NATURE CROWNED IN MAN 56B 



In ordinary affairs a feckless unreliable person who is very 

 delightful in many ways, but cannot be trusted to keep 

 appointments, gets left automatically. The traditions of 

 business-likeness, the social systematisations, make him im- 

 possible, and he is elbowed out as a failure. This is closely 

 comparable to the process in Nature by which a variant that 

 is incompatible with the external systematisations gets sifted 

 out. But there is in society another and distinctive kind 

 of sifting which works potently for good and ill, where a 

 social ideal of some sort is defined, and organisations are 

 formed, both on the temporal and spiritual side, to realise 

 it. There is deliberate controlled selection and its instru- 

 ments are integrates, not individuals. 



It seems, then, that in societary variations, apart from 

 those due to the great men; and in social extra-organismal 

 heritage, apart from all germ-plasm; and in societary selec- 

 tion, apart from natural selection in society, new notes are 

 sounded, which forbid any false simplification of the facts, 

 which in sociology is called a biologism and in biology a 

 materialism. 



Hear, then, the conclusion of the whole matter. There 

 are some who think human society is just a new edition 

 of the animal community or of the alleged animal gladia- 

 torial show, and they are wrong. There are others who 

 think human society is on a plane wholly apart, a little lower 

 than that of the angels, where all talk of germ-plasm and 

 other abominations of the breeding-pen is irrelevant, and 

 they are wrong. 



The truth is between the two extremes, and the whole 

 truth has not yet been revealed. We have given atten- 

 tion to the contrast between organic evolution and social 

 history because inattention to such contrasts is the theo- 



