time: the refreshing river 



that philosophers are not to be expected to descend into the arena of 

 political struggles has no force. Philosophers themselves have said 

 that the world would not be well until philosophers became kings. 

 To-day kingship lies open to whoever cares to take it. It is said that 

 Stalin was once asked when and where did Lenin expound dialectical 

 materialism.'^ He answered, "When and where did he not expound 

 it.'^" — a curiously Confucian reply. 



^''The Rival Errors recognise their Loves T 



But if the cobbler must stick to his last, the general upshot of this 

 contribution is the great debt which biologists owe to A. N. White- 

 head as the greatest living philosopher of organism. The epigram of 

 old John Scott Haldane, neo-vitalist though he was, is coming true: 

 "If physics and biology one day meet, and one of the two is swallowed 

 up, that one will not be biology." In justice we should add that 

 though it might perhaps be classical physics, it will not be physics 

 itself, either; the two disciplines constituting indeed a Hegelian- 

 Marxist contradiction of which the philosophy of organism is the 

 synthesis. In conclusion it may be of interest to give two examples, 

 from the author's own field, of the way in which the newer attitude 

 is changing previous conceptions. 



The question of the reducibility or irreducibility of biological facts 

 to physico-chemical facts has already arisen several times above. 

 Once tlie idea of a series of organic levels is reached, what we have 

 to do is to seek to elucidate the regularities which occur at each of 

 these levels without attempting either to force the higher or (an- 

 atomically) coarser processes into the framework of the lower or finer 

 processes, or conversely to explain the lower by the higher. From 

 this viewpoint the regularities discovered by experimental morphology 

 will always have their validity; they cannot be afifected by anything 

 which either biochemistry or psychology may in the future discover. 

 The behaviour, for instance, of an embryonic eye-cup isolated into 

 saline solution — its capacity for self-differentiation, fusion with another 

 eye-cup, lens-induction, regulation, etc. will always remain the same 

 however our knowledge of biochemistry or biophysics may advance. 

 This is the reason why prediction is possible at levels which, strictly 

 speaking, we do not "understand" at all, for example, genetics. 

 But though the biological regularities, once well and truly established, 

 may remain for ever irrefragable, they will, considered alone, remain 

 for ever meaningless. Meaning can only be introduced into our 



204 



