course through history, determining by their ceaseless reactions the order and progress of the world, or, when wrongly balanced, its disorder and decay. According to evolutional philosophy there are three great marks or necessities of all true development, aggregation, or the massing of things; differentiation, or the varying of things; and integration, or the reuniting of things into higher wholes. All these processes are brought about by sex more perfectly than by any other factor known. From a careful study of this one phenomenon, science could almost decide that progress was the object of nature, and that altruism was the object of progress.

This vital relation between altruism in its early stages and physiological ends neither implies that it is to be limited by these ends nor defined in terms of them. Everything must begin somewhere. And there is no aphorism which the labors of evolution, at each fresh beginning, have tended more consistently to indorse than "first that which is natural, then that which is spiritual." How this great saying also disposes of the difficulty, which appears and reappears with every forward step in evolution, as to the qualitative terms in which higher developments are to be judged, is plain. Because the spiritual to our vision emerges from the natural, or, to speak more accurately, is conveyed upwards by the natural for the first stretches of its ascent, it is not necessarily contained in that natural, nor is it to be defined in terms of it. What comes "first" is not the criterion of what comes last. Few things are more forgotten in criticism of evolution than that the nature of a thing is not dependent on its origin, that one's whole view of a long, growing, and culminating process is not to be governed by the first sight the microscope can catch of it. The processes of evolution evolve as well as the products, evolve with the products. In the environments they help to create, or to make available, they find a field for new creations as well as further reënforcements for themselves. With the creation of human children altruism found an area for its own expansion such as had never before existed in the world. In this new soil it grew from more to more, and reached a potentiality which enabled it to burst the trammels of

physical conditions, and overflow the world as a moral force. The mere fact that the first uses of love were physical shows how perfectly this process bears the stamp of evolution. The latter function is seen to relieve the earlier at the moment when it would break down without it, and continue the ascent without a pause.

If it be hinted that nature has succeeded in continuing the ascent of life in animals without any reënforcement from psychical principles, the first answer is, that owing to physiological conditions this would not have been possible in the case of man. But even among animals it is not true that reproduction completes its work apart from higher principles, for even there, there are accompaniments, continually increasing in definiteness, which at least represent the instincts and emotions of man. It is no doubt true that in animals the affections are less voluntarily directed than in the case of a human mother. But in either case they must have been involuntary at first. It can only have been at a late stage in evolution that nature could trust even her highest product to carry on the process by herself. Before altruism was strong enough to take its own initiative, necessity had to be laid upon all mothers, animal and human, to act in the way required. In part physiological, this necessity was brought about under the ordinary action of that principle which had to take charge of everything in nature until the will of man appeared, — natural selection. A mother who did not care for her children would have feeble and sickly children. Their children's children would be feeble and sickly children.1 And the day of reckoning would come when they would be driven off the field by a hardier, that is a better mothered, race. Hence the premium of nature upon better mothers. Hence the elimination of all the reproductive failures, of all the mothers who fell short of completing the process to the last detail. And hence, by the law of the survival of the fittest, altruism, which at this stage means good motherism, is forced upon the world.

This consummation reached, the foundations of the human world are finished. Nothing foreign remains to be added. All

1 This seems contrary to the views of Weismann.

that need happen henceforth is that the struggle for the life of others should work out its destiny. To follow out the gains of reproduction from this point would be to write the story of the nations, the history of civilization, the progress of social evolution. The key to all these processes is here. There is no intelligible account of the world which is not founded on the realization of the place of this factor in development. Sociology, practically, can only beat the air, can make no step forward as a science, until it recognizes this basis in biology. It is the failure not so much to recognize the supremacy of this second factor, but to see that there is any second factor at all, that has vitiated almost every attempt to construct a symmetrical social philosophy. It has long, indeed, been perceived that society is an organism, and an organism which has grown by natural growth like a tree. But the tree to which it is usually likened is such a tree as never grew on this earth. For it is a tree without flowers; a tree with nothing but a stem and leaves; a tree that performed the function of nutrition, and forgot all about reproduction. The great unrecognized truth of social science is that the social organism has grown and flowered and fruited in virtue of the continuous activities and interrelations of the two corelated functions of nutrition and reproduction; that these two dominants being at work, it could not but grow, and grow in the way it has grown. When the dual nature of the evolving forces is perceived; when their reactions upon one another are understood; when the changed material with which they have to work from time to time, the further obstacles confronting them at every stage, the new environments which modify their action as the centuries add their growths and disencumber them of their withered leaves, when all this is observed, the whole social order falls into line. From the dawn of life these two forces have acted together, one continually separating, the other continually uniting; one continually looking to its own things, the other to the things of others. Both are great in nature, but "the greatest of these is love."

XXV

INFLUENCES THAT AFFECT THE NATURAL

ABILITY OF NATIONS1

It seems to me most essential to the well-being of future generations that the average standard of ability of the present time should be raised. Civilization is a new condition imposed upon man by the course of events, just as in the history of geological changes new conditions have continually been imposed on different races of animals. They have had the effect either of modifying the nature of the races through the process of natural selection whenever the changes were sufficiently slow and the race sufficiently pliant, or of destroying them altogether when the changes were too abrupt or the race unyielding. The number of the races of mankind that have been entirely destroyed under the pressure of the requirements of an incoming civilization reads us a terrible lesson. Probably in no former period of the world has the destruction of the races of any animal whatever been effected over such wide areas and with such startling rapidity as in the case of savage man. In the North American continent, in the West Indian Islands, in the Cape of Good Hope, in Australia, New Zealand, and Van Diemen's Land, the human denizens of vast regions have been entirely swept away in the short space of three centuries, less by the pressure of a stronger race than through the influence of a civilization they were incapable of supporting. And we, too, the foremost laborers in creating this civilization, are beginning to show ourselves incapable of keeping pace with our own work. The needs of centralization, communication, and culture call for more brains and mental stamina than the average of our race possess. We are in crying want for a greater fund of ability in all stations of life; for neither the classes of

1 From Hereditary Genius, by Francis Galton, pp. 332-348, Macmillan & Co., New York, 1892.

statesmen, philosophers, artisans, nor laborers are up to the modern complexity of their several professions. An extended civilization like ours comprises more interests than the ordinary statesmen or philosophers of our present race are capable of dealing with, and it exacts more intelligent work than our ordinary artisans and laborers are capable of performing. Our race is overweighted, and appears likely to be drudged into degeneracy by demands that exceed its powers. If its average ability were raised a grade or two, our new classes F and G would conduct the complex affairs of the state at home and abroad as easily as our present F and G, when in the position of country squires, are able to manage the affairs of their establishments and tenantry. All other classes of the community would be similarly promoted to the level of the work required by the nineteenth century, if the average standard of the race were raised.

When the severity of the struggle for existence is not too great for the powers of the race, its action is healthy and conservative, otherwise it is deadly, just as we may see exemplified in the scanty, wretched vegetation that leads a precarious existence near the summer snow line of the Alps, and disappears altogether a little higher up. We want as much backbone as we can get, to bear the racket to which we are henceforth to be exposed, and as good brains as possible to contrive machinery, for modern life to work more smoothly than at present. We can, in some degree, raise the nature of a man to a level with the new conditions imposed upon his existence, and we can also, in some degree, modify the conditions to suit his nature. It is clearly right that both these powers should be exerted, with the view of bringing his nature and the conditions of his existence into as close harmony as possible.

In proportion as the world becomes filled with mankind, the relations of society necessarily increase in complexity, and the nomadic disposition found in most barbarians becomes unsuitable to the novel conditions. There is a most unusual unanimity in respect to the causes of incapacity of savages for civilization, among writers on those hunting and migratory nations which are