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A preface should be long, like one of Mr. Shaw’s, or short. I propose the latter.

The essays here collected were written on very various occasions. This must excuse the considerable overlap that will be found among them. I have not thought it worth while to attempt to get rid of this, since, though facts may be repeated, the point of view and general context are on each occasion different.

Contrary to all custom, I have put the meat courses at the two ends of my menu. If an author may presume to advise his readers, I would suggest that, after finishing the first essay, they should (if they retain a stomach for more) proceed at once to the last. This done, they will find the others all in a sense lesser variations (if I may change my metaphor) upon the same themes.

In spite, however, of the diversity of their occasions, there is a common thread running through them, a common background of ideas. I do not know whether I am justified in calling those ideas especially biological, but they are certainly ideas which must present themselves to any biologist who does not deliberately confine himself to the technicalities of his science.

The biologist cannot fail to be impressed by the fact that his science to-day is, roughly and broadly speaking, in the position which Chemistry and Physics occupied a century ago. It is beginning to reach down from observation to experimental analysis, and from experimental analysis to grasp of principle. Furthermore, as the grasp of principles in physico-chemical science led speedily to an immense new extension both of knowledge and of control, so it is not to be doubted that like effects will spring from like causes in biology. But whereas the extension of control in physics and chemistry led to a multiplication of the number of things which man could do and experience, the extension of control in biology will inter alia mean an alteration of the modes of man’s experience itself. The one, that is to say, remained in essence a quantitative change so far as concerns the real life of man; the other can be a qualitative change. Applied physics and chemistry bring more grist to the mill; applied biology will also be capable of changing the mill itself.

The possibilities of physiological improvement, of the better combination of existing psychical faculties, of the education of old faculties to new heights, and of the discovery of new faculties altogether—all this is no utopian silliness, but is bound to come about if science continues her current progress.

Take but one example. In the first half of last century, hypnotism, or mesmerism as it was then called, was in complete scientific disrepute. To-day, all the main claims of its founders have been verified, and many new facts unearthed. Every text-book on the subject will tell you that men may be made insensible to pain by hypnosis alone without any drug, many women even being delivered of children under its influence without suffering. Temperature can be changed, blisters raised, and many other processes not normally under the control of the will can similarly be affected. The mind can be raised to an abnormal sensitiveness, in which differences between objects that are completely unrecognizable in ordinary waking existence, such as those between the backs of two cards in a pack, may be easily distinguished.

If such possibilities are open to the empiricism of the hypnotist, what may we not await from any truly scientific knowledge of mind, comparable even in low degree to our knowledge of, say, electricity?

But these in a sense are all details, relevant in a way, and yet only details. There is something still more fundamental in the biologist’s attitude. He has to study evolution, and in that study there is brought home to him, more vividly than to any one to whom the facts are not so familiar, that in spite of all appearances to the contrary there has been, throughout the whole of evolution, and most markedly in the rise of man from his pre-human forbears, a real advance, a progress.

He sees further that the most remarkable single feature in that progress has been the evolution of self-consciousness in the development of man. That has made possible not only innumerable single changes, but a change in the very method of change itself; for it substituted the possibility of conscious control of evolution for the previous mechanism of the blind chances of variation aided by the equally blind sifting process of natural selection, a mechanism in which consciousness had no part.

Most of mankind, now as in the past, close their eyes to this possibility. They seek to put off their responsibility on to the shoulders of various abstractions which they think can bear their burden well enough if only they are spelt with a capital letter:—Fate—God—Nature—Law—Eternal Justice—and such like. Men are educated to be self-reliant and enterprising in the details of life, but dependent, unreflective, laissez-faire about life itself. The idea that the basis of living could be really and radically altered is outside most people’s orbit; and if it is forced upon their notice, they as often as not find it in some way immoral.

Closely connected with this, in a sense its corollary, we have the fact that ninety-nine people out of a hundred are concerned with getting a living rather than with living, and that if for any reason they are liberated from this necessity, they generally have not the remotest idea how to employ their time with either pleasure or profit to themselves or to others.

There are two ways of living: a man may be casual and simply exist, or constructive and deliberately try to do something with his life. The constructive idea implies constructiveness not only about one’s own life, but about that of society, and the future possibilities of humanity.

In pre-human evolution, the blind chances of variation and the blind sifting of natural selection have directed the course of evolution and of progress. It is on survival and the production of offspring that the process has hinged; the machinery is in reality blind, but these emerge as its apparent ends or purposes. The realization of ever higher potentialities of living substance has happened, but only as a secondary result and slow by-product of the main process.

In human evolution up till the present, the apparent ends and aims have for the most part and in the bulk of men remained the same; it is only the methods of pursuing them that have changed. True or conscious purpose comes in and aids the unconscious biological forces already at work.

However, to most men at some time, and to some men at most times, these purely biological ends and purposes of life become altogether inadequate. They perceive the door opened to a thousand possibilities higher than this, all demanding to be satisfied. The realization of what for want of a better term we can call spiritual values becomes the true end of life, superposed on and dominating the previous biological values.

When civilizations and societies are organized so that their prime purpose is the pursuit of spiritual values, then life will have passed another critical point in its evolution; as always, what has gone before is necessary as foundation for what is coming, and the biological conditions must be fulfilled before the new and higher edifice can be built; but, as when the mammals superseded the reptiles, so this change of aim will mean the rise of a new type to be the dominant and highest form of life.

This can only come about so far as man consciously attempts to make it come about. His evolution up to the present can be summed up in one sentence—that through his coming to possess reason, life in his person has become self-conscious, and evolution is handed over to him as trustee and director. “Nature” will no longer do the work unaided. Nature—if by that we mean blind and non-conscious forces—has, marvellously, produced man and consciousness; they must carry on the task to new results which she alone can never reach.

Mr. Trotter, in his delightful book on the Herd-instinct, draws a distinction between the stable-minded or resistive and the unstable-minded or adaptive, and points out how the destinies of society have usually been entrusted to the former—whence spring our persecutions of prophets and our neglect of innovating genius. This will continue so long as the accepted belief of the majority is that there exists a Providence who has assigned every one his proper place, or even (oddest whim!) ordained the present type of society; so long as they rely more on authority than experience, look to the past more than to the future, to revelation instead of reason, to an arbitrary Governor instead of to a discoverable order.

The general conceptions of the universe which a man or a civilization entertains come in large part to determine his or its actions. There are only two general and embracing conceptions of the sort (though any number which are not general, and fail because they leave out whole tracts of reality): in the fewest possible words, one is scientific, the other unscientific; one tries to use to its fullest extent the intellect with which we have been evolved, the other does not. The thread running through most of these essays is the attempt to discover and apply in certain fields as much as possible of this scientific conception to several different fields of reality.

Of these essays, “Progress” has already appeared in the Hibbert Journal, “Biology and Sociology” in the Monist, “Ils n’ont que de l’âme” and “Philosophic Ants” in the Cornbill Magazine, “Rationalism and the Idea of God” in the Rationalist Press Annual, and “Religion and Science” in Science and Civilization, this year’s representative of the annual “Unity” series edited by Mr. F. S. Marvin and published by the Oxford University Press. They have all, however, been considerably revised and enlarged before appearing in the present volume. I have to thank the proprietors and publishers for kindly permitting me to reprint these.

Oxford,

April 1923.