BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1295 



the plant and animal world, we cannot but see that — despite all that 

 can be said of and for "the struggle for existence", even to its aspects 

 of "gladiators' show" — such struggle is still nerved by and towards 

 life-realisation, and with individuality thus so far attained, expressed 

 and enhanced accordingly. Man's psyche, in its exceptional awaken- 

 ing to consciousness and inter-communication, has long been striving 

 to realise this general life-process ; and thus in his own different life- 

 stages and civilisation-phases ; so with different expressions, different 

 emphasis on its different aspects, from earliest self-maintaining 

 efforts to fuller species-advancing service. Hence throughout the 

 study of past civilisations we find this life-progress, however largely 

 arrested on various levels, and so recognisable, even in active life 

 from its rudest, thought at its crudest, and with these uniting into 

 egoism at its dullest, competition at its severest, and culminating in 

 war towards its harshest. Such limited developments, ferocious in 

 war and base in its intervals of so-called peace, have thus not only 

 been recurrent, but intensifying throughout recorded history, as 

 our passing generation so well knows; and hence the perversions 

 and misrepresentations of man's progress and evolution-process, so 

 characteristic of the competitive types of thought and action, 

 still too predominant in our time. Yet even in these, it is easy to see, 

 as did indeed the very sophists of utilitarianism, that even the most 

 sordid competition, the most ruthless war, are yet moved, and more 

 than sub-consciously, by and to species-maintaining efforts, how- 

 ever narrowed in their range. Returning then to higher expressions 

 of human development, on its maturer and higher levels, we also 

 find more or less of these in all past and present types of humanity, 

 even the lowest and simplest, since anthropologists have come to 

 know and understand them. And here, of course, more fully the 

 historian; and this especially when he starts from (or works back 

 to) that most world-significant of all historic periods, that of about 

 B.C. 700-600, in which a survey of the world from east to west shows 

 us, as, broadly speaking, simultaneous, the teachings of Confucius 

 and Lao-Tze in China, that of Brahmins and of Buddhist and Jain 

 founders in India, of Zoroaster and of the Magi in Persia, and "the 

 Finding of the Law" in Judea. See also Egypt widening its vast 

 culture-influences, and recall the sages and poets in Greece, the 

 founders and law-givers in Rome, and the Druids in Gaul and 

 Britain. Repeatedly since there have been great philosophic, ethical, 

 and religious developments, but never again so many, even to 

 world-wide. Yet the intercommunications of our day are bringing 

 the world together; while the regional spirit and collective indi- 

 viduality of every people, small or great, are also so increasingly 

 re-affirming themselves; yet increasingly with aspirations and 

 endeavours towards concord. So, despite wars and rumours of wars, 

 not to be optimistically disregarded, may not the evolutionists of 



