COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 271 



how great the difference when their respective cultural 

 instruments and social atmospheres are thrown into the 

 balance! 



Consider for a moment the man of today in his 

 altered mental relations to natural phenomena. How his 

 knowledge of the physical and organic, large and small, 

 has grown! How his mental attitude, or his mental 

 orientation in reference to them, has been readjusted 

 and progressively stabilized with that growth! Con- 

 sider geography, and celestial architecture; spiral 

 nebulae and radio-activity; spontaneous generation, con- 

 tagious diseases, surgery, sanitation, bacteria, heredity, 

 and the architecture and functions of cells, plants, and 

 animals; slavery, and the social relations of man to 

 man. How this world of his has been enlarged in the 

 nineteenth century! How he has been compelled to 

 reorient himself to it in mental tropic response. How 

 his vision has been clarified, his wild guesses and super- 

 stitions rectified. How his resources have been in- 

 creased, and his ability to distinguish between reality 

 and phantasy, good and evil, right ways of thinking 

 and acting, and wrong ways. Then consider his profits 

 therefrom in terms of mental and physical growth, 

 mental and physical freedom. His old world of 

 thought and action appears small, indeed, and tra- 

 gically confused, but only because a larger, more law- 

 ful world of thought and action has been revealed to 

 us, and our life has been brought into cooperative action 

 with it. 



But this new heritage of man was not merely an 

 endowment of physical power and material instru- 

 ments; it was also a spiritual endowment, and the 

 greatest of all was the new concept of world growth. 



