SOCIETAL EVOLUTION 149 



very enlightened few can be imagined as so doing. Human 

 beings act upon interest as they see it; and interests are bound, 

 for the masses of mankind (who must do the selecting that is 

 done), to be narrowly circumscribed. 



That this is a counsel of despair is nothing against it, if it 

 is true. But it is not such a counsel. Societal evolution is a 

 vast process, where the forces are massive and act with un- 

 hurried deliberation, endlessly interlocking, within a spacious 

 field. There are dim ages of the process behind us, and ages 

 untold yet to come. Selection occurs at every stage, and is 

 but an episode along the course. 



How then can men do anything, if all is determined by such 

 cosmic power? Why struggle? Well, man can do something 

 with gravitation, with the expansive power of steam, with the 

 germ-plasm stream, although he can control the processes 

 themselves in no degree. He can move things about, into the 

 path or out of the path of natural forces. He can fix the mill- 

 wheel beneath the falling water. He can place the cylinder in 

 the way of the steam. He can isolate or bring together the 

 sexes of animals. This has been done so successfully for 

 man's interests and welfare that man has conceived the idea 

 that he is master of nature. But what he has done is to learn 

 nature's ways and adapt his action to them. At a pinch he is 

 nature's plaything and victim: the earth shakes a little, and 

 his great works collapse; the volcano spills a little gas over 

 its crater-rim upon a town, and the lords of nature lay them 

 down and are still. 



It is not otherwise with the elemental forces of the societal 

 realm. They cannot be mastered; they must be studied and 

 known and adjusted to, as a condition of societal well-being. 

 The efforts of many a would-be benefactor and uplifter of the 

 race are sterile or even harmful because he is trying to do 

 what he would realize, if he knew what a society is, and what 

 can and cannot be done with it, to be out of the question. 



