INTEGRATIVE LEVELS 



all its learning, indescribably superficial. All it found to say about the 

 eighteenth-century beliefs in reason and human perfectibility was 

 that in France they "culminated in the delirium of the Terror." More 

 than half a century after the beginnings of agricultural chemistry, 

 and oblivious of modern methods of population control, it could still 

 take seriously the views of Malthus. Neither history nor science, it 

 concluded, give us any warrant for believing that humanity has 

 advanced, except by accumulating knowledge and experience and the 

 instruments of living; and the value of this social inheritance is "not 

 beyond dispute." Nevertheless he retained sufficient admiration for 

 a great, though perverse,^ scholar, to continue to regard him as on a 

 totally different level from Cro-Magnon man. 



Time and the Biologists. 



But side by side with these cogitations on the first and last things, 

 your lecturer was occupied in his daily work with biology in general 

 and biochemistry in particular. And since biochemistry is the most 

 borderline of sciences, it was only natural that, like most reflective 

 students of that subject, he should devote a good deal of attention 

 to its philosophical position. That chemistry should indeed be able 

 to cover the realms both of the inanimate and the animate, was in 

 fact quite sufficiently a riddle in itself. The whole history of bio- 

 chemistry, indeed, has been the scene of a persistent debate between 

 those who have taken the hopeful view that the phenomena of life 

 would one day be fully explicable in physico-chemical terms, and those 

 who have thought themselves able to see in these phenomena evidences 

 of some guiding influence — spiritus rector, archaens, vis formativa, 

 entelechy, or what you will — formally impossible to bring into 

 relation with chemistry. Often enough these "vitalists," as they have 

 been called, not content with prognostications of failure, have pur- 

 ported to give proofs of a more or less convincing nature, that the 

 phenomena of life must ever resist scientific explanation.^ During the 

 first three decades of the present century the majority of working 

 biologists and biochemists were not "vitalists" but "mechanists." 



own creative powers, to which he put no frontiers or limits; today he leaves it to pass 

 into an unknown epoch, discouraged, his faith in shreds, threatened with the loss for 

 ever of the core of his personality" (The End of Our Time, 1933, p. 15). In 1940 Inge 

 returned to his attack on the idea of progress in The Fall of the Idols (London). 



^ Another essay. Our Present Discontents (1919), will long remain a museum piece 

 of upper middle-class spitefulness, unworthy of a christian, still less a priest. 



^ Such as Hans Driesch in his Science and Philosophy of the Organism (London, 1908). 



241 Q 



