()6Q Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



in the North and the South. Amongst the former, active, 

 self-rehant, cooperative, and inventive, plans took shape, so 

 that these might equal or excel the sluggish, dependent, slave- 

 holding, and conservatively uninventive plans of the latter. 

 Such gradually acquired and divergent characters, in what 

 was before a national race, could only result in one of the new 

 evolving races becoming dominant and swamping the other; 

 or each had to become a distinct national race, restricted to 

 a distinct area. The North proenvironed and responded for 

 unity of the national race. By the loss of hundreds of thou- 

 sands of individuals in each incipient new race the balance 

 was restored, the moral ideal was anew proenvironed on an 

 evolving line, and, even though — for other and far-reaching 

 reasons — the moral evolution has scarcely equaled the cumu- 

 lated strength stored in the first proenvironal response, evolv- 

 ing moral characters have been added that the unified nation 

 is acquiring and steadily handing dowTi. 



Biologically the interest of this struggle was that in 1862 

 it seemed scarcely possible to predict whether a whole nation 

 was to accept and follow a proenvironal pathway of easy moral 

 degeneration, or of earnest aspiring struggling evolution. And 

 the whole moral question was decided fundamentally on utili- 

 tarian grounds that would have rejoiced the heart of a Hume, 

 a Bentham, or a Mill. For the side conquered that repre- 

 sented hereditarily the most active, varied, energetic, and 

 struggling aspiring aggregate of human units. 



At first sight it might seem more utilitarian, more truly 

 usefuly to employ many slaves and let the lordlings go easily. 

 But evolution has ever represented the pathway along which 

 complex matter or static energy reserves, and complex energy 

 or kinetic energy flows, are constantly acting and reacting, 

 so as to build up still more complex results. Devolution is 

 ever leading along an easier and analytic road. True utility 

 then, from the moral standi)oint, is the most continuously 

 satisfying individual effort in relation to neighbors, cumulated 

 into completed cooperative or social result. Such result the 

 nests or hives of wasps, bees, ants, and beavers show, in their 



