i 
| 
| 
1 
| 
i 
| 
i 
4 
[ 
I 
i 
! 
| 
ου οι ου 
* ——"———Q —— —— ————""—————Pm —-——————— 
Biosophy | 
60. Among the names I have mentioned, that of 
Marx, the least distinguished of them all in the field of 
pure science, stands alone in his living influence on the 
practical destiny of a large section of mankind. 
Biosophy needs its Marxes no less than it needs its 
Huxleys. Descriptive and historical science, without 
the driving force of politics and the revolutionary spirit, 
cannot ensure the betterment or even the safety of our 
civilisation. 
CHAPTER I.—KNOWLEDGE AND THINGS 
KNOWN. 
61. There are three levels of knowledge. The first 
level, that of everyday unspoken knowledge, man shares 
more or less completely with the higher animals; at 
this level we know our own personality and conscious- 
ness, with which is intimately connected our own body, 
and we are aware of various personalities and things 
around us; we learn by experience that we can act upon 
these personalities and things in various ways and that 
they can act on us. At this level of knowledge we take 
things for granted as being actually what they appear 
to be in the light of our sense impressions and our 
experience. At this level words do not come into 
the picture, but the self and the world of objects are 
none the less real for that; a child of eighteen months 
is at this level and such animals as dogs continue there 
throughout their lives, This is the field which had been 
expanding during fifty million years of the evolution of 
mammals and was derived from countless more distant 
years of earlier evolution. No matter that things were 
known through the medium of the unaided senses and 
through rough practical experience, it was and is a very 
real knowledge, it corresponded sufficiently with reality 
to enable man to live and reproduce and evolve. 
62. The second level developed gradually in man 
with the growth of language and the growth of the 
brain mechanism associated with language. For the 
greater part the field of knowledge remains the same 
as at the first level. Αι first the difference between 
the second level ‘and the first was chiefly a matter 
of the use of names; grass was called green, 
though the impression had been equally vivid and 
certain before the name came; a stone was hard, honey 
was sweet, food was desirable equally before the use of 
language as after. With the development of language 
and still more with the accumulation and transmission 
of knowledge which written records made possible, came 
further accession of facts, attempts at their logical 
classification and co-ordination, and great progress in 
the mechanical arts. The obvious aspect of space and 
time were noted and more or less accurate measurements 
made, and a valid science of- mathematics was con- 
structed. All this occurred in a few tens or hundreds 
of thousands of years preceding our present era, and 
progress was increasingly rapid in the last few thousands 
and few hundreds of years of that period. Still during 
that period the facts were of the same kind as those 
known at the first,-speechless, or animal level, the facts 
48 
which have to be known for survival in the animal 
struggle for existence; but they were more numerous, 
were recorded and measured, and applied in the 
mechanical arts. Language, in the period of the second 
level of knowledge, was of great service in recording 
facts and extending their knowledge and utility, but 
when it was used to discuss and explain them, and when 
jt was attempted to penetrate below the surface of the 
world of the senses and experience without being 
possessed of appliances which gave fresh actual know- 
ledge and a developed method of gaining that fresh 
knowledge, language became a dangerous weapon. 
Countless systems of mythology and philosophy and 
religion arose on the basis of attempts to get beyond 
the world of facts and commonsense by the use of words 
and by reasoning with words, and our world to-day is 
still permeated by the echoes of these old verbal disputes 
and imaginary systems. Interesting and important as 
is the history of early science and mathematics in Greece 
and in other old civilisations, I am unable to deal with 
it adequately, though a chapter should be given to it in 
the historical section of Biosophy. 
63. No sharp line of division can be drawn between 
the second level of knowledge, in which the observations 
of commonsense were supplemented by speech and 
articulate reasoning, and the third level, in which instru- 
ments and appliances have been gradually introduced 
to amplify the power of the senses, in which measure- 
ments have been made with increasing accuracy, and in 
which a definite experimental system has been developed 
for checking and amplifying previous results. A 
transitional period extended from the Greeks through 
the Middle Ages, and the dominance of the third period 
may be taken roughly as commencing in the sixteenth 
century and as approaching full development at the 
present day. 
64. The world. of commonsense, of everyday 
experience, of ordinary language, of arithmetic and 
Euclid's geometry, is still the real, practical working 
world; although even for the working world science 
has given enormously increased understanding and 
increased. power, through the microscope and telescope 
and physical and chemical discoveries of all kinds. But 
the new science is not destroying the old working world 
or making an illusion of it; on the contrary, it is ex- 
plaining its nature by a continuous approach, at the 
third level of knowledge, to the “things in reality" of 
which the world is built up and to which the everyday 
properties of things are due. The mathematical relations 
of angles, sides and area of a triangle are none the 
less true and real because we cannot draw an infinitely 
thin and perfectly straight line. A perfect cylinder is 
impossible, but the motor mechanic can with no trouble 
rebore to an accuracy of 1/1000 inch, which is perfect 
for his purpose, and an. accuracy of 1/100,000 inch 
could be obtained if there were need for it. By a 
machine 100,000 parallel lines to the inch can be ruled 
on glass with a diamond (Norbert's test for microscope 
lenses). A knife is none the less hard and sharp 
