Social Environment 



CHAPTER I 



THE BIOLOGICAL POINT OF VIEW 



THERE are not many persons, probably, 

 who fully appreciate the revolutionary 

 changes that have come over the modern con- 

 ception of human nature and human society. 

 If one goes back to the philosophers who 

 helped to lay the foundations of the modern 

 age — Calvin and Locke, for example — he 

 finds that in their reasoning they often drew 

 conclusions from the mental skies of imagina- 

 tion and abstraction. They were not at all par- 

 ticular about the exactness of their facts so 

 long as they succeeded in constructing a theory 

 that agreed with their preconceptions. 



The modern thinker, however, distrusts any 

 such airy foundation for his logic. With a 

 hunger for the exact facts he turns, instead, to 

 digging in the soil of the actual past where he 

 finds recorded the sordid details of man's early 

 struggles, and to a careful examination of hu- 



I 



