656 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



DISTINCT ORDERS OF FACT DEMAND DISTINCT FOR- 

 MULATIONS.— What does all this amount to? We do not know 

 the secret of life, but we are convinced that living creatures are 

 more than mechanisms, and that they have qualities requiring 

 special categories for their due description. This is the autonomy of 

 life, and if we are to avoid false simplicities we must hold by it. 



We do not know the relation of "mind" and "body", if it be a 

 relation, but we know that there is the closest of correlations. Some 

 would say that the mind plays on the body as the musician on his 

 instrument, the very attractive definitely dualistic view. Others 

 would say that mind and body are two aspects of life, as inseparable 

 as the inner and outer surfaces of a dome, or the concave and convex 

 aspects of a curve. As Lloyd Morgan puts it: "All the events which, 

 as physiologist, I study, are connected with psychical events; and 

 all events which, as psychologist, I study, are connected with 

 physiological events." This is the monistic view, as the anti-theo- 

 logical Haeckel indeed named it, yet which in Lloyd Morgan's case, 

 for instance, is not inconsistent with being a religious man and a 

 convinced theist. But our point is simply this: that whether we are 

 dualists or monists, we must admit that the mental aspect is as real 

 as the bodily; and that it is so different from the metabolic or neural 

 or protoplasmic aspect that it requires categories of its own for 

 its description. This is the autonomy oj mind, and to avoid false 

 simplicities we must hold by it. 



We must try in the name of science not to allow wishes to father 

 thoughts, as they are so prone to do. What is the most accurate 

 way of stating the facts? That is the primary question. But when 

 we pass beyond science to a synoptic view which includes all that 

 we have gained in our practical experience of life and mind, and all 

 that we have gained along the pathway of feeling, we may perhaps 

 come to this practical conclusion, that there is something wrong 

 with our science if we are not led to think in a big way both of life 

 and of mind, and of these more and more in harmony, and in 

 progress, in which surely mind goes further of the two — whence 

 even growing bodily old has often its compensations. 



In another section we must thus say something in regard to the 

 autonomy of Sociology; for the Kingdom of Man requires categories 

 of its own, and human society transcends the individual as the hive 

 transcends an individual worker-bee. Moreover, as all must allow, 

 a human society is at a much higher power than an ant-hill or a 

 beehive, a herd of antelopes, or a beaver village. 



In short, then, to try to force the whole life of organisms into the 

 framework of chemistry and physics is, we maintain, an illegitimate 

 materialism, to be guarded against, and similarly to try to force 

 the life of human society into the framework of zoology is in its 

 way as bad, an illegitimate biologism, to be guarded against. Yet it 



