382 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION 



power to transform and to create new social institu- 

 tions, one must view this critical period against the 

 whole background of organic evolution. 



Seen in this universal setting, the past century, to 

 use a convenient unit of time, stands clearly apart as 

 a period of unsurpassed intellectual revelation, of vio- 

 lent social paroxysms, and flocculent political precipi- 

 tations. 



Approximately within that period, an incredibly 

 short time for such world-moving events, the morpho- 

 logical features of many systems of physical and in- 

 tellectual conveyance, wholly new and world wide in 

 range, have been definitely established. Through 

 their instrumentality, utilizing agencies as intangible 

 as air and as unsubstantial as a dream, but agencies 

 which alone can hold free men together, as with hooks 

 of steel, this formless Leviathan has attained to individ- 

 uality, to structural unity, and to continuity of action. 

 In this individuality is now resident a stimulating self- 

 consciousness; a consciousness that mankind has a com- 

 mon origin with other living things, common blood, 

 and common purposes, and that he now possesses the 

 physical and spiritual instruments to translate his pur- 

 poses into self-preserving and self-constructive action. 



It is, therefore, no mere trick of the imagination 

 which pictures this social Leviathan as a quickening 

 maelstrom of the most heterogeneous physical, organic, 

 and spiritual, agencies. An omniverous world-wide 

 plasmodium, greedily incorporating into itself the help- 

 ful instrumentalities of all nature life, from bacteria to 

 forests, and from protozoa to man; extending its dis- 

 criminating industrial pseudopodia into land and sea 

 and air, and extracting from them its sustaining forces 



