1414 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



crystallise our still too vague treatment of "natural history" into a 

 rational ecology, we need logic, and logic at its best and clearest. 



The ordinary logic of induction from observation and experience 

 and of deduction from clearly ascertained principles is all very wel^ 

 so far as it goes: but — to confess the very worst — we need also the 

 main logical advance made by Hegel, and this further clarified, by use 

 of the co-ordinates of Descartes ! Yet these, for practical purposes, so 

 far from leading us into the deep and intricate speculations of the 

 philosopher, or the high and refined elaborations of the mathematician, 

 turn out to be as simple as is the multiplication table in its earliest 

 beginnings; since we only need that of one and one, two and four, for 

 all of Hegel we require, and the like extended to three, for the theory 

 of life. 



Recall, then, the simple key with which Hegel opens his labyrinths, 

 which we do not need to enter: namely, that while the Greeks long 

 debated between thesis and antithesis — e.g. virtue and vice, love and 

 hatred, truth and error, beauty and ugliness — we can clarify Aristotle's 

 solution, of finding "the golden mean" between these extremes, into 

 Hegel's more definite "synthesis". Thus let W represent white, and B 

 black, its antithesis : their synthesis will obviously be their Aristotelian 

 mean, which we call grey. But, says Hegel — in principle, though we use 

 this simple illustration of it — this synthesis does not really absorb and 

 unify our thesis and antithesis of white and black into harmony as 

 synthesis finished and done with. For the original antithesis is still also 

 present ; since we see (at once visually and logically) that grey can and 

 does range to light grey and to dark grey; hence preserving more or less 

 of the old contrast, as well as of the new harmony. In another connec- 

 tion, Hegel images for us the owl of philosophy emerging at dusk; so 

 we may here use this to recall how its grey plumage seems dark against 

 the twilight, yet light against its shadows, of coming dark. Next put 

 this main idea into graphic form — which Hegel, like philosophers 

 generally, fails to provide; so too often leaving those who might be 

 their clearest readers in twilight of understanding. Given W and B for 



W 



White and Black, their antithesis can then be graphed as . Their 



B 

 ideal synthesis, as medium grey, is thus but their meeting-point, at 

 intersection of their separating lines; but these leave two spaces for 



wB 



, in which white is but darkened. 



W 



two less perfect syntheses, in — — 



bW B 



and black but lightened; in short, light grey on left and dark-grey on 

 right. Each is so far in its way a pro-synthesis ; yet to the other it is also 

 a counter-synthesis ; since much of the initial antithesis between white 

 and black still appears. And these, when we graduatedly shade their 

 spaces, will always show something of the same antithesis within the 

 light grey, and the dark-grey spaces themselves. Here, then, is a form 

 of graph, which like so many others, can be put to the most varied uses, 

 say for historically recalling the shades of opinion in any great field 



