THE EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUALITY 49 



With the onward march of evolution, therefore, 

 "chance" is always a diminishing factor, determination, 

 or compulsion, an increasing one, because cooperative 

 ways once found, thereby create new units smaller in 

 numbers but larger in content than any of their own 

 constituent parts, and these units have special directive 

 qualities of their own and more comprehensive influ- 

 ences. 



A hundred million people, for example, each one 

 living, so far as it is possible to do so, a free and in- 

 dependent life, will expend their vital energies sel- 

 fishly, that is to no common purpose. Each one will 

 exhaust itself in beating against the walls of its narrow 

 environment; in haphazard, balanced conflicts, like 

 so many peas in a hopper, or like atoms bombarding one 

 another in a gaseous medium. 



There let life be as fast and strenuous as it may, it 

 will still remain local and futile. So long as it is not 

 increasingly cooperative, there can be no accumulation 

 of power, no summation of influences, no organized in- 

 struments of conveyance, for the influence of each in- 

 dividual is immediately neutralized by that of his 

 neighbor. 



But when those hundred millions are organized 

 into a cooperative social unit, as, let us say, in our own 

 country, the fleeting, insignificant powers of many 

 separate individuals are summed up into great currents 

 of activity, or into great unified social functions, such 

 as commerce, science, literature, and art, which ever 

 draw to themselves new agencies, and grow in power 

 until their determining influences become world-wide 

 and permanent. 



This diminution of "chance" and the increase of 



