Essays of a Biologist

by Julian Huxley

In any case the man of science must obviously, if he face the problem at all, take up a scientific attitude of mind towards it. He cannot say that there is no such thing as religion; or try to whittle it away by explaining that it is something else—a complicated fear, or a sublimated sex-instinct, or a combination of credulity and duplicity. A thing, if it is a thing at all, is never merely something else. Nor can he submit to the pretensions of those who assert that it is too sacred to be touched, or that its certainties are greater than those of science. No—he must treat it for what it is—a fact, and a very important fact at that, in human history: and he must see whether the application of scientific method to its study—in other words, its illumination by the faculty of pure intellect—will help not only our comprehension of religion in the past, but its actual development in the future.

He can study it in various ways. He can use the method of observation and comparison, collecting and collating facts until he is able to give a connected account of the manifestations of religion and of their past history; he can study it physiologically, so to speak, to see what part it plays in the body politic, and how that part may alter with circumstances; or he may seek to investigate its essence, to discover not only how it appears and what it does, but what it is.

Further, he must have some general principles to lean on in his search, principles both positive and negative. He must be content to leave certain possibilities out of account because as yet he cannot see how they can be connected with his organized scheme of things; in other words, he has to be content to build slowly and imperfectly in order that he may be sure of building soundly. This is the principle which we may call positive agnosticism.

This very fact has been in the past one of the great obstacles in the way of successful treatment of religion by science. One of the attributes of man is his desire for a complete explanation, or at least a complete view, of his universe, and this has been at the bottom of much doctrine and many creeds. But before Kepler and Newton, no truly scientific account could be given of celestial phenomena; before Darwin, none of Natural History; before the recent revival in psychology, none of the mind and its workings. In the second half of the nineteenth century, for instance, science could give an adequate account of most inorganic phenomena, and, in broad outline, of evolutionary geology and biology; but mind was still refractory. Accordingly, the philosophy of science was mainly materialist. But the common man felt that mind was not the empty epiphenomenon that orthodox science would have it; and he desired a scheme of things in which mind should be more adequately explained than it could be by science at its then stage of development. Hinc illae lacrimae.

To-day it is at least possible to link up, not only physics and chemistry and geology and evolutionary biology, but also anthropology and psychology, into a whole which, though far from complete, is at least organized and coherent with itself. If the seventeenth century cleared the ground for that dwelling-place of human mind which we call the scientific view of things, if the eighteenth century laid the foundations and the nineteenth built the walls, the twentieth is already fitting up some of the rooms for actual habitation.

There are certain other domains of reality which have not yet been properly investigated by science. Telepathy, for instance, and the whole mass of phenomena included broadly under the term spiritualism, are in about the some position with regard to organized scientific thought to-day as was astronomy before astrology’s collapse, as was the study of electricity in the eighteenth century, or that of hypnotism in the middle of the nineteenth. What is more, the average man demands that phenomena of this order shall be included in his scheme of things. Science cannot yet do this for him; and accordingly the dwelling-place that we are building must still be incomplete; it is for those who come after to build the upper stories.

This cannot be helped. What we build, we must build firmly; on what is yet to be built, science cannot pronounce, except to say that she knows that it will be congruous with what has gone before.

What general principles, then, do we assume? We assume that the universe is composed throughout of the same matter, whose essential unity, in spite of the diversity of its so-called elements, the recent researches of physicists are revealing to us; we assume that matter behaves in the same way wherever it is found, showing the same mode of sequence of change, of cause and effect. We assume, on fairly good although indirect evidence, that there has been an evolution of the forms assumed by matter; that, in this solar system of ours, for instance, matter was once all in electronic form, that it then attained to the atomic and the molecular; that later, colloidal organic matter of a special type made its appearance, and later still, living matter arose. That the forms of life, simple at first, attained progressively to greater complexity; that mind, negligible in the lower forms, became of greater and greater importance, until it reached its present level in man.[45]

Unity, uniformity, and development are the three great principles that emerge. We know of no instance where the properties of matter change, though many where a new state of matter develops. The full properties of a molecular compound such as water, for instance, cannot be deduced at present from what we know about the properties of its constituent atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. The properties of the human mind cannot be deduced from our present knowledge of the minds of animals. New combinations and properties thus arise in time. Bergson miscalls such evolution “creative.” We had better, with Lloyd Morgan, call it “emergent.”

With mind, we find a gradual evolution from a state in which it is impossible to distinguish mental response from physiological reaction, up to the intensity and complexity of our own emotions and intellect. Since all material developments in evolution can be traced back step by step and shown to be specializations of one or more of the primitive properties of living matter, it is not only an economy of hypothesis, but also, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the proper conclusion, that mental properties also are to be traced back to the simplest and most original forms of life. What exact significance is to be attached to the term “mental properties” in such organisms, it is hard to say; we mean, however, that something of the same general nature as mind in ourselves is inherent in all life, something standing in the same relation to living matter in general as do our minds to the particular living matter of our brains.