BIOPSYCHOLOGICAL 657 



is often more difficult to guard against, since simple forms of social 

 life are found in the animal world, and our human-animal life 

 underlies and interpenetrates our social. Yet here psychology — 

 though also of evolutionary rise from simple to higher forms — 

 comes in to aid us: for in all our human societies, from simplest 

 onwards, there is a psychosocial life which in higher ones becomes 

 "the spiritual power", that of the psychic life more and more fully 

 dominating the physical. We may trace this from its beginnings 

 with the shaman and the medicine-man ; and advance to the solitary 

 hermitage, and thence to the associated cloister. We see how such 

 have been characteristic, in various yet kindred forms, of each 

 historic faith; and thus modifying, sometimes even transforming, 

 the material life of the community, its "temporal power", to a 

 veritable associate, and sometimes even too much an instrument, 

 of the spiritual. Hence, too, we better understand the great historic 

 founders, each at first with his single or few adherents, yet these 

 increasing, and even some day dominating their peoples; at best to 

 issues of peace, yet also at times to war. History is thus more than 

 annals of place, work, and people, as they have developed to material 

 wealth and temporal power. It is, above all, the record and interpre- 

 tation of thought : and its greatest records are those which tell how 

 thought deepened, not only to individual creation, but widened also 

 to some higher conception of social life; and with this emotionally 

 thrilled, imaginatively and symbolically conceived — and thus 

 inspiring its community to better life, to worthy deed. How? 

 Through arousing its folk to citizenship, their "polis" into a true 

 Polity, even as Etho-Polity; and this giving to their work something 

 of new energy, even to sjoiergy; and this applied to such achieve- 

 ment as they imaged. 



Such is the history of Athens and of Rome at their best, and hence 

 their achievements ; as from Theatre to Parthenon, to Pantheon and 

 Forum, with all that these imply. And as the now incipient wave of 

 evolutionary progress rises, may not our cities also in their turn 

 awake to fuller life, and shape themselves nearer to the City of the 

 Ideal ? History thus above all turns on the evolution of individual 

 minds and souls, and these to highest community, truest fellowship. 



8. What of the "Soul"? — Let us end with a speculation which 

 some will regard as a certainty that might be assumed, and others 

 as foolishness. A survey of the world shows a hierarchy of syntheses 

 — ^what Smuts has called a progressive sequence of "wholes". A 

 living organism is a new synthesis compared with a crystal. An 

 average representative of the species Homo sapiens is a new synthesis 

 compared with a dog. But what if this process of successive syntheses 

 or emergences is still continuing? — and what if in man there has 

 been long emerging a new and essentially psychic integration — for 

 which (despite present psychological convention) what better name 



VOL. I uu 



