A biologist's view of whitehead's philosophy 



nervous system becomes more complex so mental phenomena emerge, 

 until the elaborate psychological life of man is attained. There is a 

 sense in which minds include and envelop bodies, for the boundaries 

 of thought are far wider than those of what the special senses can 

 record, and minds interpenetrate as bodies cannot^ (see on, where 

 Whitehead's concept of the focal region is described). The remarkable 

 thing about our world is, however, that these envelopes seem each 

 to be analogous to past phases in the history of its development. 

 There were "inorganic" molecules before there were living cells, the 

 origin of which evidendy depended upon the right environmental 

 conditions for the flowering of the potentialities of the protein system, 

 there were living cells before there were organs or tissues of metazoan 

 organisms, there were primitive organisms before there were any 

 higher ones, and higher organisms before there were any social 

 associations. The fundamental thread that seems to run through the 

 history of our world is a continuous rise in level of organisation. Whether 

 this organisation is the same as that to which physicists refer in their 

 discussion of the shuffling process which underlies the second law of 

 thermodynamics, and whether its rise in the domain of living organ- 

 isms has entailed some corresponding loss of organisation somewhere 

 else, are matters which we cannot stop to deal with here. 



The basically important fact that social evolution must be regarded 

 as continuous with biological evolution was appreciated already by 

 Herbert Spencer, who in this respect, though not of course in others, 

 made an approach to the organic conception of the world. It has the 

 extremely important corollary that any static or too conservative 

 view of the present position of human institutions becomes impossible. ' 

 If living organisation has such triumphs behind it as the first invention 

 of the cell-membrane, the kidney-tubule, the notochord, the flint- 

 knife and the plough, the art of language and the skill of ships, it is 

 not likely that the agreements of Ottawa or Munich have any durable 

 importance, or that human society will always remain separated into 

 states with national sovereignties above the moral law, and social 

 classes with different privileges and manners. This has generally been 

 appreciated by upholders of the organic view of the world, but much 

 more boldly by Marx and Engels, for instance, than by Smuts, Lloyd- 

 Morgan, or Sellars.2 



1 Though some of them sometimes long to. 



2 Smuts, J. C, Holism and Evolution (London, 1926); Lloyd-Morgan, C. (Gifford 

 Lectures, ist Series, Emergent Evolution, London, 1923, 2nd series, Life, Mind and 

 Spirit, London, 1926); Sellars, R. W., Evolutionary Naturalism (Chicago, 1922). 



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