THOUGHTS ON THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN SCOTT HALDANE 



unity; the "mental event" cannot really be separated from the 

 "physical neural event," and it is profitless to try to do so.^ So in the 

 coming into being of the world as a whole, we should envisage a 

 unity, as dialectical materialism in fact does. Out of original chaos a 

 vast flowering of the new has originated, and that is all that can be 

 said. This point of view can be found already in scholasticism, when 

 Duns Scotus asked "whether it was impossible for matter to think .^"^ 

 In the seventeenth century Hobbes maintained that it was impossible 

 to separate matter from matter which thinks. In the eighteenth, we 

 have that celebrated dialogue of Diderot with d'Alembert.^ They 

 discuss the development of the sensibility of the chick embryo in its 

 egg.^ Diderot maintains that one must either admit some "hidden 

 element" in the egg, penetrating into it in some unknown way at a 

 certain stage of its development, an element about which we know 

 nothing, v/hether it occupies space, whether it is material, or whether 

 it is created independently for each chick (an idea contrary to com- 

 mon sense and leading to inconsistencies and absurdities) — or one 

 must make a "simple supposition which explains everything, namely, 

 that the faculty of sensation is a general property of matter, a pro- 

 duct of [certain forms of] its organisation." To d'Alembert's 

 objection that such a supposition implies a quality which is essentially 

 incompatible with matter, Diderot retorts: "And how do you know 

 that the faculty of sensation is essentially incompatible with matter.'^ 

 You do not know the essence of anything, neither of matter nor of 

 sensation." 



Dialectical materialism itself may, in a sense, be considered his- 

 torically as a dialectical synthesis. Classical metaphysical materialism 

 and idealism were the antitheses which gave rise to a deadlock. The 

 former was unable to account for any of the higher manifestations 

 of the human spirit, values, artistic creation, altruism, love. It had 



■^ Cf. Pavlov's famous essay on the fusion of the subjective and the objective. 

 Introspective psychology plus the physiology of conditioned reflexes and other 

 neurological methods promise at last an understanding of the relations between the mental 

 and physical levels of organisation (^Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes, London, Vol. I, 

 p. 39, Vol. II, p. 71). Pavlov had been stimulated by the brilliant insight of a Russian 

 physiologist of an older generation, I. M. Sechenov, whose Cerebral Reflexes appeared 

 in 1863 (see Seclienov's Selected Works, English edition, Moscow, 1935). 



^ Cf. Engels' exposition of this in, Ludwig Feuerbdch, p. 84, 



^ Cf. Lenin's exposition of this in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, p. 104. 



* The "problem" of the entry of the soul into the embryo is of great antiquity; 

 see the account of it in my History of Embryology. For an insight into tlie way in which 

 the development of behaviour in the embryo is treated by modern science, the papers 

 of Kuo Zing- Yang in the psychological and physiological literature should be consulted. 



