as living. Matter moves. Life evolves.
We have entered a new dimension of existence.
The laws of matter in motion are not abrogated, for
the simple reason that in physics one makes abstraction
of life, or in other words leaves its peculiar effects
entirely out of account. But they are transcended.
They are multiplied by
x, an unknown quantity.
This being so from the standpoint of pure physics,
biology takes up the tale afresh, and devises means
of its own for describing the particular ways in which
things hang together in virtue of their being alive.
And biology finds that it cannot conveniently abstract
away the reference to time. It cannot treat living
things as machines. What does it do, then?
It takes the form of history. It states that
certain things have changed in certain ways, and goes
on to show, so far as it can, that the changes are
on the whole in a certain direction. In short,
it formulates tendencies, and these are its only laws.
Some tendencies, of course, appear to be more enduring
than others, and thus may be thought to approximate
more closely to laws of the timeless kind. But
x, the unknown quantity, the something or other
that is not physical, runs through them all, however
much or little they may seem to endure. For science,
at any rate, which departmentalizes the world, and
studies it bit by bit, there is no getting over the
fact that living beings in general, and human beings
in particular, are subject to an evolution which is
simple matter of history.
And now what about philosophy? I am not going
into philosophical questions here. For that reason
I am not going to describe biology as natural history,
or anthropology as the natural history of man.
Let philosophers discuss what “nature”
is going to mean for them. In science the word
is question-begging; and the only sound rule in science
is to beg as few philosophical questions as you possibly
can. Everything in the world is natural, of course,
in the sense that things are somehow all akin—all
of a piece. We are simply bound to take in the
parts as parts of a whole, and it is just this fact
that makes philosophy not only possible but inevitable.
All the same, this fact does not prevent the parts
from having their own specific natures and specific
ways of behaving. The people who identify the
natural with the physical are putting all their money
on one specific kind of nature or behaviour that is
to be found in the world. In the case of man they
are backing the wrong horse. The horse to back
is the horse that goes. As a going concern, however,
anthropology, as part of evolutionary biology, is
a history of vital tendencies which are not natural
in the sense of merely physical.