RELATION OF BIOLOGY TO SOCIOLOGY. 211 



The object of the social reformer should be, not only to accom- 

 plish the renovation of society, but to do it in the quickest pos- 

 sible time in which it can be so accomplished that the changes 

 effected shall be permanent, and the trend of social evolution 

 shall surely be directed toward the ideal end of individual en- 

 lightenment and liberation and social integration. These ends 

 can be surely accomplished by the method of evolution ; they are 

 as surely retarded and indefinitely postponed by the methods of 

 anarchical violence and artificial compulsion. The individualism 

 fostered and aimed at by the evolutionary method should be 

 sharply distinguished from that destructive anarchism which aims 

 at the sudden and forceful abolishment of existing institutions. 



Here, too, biology offers us a wise suggestion. Galton's law 

 of " reversion toward mediocrity " shows that those biological 

 changes which are suddenly effected by artificial selection and 

 forcible deviation from the main trend of natural evolutionary 

 tendency are not permanent. They endure only so long as the 

 organisms are kept under the direct and active influence of the 

 artificial conditions which produced them. The moment they are 

 left to the unrestrained operation of purely natural forces, they 

 speedily revert to their original status. This must be the case in 

 sociological evolution also, whenever social and institutional con- 

 ditions are artificially forced, in advance of the intellectual cult- 

 ure and functional development of the masses of the people. 



The history of our own time is full of instructive examples 

 illustrative of this sociological law : of innumerable co-operative 

 experiments, ideal communities, and the like, that have arisen, 

 obedient to philanthropic impulse, enjoyed a brief, precarious 

 existence, and died for want of sustenance ; of artificial commer- 

 cial situations, the product of legislative interference with the 

 natural laws of trade, which induce at first a feverish appearance 

 of prosperity, followed by great fluctuations in values, and finally 

 by panic and financial collapse. As artificial conditions thus 

 established are always liable to be suddenly modified or annulled 

 by variations in popular sentiment, the progress of discovery 

 and invention, changes in governmental administration and ad- 

 ministrative policy, the influx of foreign elements into the popu- 

 lation of a given locality, and a thousand and one other causes, 

 temporarily or permanently operating, it should manifestly be 

 the purpose of the wise social reformer to build along the great 

 lines of natural evolutionary tendency, and thus to make use of 

 those elemental forces, social, moral, and biological, which will 

 insure stability and permanent prosperity for the results of his 

 efforts. 



He will thus aim to encourage voluntary co-operation instead 

 of an enforced regulation of society by means of legislative en- 



