬ Artists, comparison of their approach to
tion, 26, 94; extension and thought, that of biologists, 11, 14, 19, 29, 37,
98> 99> 115 Jform and function, 93,94; 56, 71, 76, 91, 113, 116, 118-21
intellect and senses, 115; matter and Assumptions, basic, 76-91; comparison
form, 92, 93; mechanism and teleo¬ with tools, 79,80; as hypotheses, 86-8;
logy, 73, 92, 95; mechanism and metaphysical or methodological, 78,
vitalism, 100, 101; mind and eye, 79; reduction to a minimum, 80, 81,
115-26, et passim; multiplicity and 88
change, and unity and changeless¬ Attribute, 84, 97-9
ness, 99; the One and the Many, Aureolus, P., simplicity postulate, 88 n. 4
103, 104, 115; organism and environ¬
ment, 103; as pairs of partial truths, Bacon, F. (Lord Verulam), on analogy,
109; preformation and epigenesis, 92, 32, 33; dictating to T. Hobbes, 50;
101, 102; subject and object, 94, 120; on induction and hypotheses, 27
vegetative phase in plants and repro¬ Bamboos, death of vegetative parts after
ductive phase, 102 seeding, 102
Antithesis, see Thesis Bayle,P., anticipation of Berkeley, 120 n. 1
Aquatic plants, vegetative reproduc¬ Beatrice (Dante) on the cosmic order, 83
tion, 102 Berkeley, G., on analogy, 33; antici¬
Aquinas, St Thomas, on contemplation pated by Bayle, 120 n. 1; on Locke’s
and communication, 64; on hypo¬ ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities
theses and proof, 24; on sensory and of bodies, 120; Three Dialogues, 112
conceptual thinking, 125; on subject- Beveridge, W. I. B., on biology as pure
object antithesis, 120 Natural Science, 126 n. 2; quoting
Arab commentators on Aristotle, 10 Gauss on intuition, 47 n. 2

139
 INDEX

Biochemists on form and function, 93,94 Chu Hsi on the intuitive flash, 20
Biology, aims and scope, 3; intermediate Citation of authorities in biology and
between physical science and the philosophy, 52, 53
humanities, 54, 125; part of natural Claudius Ptolemy, see Ptolemy
philosophy, 71, 76, 125, 126; termin¬ Clifford, W. K., on Uniformity of
ology, 54, 55; and the visual arts, 45, Nature, 83, 84
121; visual aspect, 5, et passim ‘Coherence’ theory of truth, 29, 70 et
Bipolar and multipolar thought, 96, 97 seq.
Bipolar unity, 97 ‘Coincidence of contraries’, 96, 97, 110
Blake, W., on expression of ideas, 49; on Coleridge, S. T., on “despotism of the
seeing with the mind, 116; on truth, eye ”, 119; failure to find an adequate
73> 74 theme, 11; on Hercules and Om-
Book of Nature (Konrad von Megenberg), phale, 10; on identity and opposition
of thesis and antithesis, 96, 97; on the
385 39
Book-size, factors determining it, 58 kaleidoscope and symmetry, 117, 118;
Bosanquet, B., explanation, 59; form marginal notes, 57; on Natural Science
and function, 93; ‘implication’ in and Natural Philosophy, 125, 126; on
argument, 46; logic, 22, 93; reason organized wholeness in writing, 49
in form of feeling, 123 ‘Comparative anatomy’, early use of
Boyle, the Hon. R., dialogue technique term by T. Willis, N. Grew, and
in The Sceptical Chymist, 111, 112; on Vicq d’Azyr, 34
hypotheses, 28 Comparisons, irreversible and reversible,
Bradley, F. H., on relationship implying 35) 36
unity, 96 n. 1 ‘Compound’ and ‘simple’ flowers,
Browne, Sir T., on microcosm and analogy between, 43
macrocosm, 39, 40 Conatus (Spinoza), 101
Bruno, G., ‘coincidence of contraries’, ‘Consilience’ (Hobhouse), 70 n. 6
110; On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, Contemplative phase in biological work,
hi; the unimportance of the senses, 4, 5, 63, 64; Chap, vi-y. passim
118; Unity which is not bare Oneness, ‘ Copy’ theory of truth, 66, 67
106; use of dialogue technique, 111 Correspondence in writing between
Buddhism, Zen, stages in initiation, 55 scientists as equivalent to circulation
Butler, J., on analogy, 36; on probability of offprints, 112
and the ‘likely’, 33 ‘Correspondence’ theory of truth, 66,
Butler, S., on memory and heredity, 43 67, 71, 116
Biitschli, O., 58 Cosmos and Chaos, 81, 82, 87, 92
‘ Creative ’ intellectual work, 17 et seq.
Candolle, A. Casimir P. de, see de Croce, B., on Hegel’s dialectic, 97
Candolle, A. Casimir P. Cuvier, G. L. C. F. D., polemic with
Candolle, A. P. de, see de Candolle, A. P. £. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 104
Causal hypothesis as an instrument of
method, 89 Dante Alighieri, on the artist becoming
Causal relation, Hume and Kant, 87 what he paints, 120; on basic as¬
Causality, as an hypothesis, 88; relation sumptions, 77; Beatrice on the cosmic
to the principle of the Uniformity of order, 83; personification of his odes,
Nature, 82, 83, 87, 88 49; on the simplicity postulate, 88
Cause, difficulty of deducing from an Darwin, C., theory of Natural Selection,
effect, 23, 24 24, 42, 43; use of inaccurate instru¬
Causes, material-efficient and formal- ments, 66
final, and their relation to spatial and de Candolle, A. Casimir P., on leaf as
temporal succession, 100 a partial shoot, 81, 108, 109
Chaos and Cosmos, 81, 82, 87, 92 de Candolle, A. P., on comparative
Chinese art and thought, 11, 37, 118, aspect of morphology, 34; on ‘func¬
120,121; see also Chu Hsi, and Mencius tion’ and ‘organ’, 93
I
 INDEX

Deduction, and induction, 25, 26, 94; Eliot, G., on systole and diastole in
and the syllogism, 26; as the unfolding research, 97
of implications in premisses, 77 Emotion as a factor in research and
Demiurge (Plato, Timaetis), 37, 38 discovery, 9-10, 20, 21
Democritus, and sensation, 125; the Environment and organism, 103
view that the Whole is achieved £Trocycoyf) (Aristotle), 25
through the Parts, 106 Epicurus, ‘hooked atoms’, 19, 20
de Monet, J. B. P. A., see Lamarck, Epigenesis and preformation, 92, 101,
Chevalier de 102; compared with two modes of
de Morgan, A.,‘Universes’ of ideas, 108 logical inference, 101, 102
Descartes, R., dualism, 90, 91, 98, 99; Eternity, aspects of, 99, 100
on the mind as unity, 99; on research, Explanation, in biology, 36, 58, 59; in
6, 7; thought and extension, 98, 115; philosophy, 59 n. 3; in relation to the
union of conceptual and pictorial Uniformity of Nature, 87
thought in perception, 123; use of Exposition, different in mode from dis¬
dialogue technique, 111; on writing, covery, 46-8
Extension, term broadened to include
45
Descriptive work, 8, 9, 34 time, 100; and thought, as primary
De Veritate (Lord Herbert of Cherbury), antithesis, 115; as an attribute of the
72, 74, 85, 86 Whole, 84, 98, 99
Dialectic, 109 et seq.; M. J. Adler, on its
inconclusiveness, 113 n. 1; Hegelian, Factual knowledge, additions to, 12 et
47, 48, 107, 109-11 seq., 17; for solving a problem, 3, 4
Dialogue form in philosophy and science, ‘Fine structure’, 9
hi, 112; its impress on Greek ‘Frugality’ in thinking, principle of, 88
philosophic prose, 112
Diderot, D., on senses and reflective Galton, F., use of analogy in the study of
thinking, 124 heredity, 40, 41
Digby, Sir K., on associative meaning, Gauss, K. F., on reaching results by
54; on the difference between speech intuition, 47
and writing, 53 Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, £., polemic
Ding-an-sich (JVownenon), 72 with Cuvier, 104
Discovery, 17-21, 25; emotional ele¬ ‘Germinal’ words, 121
ment, 20, 21 Gestalt conception of the flower, 122
Discursive thought, 46, 74, 75,111,122; Gibbon, E., choice of a theme, 11
defined, 29 n. 3; fusion with emotion, Goethe, J. W. von, Anschauung, 122; on
20, 21 comparative aspect of morphology,
Donne, J., on unity due to brain and 34; on polarity, 97; urge towards
nervous system, 124 Oneness, 106
Dormer, K. J., on geometric necessity Greek biology, stress on comparison
in arrangement of parts in flower- between animals and plants, 41, 42
bud, 108 Greek philosophic prose showing im¬
Dramatic form of discussion, 111 press of dialogue form, 112
Dualism, 96; Descartes’s, 90, 91, 98, 99; Grew, N., on plant-animal analogy, 42;
and monism, 97 use of term ‘ comparative anatomy ’, 34
Duns Scotus, 88
Haller, A. von, on linear sequence in
Eckhart, J., on motive of work, 16; on thought, 46
seeing with the mind, 116 Hamilton, Sir W., “law of parsimony ”,
‘Economy’ in thinking, principle of, 88 88
Eighteenth century as “Age of Con¬ Harvey, W., Aristotelian influence on
versation”, 112 the discovery of the circulation of the
Einstein, A., on rationality of the world blood, 39, and on the theory of
of existence, 84, 85 embryonic development, 101
 INDEX

Hegel, G. W. F., the Absolute, 48, 107, Johnson, S., failure to find an adequate
no; conception of reason, 123; theme, 11; on the recording of
dialectic, 47, 48, 107, 109-n; on observations on the spot, 51
Richtigkeit and Wahrheit, 70, 71
Heraclitus (Herakleitos), on Nature, 12; Kant, I., anticipating Hegel’s dialectic,
on Unity based on conflict, 106 109; on attributing regularity to
Herbert, E. (Lord Herbert of Cher- Nature, 85; awakening from ‘dog¬
bury) (De Veritate), denial of anti¬ matic slumber’, 78; on causality, 87;
thesis of Man and Nature, 85, 86; on conception of truth, 66; criticism of
truth, 72, 74 Plato, 118, 119; on criticizing basic
Hercules and Omphale, Coleridge on, 1 o principles, 78; on logic, 22; on
Herschel, J. F. W., on simplicity as an Phenomenon and Noumenon, 72; on the
index of truth, 89 pleasure of research giving it the
Hildegard of Bingen, on microcosm and appearance of duty, 1 o; on senses and
macrocosm, 38, 39 understanding, 124; schemata, 123
Hippocratean theory of preformation, Kepler, J., on microcosm and macro¬
101 cosm, 39
Hobbes, T. (Leviathan), on error and
meaninglessness, 72; method of Lamarck, Chevalier de (J. B. P. A. de
writing, 50, 51; on truth in language, Monet), views on evolution, 42
67 Language in biology, dangers of over¬
Hume, D., on causality, 87; Dialogues simplification, 56, 57; phases in, 54,
concerning Natural Religion, 91, 112; on 55; poor writing and ease of trans¬
the universe and man’s mind, 91 lation, 55, 56; special terminology,
Hypotheses, 17-22, 27-31; basic as¬ 54> 55; stress on brevity, 57, 58
sumptions as hypotheses, 86-8; bio¬ Lavoisier, A. L., as a thinker rather than
logical, and artistic interpretations, an experimenter, 14, 15
29; Boyle on, 28; discarded, 30; modes “ Law of parsimony”, 88
of assessment, 29; Newton on, 29; Laws and theories, 29, 30
Poincare on their mode of origin, Laws of thought (Identity, Contradic¬
18-20; unprovable, 31, 86 tion, Excluded Middle, Sufficient
Reason, Ground and Consequent),
Illative Sense (Newman), 74 82; criticism of Laws of Contradic¬
Illustration in black and white, im¬ tion and Excluded Middle, 110
poverishment from original, 56, 119; Leaf, comparison of foliage-leaf and
symbolic, 117 carpel, 35, 36; length of stalk cor¬
Imagery, pictorial, 122, 123 related with abbreviated axis, 95;
Images, nature of mental, 116 partial-shoot theory, 81, 108, 109;
Imaginative reason (W. Pater), 123 peltate leaves with radial anatomy of
‘Immattered form’ (Aristotle), 125 stalk, 25-8; restriction of meaning of
Induction, 25, 26, 27, 32, 83, 84, 94, ‘leaf’ in botanical terminology, 54;
124; and probability, 26, 28 spatial relation of rudiments at
Infinite Universe and Worlds, On the shoot-apex, 95
(G. Bruno) 111 Least action, principle of, 88 n. 3
Intelligibility of the universe, 81 et seq. Leibniz, G. W., intellectual develop¬
ment, 15; on microcosm and macro¬
Japanese artists, difference from West¬ cosm, 39; on mind and body, 100;
ern standpoint, 68, 120 on Unity of Universe, 83
Jeffreys, Sir H., on simplicity postulate, Leviathan (T. Hobbes), 50, 51
89 Linear sequence in reasoning, speech,
Jevons, W. S., on analogy, 33 and writing, 22, 23, 45, 46, 111
Joachim, H. H. on ‘correspondence’ Locke, J., on ‘ primary ’ and * secondary ’
and ‘coherence’ theories of truth, 70 qualities of bodies, 119, 120; on the
John of Salisbury on logic, 31 work of the “Under-Labourer”, 10
142
 INDEX

Logic and the biologist, 22-31; defini¬ Newman, J. H.,on the Illative Sense, 74
tions, 22, 23 Newton, Sir I., decision against simpli¬
fying results, 56, 57; geometrical
Mackenzie, J. S., on logic, 22 method, 47; on ‘hooked atoms’, 20;
Macrocosm and microcosm, 36-40, 90 on induction, 25, 26; not “feigning
Makranthropos, 37 Hypotheses ”, 29; on simplicity postu¬
Malpighi, M., on plant-animal analogy, late, 89; Sir D’Arcy Thompson on
42 Newton and the apple, 34; on
Many and the One, the, 86, 103-7, 1J5 Uniformity of Nature, 83
Mechanism, and teleology, 73, 95, 96; Nicolas-of Cusa, no
and vitalism, 100-2 Norris, J., ofBemerton, 113, 114
Mechanistic theory of the organic Noumenon and Phenomenon, resolution of
world, 43 antithesis, 72
Megenberg, Konrad von (Book of
Nature), 38, 39 Object and Subject, history of change of
Mencius on subjective truth, 67, 68 meaning of these terms, 94 n. 2
Mendel, J. G., in relation to F. Galton, 40 Occam (Oakham), William of, 88
Metaphysics, scope of, 125, 126 ‘Occam’s razor’, 88
Meyer, A., on microcosm and macro¬ Omphaleand Hercules, Coleridge on, 10
cosm, 36, 37 One and the Many, the, 86, 103-7, 115
Microcosm and macrocosm, 36-40, 90 “One in the Manifold”, the, 107
Microtome technique, 13, 67 ‘ Ore-like ’ words, 121
Mill, J. S., Method of Agreement and Organism and environment, 103
Method of Difference, 27; mode of Organismal theories, synthesizing
opposing wrong opinions, 114; reduc¬ mechanism and vitalism, 100, 101
tion of assumptions to a minimum, 80; Output of a biologist as an integrated
Uniformity of Nature and induction, whole, 15, 16
83, 84 Owen, R., motto on signet ring, 107
Milton, J., choice of a theme, 11; on
discursive thought and intuition, Palaeontology, imperfect evidence, 12,
29 n. 3; on “saving appearances”, 24 13
Mind, disciplined by the eye, 119; use of Parmenides (Plato), analysis of the con¬
the term to include sensuous ele¬ cept of the One, 103
ments, 85, 98, 123, et passim ‘ Parsimony, Law of’, 88
Mind-body individual as unity in Partial-shoot theory of the leaf, 81, 108,
multiplicity, 99 109
Monet, J. B. P. A. de, see Lamarck, Pater, W., on imaginative reason, 123
Chevalier de Peltate leaves, radial anatomy of
Monism, as basis of Spinoza’s philosophy, petioles, 25, 26, 27, 28
84; and dualism, 96, 97; and science Perception, and preparedness, 117; as
(W. P. D, Wightman) 104 n. 4 union of conceptual and pictorial
Mono- or polyphylesis, 79 thinking, 123
Morphology linking mechanistic science ‘ Perceptual judgment ’, 123
and the arts, 125 Phenomenon and Noumenon, resolution of
antithesis, 72
Natural philosophy, 71, 76, 125, 126 Philosophy, natural, 71, 76, 125, 126
Natural science, scope of, 125 ‘Picture thinking’, 41, 122, 123
Natural Selection, and adaptation, 24; Plato, on chaos and cosmos, 81, 82;
theory of, originating in an im¬ conceptual thinking, 125; on dis¬
perfect analogy, 42, 43 course as an organism, 49; on first
Negation, way of, 11 principles, 77; ‘forms’, 101, 1^3;
Nervous system (including brain) or¬ images and realities, 122; Kant’s
ganizing multifariousness into unity, criticism, 118, 119; on the ‘ likely ’, 33;
105, 123, 124 on microcosm and macrocosm, 37,38;

143
 INDEX

Plato, cont. Renan, E., on refraining from con¬

on the concept of the One, 103; on clusions, 113; on style, 52
resemblances, 35; on seeing through ‘Representational’ and ‘abstract’ art,
the eyes, 116; on system-making, 116
69 Reproductive and vegetative phases in
Platonic dialogue, 111, 112; period, plants, 102
relation of theory and fact, 24, 25; Research in science as an attempt to test
tradition that the Whole precedes the the hypothesis of the Uniformity of
Parts, 106, 107 Nature, 86, 92
Plotinus, the artist and reasoning, 29; Reynolds, Sir J., on invention, 19; on
mystical conclusion of intellectual the mind and nature, 91; on the
effort, 75; relation of man and the thought-factor in painting, 14
universe, 91; truth, 74 Richtigkeit and Wahrheit, 70, 71
Poincare, H., on discovery, 18-20 Root, restriction of meaning in botanical
Polemical controversy, 113, 114 terminology, 54
Poly- or monophylesis, 79 Russell, E. S., on epigenesis and pre¬
ttoO orco (Archimedes), 77 formation and their synthesis, 101,
Power, H., on the early revelations of 102; on form and function, 93; on
the microscope, 13 instinctive behaviour and bodily
Preformation and epigenesis, 92, 101, development, 93; on organismal
102; compared with two modes of theories, 1 o 1; on self-maintenance,
logical inference, ior, 102 101 n. 2
Pre-Socratics, 12, 13, 103, 119
‘Primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities of Sachs, J. von, on the value of drawing
bodies, J. Locke on, 119, 120 to the botanist, 121
Principle of least action, 88 n. 3 St Thomas Aquinas, see Aquinas, St
Probability, 26, 27, 28, 31, 33, 89 Thomas
Problems in biology, 3-16; choice, 10, Sampling, inference from, 32
11; frame of reference, 14, 15; phases Scale of problem as a factor in research,
in solution, 3-6; scale, 10, 11; serial 10, 11
character, 15, 16 Sceptical Chymist, The (the Hon. R.
* Proof’ in biology, 31 Boyle), 28, hi, 112
Psychology, history of, 7 Science in the narrower sense, as a
Ptolemy and the Ptolemaic system, 31 shareable process, 25; as an inductive
Punctuation in scientific writing, 53 process, 124
Pythagorean school foreshadowing Seed, restriction of meaning in botanical
theory of microcosm and macro¬ terminology, 54
cosm, 37, 90 Seeing with the mind, 115 et seq.
Selection, Natural, and adaptation, 24;
Quaestiones Naturales (Seneca), on micro¬ theory originating in an imperfect
cosm and macrocosm, 38 analogy, 42, 43
Queen-Anne’s-Lace, 117 Self-maintenance, urge to, 101, 102
Quotation, drawbacks of excessive, 51 Seneca (Quaestiones Naturales) on micro¬
cosm and macrocosm, 38
Radial anatomy of petioles in peltate Senescence, racial and individual, 42
leaves, 25-8 Sense perception, and mental activity,
Radiai and dorsiventral outgrowths 123; and preparedness, 117
from shoots, 27 Senses, as cause of diversity, 103; and
Raphael (Paradise Lost) to Adam, on dis¬ reflective thinking (Diderot), 124;
cursive thought and intuition, 29 n. 3; and understanding (Kant), 124; un¬
on “saving appearances’, 24 dervalued by Bruno, 118, and by
Rationality of the universe, 81 et seq. Coleridge, 119
Recording observations on the spot, 51 Sensibilite esthetique in mathematical dis¬
Religio Medici (Sir T. Browne), 39, 40 covery, 19, 20
!44
 INDEX

Shakespeare, W., dramatic technique, Technique, advantages and dangers in

hi; on discursive thought, 29 n. 3; its advance, 13, 14, 15
on resemblances, 35 Teleology and mechanism, 73, 95, 96
Shelley, P. B., 111 Theaetetus (Plato), 116
‘Simple’ and ‘compound’ flowers, Theophrastus, 68
analogy between, 43 Theories and laws, 29, 30
Simplicity postulate, 88 et seq.\ as an Thesis, antithesis, synthesis (Hegel), 109,
instrument of method, 89, 90 110
Singer, C., on difference of process of Thing-in-itself (Noumenon), 72
discovery and demonstration, 46 n. 4; Thompson, Sir D’Arcy W., on Newton
on separation of human and animal and the apple, 34
anatomy, 34; on uniformity of nature, Thought, discursive, 29 n. 3,46, 75, 111,
84; on unresolved antitheses, 96 122; fusion with emotion, 20, 21, 75
Singleness-in-complexity, 106 Thought and Extension, see Extension
Size of books, factors determining it, 58 Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature
Socrates, 106, 112 (Diderot), 124
Socrates (Plato’s), on discourse as an Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philo-
organism, 49; on first principles, 77; nous) (G. Berkeley), 112
on images, 122; on seeing through the Timaeus (Plato), 37, 38, 40, 68, 69
eyes, 116 Troll, W., comparative method, 34; on
Socratic dialectic, 109 the Gestalt theory of the flower, 122;
Solomon, 28 and renaissance of botanical morpho¬
Sophist (Plato), on resemblances, 35 logy in Germany, 12 2; on ‘ simple ’ and
Spigelius (Spieghel), A., separation of ‘ compound ’ flowers, 43
human and animal anatomy, 34 Tropaeolum, peltate leaves, 25
Spinoza, B. de, attributes of the Whole, Truth in biology, 65-75 5 absolute, 73-5;
84, 97-95 bodY and ^nd, 98, 99; ‘coherence’ theory, 29, 70 et seq.\
conatus, 101; conception of truth ‘copy’ or ‘correspondence’ theory,
(Short Treatise) 65,66,69, (DeIntellectus 66, 67, 71, 116; as organic develop¬
Emendatione) 70, (Ethices) 73, 74; as ment, 69; see also under Blake, W.,
conciliator, 99 n. 1; correspondence, Herbert, E. (Lord Herbert of Cher-
112; definition of pleasure, 21; exten¬ bury), Joachim, H. H., Plotinus,
sion and thought, 84, 97-9; geo¬ Spinoza
metrical method, 47; idea of cause Two-level theories, 108, 109
discussed by Sir F. Pollock, 83 n. 1;
intuitive insight, 75; monism, 84; on Uniformity or Unity of Nature, 9, 70, 82
the nature of error, 72; on subject and et seq., 103, 107; as an hypothesis, 86;
object, 94; on uniformity of nature, unprovable inductively or deduc¬
84, 85, 86 tively, 86
Stace, W. T., on uniformity of nature, Unity, based on conflict, 105, 106; bi¬
84 polar, 97; development of the concept
Sterne, L., representing the non-linear in man’s mind, 105; intellectual
behaviour of the mind, 46 source, 103; and multiplicity, 99
Style in scientific literature, 52 Unity-in-plurality, 106
Subject and object, history of change of ‘ Universals’, 33
meaning of these terms, 94 n. 2 Universe, rational or irrational, 81,
Symmetry, 117, 118 82
Synthesis, see Thesis “Unive*rse of discourse” (Adler), 45
System-making, dangers of, 69 ‘Universes’ of ideas (de Morgan), 108
Systole and diastole in research (G.
Eliot), 97 Vasari, G., on buildings as organic, 50
Vegetative and reproductive phases in
Tarshish, 28 plants, 102
Team work in biology, 6 Vesalius, A., 5, 34

145
 INDEX

Vicq d’Azyr’s use of term ‘comparative Wightman, W. P. D., on science and

anatomy’, 34 mbnism, 104 n. 4
Visual arts and the biologist, 121; see William of Occam (Oakham), 88
also Artists Willis, T., use of term ‘comparative
Visual aspect of biology, 5,20, 115^ seq. anatomy’, 34
Visual thought, 98, 125 Wolf, A., on Spinoza as conciliator,
Vitalism and mechanism, 100, 101, 102 99 n. 1
Woodger, J. H., on antitheses, 103 n. 1
Wahrheit and Richtigkeit, 70, 71 Wo'rds, ‘germinal’ or ‘ore-like’, 121
Wardlaw, G. W., on dorsiventral sym¬ Writing, biological, 45-59
metry of leaves, 108
Wholeness or Unity, development of Zeitgeist, 7, 8
concept in man’s mind, 105 Zen Buddhism, stages in initiation, 55
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pocket.
Agnes Arber achieved international renown as a plant morphologist
who was able, especially in her later writings, to interpret biological
science as a product of the history of ideas in general.
Arber's international reputation, which in particular extends to North
America, is due in part to her exceptional ability to interpret the
German tradition of scholarship to the English-speaking world. The
Mind and the Eye is an erudite book, revealing its author's familiarity
with philosophy from Plato and Aristotle through Aquinas to Kant and
Hegel; but it is not dull, because the quiet enthusiasm of the author
shines through.
In this book she turns from the work of a specialist in one science to
those wider questions which any scientist must ask at intervals. How
are things known - and what, in any case, is meant by 'known'? Do the
scientist's presuppositions unconsciously form his findings? What are
the aims of science? How does language affect the processes of
thought it is supposed to recount? How does method affect results?
What, in short, is the relationship between the eye that sees and the
mind that weights and pronounces?
An important feature of this Cambridge Science Classics reissue is the
introduction provided by Professor P. R. Bell who as a Cambridge
botany student at the time that Agnes Arber was writing The Natural
Philosophy of Plant Form, is uniquely able to set The Mind and the Eye
in the context of contemporary biological research.

'This book is an example of scientific criticism worthy to stand beside the best
literary criticism of our time.' Eric Ashby in Nature
'A scholarly and yet thoroughly delightful book on biological methods and
philosophy.' Main Currents in Modern Thought

GO 0585