CHAPTER XIII 



MENTAL IMAGERY AS A FACTOR IN 

 SOCIAL GROWTH 



Conflicting Social Philosophies, Old and New The Distorted 

 Philosophy of the Biologists Business Philosophy Germany's Mili- 

 tant Kultur The Permanent Mental Incentive in Social Regenera- 

 tion Mental Limitations and Unadaptive Social Growths: Primi- 

 tive Social Life of the Australians; Christianity, Buddhism, and 

 Hinduism; the Cultural Inequalities of the Greeks Science and the 

 New Democracy The New Demands of the New Freedom. 



I. Conflicting Social Philosophies, Old and New 



IT is not surprising that the subjective and objec- 

 tive interpretations of nature were at first so generally 

 regarded as mutually exclusive. The problem was 

 complicated by a general lack of sympathy with na- 

 ture-action, a narrow interpretation of evolution by 

 all the disputants, and above all by a bitter struggle 

 for mental supremacy between the leaders of the new 

 science and the old religion. 



For countless ages man had pictured natural phe- 

 nomena as vital processes, or as living processes domi- 

 nated by living agents endowed with human powers 

 and animated by capricious human motives. Science 

 and evolution dealt a mortal blow to this fictitious uni- 

 verse and set up in its place a dead and empty mechan- 

 ism. But scientists, theologians, and laymen alike 

 quite generally overlooked the fact that the vital crea- 

 tive power of nature was not destroyed by evolution. 

 On the contrary in all the domains of the physical and 

 organic world, so far as they were accessible to scien- 



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