Biology and Man

T H E N A T U R E O F L I F E world demonstrated thereby their biological superiority, and not only had, but deserved, a leading role in determining how the future of mankind would develop. With the realization, which was described in the last chapter, that Darwinian ‘fitness' is a very special concept, relating to the leaving of offspring and not to any other form of success within the individual's own lifetime, the basis for this theory of ‘Social Darwinism' dis­appeared. It can now be regarded as no more than a temporary aberration in the history of thought.Somewhat similar attempts to carry over notions derived from our biological understanding into the field of human activ­ity are sometimes made at the present day. For instance, some years ago the school of Soviet biologists who, under the inspiration of Lysenko, believed that heredity may be altered by environmental circumstances rather in the manner suggested by Lamarck, put forward the argument that this had important implications for mankind. They suggested that under a satis­factory social system-which they believed the Soviet system to be-the favourable conditions of life would bring about an actual improvement in the hereditary potentialities of the people fortunate enough to live in that society. They did not, however, draw the equally obvious conclusion that peoples who have lived for many generations under adverse social conditions will have suffered in their hereditary potentialities.It is perhaps mildly interesting to contrast this view, devel­oped in the Soviet society, with the analogous view that would follow from the application to mankind of the ideas concerning the inheritance of acquired characters that were discussed in the last chapter, which were worked out in a democratic society. According to Lysenko's ideas, an organism subjected to environ­mental stress merely suffers passively an alteration to its here­ditary potentialities-an alteration in a negative sense if the environment is unfavourable, in a positive sense if it is favour­able. According to the ideas discussed in the last chapter, there is no question of the organism passively submitting to any such alteration. Instead, the critical point is the active adaptation of the organism to the environmental stress. The appearance of the inheritance of acquired characters occurs because of the

B I O L O G Y A N D M A N selection of organisms which are better able actively to carry out an adaptation during their lifetime to the stresses impinging on them. Thus, the Soviet theory emphasizes a more or less passive response of the population as a whole, while the theory put forward here emphasizes in contrast the active ability of individuals to find some way of dealing with the situation.However it is very important to realize that no such analogies between the biological processes of evolution and the conduct of human affairs should be taken very seriously. Certainly the rules of biological evolution apply to the biological evolution of man, but in relation to the general processes of human advance they cannot be regarded as more than suggestive. This is so because human advance does not take place only, or even mainly, by means of biological evolution. It is quite obvious that when the human species has developed a new capacity for dealing with its environment-for instance the ability to fly-it has not done so by means of the same kind of processes as were involved when other species of organisms, such as the ancestors of the birds, developed similar capacities. Biological evolution has in mankind been reduced to relative unimportance by the develop­ment of a new, and characteristically human, method of advance. We shall return to discuss the nature of this in a moment, but before doing so there is a further point to be made about evolution at the sub-human level.There is another consideration about the general course of evolution which should have a very profound effect on man's general view of his place in nature, but which has in practice been unduly neglected. It concerns the type of things which undergo evolution. Biologists have always been under the strong temptation to regard their basic subject matter as com­posed of individual animals and plants, but one of the services of Darwinism, and particularly of the Mendelian neo-Darwinism of the last few decades, was to show that a more fundamental entity is the population. By this is meant a group of inter­breeding individuals of the same species. A population, from the point of view of evolution theory, can be defined as a collec­tion of individuals whose genes could be recombined to form the next generation. The transition from thinking in terms of

T H E N A T U R E OF L I F E individuals to thinking in terms of populations is another of those changes which has been hailed as a major advance in the conceptual scheme of biology. However, one can see now that like the 'biological relativity theory' proclaimed by Mayr, it did not go far enough. Populations of individuals of one species exist only as parts of a larger whole, which is the entire set of animals and plants which makes its living on a given part of the earth's surface. This whole system of living things is known as a biotic community. The study of the organization of communities, and the inter-relations of the various species which comprise them, is known as ecology. A fully comprehensive view of evolution must see it as a series of changes in communities, and in the types of organism which comprise them.The study of communities essentially demands an organismic approach.* Perhaps the idea of a population, that is to say, a group of Individuals of the same species, is indeed to some ex­tent an atomistic notion-it is the kind of idea which is arrived at when one attempts to isolate separate parts within a com­munity. But the ecology which studies communities as wholes cannot do other than concentrate its attention on connectedness and organization. The inter-relations within communities are in fact usually of great complexity. The fundamental theme around which they are organized is the winning and utilization of the energy which is required for organisms to maintain themselves. Ultimately, of course, this energy is derived from the sun. Any self-sufficient community must contain a basic stratum of organ­isms which are able to utilize directly the sun's energies to synthesize complex organic molecules; these are the green plants. On these plants many other organisms may live. The earliest theories of ecology supposed that it would be possible to exhibit the organization of a community in the form of com­paratively simple 'food chains'. These would start with the primary producers which made direct use of solar energy; in the next level of the chain, the species b, c and d, would live by eating the primary producers; above them would be another level, m, n, o, which lived by eating b, c, d; and above them again perhaps a further level p, q, r, which lived by eating m, n, o; and so on. In practice, however, communities rarely have

B I O L O G Y A N D M A N such a simple hierarchical structure as this. If, for example, grass is the primary producer, there will indeed live on this such graz­ing animals as cattle, sheep, etc., corresponding to b, c, d, and on these carnivores such as wolves and leopards, etc., corre­sponding to m, n, o; but in addition there will be worms, beetles, mice, etc., living on the grass, and on these another set of carnivores, such as weasels, which in their turn will pro­vide some of the food for the wolves. There will be birds eating seeds as well as eating the insect grubs, others, such as owls, which live on some of the small mammals, and so on. The whole community, in fact, will form an extremely complicated network rather than a simple hierarchical pattern.It is only rather recently that biologists have begun to come to realize the high degree of organization of the inter-locking relationships on which the workings of a living community de­pend. There are indeed very few types of community, even amongst the simplest ones which are found under the severest conditions of the desert or the arctic tundra, which have been fully described in detail. We are also still far from a proper theoretical understanding of community structure. It is interest­ing to realize that the mathematics required to express the structure of a community in which many populations of different species are related to one another is also applicable to many of the basic problems of development. In differentiation we are concerned with systems containing many different types of mole­cules, which compete with or influence one another in the utilization of the raw materials of growth, which in this case are simple chemical building blocks, such as the amino acids out of which proteins are built, or the nucleotides which form nucleic acids. From the formal mathematical point of view, the situa­tion is essentially similar to that in a community in which many different species of organisms are competing for the energy which has been captured by the primary producers of the com­munity. I have made some tentative efforts to utilize the mathe­matics of population growth, laid down by authors such as Lotka, Volterra and others, in connection with the theory of differentiation*; and quite recently a young mathematician in my laboratory, Brian Goodwin, has considerably developed this line

T H E N A T U R E OF L I F E of thought, and has produced a general system of mathematics, comparable to the statistical thermodynamics used in physics, which has applications to both the fields of community structure and differentiation.It is a remarkable and regrettable fact that biological theory in this field is so comparatively backward. This is probably both a result and a cause of the widespread neglect of such ecological thinking in man's recent views about how his societies should be related to the material world he lives in. This part of biology should form a basic element in what used to be considered an essential aspect of philosophy, namely, economic and political philosophy. The application of scientific technology in human affairs has unfortunately produced results in this field which are not at all congruous with a truly scientific outlook. Since the end of the Industrial Revolution political philosophy, in the societies influenced by this revolution, has been unduly dominated by a climate of thought which may be appropriate to the simpler sub­ject matter of physics and chemistry but which is exceedingly in­adequate for the complexities of the human situation as it really is. The western industrial world has sought simply to utilize as much as possible of any sources of usable energy on which it could lay its hands. The sad story of the uncontrolled exploita­tion of the fertility of the prairies of the New World, which at one time reduced them to a dust bowl, is only a particular, rather extreme, example of the general way in which industrial man has been treating the world around him. There has been almost no realization that man is, and must always be, one element in an ecological community, and that if such a com­munity is to continue operating successfully for long periods of time it must be organized with a carefully balanced system of checks and interactions between its various parts.The development of a thorough understanding of ecological systems, and the application of such ideas to man's political and economic affairs, is nowadays rapidly becoming even more im­portant. The major historical happening in the last half of the twentieth century is likely to be the taming for civilized life of the greater part of the earth's surface which is still, as we say, 'under developed'. In large parts of Asia, Africa and South

B I O L O G Y A N D M A N America the earth's surface has until now been utilized by man only for peasant subsistence agriculture. How can we turn tropical forests, Saharan savanna, or the African bush into suit­able habitations for civilized and cultured men and women? It will certainly not be just by building a few automobile-domin­ated modern cities; nor can we rely in the long run on the extravagant exploitation of the stored-up energy in fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, on which western civilization has been largely based. We must find some self-sufficient system which produces as much energy as it uses. In time the production of energy from atomic processes will possibly solve this problem, but that date is likely to be some distance in the future. We need at least to approach the problem as an intelligent species, which, recognizing that it forms part of an ecological community, is considering how best that community can be organized. In the past we have, only too often, taken the attitude of a simple band of robbers, concerned only to get as much out of our surround­ings as quickly as possible, with no thought of setting up a sys­tem capable of long-term operation. Perhaps the most important practical effect that the natural philosophy of biology could have the present time would be to show mankind a more truly scientific way of looking at his situation as an inhabitant of the world's surface.However, the most important of all the lessons to be learnt by man from the consideration of evolution arises, not from the methods by which evolution has been brought about, but from the nature of the results which it has achieved. This lesson was in fact realized long before the theory of evolution was devel­oped. It is the notion that the types of living things can be arranged in a hierarchy from lowest to highest. We have seen that this idea was well known to Aristotle, and was familiar to the Middle Ages in the form of the Great Chain of Being. In terms of evolution we express it by saying that there has been real evolutionary progress, which has led from the simplest and lowliest creatures by a series of stages to the most highly evolved type, which we consider to be man.In quite recent years it has become fashionable in some circles to reject the idea that evolution has led to anything that is en­

T H E N A T U R E OF L I F E titled to be called progress. This repudiation of the very ancient notion that some organisms are, in a meaningful sense, higher than others is probably largely a consequence of the reaction against the over-simple application of Darwinism to human affairs by the Social Darwinists. When it was argued that suc­cess in evolution went inevitably to those who were most ruth­less in gaining advantage over their fellows during their life­time, the idea of progress tended to become connected with the most blatant type of 'getting on\ Human progress seemed almost to be synonomous with imperialism and 'might is right'. When these political doctrines were repudiated, the concept of progress was abandoned along with them. But, as we have seen, there was never any real justification for associating worldly success with evolutionary fitness. A belief in the reality of evolutionary progress should never have been advanced as an argument for such political doctrines, and equally it should not be rejected along with them.Evidence for or against the reality of progress is to be sought not in any implications which the idea may be thought to have for human affairs, but in the facts of biology. Many of the later products of evolution, such as the mammals in general, or man in particular, can do better many of the things that more primi­tive organisms do relatively inefficiently. For instance, many of the lowest organisms are stationary, like corals, or drift at the mercy of the currents in the sea, like jelly-fish, or move com­paratively sluggishly, like many worms; while higher organisms can in general move much more actively and effectively. The contrast between higher and lower forms is even more striking nowadays, when we can seriously discuss the transition from non-living chemical molecules to systems which for the first time show the characteristics of life.Evolution must have begun with the simplest possible sys­tems which were able, firstly, to reproduce themselves, and, secondly, to undergo changes or mutations and then reproduce in the changed form. Such systems may perhaps have consisted of no more than a single type of molecule, perhaps of the nature of a nucleic acid, but it is perhaps more likely that the simplest conceivable system capable of undergoing evolution would re­

B I O L O G Y A N D M A N quire the presence of several different kinds of molecules. It seems rather probable that identical reduplication requires the presence of a nucleic acid, or conceivably some other compli­cated molecule which might fulfil a similar role of preserving some identity of structure through the process of multiplication; but it may well be that in addition to such information-preserv­ing molecules some other types of chemical substance are re­quired to carry out the actual work of forming the new material. However this may be, it is already clear that elementary assem­blages capable of beginning a process of evolution are of ex­treme simplicity, when compared with such late products of evolution as the mammals. It is to the transition from these sim­ple forms of life to the much more elaborate kinds which first appeared in relatively recent periods of the world's history that the name progress is given.Those who object to the use of this name may agree that a series of changes have led on from the first organisms which began evolving to the more recently appearing forms, but argue that it is inappropriate to use the word progress to refer to it. Progress, they say, implies some form of betterment; and why should we consider ourselves in any way better than the worms? A short answer to this is similar to Dr Johnson's answer to those who queried the reality of the external world. He kicked his foot against a stone. We might say that we will take seriously the worm's claim to be our equals when the worms come and present it, but not before.A more detailed reply can be found by examining the nature of the evolutionary processes and the kinds of results which they must be expected to produce. Let us consider some particu­lar type of animal. As an example we may take the horses, whose evolutionary history is rather well-known. The recent members of the family are animals whose form of life involves nourishing themselves by eating grasses and relying on their fleetness of foot to escape marauding creatures which might prey on them, such as tigers or wolves. Their evolution will have been guided by the fact that those of them which left most offspring are likely to have been the animals which were most efficient in these respects. It is therefore only to be expected that we

T H E N A T U R E OF L I F E should find, as we do, that during their evolution the family of horses show signs of improvement in performing their charac­teristic way of life. Their jaws and teeth, for instance, have become larger and better suited to grinding hard grasses, and their legs have become longer and better fitted to enable them to run fast. Thus there has been something which is definitely an improvement within the terms of reference set by their particu­lar way of life.This is an example which shows that we may expect natural selection always to produce an ‘improvement’; but it is im­portant to realize that the changes it produces will be improve­ments from a particular point of view, and from other points of view may not be improvements at all. For instance, the changes in the horses’s jaws are improvements from the point of view of eating grass, but they have rendered it almost impossible for the horse to eat certain other possible types of food, such as meat. Again, the changes in its limbs are improvements in producing a faster turn of speed, but this has been at the price of losing any possibility of developing manipulative skill. If, for instance, the climate were to change so that grass, instead of being a com­mon plant became a rare one, the improvements which the horse family has undergone during its evolution would turn out to have led it into a dead end, from which it would probably not be able to escape; and the family would die out, so that its evolution came to an end. A fate of this kind has certainly overtaken many families of animals in the past.When we turn from considering the evolution of one particu­lar family of animals, with a characteristic way of life, to the inspection of the whole course of evolution from the simplest creatures onwards throughout the whole of the world, we are no longer provided with a simple criterion on which to judge im­provement, since there is no longer any one mode of life against which to assess it. The living world as a whole is not faced by any one task, such as running fast and eating grass. The only enterprise on which it is engaged is the very general one of finding some way of making a living. But, just as the evolu­tionary processes will lead to an improvement in carrying out a particular task, so we may expect them to produce organisms

B I O L O G Y A N D M A N which are improved in relation to this more general require­ment. This is, in fact, what has happened; and it is improvement in respect of finding some way of exploiting the environment to make a living that justifies the use of the phrase 'evolutionary progress'. The groups of creatures that we speak of as 'highly evolved', are in general, less at the mercy of their environment than are the 'lower' organisms, and able to utilize, to carry on their life, more subtle relationships between environmental fac­tors. Mammals, for instance, can keep their internal temperature constant, and thus attain a degree of independence of the sur­rounding temperature which is impossible to animals not able to do this. Again, it is only by the evolution of adequate organs of sight and scent and of a brain able to co-ordinate these, that the mode of living of a hunting wolf or tiger became a possible way of exploiting the surroundings to make a living.We may conclude that the changes brought about by evolu­tion will always be, in some sense, an improvement. In many cases they will be improvements only from a narrow point of view; and when circumstances change this may no longer be relevant, so that what had once been an improvement now leaves the animal defenceless to deal with the new situation. But, however many such setbacks may occur to particular fami­lies, the world of living things as a whole shows a continuous improvement in the ability to exploit, in some way or another, the surrounding circumstances so as to make a living off them.This improvement is what we, quite justifiably, refer to as evolutionary progress. It is, as was said above, a fact of the greatest possible importance to mankind. It requires no great subtlety to recognize that the human species is still more effi­cient in finding ways of exploiting the environment so as to make a living, than any other species in the world. Man's abili­ties, in fact, carry forward the story of evolutionary progress into a new chapter.The particular importance for man of the fact that evolu­tionary progress is a reality arises, however, from the peculiar­ity of man's nature and of the way in which his biological situa­tion changes. Man has in effect produced a new mechanism which brings about alterations in his relations with the rest of

T H E N A T U R E OF L I F E the world as the generations pass. It is, if you like, a new method of evolution; but it operates by a method different from that on which biological evolution depends, and it might per­haps be questioned whether evolution is the right word to use in naming it. However, since there is no other word obviously available for this purpose, I shall continue to refer to the characteristic human process as 'human evolution', or, in the light of its mechanism, which we shall discuss in a moment, 'socio-genetic evolution'.What the human species has developed is a new method of transmitting potentialities to later generations. This depends on the use of language. Items of fact, or methods of operation, can be taught by one generation to the next. Processes of teaching and learning carry out a function exactly analogous to that of biological heredity, in that they serve to specify the character of the new generation. This similarity in result can be indicated by referring to this method of passing on information as 'socio-genetic' transmission.The development of what is in effect a new method of heredity must inevitably lead to the appearance of a corresponding new method of evolution. This method will, of course, not entirely supersede the biological type of evolution, which man undergoes like all living things, but will be supplementary to it. In addition to evolving biologically, man also evolves sociogenetically. Moreover, this socio-genetic evolution very rapidly results in changes which are, in human terms, of enormous importance. Within the period of recorded history we can detect only slight indications of biological evolution in human potentialities, but we are confronted with overwhelming evidence of most striking changes in human culture. These cultural alterations are not unidirectional, any more than were the changes produced by biological evolution through the long ages of animal life which led up to the appearance of man. Some cultures, like some animal species, have changed in directions which turned out to lead to a dead end, and some have altered in ways which from the general point of view must be considered regressions. But, just as in animal evolution as a whole we can see some direction which justifies us in speaking of certain groups as lower and of others

B I O L O G Y A N D M A N as higher, so when we look at the whole of human cultural development we can see a general pattern of change, from small groups of nomads or scattered communities of food gatherers, to the complex and elaborate civilizations typified by such indi­viduals as, let us say, Confucius, Plato, Newton and Leonardo.It has often been argued that the existence, both within the sub-human animal world, and in the world of mankind, of general patterns of change which merit the title of evolutionary progress, provides us with an inspiration which should guide mankind's ethical strivings. One of the most prominent advo­cates of this type of ethical humanism at the present day is Julian Huxley. A similar argument has also been put forward from a more definitely religious point of view by Teilhard du Chardin. I personally agree very largely with their conclusions; but I should like to put forward an argument, which arises from a consideration of the nature of the human species as a biological entity, which I think establishes a still closer connection between human ethical beliefs and evolutionary processes. I have dis­cussed this at some length in another book recently* and shall therefore only deal with the matter shortly here.We need to consider carefully the requirements for any pro­cess which will make it possible for information to be trans­mitted from one generation to the next by teaching and learning. For such a process to be effective, it is not only neces­sary for a language to be developed in which the information can be expressed, but it is essential that the recipient should be brought into a frame of mind in which he is prepared to receive the information which is transmitted to him. In the process of biological heredity the new individual cannot avoid receiving the transmitted information, since half of it is already incorpor­ated in the egg nucleus, and the other half is brought into the egg by the fertilizing sperm. In a process of cultural or socio-genetic transmission there must be some analogous function which ensures that the message is actually received. One might say, somewhat crudely, that socio-genetic transmission requires that first of all the recipient believes what he is told. If he does so, the transmission of information from one generation to the next is possible. Only after that, as a second stage, does the

T H E N A T U R E OF L I F E question arise of the person who has received the information comparing it with empirical observation, or with other items of information, and accepting or rejecting it for belief as we normally understand that word.Recent studies on the psychological development of human infants, both by psycho-analysts and by authors such as Piaget, are beginning to throw some light on how this receptivity is formed in the developing mind. The human infant soon after birth seems not to be able to distinguish between itself and its surroundings. It exists, apparently, in a truly solipsistic uni­verse in which it is the world and the world is part of it. The development of a mentality which is prepared to receive informa­tion transmitted from outside by language demands, of course, the breakdown of this solipsistic unity. The readiness to receive a transmitted message implies that there appears within the infant's mind some psychological system which carries the authority which is necessary for the information not only to be taken in, but to be allowed to have meaning. Now it appears, as a fact of empirical observation, that the development of the authority-bearing system required for the transmission mechan­ism goes on at the same time as, and in intimate conjunction with, the formation of the notion that some things are good, and others bad, in an ethical sense. It is, of course, a major character­istic of ethical ideas that they involve some sort of authority.I do not mean that our ideas of good and bad are necessarily imposed on us by some outside authority, such as that of our parents, or of the church. What I mean to say is that it is an essential part of the idea of the ethically valuable that it is authoritative in the sense of tending to impose an obligation.The argument I wish to advance is that the authority which is required to make possible the socio-genetic method of trans­mitting information, and the authority which is involved in the development of the ideas of ethical good and bad, are two aspects of one and the same type of mental functioning. It might perhaps be possible to conceive, in theory, of a method of cultural trans­mission which involves some form of authority not of the kind which leads to the development of ethical beliefs; but in fact the mechanism which has actually been produced during the

B I O L O G Y A N D M A N evolution of mankind is one in which these two aspects of authority are indissolubly connected.If this is the case, the fact that man is the sort of creature who goes in for having ideas of right and wrong is an essential part of the same mechanism which makes it possible for him to trans­mit information by teaching and learning. The basic nature of our ethical character is, then, that it is a part of our special human or socio-genetic type of cultural hereditary mechanism. It would follow from this that, just as we can judge genetic changes by whether they are suitable to carry forward evolu­tionary progress on the biological level, so we can judge various different types of ethical belief according to whether they seem likely to carry forward human evolution on the cultural level. Any understanding that we can attain of the general pattern of human cultural evolution provides us with a criterion of what one might call ‘wisdom', which can be applied to judge whether one type of ethical belief is to be preferred to another.In this argument I have applied to human affairs a kind of reasoning which is often used in biology. In dealing with living organisms we are frequently faced with the problem of defining a criterion by which particular functions can be judged. It is a commonplace in biology to discover such criteria by an adequate examination of the material which can be empirically observed. In this way, for instance, we can form a concept such as that of health, or normal growth. We have no hesitation in using such concepts to judge between, for instance, different diets. I am suggesting that the concept of evolutionary or cultural progress has a similar degree of validity to the concept of health, and can be used in a like manner to judge between different examples of one particular human function, namely the function of holding ethical beliefs.Whether this is so or not-and for a further discussion of this complicated question I should like to refer you to my recent book on the subject The Ethical Animal-no one will deny that the fact that man is a creature who goes in for entertaining ethical beliefs, is one of his most important characteristics. It confronts us with a problem which has always been recognized as one of the most difficult which natural philosophy has to

God made thee perfect, not immutable;And good he made thee; but to persevere He left it in thy power-ordained thy will By nature free, not over-ruled by fate Inextricable, or strict necessity.Our voluntary service he requires,Not our necessitated. Such with him Finds no acceptance, nor can find; for how Can hearts not free be tried whether they serve Willing or no, who will but what they must By destiny, and can no other choose. The difficulty, of course, is that our will is obviously con­nected with a material structure, namely, our brain and the events going on in material structures proceed according to cer­tain laws of causation. If causation is strictly deterministic how can there then be any freedom of the will?One of the most influential trends in recent philosophy has been the attempt to show that many of the long-standing puzzles, by which philosophers have felt themselves defeated, have in fact only arisen from a misuse of language, and are actu­ally senseless, that is to say, do not require, and in fact could not possibly receive, an answer. Some of the recent followers of the school of logical positivism, which has been particularly active in this way, have argued that the difficulty about free will is of this kind. Perhaps the most important such statement is that by Professor Ryle in his book The Concept of Mind. He advances two main points, but they seem to me both inconsistent with one another and unconvincing in themselves when taken separately.The first argument purports to show that the laws of physics 'may, in one sense of the metaphorical verb, govern everything that happens, but they do not ordain everything that happens'. They thus leave room for the occurrence of processes which are

B I O L O G Y A N D M A N not governed by strict determinism. Ryle attempts to establish this by means of an illustration. Consider a scientifically trained spectator who is observing a game of chess. He would after some time be able to deduce laws which govern the moves which the various men can make. These rules would always remain valid; but it would also be true that they do not ordain what happens in the game, since every game is different from every other. But this surely misses the entire point, which only arises when we suppose that there are laws which control, not merely the moves which can be made with the chessmen on the board, but the material happenings in the brains of the players. Ryle has put forward, as a model of the natural universe, a system which includes players who have free-will. Obviously enough, within such a system there is no problem as to whether free­will can exist or not, since the author has already put it there.But having thus made room for the existence of processes of an undetermined kind, Ryle proceeds to argue that it is un­necessary to refer to them. People he says 'often pose such questions as "how does my mind get my hand to do what my mind tells it to do?” ' (He is thinking of someone pulling the trigger of a pistol.) He goes on 'Questions of these patterns are properly asked of certain chain-processes. The question "W hat makes the bullet fly out of the barrel?” is properly answered by "The expansion of gases in the cartridge” '; the question 'W hat makes the cartridge explode?' is answered by reference to the percussion of the detonator; and the question 'How does my squeezing the trigger make the pin strike the detonator?' is answered by describing the mechanism of springs, levers and catches between the trigger and the pin. So when it is asked 'How does my mind get my finger to squeeze the trigger?' the form of the question presupposes that a further chain-process is involved, embodying still earlier tensions, releases and dis­charges, though this time 'mental' ones. But whatever is the act or operation adduced as the first step of this postulated chain-process, the performance of it has to be described in just the same way as in ordinary life we describe the squeezing of the trigger by the marksman. Namely we say simply 'He did it' and not 'He did or underwent something else which caused it.'