Conclusions about Systematics and History in General
We have finished our analysis of the history of mankind as the only instance of an historical biological process that is actually known to exist and is not only assumed hypothetically.
What we have learnt from this analysis, though certainly important in itself, has not afforded us any new result for theoretical biology.
The history of mankind is proved to be of philosophical importance, at present, so far only as it offers instances to the science of psychology; besides that it may be of value and importance to many conditions of practical and emotional life.
There is only one science, and only one kind of logic too. “In one sense the only science”—that was the predicate attached to natural sciences by Lord Gifford, as you will remember from our first lecture. It is not without interest to note that at the end of our course of this year, we find occasion to realise on what a deep insight into logical and philosophical relations that sentence was grounded.
We now leave the theory of human history, which has been to us nothing more than a branch of biological phylogeny in general. We have dealt with it from quite a simple realistic point of view, not burdened by any epistemology. We have taken psychical states as realities, just as we have taken as realities all parts of the animal body; and it seems to me that we were entitled to do so, as it was only history about the actions of men we were dealing with, not their actions themselves. Next summer we shall begin with studying action as action, and then, in fact, a well-founded epistemology will be among our first requirements. And history also will come on the scene once more.
It is the main result of our last chapters, devoted to systematics, transformism, and human history in particular, that no conclusions really useful for further philosophical discussion can at present be gained from these topics; there either is too little actual knowledge, or there are only combinations of natural elementalities, but no elementalities of any new kind.
To sum up: we expected that a rational system might be a biological result of the future, but we could not claim at all to possess such a system. We said that transformism might be proved one day to be a true evolution, governed by one immanent principle, which then would have to be regarded as a new primary factor in nature, but we did not know the least about that principle.
Human history, on the other hand—that is, the only historical process concerned with life that is actually known to have occurred—could not teach us anything of an elemental character, since human history, at present at least, did not appear to us as a true evolution, but only as a sum of cumulations, and the singularities of this history, taken by themselves, could only be of practical or emotional interest.
Thus it is from the study of the living individual only, that we have so far gained elemental principles in biology. The analysis of individual morphogenesis and of individual inheritance has yielded us the concept of entelechy as the chief result of the first part of our lectures. We shall be able to get more proofs of the autonomy of the individual life in the beginning of the second part; indeed, the beginning of that part will bring us to a full understanding of what the living individual is, and what it is not. And then the real philosophy of life, that is, the philosophy of the individual, will occupy us for the greater half of our lectures of next summer.