Anthropo-biology : towards a system of the sciences

We are faced to-day with two overwhelming problems and tasks. There is on the one hand the need for constructive world planning, the organisation of the world as a human household, the deliberate constructive planning of the world of man. And there is on the other hand the task which each one of us feels more urgent and pressing every day, the task of one’s own individual life, of the integration within it of its manifold different aspects and sides, and the whole question of the development, flowering and fruition of human personality. Even the actual survival of personality in face of the automation of our civilisation is at stake. The question is not just whether in the future individuals will be free, but whether it will be possible for an individual to be of any significance at all! These are the two startling new facts which face each one of us, and there is something about each of them which our present science and our present knowledge is quite unable to grapple and cope with.

Ordinary science to-day, ordinary physics and chemistry and biology, and even psychology and sociology, are all, without exception, analytical in their method. They consist, by the very intellectual discipline which is at their root, of an analysis and dissection into parts, and they are quite unable to grapple with the problem of the whole. Now both the world and personality are single wholes, and the science of wholes is something which at the best is in its very infancy, and to a great extent completely unrecognised. Therefore I would like to put forward that there is needed an anthropo-biology, meaning in the first place a biology of the whole, a biology in which all the functions and co-functioning of organs are understood in their systematics because, quite obviously, if there is a whole, there must be a certain rhyme and reason and system about it. It is not just a totality of anarchic parts. The very fact of a whole signifies that it is something more than the summation of its parts, and the laws of the whole are by no means simply the summation of the laws of the

arts. : From this arises the need of a new organon of knowledge with which to handle the actual problems which to-day confront us.

Therefore I do not intend a mere criticism of the inefficacy and 2