428 The Inward Urge to Change 



teristic types and degrees of integration and differentiation, 

 until we come to the highest orders of intelligence in man and 

 his nearest relatives. 



Emergent Evolution 



The doctrine of emergent evolution has become dis- 

 seminated in recent times largely through the teachings of 

 C. Lloyd Morgan, a disciple of Huxley's, who laid the founda- 

 tions of comparative psychology. Morgan frankly recog- 

 nizes that he is dealing with philosophical problems quite 

 as much as with purely scientific ones. Perhaps his chief 

 contribution lies in clearing much of our specialized termi- 

 nology of its arbitrary and restrictive connotations, and in 

 helping toward a more effective formulation of our problems 

 and issues. 



This theory does not pretend to tell us at present just 

 how each level or order of being comes to emerge from a 

 special aggregate of a lower order. It merely calls attention 

 to the fact that in our daily experience we may observe 

 emergence to take place, and invites us to reconsider our 

 principles and issues in the light of the implications of such 

 facts. Especially valuable is this approach in reconciling 

 contending interpretations, not in the sense of neutralizing 

 them, but in the sense of suggesting new bases of agreement. 

 This is, to be sure, no new thing in the history of thought; 

 it is in this respect essentially a form of transcendentalism. 

 It comes, however, from one who has been thoroughly dis- 

 ciplined in the ** mechanistic " science of the Nineteenth 

 Century and who is fully appreciative of what it has to offer, 

 but who at the same time realizes that where opinions differ 

 it does not follow that one party is right and the other wrong, 

 one who is in full sympathy with the purpose of philo- 

 sophical study. 



From the point of view of emergent evolution it becomes 

 possible to extend the scientific method of research to the 

 more complicated problems of psychology and the social 



