128 The Higher Usefulness of Science 



definite teachings about the human species that has got 

 into men's minds during the last thirty or forty years, 

 and has found its fullest expression in the writings of 

 Friedrich Nietzsche. 



Surely biologists have not taken as much note as 

 they should of the insistence by philosophical anarch- 

 ists and other disciples of Nietzsche that their prophet 

 is the particular and supreme "philosopher of evolu- 

 tion." 



Into the tumultuous whirlpool of discussion of the 

 Nietzschean doctrines I have no wish to enter, at least 

 in this place ; but a few things about it ought to receive 

 consideration by biologists, especially by American 

 biologists. Should the matter be thus attended to, I 

 believe it will be seen that there is a great measure of 

 truth in the claim for Nietzsche as the philosopher of 

 evolution, evolution being conceived as it usually has 

 been in the modern period; and the particular point I 

 want to make is that he did his philosophizing, prima- 

 rily about man and very secondarily about the rest of 

 the living world, in all but total disregard of, seem- 

 ingly in almost total ignorance of, the natural history 

 aspect of biology. His appeals to physiology, or some- 

 thing he called physiology; and to some of the results 

 and conceptions of physiological psychology ( although 

 I do not recall his having used exactly this phrase) 

 were constant and often very telling. But his neglect 

 of, yes, more than that, his positive antipathy for the 

 systematic, the coordinational, the interdependent as- 



