636 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



huge factories of modern commerce with their contained ma- 

 chinery. And similarly for each of them, as for the Botanic 

 Garden, one dominant idea prevailed as a compounded re- 

 sultant, namely memory of the exalted dead for the pyramids, 

 idol-worship for the Parthenon, barbarous amusements for the 

 Colosseum, worship of God for the cathedrals, production 

 of some one article of conmierce for each factory. 



If now we consider the connection between any one indi- 

 vidual and his community, in a primitive state, where hunt- 

 ing, fishing, fighting, hut-building, clothes-weaving, food-cook- 

 ing, and like occupations made up the acts of each life, the 

 successful survivor, in application of the law of Natural Selec- 

 tion, would usually be the one who proenvironed and then 

 fashioned the most imposing but healthful hut, the "best" 

 clothes, the most nutritious food. The keenest and most 

 far-sighted proenvironal outlooks, when put into practice as 

 definite proenvironal responses, aided and selected the origin- 

 ator of such. 



In modern civilized society, various conflicting factors come 

 in to obscure or slightly alter the proenvironal law. But its 

 constant influence is everywhere seen and felt. The man who 

 can inhibit lower desires, and who can deny himself today, 

 while others are spending on luxuries, is planning and projecting 

 a wise future; the man who patiently combines several mental 

 stimuli — even though some of these give rise to responses 

 that are failures — into a tool that combines all the best of the 

 past with added points of advantage; the architect who cumu- 

 lates in his mind all the finest details of beauty, finish, internal 

 adornment, and usefulness of past buildings, and then proen- 

 virons in his brain, still later on paper, and finally in stone 

 and mortar, a building that excels; the agricultural inventor 

 who previews all past reaping machines in his mind, and then 

 proenvirons one that in thought he already sees excelling all 

 others at agricultural shows and in farm practice; these are the 

 individuals who become "leaders," and successful survivors. 



The continued mental environal stimuli and proenvironal 

 responses draw new supplies of cogitic, cognitic, and biotic 



