252 SYMBIOGENESIS 



these do those in a stone." Thus we see that it is co-operation 

 rather than co-ordination that is the test of status and of 

 degrees of life. Co-operation includes co-ordination. 



What " is co-ordination of actions" if it is not co-opera- 

 tion?* If it is not to be co-operative, then, as Spencer rightly 

 perceives, an organism becomes a brother of the sun and of the 

 stars which implies a consanguinity, if one may say so, which 

 seems rather remote. Co-ordination, therefore, takes us too 

 far out of our sphere and into cosmic realms where we yet lack 

 a compass, where, as Goethe would say, we meet with spirits 

 that we do not comprehend for lack of similarity. It is other- 

 wise with co-operation, which moves in spheres that we can 

 understand and explain with tolerable adequacy, and tolerable 

 consensus of opinion. "Die Erde hat mich wieder." 



With "co-ordination" we have the physico-mechanical 

 Spencer. As Professor Lloyd Morgan rightly says of him: 



The impression one gets, here and elsewhere, is that all forms of 

 relatedness must somehow, by the omission of all other specific characters, 

 be reduced to the mechanical type. This, no doubt, is unification of a 

 sort. But is it the sort of unification with which a philosophy of 

 science should rest content? 



It may be said that unification can only be reached by digging 

 down to some ubiquitous type of relation which is common to all 

 processes throughout the universe at any stage of evolution. But what, 

 on these terms, becomes of evolution itself as a problem to be solved ? 

 Surely any solution of that problem must render an account of just 

 those specific modes of relatedness which have been ignored in digging 

 down to the foundations. Surely there must be unification of the 

 superstructure as well as of the substructure. Here and now is our 

 world within the texture of which things stand to each other in such 

 varied relations though they may be reducible to a few main types. 

 There, in the far-away past, was the primitive fire-mist, dear to Spencer's 

 imagination, in which the modes of relationship were so few and BO 

 simple, and all seemingly of one main type. How do we get in scientific 

 interpretation from the one to the other ? Will it suffice to breathe over 

 the scene the magic words differentiation and integration ? Spencer 

 appears to think so. Of course he did exceptionally fine work in eluci- 



* The word co-operation has hitherto been tabooed or argued out of existence 

 by biologists, because there was no theory of co-operation. The word competition 

 has, however, been welcomed universally, because there was an established 

 theory of competition. Such dialectic opposition to the introduction of a theory 

 of co-operation has too long been the bane of progress. 



