ndow.
The Inadequacy of Materialism
This leads to a brief consideration of the second horn of our dilemma. The concern is now for those young scientists who have arrived at the conclusion that materialism is inadequate to fully explain nature. And it would not be hard to identify these people. With specific reference to the example above, these would be the John Does who unconsciously feel, or even truly understand, that the concept of "living in a group," when taken in a strictly biological sense, is contradictory to the concept of the distinctiveness of the individual, his independence, his individual initiative, his moral self. For John Doe may recognize this contradiction to be directly tied up with the freedom of any individual to choose one goal rather than another.
Now this ability to make a choice between two distinct alternatives is generally spoken of as "free will." Free will is identified as that which provides man with a feeling of freedom, of giving him a sense of authorship and responsibility, a sense of guilt and ethics, and a sense of knowing that there are norms and standards to be maintained in every human endeavor. This means that the notion of "free will" is opposed to the concept of people existing only as a part of some group. In the collective, the individual no longer counts; his mind must fit in with the group mind; his every thought and action is determined for him in terms of what the group thinks and does. If he deviates from this, he is made to feel ashamed, selfish, and a misfit. And, if this be the "choice" he has, it is clear that, in practice, it amounts to having no choice at all.
A purely materialistic philosophy is, by its very nature, metaphysically contradictory to, and hence unable to cope with, questions regarding the morality of man, and therefore the obligations of scientists to their society. One implication from this fact is that man, the human being, must be considered in terms of his totality. This "totality" we shall call the whole man. The point is that man is more than just a mechanistic, physical-chemical machine. He is more than just a highly complex, integrated glob of protoplasm. Man also has a spiritual self. This consists of a sense of beauty, of goodness, and moral responsibility. And it is this whole man that scientists must take into consideration on those occasions when they concern themselves with any obligations they might have to their society.
This makes it clear why the first horn of the dilemma—stated at the beginning of this paper—ought to be our primary concern. The young scientist, more often than not, accepts the prevailing materialistic philosophy of his group, and therefore regards moral questions as irrelevant to "real" science. With this we would have little quarrel provided that this sort of philosophy was explicitly restricted to questions regarding biological phenomena. But, unfortunately, this has not been the case. We have shown, in one instance of several, how this philosophy has been extended to cover social and political phenomena to which it was never intended to apply, and cannot, significantly, be applied.
The implication is before us, then, that the nature of life, in all of its various forms and aspects, cannot be adequately explained solely in terms of chemistry and physics. There is, in fact, a certain vital, directive aspect to all forms of living matter—a certain organizational wholeness.
In humans this psychical or spiritual aspect of living substance reaches its highest fruition in what is called mind and personality.
Our suggestion is that, before science is able to consider such things as obligations and other moral problems, a theory of reality is needed that will explain both this nonmaterialistic aspect of all living matter as well as those features explicable by chemistry and physics. And it seems almost anticlimactic to point out that before such a synthesis of the moral and material could be made, it would be necessary to know something about moral philosophy. For it may very well be that, in the final analysis, moral phi