Anthropo-biology : towards a system of the sciences

blossom and flower, so outside in the world the hydras give rise to these blossoms or flowers of the medusae. The notion which arises from this carries in it something of far more value to us humanly than we can get by regarding the heart as a mere pump, without the qualitative sense of its relation, in the way I have indicated, to the rest of the system of the circulation.

That is one simple example of the correspondence to be found between the elementary animal forms and the tissues and elementary organs of the human organism. As a further illustration Jaworski shows that the higher animals like foxes and dogs, lions and tigers, which manifestly have within them something of feeling, of quality and of a character which expresses itself in their physiognomy, represent the very psychology, the very emotions of Man, analysed and exteriorised and held up almost, one might say, in nature as a mirror. We can see in the faces of our friends, or in our own in the looking glass, the danger and tendency that there is in each of us to become a different type of animal. It is not so much in this view that we are risen from the animals as that we should take very great care not to fall into an animal. It will at once be clear what I mean if I take the obvious instance of the fox as cunning. Every gesture, every behaviour, every movement, every look on the face of the fox, is a physiognomy, an incarnation of cunning. As the great philosopher Erich Gutkind sums it up, it is not that the fox became cunning by adaptation; the fox is cunning incarnated.

Now perhaps those two very small examples will be sufficient to indicate the notion, that we see separated outside in the world of nature and walking about as it were in analysis, and we might almost say vivisected, the different functions, the different organs, the different qualities and aspects which in man are held in a synthesis and balance.

Let us go further with Jaworski. We are apt with our modern intellectual consciousness and science to regard the whole planet Earth as something which exists apart from man, something which would be there even if man wasn’t, something which would have come into existence, or did exist, long before man existed, but this is a very questionable view. Certainly, if we