ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 33 



survival, but at the same time it was very clear that we were not to 

 look to man's physical organism for the highest expressions of 

 that natural selection which was peculiar to him in the animal world. 

 Regarded apart from all disputes as to their genesis, and considered 

 simply in their functions, it might be said that a plant is a machine 

 for coordinating a certain number of natural forces, and thereby 

 lifting them above the realm of the inorganic nature which is below 

 it; that the animal organism is a machine for coordinating another 

 bundle of natural forces and thereby lifting them above the level of 

 the plant world, and that man is an organism in which the vegeta- 

 ble and animal constitution simply lays the basis of a higher series 

 of activities, in proportion as the natural forces below him are . 

 coordinated and transmuted by that which in him is highest — his 

 tnind. It is, therefore, in the creations of the human mind that we 

 would naturally look for the natural selections and survivals which 

 are most distinctive of man and most descriptive of his place in 

 nature. If the place of man in nature and the place of mind in 

 man be so regarded, it does not seem necessary to assume that there 

 is any reversal of the logic of evolution when we come to study the 

 phenomena of human society. It is not a reversal of this logic and 

 nomenclature, as Mr. Ward seems to think, but a transference of 

 that logic and nomenclature to a higher sphere of action — the ac- 

 tion of man in society under the forces of an expanding science and 

 a growing morality. It is in these — that is, in the rational and moral 

 forces, which are dynamic in society — that we must look for the natu- 

 ral selections which are relatively the fittest to survive at any given 

 stage of human history. And in properly co5rdinating the rational 

 and moral forces by which he is lifted above the brutes of the field, 

 it is just as important that man should act with the forces of nature 

 below him and in him as that he should in a measure act above 

 those lower forces by virtue of his mind — his "faculty of execution," 

 as Mr. Ward calls it. And in making the purely artificial regula- 

 tions which belong to him as "apolitical animal" he is perpetually 

 in danger of making civil, political, and economical adjustments 

 which sin against the laws of nature and against the natural rights of 

 man. Against all adjustments which unduly restrict the natural 

 freedom of man in his mind, his body, or his labor, we may there- 

 fore justly hurl the doctrine oi laissez faire. 



Mr. Welling then proceeded to illustrate this point of view by 

 citing the phenomena of political economy as presented to us in 

 3 



