54 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LIII. No. 1360 



in turn derived from "ergo," to work. 

 It is one of those superb, rotund words 

 which dazzle and hypnotize the uplifter 

 and eventually come to express the peculiar 

 spirit or tendency of a whole period. 



These words, which for want of a better 

 term I may call "highbrow," and the con- 

 ceptions they embody, are so interesting 

 that I will dwell on them for a moment. 

 During the late Victorian period the most 

 high-brow word was "progress." It dis- 

 appeared and gave place to organization 

 with the World "War when we realized 

 that the evolution of our race since the 

 Neolithic Age was not nearly as substan- 

 tial as we had imagined. Neither the 

 Greeks nor the people of the Middle Ages 

 seem to have had either of these words or 

 their conceptions, though the Greeks, at 

 least, did a fair amount of progressing 

 and organizing. The Medieval high-brow 

 words were "chivalry" and "honor," the 

 latter persisting down to the present day 

 in Continental Europe in the German stu- 

 dents' duelling code, as a living fossU, or 

 what biologists would call a "relict." 

 Schopenhauer^ remarked that the duel and 

 venereal diseases were the only contribu- 

 tions to culture the race had made since 

 the classical period, overlooking the fact 

 that the Greeks and the Japanese had 

 their own high-ibrow words and institu- 

 tions. Gilbert Murray^ has shown that the 

 word "aidos," which the Achjean chiefs 

 , 2 Zwei Dinge sind es hauptsacMioh, welche den 

 gesellsohaftlichen Zustand der neuen Zeit von dem 

 des Altertherms, zum Nachtheil des ersteren unter- 

 scheiden, indem sie demselben einen ernsten, fin- 

 stern, siuistern Anstrich gegeben haben, von 

 welehem fred das Alterthvim heiter und imbefangen, 

 wie der Morgen des Lebens, dastebt. Sie sind: das 

 ritterlicbe Ehrenprineip und die venerisclie Krank- 

 heit — par nobile fratrum! Schopenhauer, "Pa- 

 rerga und Paralipomeua, " Ed. Frauenstadt, Vol. 

 5, 1888, p. 413. 



, 3 "The Rise of the Greek Epic," 2d Ed. Ox- 

 ford, Clarendon Press, 1911, pp. 103-412. 



of the Homeric age so solemnly uttered, 

 was applied to a peculiar kind of chivalry, 

 and the "bushido" of the Japeinese was 

 another similar though independent in- 

 vention. All of these conceptions — prog- 

 ress, organization, chivalry, aidos, bushido 

 — seem to start among the intellectual aris- 

 tocracy and all imply a certain "noblesse- 

 oblige," for there is no fun in continually 

 exhorting others to progress unless you 

 can keep up with the procession, or of 

 organizing others unless you yearn to be 

 organized yourself, just as there is no fun 

 in getting uip a duelling or bushido code 

 unless you are willing to fight duels or 

 commit harakiri whenever it is required 

 by the rules of the game. 



Of course, the vogue of "organization" 

 was abnormally stimulated by the mobili- 

 zation of armies and resources for the 

 World War. We acquired the organizing 

 habit wdth a vengeance and have not since 

 had time to reflect that there may be 

 things in the world that it would be a pro- 

 fanation to organize — courtship, e.g. — or 

 not worth organizing — a vacuum, e.g. — or 

 things that can not be organized, or if 

 organizable, better left as they are — scien- 

 tific research, perhaps. 



There are at least three different types 

 of organization. One of them we find 

 ready to hand in individual animals and 

 plants, in our own bodies and in animal 

 colonies and societies, i.e., in complexes 

 which organize themselves both onto- and 

 phylogenetically. This is a self-contained 

 type of organization, requiring much time 

 and energy for its consummation and 

 though very intricate and profound still 

 sufficiently plastic and adaptable to trade 

 with time and the environment and to 

 resist a considerable amont of thwarting 

 and meddling. For obvious reasons this 

 type appears to us to be so admirable that 

 it influences aU our conceptions of organi- 



