Cooperative System Amongst Lower Animals 791 



but the earnest effort of the individual and the social mind 

 to proenviron, more and more clearly, an elevated conception 

 of his best possible relation to his neighbor, to the world around 

 him, and to a great Agency or Power who formed and ener- 

 gizes the universe, its laws, and its motions. At times the 

 conceptions that aggregations of men have proenvironed and 

 set before them for their socialistic guidance have been de- 

 grading, socially demoralizing, and disrupting, as with the 

 Ashtar or Ashtoreth of the Assyrians and Phoenicians. But 

 far-seeing prophets of their own or of other nationalities have 

 noted the evil, have denounced it, and have proenvironed 

 higher and truer pathways of progress. True, the social cancers 

 may meanwhile have eaten into the body politic till, as in Im- 

 perial Rome, conquest was easily possible by a more vigorous 

 and morally healthy nation. Then the conquered nation may 

 largely have disappeared from history, to become a fossilized 

 tradition, as with the extinct Tasmanians. 



In all such sociological growth, the proenvironal outlook 

 and aspiration became a biological necessity, unless death 

 of the social mass was accepted by it as an — and the only — 

 alternative. Thus often, in the history of primitive as of civi- 

 lized man, the determined effort has been made by one man 

 or group of men to hate and destroy another such. But, even 

 after generations of such strife, the hater and the hated have 

 alike learned that unity and friendship are better than dis- 

 cord, so very slowly but very surely mankind has proenvironed 

 the law, ''Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.'' The 

 history of the kings of AVest Asia for a thousand years B. C, 

 as well as their history in Western Europe from l'-200 to 1900 

 A. D., has been a wavering but steady testimony to the truth 

 of this. For the treaties they have made, the marriages they 

 have consummated, and the mutual concessions they have 

 agreed to, have been either perfect or more or less imperfect 

 commentaries on the above moral law. Behind their dii)lom- 

 acy and statesmanship so-called they have felt compelled 

 steadily to proenviron the greatest social good for their nation. 

 The sad thing often has been that they have put selfish indi- 



