312 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION 



or by personal intercourse, imitation, or communica- 

 tion. 



This mental egoism and altruism of teacher and 

 learner, that we call education, is the system of mental 

 inheritance, and the only one, by which society con- 

 serves its mental profits, augments its capital in mental 

 Tightness, and stabilizes its purposes. It is the great 

 saving and creating factor in social evolution; the most 

 vital spot in social life, and the one most difficult to 

 fortify. A nation, stumbling into ignorance, must be 

 bandaged with restrictions, and propped up with the 

 crutches of force. Pricked by the poisoned shafts of 

 propaganda, it may dissolve in anarchy though the ar- 

 mies and navies of the world have failed to break it. 

 Its vital powers can be mobilized only in a common 

 self-saving purpose, clearly recognized as such, and 

 approved by a common fund of intelligence. 



VII. The Creative Value of Truth as the Expression 

 of a Natural Creative Law 



The creative value of truth is measured by its men- 

 tal candle power, or its power to reveal creative ways. 

 The harvest of constructive returns which flow from 

 every great discovery, springs from the revelation of 

 a fundamental unity and similarity in phenomena that 

 appeared to be different in method, or in domain. 

 That all celestial bodies are moved and regulated by 

 a common force; that physics, chemistry and biology 

 have a common basis in atomic and ionic mechanism; 

 that all organic life is upraised on common structural 

 units, or cells, which are activated by common vital 

 processes; and that all social life is based on mutual 



