time: the refreshing river 



"will men see how true it is that to be loyal to all of nature, they 

 must be loyal to that part described as spiritual." If he ever knew of 

 it, he must have approved of the verse ascribed to Thomas Aquinas' 

 contemporary, the Persian Sufi poet Jalal'ud-Din Rumi, who has 

 been called the Thomas a Kempis of Islam; — 



"I died from mineral and plant became 

 Died from the plant and took a sentient frame 

 Died from the beast and donned a human dress 

 When by my dying did I e'er grow less?" 



Though referring to the ancient Aristotelian doctrine of the succession 

 of souls (vegetative, sensitive, and rational) in the scale of nature and 

 the development of individual man, and doubtless written in the 

 interest of the doctrine of immortality, these lines do emphasise the 

 human-ness of human beings. Their society cannot be built on sub- 

 human lines. They must be loyal to what Drummond called "the 

 spiritual." ^ 



Drummond never tires of describing the levels of organisation, 

 atomic, molecular, crystalline, organic, cellular, organismic, biological, 

 social, etc. "The inorganic had to be worked out before the organic, 

 the natural before the spiritual."^ In another passage, he correctly 

 shows the relations between the levels of organisation: "It is of course 

 not to be inferred that the scientific method will ever abolish the 

 radical distinctions of the spiritual world. True science proposes to 

 itself no such general levelling in any department. 'Any attempt to 

 merge the distinctive characteristic of a higher science in a lower, of 

 chemical changes in mechanical, of physiological in chemical, above 

 all, of mental changes in physiological, is a neglect of the radical 

 assumption of all science, because it is an attempt to deduce repre- 

 sentations of one kind of phenomenon from a conception of another 

 kind which does not contain it, and must have it implicitly and 

 illicitly smuggled in before it can be extracted out of it.' "^ This is 

 the meaning of the irreducibility of biology to physics and chemistry. 

 It has nothing to do with vitalism in any form; it simply means that 

 the laws which apply at the level of the organic do not operate at 

 the level of the inorganic. But at the same time it must always be 

 remembered that though we can chart out quite fully the laws existing 

 at a given high organisational level, we can never hope to understand 

 how they fit in to the picture of nature as a whole, i.e. how they 

 1 NLSW, p. 1 8. 2 NLSW, p. 21. 



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