478 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



They both (Aristotle and Plato) — unlike as they are — hold with Zenophon — 

 so unlike both — that man is the ' ' hardest of all animals to govern. "... We 

 reckon, as the basis of our culture, upon an amount of order, of tacit obedience, 

 of prescriptive governability, which those philosophers hoped to get as a prin- 

 cipal result of their culture. 



Bagehot, of course, had no difficulty in explaining this increase in 

 social amenability which he believed he observed. He had accepted the 

 idea that acquired characters are inherited; and he thought that our 

 modern orderliness and sympathy would be attained "when the soft 

 minds and strong passions of youthful nations are fixed and guided by 

 hard transmitted instincts." But if we rule out this agency, and adhere 

 to the position of Weismann, now generally acknowledged as correct, 

 we must forego this easy explanation and seek some other reason than 

 the transmission of acquired characters for the world's increasing moral 

 stability. 



There remain two possible views to be taken of the fact that the 

 moral complexions of the ancient world and the modern are so different. 

 First, we may accept the orthodox dictum, and maintain that any ap- 

 parent changes are due to the increased weight, so to speak, of the race's 

 moral heritage — to strengthened social controls and the ascendency of 

 new ethical types; or secondly, we may postulate a change in man's 

 innate moral nature, accompanying and reenforcing the influence of the 

 augmented social heritage. We shall be justified in pursuing the second, 

 and bolder, course only if we can discern some selective agency adequate 

 to effect the change. 



It is here suggested that such a selective agency can be discerned as 

 operative, an agency at once powerful, comprehensive and continuous. 

 We may denominate it the elimination of the anti-social — that is, the 

 constant cutting off of those elements in society which do not fit in with 

 the requirements of orderly civilized life. The forms that this process 

 has taken — a number of which we shall examine shortly — have been 

 many and diverse ; but the result has been unified and focused. 



Settled community life creates an environment of its own, imposing 

 new requirements of " fitness." A heavy survival value comes to attach 

 to tractability, so that non-conformity, in greater or less degree, leads 

 to extinction or failure to beget offspring. The church and the state cut 

 off the anti-social person by capital punishment, imprisonment and 

 banishment; while the anti-social individual eliminates himself by 

 suicide, by choice of a dangerous occupation, by withdrawal to the 

 world's frontiers, by exposing himself to vice and racial poisons. Those 

 who tend to survive and perpetuate themselves, on the other hand, are 

 those whose moral natures make the restraints of sedentary communal 

 life less irksome. 



It would not be possible — nor is it necessary to our present purpose 



