CH. XVIII.] THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY. 213 



history of scientific progress is in like manner the history of 

 an advance from a less complete toward a more complete 

 correspondence between the order of our conceptions and the 

 order of phenomena. Truth — the end of all honest and 

 successful research — is attained when subjective relations 

 are adjusted to objective relations. And what is the con- 

 summation of moral progress but the thorough adaptation 

 of the desires of each individual to the requirements arising 

 from the coexistent desires of all neighbouring individuals ? 

 Thus the plienomena of social and of organic progress are 

 seen to correspond to a degree not contemplated by those 

 thinkers who, from Plato to Hobbes, have instituted a com- 

 parison between them. The dominant characteristics of all 

 life are those in which social and individual life agree. 



Let us now examine more closely the relations between 

 the Community and the Environment. From the twofold 

 circumstance that life is high according as the organism ig 

 heterogeneous, and also according as it is adjusted to sur- 

 rounding conditions, may be derived the corollary that the 

 heterogeneity of the environment is the chief 2^roximate deter- 

 mining cause of social ]}rogress. Thus we may imderstand 

 why civilization advances so much more rapidly in modern 

 than it did in ancient times.^ As Sir Charles Lyell observes; 

 " We see in our own times that tlie rate of progress in the 

 arts and sciences proceeds in a geometrical ratio as know- 

 ledge increases, and so, when we carry back our retrospect 

 into the past, we must be prepared to find the signs of re- 

 tardation augmenting in a like geometrical ratio ; so that the 

 Drogress of a thousand years at a remote period may cor- 

 respond to that of a century in modern times, and in ages 

 still more remote ]\Ian would more and more resemble the 

 brutes in that attribute which causes one generation exactly 

 to imitate in all its ways the generation which pieceded 

 it"' That the process is here the same in social and in 



* See above, p. 72. • Antiquity of Man, p. 377. 



