INTEGRATIVE LEVELS 



in combination and juxtaposition and mutual dependence of the parts, 

 and of the parts of the parts.^ 



Side by side with integration goes differentiation; the scission of 

 wholes into parts, and parts into smaller parts.^ Instances of this 

 growing heterogeneity he finds in sidereal changes, in the changes of 

 the earth's crust, in ontogenetic development (cf. the passage on 

 chemical embryology already quoted) in phylogeny and in sociology. 

 He ends by his celebrated definition of evolution;^ evolution is a 

 change from a relatively indefinite incoherent homogeneit}^ to a 

 relatively definite coherent heterogeneity, accompanied by integration 

 of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion.* We may smile at 

 what we suppose to be the presumption of such a cosmic formula, 

 but we may find ourselves smiling on the wrong side of our faces, 

 if, as is not unlikely, Herbert Spencer had hold of the right end of 

 the stick. We should be foolish to put ourselves in the position of 

 the devil, who was defined by the patristic writer, Hippolytus, as 

 o dvT LTOLTrcov TOLs KoorfiLKoHs, he who resists the world-process. 

 With Spencer's attempt to elucidate the causes of this process, to say 

 why evolution should go on at all (the instability of the homo- 

 geneous^), we need not here be concerned; the important point is his 

 realisation of its universal scope. In reading his work to-day, we are 

 likely to feel that he is most right where he emphasises integration 

 and organisation rather than homogeneity and heterogeneity. 



In Spencer's biological writings, too, there is much of great interest 

 for the modem biologist who cares to know how ideas familiar 

 to-day in science had their origin. The definition of life as the con- 

 tinuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations was his,^ 

 and so too was the conception of increasing independence of the 

 environment accompanying increasing organisational level." "One of 

 those lowly gelatinous forms," he writes, "so transparent and colour- 



^ FP, p. 300. 2 FP, pp. 301-14. ^ FP, pp. 351 and 367. 



* It is important to note that much of Spencer's argumentation depended on assump- 

 tions about energy which antedated modern statistical interpretations of the second law 

 of thermodynamics. There is now, therefore, a certain contradiction here. The universe 

 is passing, it is said, from less probable to more probable states, as if a basic shuffling 

 process was continually at work. The word "organisation" is applied to the initial state 

 of the universe, so that the increase of entropy must imply progressive disorganisation. 

 The irreversibility of time is said to depend on this. We must, therefore, say either that 

 thermodynarpical organisation is quite a different tiling from crystalline-biological-social 

 organisation, or else that the persistent increase in the latter with time, which cannot 

 be gainsaid, involves a correspondingly greater decrease of organisation somewhere 

 else in the universe. See p. 207. 



5 FP, pp. 368 and 372. « PB, I. 99. ' PB, I. 176. 



247 



