V GENERAL CONCEPT OF HOLISM 91 



specialisation to give the clues to the unsolved problems. 

 More than ever before they are occupying themselves with 

 the problems of structure, the structure of matter and the 

 physical universe, the structure of cells and organisms as 

 explaining the systems of life, the structure of the nervous 

 system and the brain with a view to understanding the 

 movement of Evolution in its higher reaches. While science 

 is thus preoccupied with the details of structure, philosophy 

 continues very much on the old lines of exploring general 

 points of view, general principles and tendencies and con- 

 cepts. Philosophy, in endeavouring to demarcate a province 

 of her own and distinct from the special regions ruled by 

 science, is more and more confining herself to general view- 

 points and ultimate concepts and principles, and thus runs 

 the risk of getting further away from science instead of 

 drawing closer to it. The result of this divorce is lamentable 

 in the extreme. For science, divorced from the view- 

 points and principles which philosophy embraces, structure 

 becomes merely mechanism. For philosophy, divorced from 

 the actual concrete structural facts which science studies, 

 the general principles remain in the air, and never generate 

 this specific concrete sensible world which is there to 

 explain and understand. But the real world is neither a 

 mere principle nor a mere structure, neither a dis- 

 embodied soul nor a soulless mechanism. The creative 

 Evolution which both scientist and philosopher embrace 

 works as a general principle or tendency in and through 

 particular concrete specific forms. Evolution is thus 

 structure plus principle, interpenetrating each other, 

 reacting on and vitalising each^ other. Individuation and 

 universality are equally characteristic of Evolution. The 

 universal realises itself, not in idle self-contemplation, not in 

 isolation from the actual, but in and through individual 

 bodies, in particular things and facts. The temple of the 

 Spirit is the structure of matter; the universal dwells in the 

 concrete particular; neither is real nor true apart from 

 the other. All this sounds like truisms and platitudes. 

 But if there is any force in this position it comes to 



