E MONISM OF GENERAL SMUTS
sm and Evolution. By General the Right Hon. J. C. Smuts. (Macmillan. 18s.)
MINENT statesmen have been addicted to Philosophy ever the days of Marcus Aurelius. The earlier tradition, the lion of Machiavelli, of Bacon and of Marcus Aurelius elf pointed the retiring statesman in the direction of tical philosophy, especially of morals ; and the experience ered in a lifetime of action and command was distilled he edification of lesser men in pregnant aphorisms or essays ellow wisdom. To-day the great statesman who turns elief from the world of affairs to the calm of philosophic ght inclines to metaphysics and speculates about the e of the universe. General Smuts is the latest of statesmen recruits to philosophy, and he is well fitted aintain the tradition. In reading his Holism and Evolution difficult to believe, so coherent is the argument, so closely the reasoning, that it was written at intervals in the busy of a Prime Minister and a General, who far from having
d is still very much in harness. Yet so it is. Begun the writer was an undergraduate at Cambridge, con- ed during a respite from politics in 1910, interrupted by Tar, and finally recast in 1924, the present book represents fruits of over thirty years continuous thinking, carried n the face of distractions which would have reduced productive capacity of ninety-nine men out of a hundred volume or so of personal chitchat, disguised under the e of memoirs.
e author's philosophy of evolution stands on a very rent level. He propounds a definite and, in certain respects, ntirely original theory of what he calls holism or wholes. ay be briefly summarized as follows. General Smuts, so many others, has been impressed by the growing rochentent, which recent work in psychology and physics brought about, between mind and matter. Mind regarded for example, the New Realists, is a collection of neutral culars arranged in a peculiar kind of order ; matter as caged by modern physics. is a modification of or a hump in -time, .a modification which can again be resolved into etions of peculiarly arranged point-instants. Mind in any. t is less mental, matter less material than it was ; each is fluid, more amenable to treatment. May they not then be emanations from one common source, expressions of common principle ? In General Smuts' view this is exactly t they are, the principle in question being what he calls sm, or the tendency of whatever exists both in the world ind and in that of Nature to form wholes.
word of explanation is necessary on the philosophical ificance of the word whole, a significance upon which ral Smuts' conception is based. A heap of stones lying. he side of the road is just a heap of stones ; a collection of struck at random on the piano is just a collection of notes. a building or a symphony, while each of them is respec- ly a heap of stones and a collection of notes, are somehow rent ; they are in short wholes. Similarly an organ of human body isolated from the body to which it belongs erally a different thing from what it was as an integral Of the whole body, when, by contributing to the welfare of
the body, it avowed itself, not merely a unit, but an integral part of a whole which transcended itself.
Now, General Smuts' view is that the driving force behind evolution is the tendency on the part of every unit to join up with other units to make a whole in this sense. This whole joins up with other wholes at the same level to make a further whole on a higher level, and so on indefinitely. The process of making ever more embracing and more perfect wholes is the process of evolution. The highest individual whole is the human Personality, beyond this is the State, which is a whole composed of Personalities, and beyond this again are certain ideal wholes, such as Truth, Beauty and Goodness, which all the other wholes arc in some sense trying to become. General Smuts thus disavows both the mechanist and the absolutist conceptions of the universe. The universe is not all there to begin with, evolution being merely the unfolding of the initially given, as the mechanists believed ; nor is it in some sense an already perfect static whole, change and plur-
ality being merely illusions due to our imperfect vision of reality. On the contrary, the universe is creative ; it brings something new to birth at each moment of- time, while the movement to greater perfection and wholeness, so far from being illusory, is the very stuff of which reality is made.
" Evolution," says General Smuts, " has an ever-deepening inward spiritual character ; and the wholes of evolution and evolutionary process itself can only be understood in reference to the fundamental character of wholeness. This is a universe of whole-making."
In taking his stand on the doctrine of creative evolution General Smuts is in line with the best modern thought, but it may well be doubted whether the impulse or tendency to form wholes is its driving force. That the progress of evolu- tion witnesses an ever-growing synthesis of heterogeneous elements in living organisms cannot be doubted ; a man is obviously a complex of more parts than a jellyfish. But does this make him more of a whole? The test of wholeness lies not in the number of parts the whole embraces, but in their unity ; and from this point of view it is distinctly open to question whether a man is as much a whole as a slug ; we have yet to hear of disassociated personalities in slugs. It is not in increased wholeness that the test of advance is to be sought, but in added power and quality of life, a quality and power which is only too often achieved at the expense of a loss in wholeness. Though • I do not entirely agree with the General about wholes, he has written a first-rate book.
C. E. M. JoAD.
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