782 Causes and Course of Organic Evolution 



time has been slowly permeating humanity. But our law- 

 givers, rulers, moralists, and reformers have almost wholly 

 failed to realize that alike Plato, Aristotle, Christ, and Paul 

 have all regarded the realization of this commandment as 

 possible only when the two sets of nerves in the human sys- 

 tem, the inhibitory and the motor, are equally cultivated and 

 utilized. 



If we analyze the social regulations and recommendations 

 that Zarathushtra, Plato, Christ, and Paul laid down, we clearly 

 recognize that they fall under two categories. Many thoughts, 

 words, and actions that readily tend to assert themselves are, 

 by increasing use of the inhibitory nervous system, to be in- 

 hibited, restrained, and by degree suppressed. No one has 

 put these so pithily as Paul, when he classifies them as "x\dul- 

 tery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witch- 

 craft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, 

 heresies, en\yings, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and such 

 like." 



In contrast to these are the thoughts, words, and actions 

 that can alone make a cooperative state possible, and which 

 are in line with the highest uses to which the motor nerves 

 can be put. These Paul equally perfectly summarizes as 

 "love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, 

 meekness, temperance." 



In these two quotations, from the moral and religious leader 

 who for thirty years poured out his life for humanity, we have 

 placed in perfect antithesis the principles and well-springs of 

 competition, disintegration, analysis, with those of coopera- 

 tion, integration, synthesis. Christ was rejected by the Jews 

 because of their keenly individualistic and acquisitive spirit, 

 just as Socrates was rejected by the Greeks because he re- 

 jected their immoral superstitions. 



The Jewish law, even when acted up to, meant morality, 

 justice: Christ's message meant sympathy, generosity, love. 

 The former was the legal climax of competition; the latter 

 sounded the tocsin of cooperation. The Greeks, unwilling 

 in their national pride to accept the Medo-Persian Zarathush- 



