II28 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



general demand for biology, with its applications — agriculture, 

 medicine, and public health, eugenics, and more. Indeed, without 

 social inquiries, too little knowledge of life at all, as certainly no 

 practical ethics, or even human psychology to speak of. 



Enough, however, of this outline of the sciences; save finally to 

 outline the position of Biology among these, and this as peculiarly 

 central. For it needs and utilises the essential concepts of the 

 physical sciences, and of mathematics and logic. It is plainly 

 associated with mind in evolution ; and, especially taken along with 

 this, it affords in turn fundamental concepts indispensable to social 

 science. It is affording standards by which to evoke and to evaluate 

 the applications of the sciences and arts to life. Each and every 

 science, and art also, has its contribution to the general concept of 

 evolution ; but it is in the biological field that these have been most 

 fully applied, and can be most widely observed and interpreted, and 

 with service to social science and conduct. Its elemental concept of 

 Life has thus organising value and service to all the sciences and 

 their arts, since applying this growing knowledge, guiding these 

 advancing masteries of our cosmic environment, to the compre- 

 hension of the protean world of Life, and this increasingly dis- 

 cerned as by turns biopsychic and psych-organic. From earliest 

 times there has also been a striving to understand life's evils, 

 towards their abatement also, and now towards their prevention, 

 or even sublimation. The progress of our science is thus towards 

 the ever better interpretation and surer development of organic life, 

 especially, of course, in such species as can be brought into co-opera- 

 tion with our own. Indeed, biologic studies and biotechnic labours 

 aspire yet further; contributing to the life-advancing insights and 

 activities of social progress; and thus even towards the etho-social 

 and fully eupsychic development of humanity at its best, for which 

 Olympians, Parnassians, and all other worthy ideals and Eutopias, 

 of past, present, and opening future, are seen as renewing from 

 disasters and discouragements, and as at once legitimate and 

 re-inspiring towards the advance of life and humanity in evolution. 



THE SUB-SCIENCES OF BIOLOGY.— So much for the preceding 

 outline-charting of the sciences. But we must next consider the 

 charting of the sub-sciences of biology itself; for to what use a mere 

 outline of the main continents of thought, if we cannot also map 

 out within these the fields of biology itself, so as to arrange its 

 multifarious interests and problems as clearly? Not only biology, 

 but each of its sub-sciences, includes the work of innumerable 

 lifetimes broad and long; so within its vast field, here delimited 

 from the surrounding infinitudes of other sciences, we have our 

 minor infinities again; and these phenomenally among the most 

 multifarious of all. Working distinctions, of course, there long have 



