CHAP, in THE APPEAL TO BIOLOGY 27 



idealism will welcome Comte's progress, such as it is. 

 He will think it far better to expound human reason 

 and what he regards as a creation of human reason, 

 human society in terms of biology rather than in 

 terms of mechanism, or of " matter and motion." Neither 

 interpretation may be adequate, but Comte's will seem 

 to the idealist much nearer the truth than the other. 

 Only the idealist will lament that the scale of the 

 sciences is cut off with a knife at biology. He thinks 

 life a truer, richer, fuller, worthier category than affinity 

 or force, or any purely physical conception ; but he 

 believes there is a higher category still, viz. self-conscious 

 reason. He believes that, while the processes of life 

 may do a good deal to throw light upon the processes of 

 reason, the processes of reason throw back even more 

 light upon the allied yet inferior processes studied by 

 physiology. The idealist holds that reason has gone to 

 the making of all things ; that it shows a little of itself 

 in the lower sciences, much of itself in the sciences of 

 biology and physiology, but all of itself in self -con- 

 sciousness self-consciousness, which is the open secret 

 of the world, and which does not need to be studied at 

 second hand either in biology or in sociology when we 

 can study it in itself, and in its workings everywhere. 

 Good to use biology as a help, says the idealist ; but 

 why stop at biology ? l 



It is perhaps the same position in different words 

 when Mr. Mackenzie tells us that his doctrine of an 

 organism (as applied to the social organism) is a meta- 

 physical category. The perfect realisation of unity in 

 difference, the whole in all the parts, each for all, and 



1 With an interesting and characteristic modification, Professor 

 Baldwin of Princeton affirms that Psychology gives us the true clue to the 

 nature of society. 



