BIOLOGY AMONG THE SCIENCES 1125 



and so far as possible even for its improvement. Yet the essentials 

 of social science — its historic tradition and heritage of civilisation, 

 for prime instance — remain clearly within its own field ; and so have 

 been too easily forgotten among the external contributions, sta- 

 tistical, physical, and organic, which are offered it from the pre- 

 liminary sciences. 



THE ARTS WITH THE SCIENCES —All this becomes plainer 

 when we now next add to our diagram of the sciences that of the 

 corresponding outline of the activities and arts from which they 

 had their birth. For here the order is no longer ascending, but now 

 clearly a descending one. The social group, from its family and 

 tribe, its region and city, not only develops its own civilisation, its 

 heritage, both material and immaterial, as of organisation, language, 

 and more, but it applies itself practically to the organic problem 

 of its own maintenance, so initiating its biologic knowledge. The 

 need of tools, fuels, and so on did much towards initiating physical 

 knowledge ; and for all this were soon needed number and measure- 

 ment, the germs of mathematics. Thus though thought most readily 

 proceeds in the ascending order of the sciences, action is plainly a 

 descending order, in its active life, of arts: and from this side, of 

 active life, the relatively passive world of thought has largely 

 arisen, from experience. Nor is this merely ancient history: for 

 every science is progressing, and more than ever, from the active 

 experimentation as well as observation of all its workers, in their 

 most real and intensive life. 



Our classification of the sciences is thus plainly associated with a 

 classification of the arts as well. First, social science with the con- 

 duct of society; second, biology with medicine, agriculture, and 

 allied arts; third, physics, with the use of implements, and finally, 

 even mathematics, with its refinement of measurement and move- 

 ment, up to the relativity theory itself. Yet though our survey is 

 thus growing more and more comprehensive, we must not forget 

 that we are still thinking consistently in terms of life, and compre- 

 hending all arts and sciences as products of its evolution. Many 

 attempts towards the co-ordination of the sciences and arts of life 

 from other points of view, logical, metaphysical, etc., have thus 

 been too largely non- vital, and pre-evolutionary. 



Is this ordered and organic complex of action and thought, as 

 arts and sciences, now complete ? Not so : life has still richer products 

 to show, and to co-ordinate with these elemental ones. 



We have already noted that with the measured and often 

 numbered thought of the mathematician, there is inseparably 

 allied the most general, universal, and abstract of the sciences. 

 Logic. Next, as we enter the concrete world of objective science, 

 the sublime spectacle of the heavens, and that of land and sea as 



