1350 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



problems, science by science, and state all we can see of possible 

 applications too, so utilising not only our professional and technical 

 groups, but combining these. We should thus have something of a 

 policy to put before the intelligent public, and thus with growing 

 support, from individual and public, municipal, national, and by 

 and by even international as well. We have already beginnings for 

 all this, as in scientific and professional societies and in the British 

 Association and the British Guild of Science, which intelligent 

 statesmen have recognised, though as yet but personally. In every 

 University city, indeed in every county and town, with its scientific 

 and other societies, often open-minded and active, we should thus 

 have a veritable policy, of surveying towards service. With such 

 activation of thought, such vision of applications, the present 

 separation of "theory" and "practice" would pass into a co-opera- 

 tion of ideas and of aims, in which the scientist and the practical 

 man would rapidly and encouragingly escape from their too 

 common mutual isolation, and work together. Of this there is already 

 no lack of illustrations and from each side. Witness Kelvin and 

 Edison, for physical science and its applications, and the like no 

 less between biologists and physicians, as from Pasteur and his 

 Institute to Sir Ronald Ross and the other cleansers of Panama 

 which at length made its canal possible. And so on, as for psycholo- 

 gists and educators, each at best when helping the other. 



But why then is this comprehensive presentment of knowledge 

 so delayed? For two main reasons. First that notwithstanding all 

 that Darwin and his successors stand for in science, or Pasteur and 

 his successors in applications, our industrial age has so concentrated 

 upon its mechanistic progress, that its public still fail to recognise 

 that it is as yet the mechanical and the pecuniary culture which 

 dominate thought and impel action, and not yet the vital and 

 evolutionary comprehension of living nature, and of our own lives 

 above all. 



Yet Biology is becoming more appreciated, as its medical and 

 even economic triumphs become increasingly realised. We are also 

 plainly in an age of corresponding progress in psychology, and of 

 its educational applications — witness how Freud and Montessori 

 are now of world-wide fame, and — ^what pleases them better — 

 influence. With the bio-psychological viewpoint affirming itself, as 

 of life and for life, it casts new light upon the physical sciences. It 

 even claims to reinterpret these ; and, what is not a little encourag- 

 ing, with living physicists and mathematicians to help them — wit- 

 ness Whitehead's projection of the organismal conception into the 

 electronic theory of the atom, or Eddington's virtual renewal of 

 Berkeley's acute psychological criticism of what everyday observa- 

 tion and practice alike call "matter". Here, in short, is a turning 

 of the tables upon that so far legitimate (yet we now see exag- 



