PURE SCIENCE AND THE IDEA OF THE HOLY 



legist W. B. Cannon^ has shown how the analogy can be safely and 

 fruitfully handled. 



Not so certain modern writers, however, such as Morley Roberts, 

 whose book Bio-Politics^ is an outstanding example of the fallacy or 

 distortion here discussed. It will long remain a museum of absurdities. 

 Compare "the action of a national press as a powerful secreting organ 

 needs no demonstration" with "in the organisation of the reticulo- 

 endothelial system it is impossible not to see deep social analogues in 

 the police, the seamen and the soldiery of a nation." Or, still better; 

 "All cells with a nucleus possess tools and weapons with which they 

 do their work. These biochemical tools I have no hesitation in de- 

 scribing as their property. I commend these notions to the legal 

 profession if they should be hard pressed to defend the descent and 

 inheritance of property." (Very candid.) Or again; "Capital is a 

 natural phenomenon and cannot be abolished till we abolish physiology 

 and physics. What begins in nature in the egg will continue so long 

 as eggs are laid." (Loud and prolonged applause from the Right. 

 And all this a hundred years after the work of Marx, Veblen, George, 

 Engels and many others on the analysis of property and capital.) 

 Fascist philosophers such as Spann also argue in this way. But the 

 attempt to justify class robbery, oppression, social injustices and war 

 by conferring upon them unimpeachable scientific authority will 

 never succeed. 



A second important case of the distortion of scientific theory for 

 specific political ends is, of course, tliat of Darwinism. The principle 

 of natural selection necessarily implied a struggle for existence among 

 animal species competing for food and reproductive facilities, and also 

 among the individuals in any one species. It is no criticism of this 

 theory to point out, as Engels did, that it was the reflection on to the 

 animal world of the competitive conditions prevailing in the economic 

 world of nineteenth-century capitalism. In the animal world it hap- 

 pened to be to a large extent true, and the principle of natural selection 

 is to-day held to account very substantially, if not entirely, for the 

 phenomena of organic evolution. The obvious conclusion was that if 

 competitive capitalism was so like the sub-human world, that was 



^ The Body as a Guide to Politics (London, 1942). He compares the constancy of the 

 physiological internal environment with that social stability in employment and com- 

 modity-exchange, combined with individual freedom, which we have not yet attained. 

 See also Science, 1941, 93, i. 



^ London, 1938. 



