Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/473

 PHILOSOPHICAL BIOLOGY 4^7

philosophy. And here is the point that ought to arrest the attention of scientific men^ indeed of all thoughtful persons. So far as concerns this vital matter the Kietzschean school is in strict accord with the '^ hahits of philosophying/* as Whewell calls it, now dominant in biology.

Listen to this, one of Nietzsche's '^Apophthegms and Darts'' occur- ring in the " Twilight of the Idols ":

I mistmBt all systematisers and avoid them. The wiU to eystem is a lack of rectitude.

What a familiar sound this has to those who, from being at home in the discussions of recent speculative biology, have had dinned in their ears the doctrine that systematic zoology and botany are old-fashioned, childish and insignificant! Of course any one even moderately ac- quainted with Nietzsche's writings knows that what he was aiming at primarily in inveighing against systems was the systems of traditional philosophy. And undoubtedly, as Miigge remarks: "many have been drawn to him for this very reason." Presumably most persons, be they scientists or philosophers, or be they admirers or detestors of Nietzsche, would easily and willingly recognize that he knew little and cared less about the systems of natural history. They would go further and say that that fact had no essential relation to his antipathies against sys- tems of philosophy. And this brings us back to the main point — ^the point to which, according to my view, men neither of science nor of philosophy have given sufScient attention, namely, that the system, the orderliness which every educated person now knows to be so greatly characteristic of living nature, must enter fundamentally into any phi- losophy of man and the animate world generally in order that that phi- losophy may be even approximately true and in any way adequate.

The following quotation from "Beyond Good and Evil" will open the way to a perception of the kindred between Neitzscheism and modern theoretical biology. He says:

Let me be pardoned as an old philologist who can not deeist from the mis- chief of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation, bnt "Nature's eon- formitj to law," of which you physicists talk so proudly as though — ^why it exists only owing to your interpretation and bad ' ' philology. *' It is no matter of fact, no "text'' but rather just a naively humanitarian adjustment and perversion of meaning, with which you make abundant concessions to the demo- cratic instincts of the modern eouL

The items in this which specially concern us are the references to nature and democracy. Nietzsche appears to have felt as genuinely and deeply as any modern whatever the importance of ''return to nature" — a cry which, though hackneyed, he was willing to adopt. For this feel- ing he is entitled, as an esthetic philosopher, to great credit. The keen- ness of perception and vigor of expression with which he protests against the repudiation of extemal nature, the vilification of the human body.

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