332 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



before the stag loses his proud antlers, the bird its song and much of 

 its beauty, the plants their fairest colors. The butterfly sheds its wings 

 and expires, while alone and unweakened it might have lived through 

 half the year. This is the course of nature in the development of 

 beings out of one another ; the stream flows on, though one wave is lost 

 in the wave that succeeds it" (Bk. II., ch. 2). 



But although Herder thus clearly remarked these characteristics of 

 nature's dealings, he did not deduce from them either the biological 

 or the philosophical consequences which have since become so familiar. 

 It did not occur to him to find in the facts of the over-production of 

 organisms and the struggle for existence an explanation — such as 

 Maupertuis had already proposed — of that progressive production and 

 selection of more highly organized and better adapted beings, the reality 

 of which he so fully recognized. Nor was he led, by his apprehension 

 of a universal tendency to the maximum production of living things, 

 to erect the notion of ' unconscious will ' into the central conception of 

 a metaphysical system. 



5. In his accounts of the beginnings of human society, and of the 

 moral instincts without which society could not exist, Herder points 

 out that these beginnings were made possible and necessary by a prior 

 peculiarity in the physiological constitution which distinguishes the 

 human species — namely, by the greater length of the period of helpless 

 infancy. This, of course, is an idea upon which many evolutionary 

 moralists and 'sociologists' have latterly delighted to dwell. Herder 

 clearly sets forth how the prolongation of infancy was the condition 

 and the chief cause of man's moral nature — how it provided the true 

 training school in which the featherless biped was fitted for the social 

 state : " The first society arose in the paternal habitation, bound to- 

 gether, by the ties of blood, of mutual reliance, and of love. Thus to 

 destroy the savagery of men and to habituate them to domestic inter- 

 course, it was necessary that the infancy in our species should con- 

 tinue for some years. Nature held them together by tender bonds, so 

 that they might not separate and forget one another, like the beasts 

 that soon reach maturity. The father becomes the teacher of his son, 

 as the mother has been his nurse, and thus a new tie of humanity is 

 formed. Herein lay the ground of the necessity of human society, 

 without which it would have been impossible for a human being to grow 

 up, and for the species to multiply. Man is thus born for society ; this 

 the affection of his parents tells him, this the years of his longer 

 infancy show" (Bk. IV., ch. 6). 



This conception, however, was by no means a new idea of Herder's 

 own. It is, therefore a little curious to find the idea put forward by 

 evolutionary writers of the end of the nineteenth century as a fresh 

 and striking discovery. Even so learned a man as the late Mr. John 



