346 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION 



were unequally recognized and obligations unequally 

 fulfilled. 



These larger social obligations can not be recog- 

 nized without clearer vision, nor fulfilled without bet- 

 ter instruments. Hence, wherever they have been ful- 

 filled, it has been through some accession of ethical 

 insight and constructive power; some increase in the 

 knowledge of, and command over nature's constructive 

 resources. In other words, through some profitable 

 application of science, which enabled man to preserve 

 himself, and to add to his possessions by such means 

 as shelters, weapons, flocks, and agricultural products, 

 or by enlarged reservoirs of constructive profit, and 

 by better ways and means of conveyance, mental and 

 physical. 



But every one of these great social functions, such 

 as science, art, religion, education, government, mili- 

 tarism, intellectualism, industrialism, and capitalism, 

 tends to become more and more self-centred and para- 

 sitic on social life. Cultivated for its own sake only, 

 each tends to overgrow and to ramify into countless 

 blind pockets of futility. Its basic, altruistic function 

 drops out of sight, and its organic usefulness as a so- 

 cial servant is gradually suppressed. The social or- 

 gan is then cut off from its bodily support, and the body 

 social is deprived of an essential function. Degenera- 

 tion and death follow in the wake of these changes. 



i. Primitive Social Life of the Australians. The 

 naked, protozoan simplicity of the social life of the 

 aboriginal Australians, for example, is apparently not 

 due to a lack of sense perception and logic, for he is 

 marvellously acute as a tracker of man and beast, and 

 he can draw surprisingly unerring and most signifi- 



