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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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