222 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 



A geologist and botanist of authority, Professor Ward was an 

 ardent admirer and disciple of Darwin, but in the controversy 

 between the nee-Darwinian and neo-Lamarckian schools he 

 ranged himself with the latter, holding that there was a " bath- 

 mic-force " ever pushing out to larger life expression and to new 

 forms, accepting also the principle of use-inheritance^^ 



In philosophy a strict monist, he endeavored to interpret life in 

 terms of the inter-action of mechanical forces. A great admirer 

 of Comte, he made use of his "hierarchy of the sciences" and like 

 Comte emphasized the affectional nature as the dynamic of social 

 evolution, even conceiving feeling as a cosmic force, a function 

 of the world-soul. Unlike Comte with whom cosmic evolution 

 culminated in humanity and whose philosophy eventuated in the 

 worship of humanity as the Great Being, Professor Ward con- 

 sidered humanity as but an incident in the cosmic process and the 

 love of nature as the highest type of religious sentiment. 2 



The greatest contribution of Professor Ward to social philos- 

 ophy is his stress on the all-importance of the intellect in social 

 evolution making possible permanent human achievement, this 

 being the characteristic which differentiates man and society 

 from lower orders of creation, and sociology from the other 

 sciences. 3 Nature in its processes, he holds, is wasteful. Man 

 is an economizer. 4 He alone is an economic animal. To be sure 

 human intelligence is rooted in animal intelligence, with no break 

 in the process, but man is characterized byjorethought, telic 

 activity. 



Our author endeavors to explain or at least describe the process 

 by which the cosmic soul evolved into the human soul as fol- 

 lows: 



The birth of the soul was the dawn of the psychic facility. It marks an 

 era in the cosmical history of the earth. Dimly and imperceptibly it worked 

 through the primordial ages in the Silurian mollusk, the Devonian fish, and 

 the Mesozoic reptile, producing scarcely any modification in the normal 

 course of biologic evolution. During all these vast eons of time the only 

 organic products of beauty or utility were such as nature in her objectless 



1 In later life he accepted De Vries' mutation theory. 



2 Pure Sociology, p. 430. 



3 Ibid., pp. 17 f. 



4 Ibid., pp. 470, 471. 



