Problems of life and mind
Nature 107 : 35–37
10 March 1921
Reviews of:
(1) Ward, S. (1920) The Ways of Life: A Study in Ethics. Oxford University Press. (2) Reinheimer, H. (1920) Symbiosis: A Socio-physiological Study of Evolution. Headley Bros. (3) Lane-Fox Pitt, St. G. (1920) Free Will and Destiny. Constable and Co. (4) McDowall, S. A. (1920) Beauty and the Beast: An Essay in Evolutionary Aesthetic. Cambridge University Press.
[...]
Here morality is dealt with in excelsis. A reasonable being and a moral being are one and the same — but beyond our reach. On the other hand, Mr. Reinheimer seeks the roots of morality in the very beginnings of life. His advocacy of symbiosis, in his extended sense of the word, is well known from his previous publications. Making due allowance for some over-emphasis, pardonable in the advocate, what one may fairly regard as his main contention — that integration in bionomic relatedness is essential to the good of all concerned in the intricate web of life — is sound at the core. In this mesh of relatedness the nutritive factors demand as careful study as those which subserve the ends of reproduction. Life as a whole is an integrated symbiotic whole; and if we be “sharers in a wholesome pan-psychism” we may fairly seek and find in the very foundations of organic evolution the foundations also of the integration of the unconscious, neither identifying the psychical with the physiological, nor accepting the mythological views of Maeterlinck and Samuel Butler (which are considered and criticised by Mr. Reinheimer), but regarding them as distinct, though, in some way, deeply and closely interrelated. Mr. Reinheimer, indeed, suggests that the physical and mental work together in internal or domestic symbiosis.
Thus, while, for Mr. Ward, at the upper limit of human thought is the concept of duty which under the conditions of our life cannot be reached, for Mr. Reinheimer the foundations of duty are laid in that integrated biological reciprocity to which he extends the concept of symbiosis.
[...] Hence it would seem that, alike in the realm of ethical thought with which Mr. Ward deals, in that of symbiotic interrelatedness under Mr. Reinheimer’s treatment, and in that of a complex of complexes founded on the unconscious, as interpreted by Mr. Lane-Fox Pitt, the direction of progress is towards further and fuller integration of factors which, under the correlative process of differentiation, tend to fall asunder.