Thoughts of a Young Scientist on the 

 Testament of an Elder One 



(^John Scott Haldane) 



(Based upon an address to the World Congress of Faiths, 

 1936; later expanded for Fact; and Science and Society, 1937) 



All through this century and for some time before it began, the 

 meetings of the Physiological Society were enlivened and adorned 

 by the presence of a peculiar stooping figure, whose bushy eyebrows 

 and moustache hardly concealed a countenance of great charm and 

 originality. It was John Scott Haldane, one of England's best physi- 

 ologists, a tireless investigator of the mechanism of respiration, an 

 acknowledged expert on the conditions of labour in coal-mines, and 

 a philosopher whose permanent place in the history of biological 

 theory was long ago assured. Personal contact with him I had none, 

 but from my earliest undergraduate days I had been nourished on 

 his work, and warned against his errors by those who did not agree 

 with him. Those of us who later made a special study of biological 

 theory had to pass through his books, and, as it were, out at the 

 other side, before reaching a satisfactory viewpoint. In this way, his 

 Mechanism^ Life and Personality^ his Materialism and his Philosophical 

 Basis of Biology were all important books, and like those of Hans 

 Driesch, had to be fully digested before we earned the right to abjure 

 for ourselves the name of vitalist. 



In 1936, in his 77th year, he died. But some time before, he had 

 been invited to take part in a World Congress of Faiths by contributing 

 a paper on science and religion, and this paper he wrote. It was to 

 be his last writing. And it fell to me to open the discussion on this 

 paper at the Congress itself, an undertaking which could not be 

 refused, partly in gratitude for the violent intellectual shocks which 

 I had received for so many years before from J. S. Haldane, partly 

 on account of the stimulating nature of this "testament" itself. If, as 

 will be seen by those who read further, I disagreed profoundly with 

 what he said, this disagreement was to some extent a disagreement of 

 generations, for the generation of to-day cannot accept the formu- 

 lations of the past. Too much has happened since the quiet days of 



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