Essays of a Biologist

by Julian Huxley

There are many facile comparisons to be drawn between the facts of biology and of sociology. The most obvious is that between a whole civilized community and one of the higher animals. Shakespeare employed an age-old fable in Menenius Agrippa’s Tale of the Belly and the Members in Coriolanus. With Darwin, and the establishment of evolutionary biology on a sound footing, matters took a new turn. Man was now seen to be connected with the rest of life not merely by analogies of his own mind’s weaving, but by the living bonds of genetic descent; and it was at once perceived that a more rigid force than had hitherto been suspected might inhere in the comparisons between State and Organism. For, as Spencer argued, was not the State in a true sense an organism—a single biological unit composed of individual human beings just as a metazoan animal was a single biological unit composed, in the first instance, of individual cells? Further, the investigation of the evolutionary process seemed to reveal certain general laws of its march: beings of the same original constitution, exposed to the environmental forces of the same planet, had reacted in similar ways, developing along parallel lines, and arriving at similar types of organization as end-result. Thus it might reasonably be supposed that we should find the same general organization and mode of development in one type of organism as in another, in human society as in a vertebrate.

On these bases, Spencer and his followers drew elaborate comparisons of the two, and apparently believed that they were reaching the same degree of accuracy as that found in comparative anatomy when they compared the circulatory system of a mammal with the transport facilities of a State, or drew parallels between the brain and the cabinet.

It was speedily seen, however, that such generalizations were so broad and vague as not to be of much service: that the resemblances were in fact often no more than symbolical or metaphorical, instead of being based upon detailed similarity of constitution or of evolutionary development. With this, evolutionary theorizing on sociological matters fell somewhat into disrepute. The earlier jubilant certainty gave place to later doubt; and the half-century whose beginnings had roused Haeckel and Herbert Spencer to their imaginative flights closed suitably enough with that remarkable document, T. H. Huxley’s Romanes Lecture, in which the greatest protagonist of Darwinism confesses to seeing between man and the rest of the cosmic process, in spite of man’s genesis from that same cosmic process, an insuperable and essential opposition, a difference of aim or direction which had turned the original bridge into a barrier.[18]

As a result, not only did the particular comparison between society and an organism fall into disrepute, but also all attempts to draw far-reaching conclusions from biology to human affairs.

But the original contention still remains, and is logically unassailable. Man is an organism descended from lower organisms; his communities are composed of units bound together for mutual good in a division of labour in the same way as are the cells of a metazoan: he can no more escape the effects of his terrestrial environment than can other organisms. There is therefore reason to suppose that the processes of evolution in man and man’s societies on the one hand, and in lower organisms on the other, must have something important and indeed fundamental in common, something which if we could but unravel would help us in the study of both.

The correlation of biology with sociology is important not only in itself, but also as part of a more general correlation of all the sciences. The correlation of the sciences is of particular importance to-day for a double set of reasons. The rise of evolutionary biology and of modern psychology have not only changed our outlook on specially human problems, but have altered the whole balance, if I may so put it, of science. There was a time when the basic studies of physics and chemistry seemed not only basic but somehow more essentially scientific than the sciences dealing with life. Distinctions were drawn between the experimental and the observational sciences—often half-consciously implying a distinction between accurate, scientific, self-respecting sciences and blundering, hit-or-miss, tolerated bodies of knowledge. Biological phenomena are now, however, seen to be every whit as susceptible of accurate and experimental analysis; and indeed to present so many problems to the physicist and chemist that in fifty years or so, I venture to prophesy, the wise virgins in those basic sciences will be those who have laid in a store of biological oil.

But the main point is this—the study of evolution, of animal behaviour and of human psychology makes it clear that in the higher forms of animals at least we are dealing with a category not touched on at all by the physicist and chemist—the category of mind and mental process. Sir Charles Sherrington, with admirable lucidity, drew for us, in his recent address to the British Association, the problem of the relation between mind and matter as it presents itself to the biologist.

The great change that has come over science in the last half century, or so it seems to me, is the recognition that mind is not to be explained away as a mere epiphenomenon, but is to be studied as a phenomenon. From this point of view, biology will always be the connecting link between physico-chemical science on the one hand, and psychology on the other. There is every reason to suppose and no reason to doubt that life, which we know to be composed of the same material elements and to work by the same energy as non-living matter, actually arose from it during the evolution of this planet. There is, in the behaviour of the lower organisms, nothing which by itself would make us postulate mind: but in the higher insects, molluscs, and vertebrates, the last in particular, mental process is not only clearly present, but clearly of great biological importance; and finally the mind of man, according to innumerable converging lines of evidence, has evolved from the mind of some non-human mammal.

The principle of continuity makes us postulate that this new category of phenomena has not sprung up during the course of evolution absolutely de novo, but that it is in some sense universally present in all phenomena. It is merely that we have not yet found a method for the direct detection of mental processes as we have, say, for electrical processes; but something of the same general nature, the same category as mind must, if we wish to preserve our scientific sanity, our belief in the orderliness of the world, be present in lower organisms and in the lifeless matter from which they originally sprang.

In the present state of our knowledge, the study of physics and chemistry can be pursued without any reference to mental processes. But the study of biology cannot: and that is one reason why the centre of gravity of science as a whole is shifting—it is shifting for exactly the same reason that the centre of gravity of a house shifts during its construction—because the foundations have to be built first.