Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/472

 466 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

conceived it thus^ organism is acknowledged to be a ^'category" — ^a real entity— of biology.

From the extreme devotion to description and classification which characterized the older biology, the new has gone, in several of its most important aspects, to the opposite extreme of scarcely any accurate de- scription and classification at alL Very few biologists appear to have considered how this attitude toward systematization has affected philo- sophical biology, and especially the biology of man, and so the general theories of human life, and influence upon human conduct

We approach here a matter of vast scope, one altogether too vast to be more than touched in a communication like this. But there is one segment of it which, though lying close to the field of biology proper and of great importance, appears to have attracted the attention of profes- sional biologists but little.

I refer to that melange (the thing will not allow itself to be called a system) of utterances and more or less definite teachings about the human species that has got into men's minds during the last thirty or forty years, and has found its fullest expression in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Surely biologists have not taken as much note as they should of the insistence by philosophical anarchists and other disciples of Nietzsche that iheir prophet is the particular and supreme '^philosopher of evolution.'*

Into the tumultuous whirlpool of discussion of the Nietzschean doc- trines I have no wish to enter, at least in this place ; but a few things about it I believe ought to receive consideration by biologists, especially by American biologists. Should the matter be thus attended to, I be- lieve it will be seen that there is a great measure of truth in the claim for Nietzsche as the philosopher of evolution; evolution being con- ceived as it usually has been in the modern period; and the particular point I want to make is that he did his philosophizing, primarily about man and very secondarily about the rest of the living world, in all but total disregard of, seemingly in almost total ignorance of, the natural history aspect of biology. His appeals to physiology, or something he called physiology; and to some of the results and conceptions of physio- logical psychology (although I do not recall his having used exactly this phrase) were constant and often very telling. But his neglect of, yes, more than that, his positive antipathy for the systematic, the coordina- tional, the interdependent aspects of living nature are striking indeed, once one comes to study his works with the point definitely in mind. I have searched, vainly, both in his own writings and in those of several professed followers of his, for evidence that the conceptions organism and history biologist, enter in any definite and positive fashion into his
 * ' organic '* with the meaning these terms have to every genuine natural

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