A biologist's view of \^TFiITEHEAD's PHILOSOPHY 



alternative tradition that the entities which are the ultimate actual 

 things, are in some sense procedures of organisation. . . . Kant 

 reflected the two traditions, one upon the other. Kant was a scientist, 

 but the schools deriving from him have had but slight effect on the 

 mentality of the scientific world. It should be the task of the philo- 

 sophical schools of this century to bring together the two streams 

 into an expression of the world-picture derived from science, and 

 thereby end the divorce of science from the affirmation of our aesthetic 

 and ethical experiences." This, then, can only be done by recognising 

 them for what they are, manifestations of the highest organisational 

 levels, sublime indeed, but connected as surely with all the lower 

 levels as the physical hands of a man playing a violin in an orchestra 

 are with the claws of a crab.^ 



Such a connection involves what we have already had occasion to 

 mention, the problem of the origin of mentality in evolution. There 

 seems to be a bifurcation^ here. As we ascend the organisational levels 

 we seem to be led off in two separate directions, one the ascending 

 series of social groups through animal associations to human com- 

 munity, the other the ascending series of stages of mental development. 

 Perhaps it is not erroneous to regard the sociological and the psycho- 

 logical series as different aspects of one and the same set of high 

 organisational levels. Only where the brain and central nervous 

 system reaches its heights as in the prim.ates does social organisation 

 really develop, or conversely only where complexity is sufficient to 

 allow of social life, intelligible communication and co-operative 

 effort, does the mental life and its physical basis attain a high 

 status. 



The problem of "mind and matter" has always been the skeleton 

 in biology's cupboard. Though generally abandoned to the philo- 

 sophers, biologists never felt any satisfaction at the way in which 

 their colleagues were dealing with it. When some trv^enty years ago 

 the present writer constructed a chart to show the historical develop- 

 ment of biochemistry and physiology since the fifteenth century, he 

 built it around the mind-body problem. Later for a long time he 

 thought that this had been a mistake, but perhaps it was really a 

 correct and useful plan, though now it would require considerable 

 revision. Physiology has had a curious history in this respect. Though 

 the word was first used in its present sense by John Femel in the 



^ Cf. Engels, Dialectics of Nature (Gesamtausgabe edn., Moscow, 1935), p. 695. 

 ^ I use the word not in its technical Whiteheadian sense. 



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