ABSTRACT
But when the operation of these instinctive urges is thus raised to the level of consciousness and employs ‘reasonable methods’, we can no longer regard the tactics as those of the specific instincts, each acting on its own, and using in its separate interest some purely private fund of energy. At some stage in organic evolution a general intelligence (or biological cunning) must come in, to co-ordinate and to control the operations of the various specific urges in the general interest of the whole organism and of the species. A highly centralised nervous system takes over in large measure the work formerly done by specialised local centres. This physiological centralisation is accompanied by a similar centralisation of intelligent control. The direction of a large part of the fund of organic energy is thus placed at the disposal of the control-board in the brain. As in the case of the separate instincts, so in the case of this general intelligence, a growing knowledge and skill arise from the employment of the surplus energy which remains after the ‘costs of maintenance’ are defrayed. This surplus, absorbed, in the case of lower organisms, in the ‘play’ or tactical cunning, or perhaps the decorative display of the special organs, passes through the more developed central control of the human brain, into the play, art, or ‘science’ of the organism as a coordinated whole. The question how far science is ‘disinterested’ thus emerges in a new form. So far as the intelligence of man and the fund of energy available for its operation are released from the control of the separate instinctive interests, and are put to the
account of the central control, they may be said to have become ‘disinterested’. But if the change only consists in the interest of the whole being substituted for the several interests of the parts, have we yet got what is meant by a disinterested pursuit of knowledge? If science is consciously directed to secure the general good of the human personality or of mankind, conceived in biological terms of survival and development, or in any other terms descriptive of human welfare, have we a fully disinterested science? Or must that term be reserved exclusively for a pursuit of knowledge which, though indirectly and incidentally conducive to human welfare, takes for its direct and conscious aim knowledge as an end in itself, as the satisfaction of an intellectual curiosity which is in no sense the servant of the other special instincts. Or, perhaps, it is unnecessary to assume that this general curiosity, or drive for knowledge, belongs to the original outfit of man. It might be that, at first a separate and subservient part of the primitive instincts of nutrition, sex, defence, etc., it came, with the developing brain, to assert its independence of these particular controls and to set up as a purely intellectual interest on its own account. In either case it will rightly rank as ‘disinterested’ in the double sense of being devoted directly and exclusively to the attainment of knowledge, and of operating free from the mandates of the special instincts that are its indirect and strictly unintended beneficiaries.
