BIOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY 43 I 



generation that seems to follow biological parasitism, except the ancient 

 law of tooth and claw. 



Now, I shall try to say in one minute what I probably failed to make 

 clear in fifty. As I see it, ours is not an age of science. Man is still driven by 

 greed and confused by guile, rather than guided by reason and justice based 

 on our expanding knowledge. Science has greatly enlarged man's under- 

 standing, conquered many of his diseases, lengthened his life, multiplied 

 his joys, decreased his fears, and added much to his physical comforts and 

 powers. But man may use these and other achievements for a greater social 

 injury, instead of for a further social advance. Science is specifically human, 

 in that it stems from the innate curiosity of all men, and the conspicuously 

 plastic brains of the ablest, if not the noblest, of our fellows. If this be so, it 

 follows that the scientific method and its products cannot be, in any funda- 

 mental and permanent sense, in conflict with human nature, though our pres- 

 ent human society, product of a past dominated by greed, force, and fear, 

 may be, and is in conflict with the scientific method. Whether science and 

 the scientific method, whether understanding, honest}^ reason, and justice 

 can contrive survival values equal, if not superior to the blind forces of na- 

 ture which shaped man's past, is as yet in the laps of the gods. Still, we can- 

 not deny the possibility, and we will nurse the hope, that the hairy ape who 

 somehow lost his tail, grew a brain worth having, built speech and song out 

 of a hiss and a roar, and stepped out of the cave to explore and master the 

 universe, may some day conquer his own irrational and myopic behavior 

 towards his kin. 



THE BIOLOGIST LOOKS AT MAN * 



JULIAN S. HUXLEY 



The Western world today is caught in an apparent dilemma between 

 two conflicting modes of thought. The one thinks in terms of absolutes — 

 the absoluteness of truth, beauty, justice, goodness, themselves all deriving 

 from an Absolute of absolutes, which is God. The natural world is com- 

 plemented by the supernatural, the body by the soul, the temporal by the 

 eternal. This view gives an essentially static world picture; the flux of 

 events is merely change, in which the only progress is a spiritual one, to- 

 ward the perfection of eternal values. Empiricism and the experimental 

 method are alien to it; the absolute of Revelation and the absolute of pure 

 Reason will between them answer all the questions that can be answered. 

 Man's place in the universe is the place of an eternal soul, created by God, 

 and working out its destiny in terms of eternal values. 



• Reprinted from Living In a Revolution by Julian S. Huxley with the permission of 

 Harper and Brothers. Copyright 1942, by Julian S. Huxley. 



