BIOLOGY IN ITS WIDER ASPECTS 1353 



the Industrial Age, now and increasingly in progress, more and 

 more recognises the necessity of the conservation of actual resources, 

 and of the increasingly scientific and skilled application of these, 

 towards not only the needs of life-maintenance, but of its increased 

 efficiency; first, no doubt, for industrial purposes, yet also in 

 growing measure towards health, and this even in its organic and 

 mental progress, as through public hygiene and advancing educa- 

 tion. It will thus be noted that, as the neolithic civilisation was 

 essentially agricultural, and with higher social type accordingly, so 

 also is advancing our industrially neotechnic age towards Biotechnic 

 action. 



It is easy to see that militaristic, nationalistic, and political 

 developments have ever owed their dominance and advance to their 

 equipment of arms by mechanical industry. To this they have ever 

 owed their force, from the time of flint-axe and arrow-point, through 

 those of the sword of bronze, iron, or steel, to the missiles of our 

 day; whence wars and nationalisms, empires and conquests, and 

 even support of internal order as well. But as we admit this, we 

 next see that when and where society thus centres its organisation 

 and its activities upon mechanism, rather than life, and on coercing 

 this by force and fear rather than advancing its evolution by help 

 and hope, there, in such society as to-day's— and despite all pallia- 

 tives and means of delay not to be despised, such as Hague Court, 

 League of Nations, Kellogg Pact, etc.— there Death is ultimately 

 arbiter and master. Does this seem discouraging ? Not really so, to 

 the biologist. He sees that such peace-efforts are but of war-peace, 

 with war latent still, are too simply mechanistic, at best but brakes 

 upon the Avernian descent, good for but so long as they can hold. 

 What then is for him the turning-point? That of dominating anew 

 the mathematico-physical sciences, and so with these their 

 mechanical and pecuniary culture, to and by those of Life and its 

 service. Yet this not simply in quantity, or in mechanical powers, 

 for the paleotects have done that, not even in industrialefficiency, 

 for the neotects are doing it; but in vital progress, in and of life 

 and the knowledge of it together, since it is by living that we best 

 learn — vivendo discimiis . 



Progress towards what goal ? The Super-Man ? Yes, in a way ; but 

 not that of Nietzsche and his like, with their of ten brilliant expression 

 of what is none the less biological blundering. For, after all is said 

 that can be for the mastery of the masterful, and in contempt of 

 the submissiveness of mere slave-morality as but feminine weakness 

 at its worst, there remains — and as the supreme fact of biological 

 science, and its discernment of the evolution- process — the normal 

 overpowering of the self-regarding life, by the species-regarding, 

 the sex-regarding, the offspring-regarding, the group- and kind- 

 regarding. And with this the manifest proof that it is in this other- 



