218 THE WHENCE AND THE WHITHER OF MAN 



units of communities and states. For, as families and 

 communities are jnst as really organisms as are the in- 

 dividual men and women, whose soundness depends 

 upon the healthy activity of every organ, so there is a 

 survival, first of families, then of communities and rival 

 civilizations, in proportion to their unity and sound- 

 ness in every part. For on account of the close bonds 

 of family and social life, and in connection with the 

 development of articulate speech, a new kind of hered- 

 ity, so to speak, arises, of vast importance for both 

 good and evil. This mental and moral heredity, over- 

 leaping all boundaries of blood and natural kinship, 

 spreads light and good influence or an immoral con- 

 tagion through the community. And thus, in sheer 

 self-defence, society passes laws setting limits to the 

 oppression of the poor and weak, lest, degraded and 

 brutalized, they become breeding centres of physical 

 and moral disease in the community. The positive 

 lesson that the surest mode of self-defence is the ele- 

 vation of these submerged classes, we are just begin- 

 ning to learn and apply. 



By the ever- increasing acceleration of the develop- 

 ment the gap between man and the lower animal 

 widens with wonderful rapidity. Of course it is only 

 in man, and higher man, that these last and highest 

 results of mammalian structure appear. But that, far 

 removed as they are, they are the results of mammalian 

 and vertebrate characteristics cannot, I think, be well 

 denied. And this is only one of innumerably possible 

 illustrations of the fact that all our most highly prized 

 institutions are rooted far back in our ancestry, often 

 ineradicably in the very organs of our bodies. And 

 thus evolution, which many view only from its radical 



