In existographies, Charles Judson Herrick (1868-1960) (CR:42), oft-cited as C. Judson Herrick, was an American self-classified "evolutionist" (1894), "biologist" (1912), and "anatomist" (1930), and or by profession: neurologist (1891), zoologist (1898), and pathologist (1917), noted for his 1930 speech “The Scientific Study of Man and the Humanities” (see: Herrick’s Humpty Dumpty), given at the opening of the new Social Science Research Building (Ѻ), University of Chicago, a very cogent and two cultures gripping appeal to humanities + natural science unification; Herrick, to note, became anti-reductionist and theism-defending (1956) in his latter publications.“The operations at this level are not uncaused; but the psychological laws of ‘immanent causality’ in this domain cannot be formulated in terms of a linear temporal sequence, every step of which is inexorably predetermined by the preceding steps, such as is implicit in the laws of causal necessity codes of conventional inorganic mechanics. The choice is determined at the moment of its exercise in accordance with psychological laws of a different order.”
“When the living body is viewed as a continuously evolving system which NEVER reacts identically to repeated exposure to apparently identical conditions. The act of response alters subsequent responsiveness. This alteration is neither random nor lawless. Creativity is exhibited in some measure by every mechanism.”
“Human freedom of choice is not uncaused action. The cause is intrinsic to the situation. The action is not predetermined by an extrinsic causal agent. It is determined at the moment of its exercise.”
“The overemphasis which these social positivists place upon environment and impersonal cultural factors leads to a social entropy which tends to reduce all social movements to the low level of inorganic mechanics. The logical outcome is Haeckel's evaluation of man — ‘our human nature sinks (under scientific scrutiny) to the level of a placental mammal, which has no more value for the universe at large than an ant or the fly of a summer's day.’ Human society is actually moving in the opposite direction, by reversal of entropy, toward constructive integration at a higher level; and the operative agencies are individual people endowed with capacity for creative work. White's contention that the individual is irrelevant to an explanation of the cultural process leads to a nihilism would paralyze all man's effort to improve his condition, and this is not what science is for.”— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 196)
“The social positivism to which the preceding criticisms are directed is, in my opinion, a perversion of the true significance of positivism as a general principle. If positivism is defined as the rule that we should never impute to a concept more properties than its operational definition allows, it follows obviously that we should never neglect any factors which do have operational efficiency. I claim, accordingly, that it is a violation of the rule of positivism to claim that the individual person's needs, desires, and ideals have no operational significance. I go further and insist that operational efficiency does not tell the whole story.”— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 196)
See also: Experientialism (Ѻ)Judson, in his §13: “The Evolution of Experience”, has the following to say:
“If we are looking for the early precursors of human ‘experience’, we find (see: Boyajian’s formula), that this limit is not reached at the level of the simplest animals known, for some rudimentary precursors of mentation can be recognized throughout the whole realm of inorganic nature. I prefer to give these early precursors of mind some noncommittal name: ‘mind-stuff’, if you like, but not mind.”— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 160)
“All animals have experiences of some kin , and so do inanimate things. The engineer says that a cantilever bridge experiences certain measurable stresses when a train of cars passes over it, and it reacts to this strain in measurable ways. The bridge experiences the strain but, so far as we can tell, it has no knowledge about it. The
engineer upon completion of his measurements and computations has scientific knowledge about the situation, though he lacks the firsthand experience that the bridge has. An ameba experiences the satisfaction of hunger when it devours a smaller animalcule. A man has experience when he winces from pain of a pinprick. This is common usage. In each of these cases the object reacts to a change in the situation and the reaction is part of the experience; in fact, I think it is safe to say that the reaction is the experience.
The exciting agent is, of course, an integral factor in the situation, but the quality of the experience as such is determined primarily by what the organism does about it. If the creature has no visual organs, light is not an adequate stimulus and the animal does nothing about it. How he does respond to an adequate stimulus depends on the structural organization of his body. There may be no awareness of the experience in any of these instances, but if the man is conscious of the pain this awareness is part of his reaction. His experience is different and different parts of the brain are acting if the awareness component of the experience is present. The experience is a property of the individual that has it, or, better, that does it; for an experience is an act, not a passive receptivity, merely something that happens to an
inert body. This is true equally for the bridge, the ameba, and the man.”— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 161)
“This twofold quality of experience and of things experienced, as manifested in external relations in contrast with internal relations, is everywhere observable, form atoms to galaxies, from ameba to man. In the series of things, it is the key factor in determining the distinctive characteristics of every individual organism, and beyond thus of every social group.”— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 166)
“The living machine, like every other mechanism, works in an orderly way. No operations of nature are disorderly. An apparently random movement is random only within some particular frame of reference. Even the movements of electrons are not lawless. If they were, they could not be systematized statistically or treated scientifically in any way. The laws of probability imply order, not chaos. Accidents don't happen in nature. The novelties that constantly appear in nature do not happen by chance.”— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 61)“I repeat that the behavior of any class of things, whether electrons or people, which seems to us to be random is not lawless. We do not know all of the laws of these events, and Heisenberg has shown that in the nature of things there are some features of behavior that we never can know because of our limitations. But we do know that all apparently random events when studied statistically show certain uniformities which can be formulated as laws of probability. These laws do not enable us to predict with certainty the action of any individual, but they give us a measure of probability that is adequate for practical operations.”— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 62)
“Let the goddess of chance aside in that pantheon to which Sam Weller assigned his Wenus and all other fabulous monsters. If nature is only partially integrated and utterly random actively is anywhere prevalent, then ever hiatus must be filled with some unnatural or mystical agency and the problems presented are scientifically insoluble.”— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 63)
“Nothing in nature is indeterminate; but this does not imply that all is inexorably predetermined.”— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 62)
“A unitary nature underlies all things. They have in common an energetic character which implies, on the face of it, nothing more than efficiency or power to act, and this, of course, a fundamental philosophical necessity of all being.”
“The second law of thermodynamics is a rather special case in that it applies only to closed systems. It does not define the steady state as this is exhibited in vital processes. Entropy may decrease in open systems. Therefore, such systems may spontaneously develop toward states of greater heterogeneity and complexity.”— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 51)
“In the organic realm all growth and all progressive evolution manifest an apparent reversal of entropy. In this domain entropy means degeneration, death, and decay. It may well be that the reversal of entropy is true for the cosmos as a whole and that the process of degradation that we call entropy is merely a local and transient episode in a vast domain of creative process that is continuously enlarging and progressively differentiating. In fact, this possibility may be regarded as a probability, because there are no strictly closed systems in nature. Nothing that exists is completely isolated from its surroundings. The second law of thermodynamics — ‘the entropy of a closed system never decreases’ — is experimentally confirmed in certain selected types of situations where the system in question is closed, or isolated, in respect to the measurable quantities under investigation, but this does not mean that the law is a universal principle applicable to all existing things.”— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 51)
“The second law of thermodynamics applies only to closed (isolated) systems: entropy is not a universal principle: indeed, it is never absolutely …”— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 52)
“A more technical discussion of the relation between vital processes, including mental acts, and the second law of thermodynamics is found in Grunbaum’s essay ‘Time and Entropy’ (1955). His explanation of the meaning of time involves two tasks ….”— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 53)
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| Herrick's 1956 The Evolution of Human Nature, the culmination of his thoughts on science, evolution, religion, and the nature of humans. [3] |
“It is not the province of science to enter the domains of esthetics, religion, and transcendentalism.”— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 39)
“It is now clear that in all natural processes there is a formative or creative factor, but it is much more difficult to find and describe the mechanisms of this apparently miraculous creative production of novelties that it is to discover the mechanical principles of those repetitive processes that yield uniform products.”Here we seek Herrick setting up a coded theological divide argument; similar, some ways, to Stephen Gould’s NOMA god (Ѻ) argument.— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 43)
“Every natural system, e.g, a volcano or a solar system, regarded as a mechanism, has intrinsic creative power, and non is a tightly closed system.”— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 57)
“In 1916, at the request of the Department of Psychology, Herrick offered a course on "Elementary Neurology" for graduate students. There were no prerequisites, all the rules and regulations of the pedagogues were disregarded, attendance was voluntary both for laboratory and for conferences, the content of the latter being usually determined by questions raised by the students. There were only two requirements for credit: a term paper that critically discussed a subject chosen by the student and a statement of such contents of the course as were most pertinent to the student's interest and program. For twenty years the course was filled to capacity by students not only from the Department of Psychology but from other scientific departments and from the divinity school and the faculty of philosophy as well. Herrick regarded the course as the most satisfactory and stimulating work of his teaching career.”
See main: Herrick Humpty Dumpty analogyIn 1930, Herrick, in his “The Scientific Study of Man and the Humanities”, a speech given at the opening of the new Social Science Research Building (Ѻ), University of Chicago, gave a very cogent and gripping appeal to humanities + natural science unification. [4]
“The modern period of biology began with the recognition that vital processes are natural events, not acts of the caprice of some supernatural spirit or ghostly presence. Today qualified biologists, with very few exceptions, accept this doctrine without reserve and devote themselves to the task of finding out just how the activities of living bodies are related with those of inorganic nature from which we derive our sustenance and our vital energies.”
“This does not mean chat the behavior of living bodies is just like that of dead machines; but it does mean that everything that goes on in a living body is related in an orderly way that is in causal sequences, with the events of the world in which that body lives. The laws of biology are not those of physics and chemistry, but they are congruous with them and the rules of these relationships are rapidly being discovered and recorded.”
“Young man, the brain has no more to do with the operations of the mind than have the cabbages out there in my garden.”— Daniel Purinton (1892), reply to Judson Herrick about the possibility of a unified “neuro-psychology” course taught at Denison University [5]
“Would you sooner go to Chicago and burn out or stay here and rust out?”— Mary Herrick (1907), hilarious query to her husband on his indecision on whether to go to University of Chicago to become professor of neurology or stay at Denison University as a zoologist; knowing, in context, that his older brother Clarence Luther Herrick, had, supposedly, “died” from overwork three years prior.
“The entropy content of a living organism is a completely meaningless notion. We have been looking, up to now, for a physicochemical interpretation of life. It may well happen that the discovery of new laws and of some new principles in biology could result in a broad redefinition of our present laws of physics and chemistry, and produce a complete change in point of view.”— Leon Brillouin (1949), “Life, Thermodynamics, and Cybernetics”; cited by Judson Herrick (1956) in The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 51) [7]
“Without some tension, social energy cannot be put to the service of man. Tension, like the voltage in an electrodynamic system, would permit energy to flow in useful channels without dangerous resistance which might destroy the structure.”— Quincy Wright (1948), “Social Tensions”; cited by Judson Herrick (1956) in The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 181) [8]
“Nowhere is the positivistic fiction of a dispassionate, objective observer wholly removed from the field of his observation more absurd than in the social sciences. The difference between the social and the other sciences, however, is merely one of degree.”— Kenneth Boulding (1949), “Is Economics Necessary?”; cited by Judson Herrick (1956) in The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 199) [9]
“A unified method of attack upon social problems which ‘must be that of modern natural science applied fully to human society, including man’s thoughts, feelings, and ‘spiritual’ characteristics.”
— George Lundberg (1947), Can Science Save Us?; cited by Judson Herrick (1956) in The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 199) [10]
“The artificial division that now exists between the natural and the humane sciences, and between the scientists and the humanists, is a survival of an outmoded dualism between things of matter and things of the mind. What we need today is a humanism that is scientific, and a science that is truly humane.”— Agnes Meyer (1955), source; cited by Judson Herrick (1956) in The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 203) [11]
“The leitmotiv of Herrick's scientific career was to contribute to the "psychobiology" envisioned by his brother Clarence in 1891. This was to be a coordinated attack on the "mind-body" problem by comparative anatomists, physiologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists in correlation with the advances in other fields of science. In 1956 he summarized the progress in this field in his The Evolution of Human Nature.”— George Bartelmez (1873), “A Biographical Memoir of Charles Judson Herrick” [5]
“Looking back now over the field which we have traversed, in our analysis of the behavior of animals and its mechanisms we start with the tropism and the reflex. This type of response is in some of its simpler phases indistinguishable from the reactions of dead machines to the forces which actuate them. But the more complex reflexes, on the other hand, grade over into those behavior types which we call intelligent. No one has yet succeeded in formulating a clear-cut definition of the limits of the reflex at either its lower or its higher extreme, and perhaps no one ever will; for the whole list of behavior types from machines to men probably forms a closely graded series.”— Judson Herrick (1909), “The Evolution of Intelligence and its Organs”, citing Charles Sherrington (1904); cited by Alfred Lotka (1925) [6]
“With the advancement of practical and scientific knowledge though the centuries the primitive demonolatries have been generally, although by no means universally, abandoned in the domain of inorganic nature. The primitive spiritistic tradition linters, however, under various disguises in many reputable scientific circles, an in the vast domain of human affairs probably the majority of men today believe as one of their most cherished articles of faith that the human personality comprises a physical body which is ‘natural’ and a spirit which is unnatural and in some inscrutable way may control the movements of the natural body.”— Judson Herrick (c.1927), “The Spiritual Life of a Mechanist” [13]
“Science is a three step process, the final achievement of which is ‘control of natural forces’, i.e. in the sense of conformity of behavior with the laws of physical and chemical science. The application of scientific method to natural phenomena, in short, involves three great processes: First, finding out as much as possible about natural ‘things’, how they are constructed and how they work. They operate according to rule and when we have learned these rules we have formatted the laws of nature. Second, the prediction of future events is possible as soon as we have learned the uniformities of natural processes, i.e., the laws of nature. Third, some measure of control of the future course of events is possible when the two steps just mentioned have been taken.”— Judson Herrick (1928), “Behavior and Mechanism”; cited by Howard W. Odum in An Introduction to Social Research (pg. 28) [2]
“When I taught physics in secondary school in 1891, the invisible and indestructible atom was the foundation upon which the scientific structure was built. Some of my naïve pupils were skeptical and asked if I were telling a fairy tale.”— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 33)
“As we have seen, any mechanism—a solar system, an electric battery, a man, a family, or a nation—is a more or less well-integrated unit which maintains transactional relations with surrounding things. It preserves its identity just so long as its own integrating processes are dominant over the disintegrating agencies that act within it and upon it. Both the integrating and the disintegrating factors of the operation are lawfully ordered processes. The disturbing or destructive processes are disorderly only from the standpoint of the mechanism involved. The laws of nature were not enacted by men to suit their own convenience, and if men disobey these laws the infraction carries its own penalty.”— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 64)
“The behavior of human beings is more labile and unpredictable than that of planets in their orbits, but in no case does science ever reach ultimate or absolutes of knowledge or predictability. The probability of the truth of a verifiable law or principle is one of the things to be determined.”— Judson Herrick (1956), commentary on George Lundberg’s positivism ideas; The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 199-200)
“Ethical values do not arise miraculously. There is an evolution of values, and all human idealistic values have their roots in biological values, which are recognizable and definable. Homeostasis at the level of human social adjustment must NOT be equated with that the chemistry of body fluids.”— Judson Herrick (1956), The Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 216)
