COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 281 



tually assured, how different are the powers so created! 

 How great the possibilities ! 



In man, as an individual organism, an absolute, or 

 natural, constructive limitation to the power of terres- 

 trial organic growth, has been attained, which neither 

 man, nor any other form of animal life, is at all likely 

 to surpass, unless it may be in better mental adapta- 

 bility to a cooperative social life. In the arthropod- 

 vertebrate stock, the great trunk line of animal evolu- 

 tion which runs through the whole gamut of geologic 

 eras and finally culminates in man, the consistent 

 progress of organic growth, with its concomitant adap- 

 tive readjustment to itself and to the outer world of 

 action, reaches its logical conclusion. Moreover man's 

 chief vital organs, sensory, digestive, circulatory, and 

 motor, have practically reached a natural limitation to 

 the physical powers of protoplasmic response. 



Man's further evolution is possible, up to the limit 

 of nature's available constructive capital, only by mul- 

 tiplication, or increase in population; by raising the 

 general average of man's physical and mental power; 

 by further individualization, or specialization; and by 

 better social cooperation, aided by the evolution of 

 those cultural agencies which extend, reenforce, and 

 communize man's purely bodily functions. 



During the last century, these wholly involuntary 

 phases of social growth, radiating from many inde- 

 pendent social foci, have met and joined forces around 

 the world, producing a new, critical stage in organic 

 evolution, where social cooperation, or cultural organ- 

 ization, irrespective of race, class, or nation, has be- 



