XVII

FORESIGHT1

In the advance to high stages of civilization, the extension of the correspondence in time is most conspicuously exemplified in the habitual adjustment of our theories and actions to sequences more or less remote in the future. In no other respect is civilized man more strikingly distinguished from the barbarian than in his power to adapt his conduct to future events, whether contingent or certain to occur. The ability to forego present enjoyment in order to avoid the risk of future disaster is what we call prudence or providence; and the barbarian is above all things imprudent and improvident. Doubtless the superior prudence of the civilized man is due in great part to his superior power of self-restraint, so that this class of phenomena may be regarded as illustrating one of the phases of moral progress. Nevertheless, there are several purely intellectual elements which enter as important factors into the case. The power of economizing in harvest time or in youth, in order to retain something upon which to live comfortably in winter or in old age, is obviously dependent upon the vividness with which distant sets of circumstances can be pictured in the imagination. The direction of the volitions involved in the power of self-restraint must be to a great extent determined by the comparative vividness with which the distant circumstances and the present circumstances are mentally realized. And the power of distinctly imagining objective relations not present to sense is probably the most fundamental of the many intellectual differences between the civilized man and the barbarian, since it underlies both the class of phenomena which we are now considering, and the class of phenomena comprised in artistic, scientific, and philosophic progress. The savage, with his small and

1 From Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, by John Fiske, Part II, chap. xxi, pp. 303-306 (copyright, 1874). By permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co.)

undeveloped cerebrum, plays all summer, like the grasshopper in the fable, eating and wasting whatever he can get; for although he knows that the dreaded winter is coming, during which he must starve and shiver, he is nevertheless unable to realize these distant feelings with sufficient force to determine his volition in the presence of his actual feeling of repugnance to toil. But the civilized man, with his large and complex cerebrum, has so keen a sense of remote contingencies that he willingly submits to long years of drudgery in order to avoid poverty in old age, pays out each year a portion of his hard-earned money to provide for losses by fire which may never occur, builds houses and accumulates fortunes for posterity to enjoy, and now and then enacts laws to forestall possible disturbances or usurpations a century hence. Again, the progress of scientific knowledge, familiarizing civilized man with the idea of an inexorable regularity of sequence among events, greatly assists him in the adjustment of his actions to far-distant emergencies. He who ascribes certain kinds of suffering to antecedent neglect of natural laws is more likely to shape his conduct so as to avoid a recurrence of the infliction than he who attributes the same kinds of suffering to the wrath of an offended quasi-human Deity and fondly hopes by ceremonial propitiation of the Deity to escape in future.

This power of shaping actions so as to meet future contingencies has been justly recognized by political economists as an indispensable prerequisite to the accumulation of wealth in any community, without which no considerable degree of progress can be attained. The impossibility of getting barbarians to work, save under the stimulus of actually present necessities, has been one of the chief obstacles in the way of missionaries who have attempted to civilize tribal communities. The Jesuits, in the seventeenth century, were the most successful of Christian missionaries, and their proceedings with the Indians of Paraguay constitute one of the most brilliant feats in missionary annals. Nevertheless, the superficiality of all this show of civilization was illustrated by the fact that unless perpetually watched the workmen would go home leaving their oxen yoked to the plow, or would even cut them up for supper if no other meat happened to be at

hand. Examples of a state of things intermediate between this barbaric improvidence and the care-taking foresight of the European are to be found among the Chinese, a people who have risen far above barbarism, but whose civilization is still of a primitive type. The illustration is rendered peculiarly forcible by the fact that the Chinese are a very industrious people, and where the returns for labor are immediate will work as steadily as Germans or Americans. Owing to their crowded population, every rood of ground is needed for cultivation, and upon their great rivers the traveler continually meets with little floating farms, constructed upon rafts and held in place by anchors. Yet side by side with these elaborate but fragile structures are to be seen acres of swamp land, which only need a few years of careful draining to become permanently fit for tillage. So incapable are the Chinese of adapting their actions to sequences at all remote, that they continue, age after age, to resort to such temporary devices rather than to bestow their labor where its fruits, however enduring, cannot be enjoyed from the outset. The contrast proves that the cause is the intellectual inability to realize vividly a group of future conditions involving benefits not immediately to be felt.

Of the correspondence in time, even more forcibly than of the correspondence in space, it may be said that its extension during the process of social evolution has been much greater than during the organic evolution of the human race from some ancestral primate. Between the Australian, on the one hand, who cannot estimate the length of a month, or provide even for certain disaster which does not stare him in the face, and whose theory of things is adapted only to events which occur during his own lifetime, and, on the other hand, the European, with his practical foresight, his elaborate scientific previsions, and his systems of philosophy, which embrace alike the earliest traceable cosmical changes and the latest results of civilization, the intellectual gulf is certainly far wider than that which divides the Australian from the fox, who hides the bird which he has killed in order to return when hungry to eat it.

XVIII

THE FUNCTION OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS IN THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY1

Since science first seriously directed her attention to the study of social phenomena, the interest of workers has been arrested by the striking resemblances between the life of society and that of organic growths in general. We have, accordingly, had many elaborate parallels drawn by various scientific writers between the two, and "the social organism" has become a familiar expression in a certain class of literature. It must be confessed, however, that these comparisons have been, so far, neither as fruitful nor as suggestive as might naturally have been expected. The generalizations and abstractions to which they have led, even in the hands of so original a thinker as Mr. Herbert Spencer, are often, it must be acknowledged, forced and unsatisfactory; and it may be fairly said that a field of inquiry which looked at the outset in the highest degree promising has, on the whole, proved disappointing.

Yet that there is some analogy between the social life and organic life in general, history and experience most undoubtedly suggest. The pages of the historian seem to be filled with pictures of organic life, over the moving details of which the biologist instinctively lingers. We see social systems born in silence and obscurity. They develop beneath our eyes. They make progress until they exhibit a certain maximum vitality. They gradually decline, and finally disappear, having presented in the various stages certain well-marked phases which invariably accompany the development and dissolution of organic life wheresoever encountered. It may be observed, too, that this idea of the life, growth, and decline of peoples is deeply rooted. It is 1 From Social Evolution, by Benjamin Kidd, chap. v; Macmillan & Co., London and New York, 1895.

always present in the mind of the historian. It is to be met with continually in general literature. The popular imagination is affected by it. It finds constant expression in the utterances of public speakers and of writers in the daily press, who, ever and anon, remind us that our national life, or, it may be, the life of our civilization, must reach, if it has not already reached, its stage of maximum development, and that it must decline like others which have preceded it. That social systems are endowed with a definite principle of life seems to be taken for granted. Yet: What is this principle? Where has it its seat? What are the laws which control the development and decline of those so-called organic growths? Nay, more: What is the social organism itself? Is it the political organization of which we form part? Or is it the race to which we belong? Is it our civilization in general? Or, is it, as some writers would seem to imply, the whole human family in process of evolution? It must be confessed that the literature of our time furnishes no satisfactory answers to a large class of questions of this kind.

It is evident that if we are ever to lay broadly and firmly the foundations of a science of human society, there is one point above others at which attention must be concentrated. The distinguishing feature of human history is the social development the race is undergoing. But the characteristic and exceptional feature of this development is the relationship of the individual to society. We have seen in the preceding chapters that fundamental organic conditions of life render the progress of the race possible only under conditions which have never had, and which have not now, any sanction from the reason of a great proportion of the individuals who submit to them. The interests of the individual and those of the social organism, in the evolution which is proceeding, are not either identical or capable of being reconciled, as has been necessarily assumed in all those systems of ethics which have sought to establish a rational sanction for individual conduct. The two are fundamentally and inherently irreconcilable, and a large proportion of the existing individuals at any time have, as we saw, no personal interest whatever in this progress of the race, or in the