time: the refreshing river 



resources, some being owners of these essential things, and others 

 only having access to them on the owners' terms, also brought about 

 a situation in which the accumulation of personal wealth is the only 

 recognised sign of success. In Herbert Spencer's own thought we 

 have had frequent occasion to remark upon it. The "sagacious," the 

 "more worthy," the "prudent" etc., shall prosper, the weak shall go 

 to the wall. Spencer was perfectly well aware that this psychological 

 valuation might have biological consequences; he hoped it would. 

 But the puzzle is that he should have been so certain that the charac- 

 teristics which lead men to rise economically in a class-stratiiied 

 capitalist society were those most desirable from a social point of view. 

 Where predatory rather than co-operative behaviour wins the day, 

 the path towards the higher social organisation is closed.^ It was 

 strange that Spencer could not see that the very predatoriness which 

 he described in primitive societies of the "military" type saturated 

 also even the most highly developed societies of what he called the 

 "industrial" type. By a curious and happy irony, however, the effects 

 of this high valuation of socially undesirable qualities have been 

 much less than might have been the case, for the birth-rate of the 

 socially successful groups has for long been far below that of the 

 socially unsuccessful, and hence relatively uneducated, workers. The 

 use of the expression, "survival of the fittest" for social success has 

 therefore attained a definitely comic level. The only Darwinian 

 meaning the term could have was as applied to those who send the 

 largest number of offspring into the next generation. The successful 

 capitalist, therefore, might be fittest for having a good time, but not 

 for transmitting his genes to posterity. 



The foregoing biological arguments have shown that the higher 

 level of integration or organisation of the classless society would 

 be greatly preferable to the class-stratified society. At this point 

 the plain man might well object that a society with two, three, or 

 four classes must surely be a more complex system than a classless 

 one. To this, however, an obvious biological analogy provides the 

 answer. We might as well assert that an annelid with twenty or 

 thirty ganglia down its body is more complex than a mammal with 

 a highly developed single brain. The almost unimaginable com- 

 plexity of neurons, synapses, commissures, etc. in the human brain, 

 forms a far higher organisational level than that of the annelid 



* Tliis is the theme of the classical essay of the geneticist, H. J. MuUer, "The 

 Dominance of Economics over Eugenics," Sci. Monthly, 1933, 37, 40. 



262 



