PSYCHOGENESIS 375 



opportunities for all, the less does any evidence of the 

 inequality of men obtrude itself, the more will the community 

 receive from every member his share of duty, and the better 

 will the community as a whole progress towards the achieve- 

 ment of its highest objects. 



Only a wrong interpretation of the fundamental laws of 

 Nature or a fractional reading only of the evolutionary process 

 could give rise to such political pessimism as that contained in 

 Butler's and Huxley's views regarding the superiority of 

 cunning and the permanent inequality of men. Seeing that 

 mere "cunning" so frequently degenerates into mere "luck " 

 (which, according to Butler, lacks a sufficiency of persistent 

 principles to have produced organic evolution), a better title 

 for a book that was to challenge the theory of natural selection 

 would have been " Luck or Service," for only in service is there 

 " bleibender Gewinn," only service can gain sweet rewards. 



According to Butler, "life viewed both in the individual 

 and in general as the outcome of accumulated developments 

 is one long process of specialising consciousness and sensation. 



" Livingness depends on range of power, versatility, 

 wealth of body and mind." 



What other but symbiogenetic factors may we trust to in 

 order to maintain the highest forms of "Livingness"? As 

 regards the line of demarcation between living and dead 

 matter, he tells us : 



Is the line to be so drawn as to admit any of the non-living within 

 the body? If we answer "yes," then, as we have seen, moiety after 

 moiety is filched from us, till we find ourselves left face to face with 

 a tenuous quasi immaterial vital principle or soul as animating an 

 alien body, with which it not only has no essential underlying com- 

 munity of substance, but with which it has no conceivable point in 

 common to render a union between the two possible, or give the one a 

 grip of any kind over the other; in fact, the doctrine of disembodied 

 spirits, so instinctively rejected by all who need be listened to, comes 

 back as it would seem, with a scientific imprimatur; if, on the other 

 hand, we exclude the non-living from the body, then what are we to do 

 with nails that want cutting, dying skin, or hair that is ready to fall 

 off? Are they less living than brain? Answer " yes," and degrees are 



