JULIAN HUXLEY 
monotheism, mathematics, marine navigation, the scientific 
method, the industrial revolution, the conquest of infectious 
disease and the prolongation of life—all have depended upon 
the growth of knowledge and its better organization. 
We have discovered that each advance may lead us into dif- 
ficulties, but also that evolution is a dialectic or cybernetic 
process operating by feedback, in which new difficulties can be 
surmounted, but only with the aid of new discoveries and new 
applications of knowledge. 
During the past three centuries the most powerful agency for 
providing new knowledge has been Science. I use the word, 
spelt thus with a capital letter, in the continental sense to include 
all branches of organized rational enquiry, including the natural 
sciences, the social and psychological sciences, and the various 
humanistic sciences, such as history and philosophy, aesthetics 
and comparative religion; and as opposed to all speculative 
and a prior: philosophies and untested explanatory systems. 
Today, science too is being bent in on itself by the earth’s 
sphericity. Its spectacular advance since the Renaissance has 
been achieved by successive invasions of separate fields of 
enquiry—mechanics, astronomy, physics and chemistry, natural 
history and geology, physiology and biology, anthropology, 
psychology and sociology. This type of separate and sometimes 
competitive scientific expansion is now reaching its limit. There 
are still some vacant areas to explore, like space research or 
extrasensory perception; but science as a whole cannot escape 
the pressure towards integration. 
In place of separate subjects each with their own assumptions, 
methodology and technical jargon, we must envisage networks 
of co-operative investigation, with common methods and ter- 
minology, all eventually linked up in a comprehensive process 
of enquiry. This, of course, will mean a radical reorganization 
of scientific teaching and research. 
If man is responsible for the future of this planet, he must 
pay more attention to ecology—the science of relations between 
organisms and the resources of their environment. 
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