209 ^^® mystique of the desert 



one way or another. He does so even at the very moment 

 when he is assuring; himself that he will do nothing; of the 

 sort. Even to say that one has no philosophy is to have one. 



More than two thousand years ago Aristotle coined the 

 word "metaphysics" — which means "beyond physics" — in 

 order to give a name to that whole realm of intellectual 

 activity which begins where the observation and organiza- 

 tion of ph\-sical facts leaves off. More recently, Bernard 

 Shaw, half -jokingly perhaps, has coined on the same model 

 another word, "metabiology." Time has not tested it so 

 thoroughly as it has tested Aristotle's "metaphysics" but it 

 may turn out to be useful by calhng attention to an im- 

 portant fact. 



Both words suggest that such subjects of inquiry as 

 morals (or the nature of the good) and aesthetics (or the 

 nature of the beautiful) He beyond the reach of that kind 

 of positive knowledge with which the phvsical sciences 

 deal. But there is a difference between what Aristotle's 

 word seems to imply and what Shaw's word is intended to 

 suggest. MetSLphysics seems to accept the recent assump- 

 tion that life itself is reducible to physical and chemical 

 laws and to imply, therefore, that moral and aesthetic 

 questions can best be answered by referring them to the 

 laws of the physical universe. MetaZ? fo/ogy, on the other 

 hand, suggests that since life itself is not completely ex- 

 plainable in merely physical terms, moral and aesthetic 

 questions should be discussed in connection with what we 

 know about living creatiu'es without any attempt to reduce 

 such questions to merely physical terms. The difference, in 

 other words, is the difference between the purely mate- 

 riahstic, mechanistic approach to such questions, which 

 is favored by the so-called "positivists," and an approach 



