Anthropo-biology : towards a system of the sciences

his actions are not always split and self-contradictory, and do not always produce the opposite result from the one he intended. Can he inherit the great past of Mankind? Can he find any clue which gives the vast panorama of Mankind, as he stands in the midst of it all to-day, and of Man’s past history and evolution, ays to his own present thoughts and feelings and deeds?

I think I can indicate how it is possible. If I want to understand myself better, then I should look outside into Nature, as also into my friends and other humans. If I want to know what qualities I have in me I should look outwards, and see myself reflected in Nature, for I have everything in me which is outside in Nature.

One of the first imperative needs of to-day is to break out of the petty, diminished notion of what a Man is which is current in our time. What is a Man in the ordinary view to-day? Something insignificant, small, which has no place in the field of Nature as revealed by Science. Our modern natural science has been at great pains to exclude rigorously from its field of inquiry and study whatever is human, and the human element is always most carefully excluded from scientific work and investigation. If, however, we begin to say, ‘What I am is mirrored before me in the whole world of nature and also society—there is nothing which I can see and behold outside which I cannot find the key to inside myself’, then we reach a notion of what we are which explodes all our ordinary little notions of human nature. We see ourselves inside as a sort of little jungle, constantly seething, with which we must come to terms and which must be mastered within and brought into a harmony and synthesis. We must start, if we are to do anything in the world now, by restituting the true notion of Anthropos, of Man, as against this small, petty, rather castrated animal, which our modern intellectuals and science would have us believe ourselves to be. Then there begins to grow the possibility of conceiving the whole planet Earth as one living organism in its development and growth. We can begin to see the races and nations, the cultures and religions, the

classes and sexes of Mankind, as the organs, the functions, of this 7