1300 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



THE RELATIONS OF BIOLOGY TO SOCIAL SCIENCE.— In 



a previous section it was shown in detail that the eight-fold group- 

 ing of subsciences which make up biology holds good for the other 

 main sciences too; and this not only through and from our social 

 development, but also on logico-mathematical and physical grounds; 

 since inevitably delimited in terms of space-forms viewed analyti- 

 cally or synthetically, of energy-states, kinetic or static, and of 

 time-phases, past, present and possible. Individual and group 

 studies, in their active and passive aspects, and their evolutionary 

 process, in biology, and indeed in each and every main order of 

 phenomenal interest open to investigation, are thus clearly recog- 

 nised and arranged for; and these in more orderly treatment than is 

 yet customary, and with increasingly clear co-ordination of their 

 special fields and inquiries. 



That this eight-fold method of study applies to the study of man, 

 viewed by the biologist as the species now, on the whole, nearest 

 world-dominance, is obvious, at any rate with a little reflection; the 

 more since it was with his physiology and anatomy (normal and 

 pathological) that biology began to come into being. So too his 

 ethnography and his social groupings have been suggestive to early 

 classifications, as also greatly by the need of getting medicinal herbs 

 into order. Embryology was stimulated by the human curiosity and 

 medical inquiry into the mysteries of gestation and birth, and of 

 course around the relations of the sexes also. Human economic 

 experience, from gathering, fishing and hunting onwards to pasturing 

 and agriculture first gave us that interest and knowledge of the ways 

 of living beings, which next — of course with the observations of free 

 curiosity as well — became collected into the old Natural History, 

 up to and from Buff on; and which is now pressing, through and 

 since Darwin above all, into that more comprehensive Ecology, of 

 which in this volume so many aspects are indicated and illustrations 

 are given. In all these studies, moreover, the human element is not 

 centred on the human individual, but is obviously a general one, 

 ranging to human kind; in which our concept of the species was not 

 the initial one, but that of family or horde, of tribe or other form of 

 community. Man's first conceptions of these in his own kind may 

 well have been helped into existence also by the animal herds, fish- 

 shoals, bird-flights, and wild bee-hives of his earliest economic 

 endeavours and experiences. Here, then, in such groupings, animal 

 as well as human, with their dawning "consciousness of kind", we 

 have a meeting-point for early thought; and this has continued 

 helpful in modern times on one hand for our studies, by turns 

 ecological and formal, of animal societies, and next of plant associa- 

 tions, on the biological side ; and on the other hand for the inquiries 

 into human community, throughout all its forms and grades, all its 

 ways and doings, which we are learning to recognise as the cognate 



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