INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL SURPLUS 561 



man had added agriculture to hunting, used hatchets and smooth stone 

 implements, made pottery and baskets, erected houses, controlled fire, 

 had domesticated sheep and cattle, had begun spinning and weaving, 

 lived in stable villages and had a comparatively complex social life. 

 Life was infinitely more worth living in the neolithic period. Compared 

 with the ages that passed before the anatomical and mental character- 

 istics peculiar to man appeared, this increase in well-being — in surplus 

 energy — between the paleolithic and neolithic periods took place with 

 tremendous rapidity. The actual time must be reckoned in tens, per- 

 haps hundreds, of centuries, but, in comparison with the period that 

 had been required for the production of voluntary imitation by bio- 

 logical processes, the interval between the paleolithic and neolithic 

 periods was but a day. Voluntary imitation and invention had in- 

 creased the rate of progress many-fold. 



To review the successive gains through invention, discovery and 

 imitation during the historic period would not strengthen the argument. 

 In these latter days, we know, the power of the western world has far 

 outstripped even the greatest population increase the planet has ever 

 seen and at the same time has raised the plane of living far above the 

 average of even a century ago. We may turn, therefore, to the infer- 

 ences of sociological importance which may be drawn from the fore- 

 going facts. Not merely do they show, as has been indicated, that the 

 appearance of voluntary imitation marks the beginning of distinctly 

 human history, but they also provide a definite reason why biological 

 deterioration is not greatly to be feared at present and why the soci- 

 ologist who bases his explanation of society more upon psychology than 

 biology, is right. For, if it is admitted that the time required for the 

 development of man's somatic surplus through the operation of bio- 

 logical processes upon his structural and mental characteristics was 

 indefinitely longer than the period required for creation of all the extra- 

 somatic surplus accumulated since voluntary imitation appeared, then 

 the conclusion is apparently inevitable that, unless for some reason the 

 biological processes that make for degeneration are much more rapid in 

 their action than were the evolutionary processes that produced the 

 ability to imitate voluntarily, human society is able to increase its total 

 surplus even if somatic-surplus remains constant or even declines to 

 some extent. To put it briefly, extra-somatic increase will more than 

 offset a threatened somatic deficit unless the powers of invention and 

 voluntary imitation are impaired. Somewhat differently stated, up to 

 the limit where biological processes seriously affect them, invention 

 and voluntary imitation will increase the sum total of social surplus 

 faster than biological processes will impair that surplus. That this 

 limit is likely to be reached quickly is absurd. To reach it quickly we 

 should have to breed from the most inferior stocks alone. The burden 



