Anthropo-biology : towards a system of the sciences

human, we human beings are to-day very dubious whether our human experience is real at all. ‘Only subjective’ is the sort of phrase that gets thrown at one; but what are our souls? Is not subjective experience the reality? And if our subjectivity is communicable and shareable, is not this vision which I have tried to conjure up of Anthropos, the kingdom of Man, exactly the shared subjectivity of us humans? And is not the real objectivity —or I would rather say the real reality—that which arises when the subjectivities of each of us are mutually corroborated? That is truly scientific to which each one of us can give accord and acclaim, not merely by our intellect, but by our actual human experience and intuition. We can find reality, not in the cold objectivity of science abstracted from human experience, but in the heights of intra-subjectively verified experience.

I have spoken to-night in a deliberately conceptual sense, in order to put forward the necessity for the existence of these new sciences. I also wish to affirm, before finishing, the need to humanise the sciences, to bring them into relation with our experience; a need each of us should bear within us as an obligation. The great development of science has become a sort of cancer, a life of its own within the body politic, with its own inherent rhyme and reason which we cannot stop. It has escaped from human guidance and control, has become divorced from our experience and from our cultural, spiritual life. Science has killed the world of Nature and our souls are bereft of their heritage. Nature is not loved but raped. That knowledge of Nature which can only be born of loving care needs to be integrated into a living organon. There was such a school at the beginning of the roth century, the so-called Naturphilosophie, with men like Lorenz Oken and Goethe, but they are still misunderstood and despised. In particular I should mention as an originator the great Swedenborg, to whom this room is dedicated, and whom Mitrinovi¢ recognised as the first Anthropophilosopher. In history there are many such men whose view of nature has been a systematic and philosophical approach, but the modern scientist says “Yes—but they didn’t produce atom bombs and machines like our modern science’.