THE NATURALNESS OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD 



join with the next higher and the next lower levels, unless we are at 

 the same time analysing those levels too. About this there is nothing 

 obscurantist, nothing animistic. Organisation is not inscrutable. 

 Organisation and Energy are the two fundamental problems which 

 all science has to solve. 



"It is quite true," writes Drummond,^ "that when we pass from 

 the inorganic to the organic, we come upon a new set of laws. But 

 the reason why the low^er set do not seem to act in the higher sphere 

 is not that they are annihilated but that they are overruled. And the 

 reason why the higher laws are not found operating in the lower is 

 not because they are not continuous downwards, but because there 

 is nothing for them to act upon. It is not law that fails, but oppor- 

 tunity." This overruling of laws characteristic of lower levels, or 

 rather, the application of them in different, more co-ordinated, ways, 

 is a fundamental phenomenon. It constitutes the complete refutation 

 of all fascist philosophers who wish to build human society upon a 

 purely biological basis. Human society must be built upon a socio- 

 logical basis, and even, as Drummond would have said, upon a 

 spiritual basis. 



It is here that we touch upon Drummond's unique contribution to 

 this line of thought, a contribution which perhaps only a christian 

 could have made. Social thinkers such as those who have already 

 been mentioned tended to mould their thought in broad, un-individual 

 terms, dealing with social mechanics and social statistics. But the 

 individual human being is also an entity of a high level of organisation, 

 the psychological. Hence Drummond's insistence on the development 

 of the individual personality. There is a definite affinity between 

 the classless world-state with its ordered production and racial equality, 

 and the Regnum Dei^ the genuine new world order, the christian ideal 

 of comradeship and social justice. But it was Drummond who pointed 

 out that for this noble state, noble individuals would be necessary, 

 guides and leaders towards it no less than operators of it. He even 

 placed the "natural man" over against the "spiritual man" as a different 

 level of organisation. "The spiritual man,"^ he wrote, "is removed 

 from the general family of men so utterly by the possession of an 

 additional characteristic that a biologist, fully informed of the whole 

 circumstances, would not hesitate a moment to classify him else- 

 where. ... It is an old-fashioned theology which divides the world 

 in this way, which speaks of men as living or dead, lost or saved, a 

 1 NLSW, p. 43. 2 NLSW, p. 83. 



33 c 



