time: the refreshing river 



the units possess the capacities for happiness and misery, if not in 

 equal degrees, in degrees that approximate." The society exists for 

 the benefit of its members, not its members for the benefit of the 

 society. But there exists also another cardinal difference not mentioned 

 by Spencer, namely, that once the early determinative processes of 

 morphogenesis have gone on, all further cell-divisions produce like 

 from like. Muscle-cells produce muscle-cells and neurons neurons. In 

 a society every point corresponding to a cell-division means a com- 

 pletely new genetic shuffling of the pack of inheritable characters. 

 Hereditary castes have thus no biological basis. Spencer shows some 

 appreciation of this where he points out that succession by descent 

 favours the maintenance of that which already exists, while succession 

 by fitness favours transformations "and makes possible something 

 better."! 



It is fairly clear to-day that, if any form of society is most in accord 

 with what we know of the biological basis of human common life, 

 it is a democracy that produces experts. Consciousness, and all the 

 higher human qualities, are dispersed pretty evenly throughout the 

 world's population. But the unclearness of Spencer on this matter, it 

 is interesting to note, together with a thoroughly uncritical social 

 outlook, led in the hands of one of the most distinguished of your 

 lecturer's predecessors, the great biologist William Bateson, to a 

 striking Herbert Spencer lecture.^ It well merits a short digression. 

 Beginning badly by urging that biology must be the supreme guide 

 in human affairs (as though sociology were not a higher organisational 

 level than biology), it went on to say that, whereas "democracy 

 regards class distinction as evil, we perceive it to be essential. . . . 

 Maintenance of heterogeneity, of differentiation of members, is a 

 condition of progress. The aim of social reform must be not to abolish 

 class, but to provide that each individual shall so far as possible get 

 into the right class and stay there, and usually his children after him."^ 

 By this mischievously misleading use of the term class, Bateson 

 wholly surrendered the prestige of science into the hands of the 

 middle-class employer and entrepreneur, assuring him that class- 

 stratification was biologically sound and that the public-school tie 

 covered all the best genes. Doubtless Bateson was referring to voca- 



1 PS, II. 260. 



^ The seventh; "Biological Fact and the Structure of Society" in Herbert Spencer 

 Lectures, Decennial Issue (Oxford, 19 16). The lecture was given in 1912. 

 ^ Loc. cit., pp. 31 and 32. 



250 



