Philosophy

conductor says, “Fares, please”, a very young child has no reaction, an older child gradually learns to look for pennies, and, if a male, ultimately acquires the power of producing the requisite sum on demand without conscious effort. The way in which our reactions change with experience is a distinctive characteristic of animals; moreover it is more marked in the higher than in the lower animals, and most marked of all in Man. It is a matter intimately connected with “intelligence”, and must be investigated before we can understand what constitutes knowledge from the standpoint of the external observer; we shall be concerned with it at length in the next chapter. Speaking broadly, the actions of all living things are such as tend to biological survival, i.e. to the leaving of a numerous progeny. But when we descend to the lowest organisms, which have hardly anything that can be called individuality, and reproduce themselves by fission, it is possible to take a simpler view. Living matter, within limits, has the chemical peculiarity of being self-perpetuating, and of conferring its own chemical composition upon other matter composed of the right elements. One spore falling into a stagnant pond may produce millions of minute vegetable organisms; these, in turn, enable one small animal to have myriads of descendants living on the small plants; these, in turn, provide life for larger animals, newts, tadpoles, fishes, etc. In the end there is enormously more protoplasm in that region than there was to begin with. This is no doubt explicable as a result of the chemical constitution of living matter. But this purely chemical self-preservation and collective growth is at the bottom of everything else that characterises the behaviour of living things. Every living thing is a sort of imperialist, seeking to transform as much as possible of its environment into itself and its seed. The distinction between self and posterity is one which does not exist in a developed form in asexual unicellular organisms; many things, even in human life, can only be completely understood by forgetting it. We may regard the whole of evolution as flowing from this “chemical imperialism” of living matter. Of this, Man is only the last example (so far). He transforms the surface of the globe by irrigation, cultivation, mining, quarrying, making canals and railways, breeding certain animals, and destroying others; and when we ask ourselves, from the standpoint of an outside observer, what is the end achieved by all these activities, we find that it can be summed up in one very simple formula: to transform as much as possible of the matter on the earth’s surface into human bodies. Domestication of animals, agriculture, commerce, industrialism have been stages in this process. When we compare the human population of the globe with that of other large animals and also with that of former times, we see that “chemical imperialism” has been, in fact, the main end to which human intelligence has been devoted. Perhaps intelligence is reaching the point where it can conceive worthier ends, concerned with the quality rather than the quantity of human life. But as yet such intelligence is confined to minorities, and does not control the great movements of human affairs. Whether this will ever be changed I do not venture to predict. And in pursuing the simple purpose of maximising the amount of human life, we have at any rate the consolation of feeling at one with the whole movement of living things from their earliest origin on this planet.