222 Science Religion and Reality 



Republic, who is charged to attend to nothing else but the making 

 of shoes, will finally find himself, far from making shoes, occupied 

 with putting the metal ends on to the laces, the shoes themselves 

 being manufactured by ninety-nine other specialists. But the 

 tendency is quite inevitable and .can only be partially controlled. 

 It is no bad thing that men should learn caution in speaking of 

 matters which they themselves have not studied. But the ever- 

 rising tide of specialisation has obscured the fact that there are not 

 a few problems, especially in the fields of pure knowledge, which 

 cannot be understood in the terms of one subject. The spectrum 

 of knowledge has been arbitrarily divided up into compartments, 

 whereas the colours really shade into each other quite imperceptibly. 

 Such arbitrary cuttings and slicings have often mutilated the 

 delicate fabric of reality, with the result that there are many 

 questions at the present time most urgently needing the synthesis 

 of two or more illuminations. As an example we might adduce 

 our knowledge of the nervous system of man. It has been studied 

 from three main directions : experimental psychology has examined 

 it, biochemistry has studied its metabolism and its chemical 

 composition, and biophysics has collected data about its electrical 

 phenomena. But no one has yet synthesised these items of 

 knowledge into one unitary whole. 



The most outstanding case, however, in which harm has been 

 produced by the superstition that one means of approach and one 

 only is valid, is the subject of this paper, the whole problem of life 

 itself. In ancient times, and in the Renaissance, this difficulty 

 was not felt, for the domain of learning was a unity and everything 

 within it bore directly on everything else. But as a more specialised 

 biology grew up, and as, later still, this science became more and 

 more infiltrated with mechanistic principles, it more and more 

 came to be thought that the full explanation or description of the 

 phenomena of living beings must be given in biological language. 

 Experience has shown, however, that this is not the case. The 

 question, why it is that living animals are different from dead ones 

 and from inorganic matter, cannot be answered completely in terms 

 of biology however physico-chemical biology may have become. 

 Philosophical conceptions must assist in the complete answer. 

 Nor is this because the foundations of the scientific method itself 

 are open to philosophical criticism — ^as some philosophers would 

 say, the chief business of philosophy — but because in studying life 



