270 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [FT. n. 



before us is how to relax the tyranny of custom, and thus 

 afford a chance for social reorganization, without entailing a 

 retrogression toward primeval lawlessness. It is one of the 

 puzzles of sociology that the very state of things which is 

 pre-eminently useful in bringing men out of savagery is 

 also likely to be pre-eminently in the way of their attaining 

 to a persistently progressive civilization. &quot;No one,&quot; says 

 Mr. Bagehot, &quot; will ever comprehend the arrested civiliza 

 tions unless he sees the strict dilemma of early society. 

 Either men had no law at all, and lived in confused tribes, 

 hardly hanging together, or they had to obtain a fixed law 

 by processes of incredible difficulty. Those who surmounted 

 that difficulty soon destroyed all those that lay in their way 

 who did not. And then they themselves were caught in 

 their own yoke. The customary discipline, which could only 

 be imposed on any early men by terrible sanctions, con 

 tinued with those sanctions, and killed out of the whole 

 society the propensities to variation which are the principle 

 of progress/ 1 



Mr. Bagehot shows that this problem has never been 

 successfully solved except where a race, rendered organically 

 law-abiding through some discipline of the foregoing kind, has 

 been thrown into emulative conflict with other races simi 

 larly disciplined, a condition which has been completely 

 fulfilled only in the case of the migrating Aryans who settled 

 Europe. But before we can extricate ourselves from our 

 eeeming dilemma, we need to point out, more distinctly 

 than Mr. Bagehot has done, that in all probability none of 

 the progressive Aryan races has ever passed through any 

 thing corresponding to the Chinese or Egyptian stage, and that 

 when a community has once got into such a state of fixity, it 

 is really questionable whether it can ever get out of it, unless 

 under the direct tuition of other communities. It would at 

 present be premature to speculate upon the results which 



1 Physics and Politics, p. 57. 



