384 PART V. WORKING STAGE. 



body of truth, but merely such portion of it as our stage of social pro- 

 gress enables us to see. Else the rise of science from art would be little 

 more than an almost prehistoric process, instead of being still and con- 

 tinually going on. Innumerable instances, large and small, might be given 

 of this; thus, the classificatory doctrine of the 'echelle des etres' due to the 

 naturalist Bonnet, is far more than a mere detail of the biographical history 

 of zoology ; for the conception of an unbroken series of beings ascending 

 in regular gradations from the lowest up to the highest is obviously the 

 projection upon nature of that established ecclesiastical and social hier- 

 archy in which the good abbe's mind was formed. Again, taking a larger 

 instance, the substitution of Darwin for Paley as the chief interpreter of the 

 order of nature is currently regarded as the displacement of an anthropo- 

 morphic view by a purely scientific one : a little reflection, however, will 

 show, that what has actually happened has been merely the replacement of 

 the anthropomorphism of the eighteenth century by that of the nineteenth. 

 For the place vacated by Paley's theological and metaphysical explanation 

 has simply been occupied by that suggested to Darwin and Wallace by 

 Malthus in terms of the prevalent severity of industrial competition, and 

 those phenomena of struggle for existence which the light of contemporary 

 economic theory has enabled us to discern, have thus come to be tem- 

 porarily exalted into a complete explanation of organic progress. 



"Finally, the division of labour having become fully established in 

 industrial practice, and recognised in economic theory by Adam Smith, it 

 was frankly borrowed for biological application by Milne-Edwards, almost 

 a couple of generations later, with fruitful results. This industrial develop- 

 ment has indeed not only given us our present clear conception of separate 

 organic functions, where an earlier school could see only their general 

 resultant as 'temperament', but it has also determined the prevalent 

 intensity of scientific specialism within artificially restricted fields. Hence 

 too, the extreme specialist's not infrequent loss, if not indeed denial, of 

 definite responsibility to the science as a whole, and still more to that 

 larger progress of which it forms a part is simply the equivalent of that 

 loss of conscious relation both to the special task and to its general 

 bearings, from which at present the labourer also so frequently suffers. . . . 



"The manifold importance of biology in education is seen not only in 

 its practical applications in the arts and in the study of medicine, but as 

 a potent agency of culture, and as preliminary to psychological and social 

 studies." (Patrick Geddes, Article "Biology", in Chambers' Encyclopaedia, 

 1908.) (See also G. Sarton, "L'Histoire de la science", in Isis, March, 1913; 

 T. B. Robertson, "The Historical Continuity of Science", in the Scientific 

 Monthly, October, 1916; and Arthur Dendy (editor), Animal Life and 

 Human Progress, 1919.) 



Nor should Bacon's pregnant rule be overlooked that when 

 we have once established a fact, we should determine how it 

 is, and may conveniently be, produced or reproduced, or de- 

 stroyed if need be. 



205. We will venture on one extended illustration in 

 regard to the application of science to practice. At the close 

 of the eighteenth century a French scientific commission ela- 

 borated the metric system, a system of measurement which is 

 not only signally superior to the "natural", or rather casually 

 developed, modes of measuring then or now in vogue, but 

 which .is irresistibly spreading over the globe. We suggest 

 that philologists might perform the same priceless service for 

 language, even though a distinguished litterateur, Viscount 

 Morley, should dilate on " how immutably the tongues of lead- 

 ing stocks in the world seem to have struck their roots". 



