The Biological Theory of Histo7y 319 



instincts ' as desire for food and sex.^ Truly a poverty- 

 stricken list! Where is thinking, which even we selec- 

 tionists must admit to be the prime utility of increasing 

 nervous plasticity ? Bagehot, writing long before Pearson, 

 made much of * group-selection,' but he saw its limitation, 

 and signalized the 'age of discussion,' in which the 

 controlHng factor in a people's advance, the real key to 

 their history, is their reasoning faculty. And Bagehot it 

 was, as well, who pointed out the social process of imitation 

 as one, at least, of the important agencies of socialization. 

 This seems to illustrate what is said above, to the effect 

 that the emphasis of natural selection as an all-sufficient 

 principle has gone so far that it leads to the denial of the 

 evident positive factors of endowment, variation, laws of 

 change, etc., which are the essential motive principles of 

 progress — in this case the psychological factors to which 

 social progress is due — in favour of that merest shell of a 

 truth, so far as social life is concerned, that like animals 

 fight one another, and that the strongest lives to tell the 

 story. Even as affecting the problem of group competi- 

 tion, what may we not say, for example, about the mental 

 fact called invejition ? 



Invention not only plays an extraordinary part in in- 

 ternal social organization and progress, — it escapes the 

 barrier of heredity by a mighty bound, — but it serves to 

 fit the competing group to survive. Suppose the know- 

 ledge of firearms and the use of smokeless gunpowder to 

 be the possession of one only of two competing groups : 



iQne is reminded of Professor Pearson's own demonstration, in his statisti- 

 cal discussion ( Chances of Death, Chap. I. p. 68) of the uneven distribution of 

 families according to number of children, of the psychological interference 

 with the normal birth-rate — an interference from a ' Malthusian restraint of 

 population ' exerted directly in opposition to the instinct of sex. 



