Creative critique and anthropo-philosophy

the working of the Cosmos. Thus we intend to take the human organism as the pattern of world wholeness. For if we take the human organism with all its muscles, nerves, blood, bones, psychic tensions and growth, and if we take the Earth and observe its geology, species, kingdoms and epochs, and if we take the solar system with its complex relationships between sun, planets, and moons, these are the phenomena we visualise when we speak of wholeness.

This view of Man as the pattern of wholeness is the very oldest tradition, starting from the book of Genesis in which it is said that God made man in his image and running right through all ancient religions and wisdom. Protagoras declared that “Man is the measure of all things’ and it is said in the Gospels “The kingdom of heaven is within you’.

Our present physics and cosmology suffer from having arisen out of the purely quantitative mathematical disciplines and are entirely inorganic in conception. To the Greeks physics was living nature. The great idea that the individual embryo recapitulates the evolution of the species opened the gate to a scientific, yet organic, cosmogony. The apparent collapse of this idea in the face of detailed knowledge has been shown by Dr Karl Koenig to be resolvable in the light of a deeper conception of cosmogony. Through this work embryology does indeed become the key to cosmogony in which Man takes a central position. So also Dr Hélan Jaworski has shown that the stages of a child’s growth are the key to the interpretation of the historical epochs.

We do not start with the dogmatic affirmation that this is so, but since it has been a central tradition of all religions and all ancient wisdom from the beginning, and since modern science has not refuted this tradition or found any other which can supersede it, and since start somewhere we must, we believe that we should not reject without inquiry a view which has been so consistently held and so carefully worked out.

Our start, then, will be the organism of Man, and it is Man himself which we must first investigate beginning with the central human science, psychology. By this we mean not merely external scientific observation, but man’s experience of himself and his own processes as they are lived. And we must ask whether from this

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