224 Nature and Nurture 



But there is more than that. Every vigorous animal 

 that is an agent does in some measure share in its 

 own evolution; and so it has been a fortiori for all 

 men who have been swimmers, not drifters, in the 

 stream. But there is more than that. To modern man 

 there is coming a growing awareness that he can, in 

 ways previously undreamt of, control not only the 

 individual life, but racial evolution as well. 



§10. The Danger of "Biologisms" 



It is convenient to use the term "a materialism" to 

 denote the attempt to give a false simplicity to the 

 activities of living creatures by trying to fit them 

 into the descriptive frameworks of chemistry and 

 physics, thus depreciating the distinctiveness of 

 "life" and "mind." Much progress has been made in 

 the chemistry and physics of organisms, but these do 

 not exhaust what is observed, which requires special 

 biological categories. Thus, to take a single instance, 

 a migrating bird is a "historic being" in a degree far 

 transcending anything that is known in the domain 

 of not-living things. 



Similarly, it is convenient to use the term "a biolo- 

 gism" to denote the attempt to give a false simplicity 

 to the activities of man, by trying to force them into 

 the descriptive framework of zoology. This unduly 

 depreciates man's apartness. 



This tendency may be illustrated, for instance, by 

 too fatalistic theories of heredity. It may be allowed 

 that a man cannot add to the number of his distinctive 

 hereditary talents, yet he can trade with them so that 



