17 
stances, and the extra nutriment which must be provided in 
consequence of the ever-increasing demands of the part which 
expends on that which produces. The higher intellectual life is 
antagonistic to the lower. There is no strain so great, no tax so 
heavy on the human constitution as nervous activity, but progress 
implies nervous and cerebral activity. Society perishes rapidly at 
the top ; it is constantly being recruited from lower strata. But 
this fountain of supply is not perpetual, and these at last become 
exhausted. 
The distinguishing characteristic of a highly civilized society 
is the setting apart of certain of its groups of units to perform 
separate and particular functions. But “ specialization implies 
loss of vitality.” This is a great law of Biology, and Biology 
means the laws of life in general. It must apply to the social as 
well as to the bodily organism. The cell which in the lower 
organism performs all functions has then in the full exercise of all 
its powers what may be termed its absolute efficiency. But as it 
becomes a part of a higher animal it suffers limitations. It is 
modified to perform special functions. The settler in the back- 
woods ploughs the land, tends the cattle, reaps the corn, fells the 
tree, builds his house, &c. ALL his faculties are developed, but 
in the specialized labour of a civilized community twenty or thirty 
men of different occupations will be employed in building the 
house. The talents of each are limited to particular functions. 
Progress in the arts is thus bought at the price of curtailed 
faculties of those who are employed in them. The exaggerated 
development of some faculties involves the loss of others. There 
can be no Progress in one direction but implies Regress in another, 
or as Goethe expressed it: ‘‘In order to expend on one side 
Nature is forced to economize on the other ;’’ or as two Belgian 
Savants have put it : “‘ Degeneration is not an accident in evolution, 
it is the correlative of progressive evolution and the necessary 
complements of every transformation whether anatomical or social.” 
Society demands the specialized individual, the one with some 
faculties atrophied, some organs which have more or less 
degenerated in order that others might serve it with greater 
effect. In the struggle for existence you have still the survival of 
the fittest, but the fittest is now no longer the rough burly 
backwoodsman but the individual with deft hands and narrow 
chest, with finer nerves, more delicate taste or abnormal brain, 
“Cells lose their vitality in proportion as they are specialized,” 
says the Biologist. 
The struggle for existence, which in the free play of individual 
action resulted in the survival of the healthiest, the strongest and 
the bravest, now under the limitations of the social organism, by a 
curious inversion of results, gives greater advantages to the weakly 
and the abnormally developed, to the SPECIALLY not the GENERALLY 
efficient. ; 
