THE CONCEPT OP EVOLUTION 359 



similar task. M. Bergson has done great service in emphasis- 

 ing this truth. 



§ 3. Organic Evolution Contrasted with the History of 



Human Societies. 



Looking forwards now, we may recognise that organic 

 evolution differs from the history of human society in three 

 outstanding ways. (1) The variations that count among 

 plants and animals are changes in the germ-plasm, but the 

 moving and shaking of the Kingdom of Man need not be 

 thus restricted, as is obvious in ' revivals ' and ' revolutions ', 

 for instance, which arc certainly social variations. (2) The 

 important evolutionary registration among plants and an- 

 imals is in the natural inheritance, but in the Kingdom of 

 Man the extra-organismal or social heritage bulks largely. 

 (3) Among social animals there is not more than a dim 

 adumbration of what is characteristic in mankind, — that 

 a social ideal of some sort is defined, and that organisations 

 are formed, both on the temporal and spiritual side, to re- 

 alise it. 



The naturalist is not disposed to agree with a too facile 

 exaggeration of the difference made by the fact that Man 

 is a social person. There is a great deal of what might 

 be called social tissue at pre-human levels. Especially on 

 the instinctive line of evolution are there quaint forms of 

 social organisation which command our admiration though 

 for ethical reasons we cannot take any imitative advantage 

 of their subtlety. There is amazement for us in the sterile 

 worker-caste in bees, in the soldier-caste among termites, in 

 the massacres of the superfluous, in the nutritive partnership 

 between many wasps and their young larvae — mothers feeding 



