EVOLUTION THE MASTER-KEY 



his toleration. A sworn servant of truth, he did 

 more than wish well to those he believed to be 

 wrong he sought and found the kernel of truth in 

 the husk of error. 



In a future chapter we shall see instances of his 

 toleration of religious systems all but the forgotten 

 core of which he believed to be false. But let us 

 take an instance from politics, in which he was at 

 bottom a Liberal of the old school. We cannot 

 understand the intellectual cause of his toleration 

 here without recalling his now famous phrase &quot; the 

 social organism.&quot; His analogy between society 

 and an organism made him a tolerator though a 

 zealot in politics. In the realm of biology we see 

 two opposing factors heredity and variation. 

 Now no biologist would write himself down an 

 hereditarian or a variationist, as we write our 

 selves down Conservatives or Liberals. Spencer has 

 taught us that, while without variation there can 

 be no advance, without heredity there can be no 

 retaining the positions won. Rigid heredity means 

 stagnation; but too rapid variation means insta 

 bility. Safety and progress are attained only by 

 &quot;the interplay of opposed forces.&quot; Of course you 

 see the rest at once. Heredity in the organism 

 is the exact analogue of the conservative forces 

 in society; variation, the exact analogue of the 

 liberal forces. Acceptance of authority, as typi 

 cally seen in woman, is heredity; and heresy, as 

 typically seen in the more variable creature man, 

 is intellectual variation. And as no biologist 



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