METAMORPHOSES OF SCEPTICISM 



physicist, Max Planck): "Not the possession of truth, but the effort 

 in struggHng to attain it, brings joy to the searcher." 



The In^i'^^duaRst Fallacy, 



All the worst deficiencies of SB and GA, as I now see it, were due 

 to thinking, of man solely as an individual, with various different 

 facets, or winSows, out of which, as in some observatory or conning- 

 tower, he could look. Immediately one begins to consider man under 

 his social aspect, the germs of a unified world-view appear.^ As I 

 have said, the position of ethics was, for this very reason, always 

 obscure to me. Ethics are the rules whereby man may live in social 

 harmony; Confucius discussed li |S and Jen ^ and i ^ in this 

 sense and without any supernaturalism thousands of year ago. They 

 are being discussed to-day in the same spirit.^ Such rules perhaps 

 correspond to the valency bonds and other forces which hold particles 

 together at the molecular and sub-molecular levels. Politics is only 

 practical mass ethics, some men seeking to perpetuate private posses- 

 sion of the goods of life, others seeking to distribute them as widely 

 as may be; some men seeking for reasons why nothing should ever 

 change, others seeking for true knowledge of the nature of man and 

 how the natural needs can be satisfied. Hence for civilised man, in 

 whom the numinous, the sense of the holy, is irrevocably attached 

 to ethical ideas, religion too becomes a bond playing its part in the 

 coherence of high social organisation. V/hen Society itself has been 

 sanctified by the full incorporation in it of the principles of justice, 

 love and comradeship, religion is destined to pass without loss into 

 social emotion as such. When oppression has been removed, religion 

 as the cry of the oppressed creature will cease to exist, but the sense 

 of the holy, one of man's most fundamental forms of experience, will 

 never disappear. We can already see a similar transformation taking 

 place in poetry, where the most moving implications can be conveyed 



^ Long before, Feuerbach had passed through precisely the same intellectual process 

 {Works, pp. 343, 344). And cf. Bukharin's words, which I read long afterwards, "The 

 philosophical 'subject' is not an isolated human atom, but 'social' man." (Marx Memorial 

 Volume, Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 1933, Eng. tr. Marxism and Modern Thought, 

 London, 1936, p. 13.) But there is no need to go so far afield; no one appreciated these 

 things better than the great English psychologist, Henry Maudsley (cf. his Body and 

 Will, London, 1883, pp. 44 and 157). 



^ See the discussion which followed a paper of C. H. Waddington's in Nature, 1941, 

 148, p. 270 ff. with contributions by E. \V. Barnes, W. R. Matthews, W. G. de Burgh, 

 A. D. Ritchie, Julian Huxley and others; see also Proc. Aristot. Soc. 1942, and Science 

 and Ethics (Allen & Unwin, London, 1942). 



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