Anthropo-biology : towards a system of the sciences

one being, Anthropos, of which Geon, the living earth, is the body. This is where the key and synthesis of the whole lies, in the inner centre of each of us. And at the same time we must behold the great span and scope of evolution and history, looking at the kingdom of Anthropos as a living organism which can be and should be and must be to-day understood as one developing, living whole.

Now Jaworski also indicated another approach to the study of Man. He studied the different civilisations and ages of history in the light of the corresponding stages of individual human life. The birth of Man from the womb of the caves, amidst the floods at the end of the Ice Ages, is succeeded by the childhood period of the ancient civilisations. Then in Greek civilisation he finds the story-telling, playfulness and questioning of children of eight to ten, and in Roman civilisation the rougher and more practical period leading up to puberty. That great inrush of new vitality of puberty finds its correspondence in the barbarian invasions of Europe, and that period of introversion and great religious aspiration and idealism which follows upon the barbarian invasion finds its correspondence in the religious idealism of adolescence. Then this is followed—we can see it very clearly, for instance, in the autobiography of Tolstoy—by that period of sowing one’s wild oats, the period of the Renaissance, with its wild flamboyance and exaggeration. Thus we can look back, and can begin to see the possibility which would have to be worked out into detail of cycles within cycles, of understanding and interpreting history in this manner. Mankind as a whole is a living being with its birth, growth, adolescence, middle age, maturity, old age and on-coming death. Mitrinovié always insisted that it was one of the essential issues of life to-day that we should begin to grapple with and understand the on-coming death of Mankind as a kingdom. At the time when he first wrote of this in the "twenties and ‘thirties, I suppose there were very few people, amongst those interested in science and philosophy, who were

‘prepared to consider seriously the problem of the on-coming death not just of individuals but of Mankind. I also imagine that in face of the facts of the last decade this problem is not only in

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