THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



210 



which recognizes that living things, being radically dif- 

 ferent from inanimate objects, are capable of standards of 

 value v^hich correspond to nothing in the merely physical 

 world. 



If your ethics, your aesthetics, your epistomology even, 

 are things which lie immediately beyond what you know 

 or think you know about the phenomena associated with 

 living creatures; if these seem to you a better taking-off 

 place than facts about mechanics or even chemistry, then 

 your metaphysical convictions will take on a color suffi- 

 ciently distinctive to justify a distinctive name. And if you 

 attempt, as Shaw did, to formulate these convictions into 

 a consistent system, then you may quite properly call your- 

 self not so much a "metaphysician" as a "metabiologist." 



Shaw was, of course, thinking especially of what seemed 

 to him to follow from his own belief that evolution is the 

 most important of all observable facts and that what evo- 

 lution reveals is not merely a Darwinian mechanism but 

 the effectiveness, throughout all time, of the imagination 

 which can dream of something better and the will which 

 can make the dream come true. Upon that conviction he 

 based his philosophy, his metaphysics, or, as he preferred 

 to call it, his metabiology. 



Whether one accepts Shaw's conviction or, not — and 

 most biologists will, I imagine, shake their heads — the fact 

 remains that a great many of us are today "metabiologists" 

 of one sort or another whether we realize it or not. And 

 by that I mean simply that for us the most important of 

 all the "collections of observable facts" which the centuries 

 have accumulated are those which concern the behavior of 

 Hving creatures. And it is "beyond" these facts that, for us, 

 the most significant philosophy must lie. 



