PSYCHIC ADAPTATION 115 



fold voice of the people that was singing in unison 

 with them. It is this harmony that has made them 

 great. Thus it had to be ; Phidias, Ictinus, the 

 men who reared the Parthenon and Olympian 

 Zeus, were, like the other Athenians, poor citizens 

 and villagers educated in the palaestra, wrestling 

 and exercising themselves as gymnasts, accustomed 

 to deliberate and vote in the public assembly, with 

 the same habits, the same interests, the same ideas, 

 the same beliefs ; men of kindred race, education, 

 and language ; so that in all the important circum- 

 stances of life they were similar to those who 

 watched them." 1 



I might continue to cite paragraphs and texts in 

 which the evidence proves how the human intelli- 

 gence is an adaptation to Nature ; I might appeal 

 to the psychology of Spencer, which could not be 

 more explicit on this point. But it would be 

 tiresome, and lengthen greatly this work, to under- 

 take to prove that which in science is an accepted 

 fact. Starting from this certain positive basis, 

 what I wish to call your attention to is the applica- 

 tion which is logically deduced from it, namely, 

 that Nature is the inheritance, the property, the 

 riches, and the happiness of mankind ; that present 

 ownership, which the philosophy of right cannot 

 explain or authorise satisfactorily, is incompatible 



1 H. Taine, Philosophie de VArt, p. 5. 



