EVOLUTION mi 



embryologist, has little or no demonstrable natural analogue for a 

 society and its socians as such; hence the apparently universal 

 existence, throughout all societies and times, of what we cannot 

 refuse to call "education", or at least "instruction" — i.e. initiation 

 into chosen elements of the social heritage, imperfect though the 

 choice and the initiation may be. Bird and animal parents make 

 educative endeavours too, and not without suggestiveness. With 

 this education, so far as it is relevant, each young socian is being 

 better fitted for his society, and towards his social functioning in it ; 

 thus, literally, he "becomes of service", towards maintaining or 

 advancing it. Yet since the whole universe is in movement and 

 change, and social life most of all, there can be no mere static 

 maintenance : and what may seem so for a time, sooner or later 

 reveals itself as not merely arrest, but a falling out, a "getting 

 behind the times". Mere static "order" is not enough; a range of 

 mummies shows that to perfection : and though mechanisms work 

 in amazingly orderly fashion, so far as they go, the true order is 

 that of life, the co-ordination of functionings, and of these towards 

 life more effective and abundant. So here, at any rate, biology and 

 sociology are at one in principle, however less perfectly co-ordinated 

 than the organism a society may be. Every living being has its 

 developmental history, and its later adult history too, in short, its 

 life-history, as naturalists habitually say; as indeed also for the 

 species from origin to disappearance. But this term "history" they 

 frankly appropriate from social records; as next was taken over 

 from the industrial revolution, and its accompanying economic and 

 political thought, the term "Progress". This era, we now see, was 

 then too simply and hopefully viewed at its progressive best, and 

 that also in opposition to evils and obstructions of the past. 

 Naturalists, in becoming evolutionists, largely adopted the like too 

 simple view of their organic world; and it has needed long investi- 

 gation — from the extreme losses and deteriorations so common in 

 parasites to less obvious cases — to correct the too simply optimistic 

 notion, still so popularly associated with the word "Evolution", as 

 somehow assuredly "progressive". Hence the now established term 

 "Degeneration". The corresponding criticism of undue optimism on 

 the part of societies and their members, and of this especially when 

 "rich and increased in goods", has been a main theme of social 

 critics, from the prophets of Israel to our own ; witness Carlyle and 

 Ruskin in our youth, or Bernard Shaw and others to-day; and also 

 many recent American writers, from economists like Veblen to the 

 novelists of Chicago or of "Main Street". Disraeli's biting saying, 

 that the Anglo-Saxon world is achieving comfort but mistaking it 

 for civilisation, was thus of full historic range. 



Still, however, in social life, industrial, political and more — and 

 especially in the rapid modem evolutionary changes of these which 



