time: the refreshing river 



to be **ascetic" or "misanthropic" in picturing its grey world of 

 clashing particles. Idealism, on the other hand, always verging on 

 subjectivism and solipsism, could never be united with the require- 

 ments of the scientific mind or with progressive social movements. 

 The difficulty had occurred long before to the scientific philosophers 

 of the ancient Mediterranean world, to Epicurus and Lucretius, who 

 introduced the famous "swerve" or clinamen of their atoms in order 

 to save the possibility of free will and other complex phenomena of 

 human life and society. This device was rather a transparent one, and 

 indeed no true synthetic way out of the difficulty was available until 

 the fact of cosmic, biological and sociological evolution came to be 

 appreciated by mankind. Room could then be found for the under- 

 standing of all the highest phenomena of human life as the character- 

 istic properties of the highest levels of organisation in the known 

 universe, without at the same time having to give up materialist 

 philosophy, i.e. the conviction that, though there may be a certain 

 distortion in the process, external nature does exist independently of 

 our observation and that we do receive a substantially true picture 

 of it as we investigate it. It did, moreover, exist for many aeons 

 without the contemplation of any observing spirits such as our own. 

 Their appearance was part of the formation of ever higher levels of 

 organisation and complexity. 



These new levels were to some extent recognised by Haldane 

 himself. Thus later on he wrote, "Vitalist biologists assumed un- 

 justifiably that in a living organism something interferes from outside 

 with physical processes. For the newer biology there is no interference 

 from outside, but the integration characteristic of life is inherent in 

 the events perceived, and they cannot be described apart from it." 

 Indeed, Haldane's great service to biological theory was the way in 

 which he persistendy called attention to the special form of organisa- 

 tion existing in living things. On the other hand, his great failure 

 consisted in his defeatist wish to accept this principle of organisation 

 as axiomatic, instead of tracing its relation to the lower principles 

 of organisation seen in para-crystals, colloids, and similar states of 

 matter. 



Again, for materialists, Haldane wrote, "religion is necessarily no 

 more than an illusion based on ignorance." For me this was frankly 

 incomprehensible. His conception of religion must have been very 

 rationalistic, some kind of theistic explanation of the universe. For 

 me, on the contrary, ever since I first read Rudolf Otto's fundamental 



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