EVOLUTION 231 



less, the successful pursuit of knowledge in the physical 

 realm has created a habit of mind favourable to patient 

 inquiry in the more^omplex region of social phenomena. 

 Natural science itself, when it attempts to speculate and 

 become a philosophy, as it generally does, shows a ten- 

 dency to turn away from the crude materialism of its earlier 

 days. It is beginning to recognize that its categories are 

 abstract, and valid only within strict limits. Above all, a 

 suspicion has arisen that a natural cosmos which has no 

 intrinsic reference to one of its most marvellous phenomena, 

 namely, the intelligent being, i.e. that the world with which 

 science has been content to deal in the past is only a frag- 

 ment. An important actor is left out of the play as repre- 

 sented by the man of science, namely, the intrinsic relation 

 of nature to mind. But the idea of evolution, even 

 though it may have raised more problems than it has solved 

 so far, has led thinkers first to divine and then to feel 

 convinced that the natural and the social orders are in some 

 way or other continuous and constitut'e one cosmos. In other 

 words, man and the social world which he has made are no 

 longer regarded as contingent addenda to a natural scheme 

 complete without them. On the contrary, we surmise that 

 we both need nature to explain man and man to explain 

 nature ; and even that the latter need is the more impera- 

 tive of the two. For man epitomizes nature ; nature, 

 amongst its many other manifestations, issues in man ; 

 and, having such an issue, it cannot be treated as the crude 

 mechanism which it was supposed to be by the earlier 

 investigators. Hence, the progress of natural inquiry will 

 itself lead inevitably to a new attempt to understand man. 

 On the other hand, it would not be difficult to show from 

 the recent history of the sciences of man that they have 



