460 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



forms of social insects with stable colonies, or in the analogous human 

 history, has demanded centuries of time. 



As we review these different kinds of individuals — the one-celled 

 animal, the many-celled creature and the community — we see that each 

 one must obey certain rules of nature. It must preserve itself, it must 

 perpetuate its kind, and, if it be a member of a higher community, it 

 must act in the interests of others and of the whole group. Do we 

 not find, then, biological definitions of right, and evil, and duty to 

 others as well as to self? Do we not see why altruism has grown out 

 of egoism as communities have evolved at the behest of nature? 



But still, facts like these are purely zoological facts. To be well 

 within his rights, the zoologist should perhaps only suggest their useful- 

 ness for the analysis of human social relations and obligations. It is 

 for the sociologist and the student of comparative ethics to employ and 

 apply them according to the principles of the genetic method, should 

 they see fit to do so. 



In closing, may I say a few words regarding the attitude of the 

 zoologist toward his problems and his results. He may maintain this 

 attitude because of a certain temperament which leads him and his 

 fellows to enter the field of science as investigators. While this may 

 be true, it is also true, I believe, that the subjects of their study, the 

 principles they may discern in nature's order, and their methods of 

 analysis have a profound reflex effect upon not only the contents of 

 their minds but upon their mental machinery as well. The zoologist, 

 like his fellow men of science, learns early that he must adopt an 

 impersonal attitude, for emotion and purely human interest are dis- 

 turbing elements that prevent him from attaining the purpose of the 

 investigator — which is, to ascertain and verify facts, to classify them 

 logically, so as to derive from them the summaries which like so much 

 " conceptual short-hand " are available for others as well as himself. 

 Science is " organized knowledge," as Pearson defines it ; " organized 

 common sense " in Huxley's phrase ; and like other men of science the 

 zoologist learns to view his great common-sensible principles like the 

 doctrine of descent, not as absolute eternal verities, but only as sum- 

 maries up to date, as working programs, to employ Professor Wilson's 

 concise phrase. This may be pragmatism ; it is certainly science. 



But surely this does not mean that principles like the one mentioned 

 are so many gratuitous assumptions. Like the principle of gravitation 

 and the law of the conservation of energy, zoological laws have the 

 strength and approximate finality of all the wide range of facts that 

 they summarize. And these are many — a vast store of detail and gen- 

 eralization accumulated during decades and centuries by those who 

 have sought upon the mountains or in the abysses of the seas for new 

 knowledge, but countless students who have spent their lives in the field 



