672 SOCIAL SCIENCE 



merest -foretaste of Nirvana is better than all these? It is then, at 

 bottom, once more, the appeal of what is proposed as the end and 

 aim of life that decides our preference. Survival, I repeat, does not 

 decide. Buddhism is older than Christianity, its followers said to be 

 more numerous; Buddhist society in its environment persists; so 

 does Chinese society, based on Confucianism. Complexity does not 

 decide. If then we still, many of us, believe that the next step in 

 religion should be along the path opened up for us by Isaiah and 

 Jesus, it is because in interrogating our inmost experience we find 

 that the ideas expressed by these great teachers satisfy us and ap- 

 peal to us to-day, not because of any wisdom we have gained from 

 the study of fetichism or ancestor-worship or the rest. 



The same informational wealth, coupled with regulative impotency, 

 we meet with in the science which deals with the industrial develop- 

 ment of society. The various forms of industrial organization are 

 the expression, not merely of physical necessities, nor of methods of 

 satisfying these necessities, but of such methods controlled by and 

 subordinate to ideas. Slavery is based on the idea of the vicarious 

 realization of the ends of the ungifted in the gifted, an idea which in 

 a modified form has even been revived in modern times by Nietzsche 

 and his school. Feudal serfdom is based on the idea of God-derived 

 power in the master over the servant, and of responsibility connected 

 with such power. The modern wage-system is based on the idea of 

 individual liberty and on the assumed possibility, a possibility which 

 may be doubted, of a just quantitative measurement of mutual serv- 

 ices. It is not possible to arrange these systems in a simple progress- 

 ive series. Each of them has its glaring defects, each also has merits 

 which are absent in the others. Even slavery and serfdom have cer- 

 tain advantages wanting in the system that is expressed in the cash- 

 nexus. At present the defects of the modern wage-system have 

 become conspicuous, and divers changes are proposed. Some persons 

 favor compulsory collectivism, others advocate a kind of industrial 

 feudalism, others hold fast to the orthodox principle of laissez faire 

 and unadulterated competition. Others, again, believe in a voluntary 

 collectivism, with industrial competition preserved alongside. Ana- 

 logies to these types may be found in the past; but a law of develop- 

 ment which, on being recognized, would turn for us into an ethical 

 imperative, has not been discovered. As before, we look in vain to 

 the test of social survival, or of complexity, to put an end to our uncer- 

 tainty. Each of the great types has operated toward social survival 

 under appropriate conditions, and the question what type will sur- 

 vive under modern conditions is the very one upon which we are 

 divided, and one which cannot be settled by an appeal to the facts 

 of survival under conditions different from ours. The test of com- 

 plexity likewise will not assist us, because the more advanced forms 



