time: the refreshing river 



the existence of levels of organisation^ in the universe, successive forms 

 of order in a scale of complexity and organisation.^ This is a theme 

 which that great man whose name we have in mind to-day, Herbert 

 Spencer, the "synthetic philosopher," would at least have appreciated.^ 

 To-day it is no longer necessary, as it was in his time, to devote any 

 effort to convincing people of the existence of evolutionary develop- 

 ment in the world's history.* The cosmological changes which 

 eventually produced a number of worlds, probably rather small 

 among the galaxies, suitable for the existence of massed and complicated 

 carbon compounds in the colloidal state, have become a commonplace 

 background of our thought. So also the conception of biological 

 evolution, in the course of which the many-celled animals and the 

 plants arose from single-celled organisms probably somewhat re- 

 sembling the autotrophic bacteria of to-day. A sharp change in 

 organisational level often means that what were wholes on the lower 

 level become parts on the new, e.g. protein crystals in cells, cells in 

 metazoan organisms, and metazoan organisms in social units. Lastly, 

 the anthropologists and ethnologists have familiarised all of us with 

 the idea of evolutionary development in sociology, where we see the 

 gradual development of human communities from the earliest begin- 

 nings of social relationships to the conception of the co-operative 

 commonwealth now dawning upon the world. 



But this great sweep of vision needs further elucidation. First, if 

 we look carefully at the steps between the successive levels of organisa- 



^ I am not quite sure where the term "levels" was first used in this way, perhaps in 

 S. Alexander's Space, Time and Deity (London, 1927, vol. ii, p. 52; ist edn., 1920). 

 This led to an interesting discussion among American authors (H. C. Brown, Journ. 

 Philos., 1926,23, 113; G. P. Conger, Journ. Philos., 1925,22, 309) which I did not know 

 about when this lecture was first written and printed. Nor did I know of the valuable 

 book of the veteran American biologist, E. G. Conklin, The Direction of Human 

 Evolution (New York, 1921), and that of the Manchester anatomist, F. Wood-Jones, 

 Design and Purpose (London, 1942), which, broadly speaking, urge the same general 

 viewpoint as that of the present book, 



^ Something approaching a definition of organisation will be given later, see p. 258. 



^ References to Herbert Spencer's own writings will be found in the footnotes as 

 follows : 



FP, First Principles (6th edn., London, 1900). 

 PB, Principles of Biology (London, 1898). 

 PS, Principles of Sociology (London, 1876). 

 A, Autobiography (London, 1904). 



* Though it must be remembered that Roman Catholic writers are still fighting a 

 rearguard action against if, and the devout engineer, R. O. Kapp, has attempted to 

 reintroduce special creation under new terminology in his Science versus Materialism 

 (London, 1940). 



234 



