Anthropo-biology : towards a system of the sciences

ally understandable. So modern biology, and even modern psychology, are continually trying to find explanations in terms of the mechanisms of things, the mere chemistry or physics, the electronic movements of things. From the point of view from which I am speaking to-night, this must be reversed.

The whole is that which is simple and precedes the parts, and physics, so far from being the first of the sciences, must in fact be the last. It must be the last in terms of derivation, because physics and chemistry are only components and aspects of living biology. The geological earth itself is only a corpse or skeleton of the living. If there had been no life neither would there be any chalk hills. There would have been no coal strata. There would have been no rocks whatsoever on the earth if it had not been for the pre-existence of life. If there had not been gravitation there would have been no matter. It is not that matter creates gravity, but that gravity creates matter. Gravity is that force which brings matter into existence. From the point of view of biology (the point of view which takes functions as creating the organs and not organs as creating the functions) all these trends in modern science which lead to our impotence in face of the problems which beset us, must be re-interpreted, turned upside down, and brought into direct relation with the feelings of ordinary men and women. ae

This brings me to the other sense in which we use the prefix ‘anthropo’ to the sciences. The ordinary world of science to-day has become something from which everyone who is not a specialist is excluded. The jargon, the discipline, the narrow specialised realm of experience in a laboratory to which it refers have become entirely and totally divorced from the life experience of ordinary people. The whole of physics has become divorced from the realm of sense experience. What is known as optics and colour theory, and so on, does not from beginning to end mention real colour. It has to do with vibrations and wavelengths and movements of lines on a wall, and so on. But colour as you and I experience it, and could come to understand it, is not the field of science. Science has excluded it. The qualities—and after all what do we experience but qualities?—have no place in the

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