INTEGRATIVE LEVELS 



in a civilisation based on scientific technology. Let us grant, however, 

 that some kind of scientifically stabilised stagnant class-stratified 

 totalitarian social organism, might succeed our own age. Hence the 

 great significance of the word ''temporary'" used in the passage from 

 the writer quoted above. Failures and set-backs and blind alleys there 

 may be in plenty, but though the ultimate victory is not in doubt, 

 it m.ust be remembered w^hat each failure may mean. It may mean 

 the enslavement of whole peoples for many generations, the destruc- 

 tion of culture and learning over a wide part of the world, the stag- 

 nation of social progress in such regions, the martyrdom of many 

 thousands of our best and noblest friends. In the ancient phrase; 

 "the saints under the altar cry, O Lord, how long, how long.^" 

 To speak of the inevitability of our higher integrative level is to say 

 nothing of when it will come.^ 



Ccncliision, 



It would be a pity, however, to conclude this lecture upon a note 

 of sadness. Let us return to the year 1838, when Herbert Spencer 

 was a young man of seventeen. The youth of anyone so exsuccous 

 as Spencer was in his old age has always a peculiar charm. This was 

 the year in which Marx was toiling in Berlin at his doctoral dis- 

 sertation on Democritus and Epicurus, Engels was quietly acquiring 

 a business training at Bremen, and Dar^dn, just back from the voyage 

 of the Beagle^ was starting his first Notebook on the Transformations 

 of Species.^ Spencer, as befitted his later outlook, was in the midst 

 of British industry. Under Mr. Robert Stephenson, the chief engineer 

 of the London and Birmingham Railway, young Mr. Spencer made 

 measurements of embankments and cuttings, draftqd out plans, and 

 sketched minor inventions in his spare tim^e. To every man who much 



^ Cf. the interesting analysis ot causality and determinism by H. Levy, Proc. Aristot. 

 Soc, 1937, 37, p. 89. "Such a form of analysis," he concludes, "will tell us how the causal 

 process operates, and, in terms of the qualities of subsidiary group-isolates, when a 

 dialectical change will occur. It cannot express the prediction in terms of time." So also 

 the conclusion of an acute student of the history of science — "Great men are not 

 absolutely essential to the progress of science, but they increase its speed." (J. G. 

 Crowther, The Social Relations of Science, London, 1941, p. 453.) 



That moving play of Robert Ardrey's, Thunder Rock (London, 1940) gave brilliant 

 expression to tliis (see esp. around p. 117). 



^ Comte, with his conviction that philosophy must acquire a social relevance, 

 his appreciation of social evolution before biological evolution was substantiated and 

 accepted, and his realisation that the classification of the sciences concealed a real problem, 

 deserves a lecture to himself. At this time he was publishing his Positive Philosophy, the 

 first volume of v/hich appeared in 1839 and the last in 1842. 



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