COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



them. And while approaching this goal, society- 

 is ever acquiring in its economic structure both 

 greater heterogeneity and greater specialization. 

 It is not only that agriculture, manufactures, 

 commerce, legislation, the acts of the ruler, the 

 judge, and the physician, have since ancient 

 times grown immeasurably multiform, both in 

 their processes and in their appliances ; but it 

 is also that this specialization has resulted in 

 the greatly increased ability of society to adapt 

 itself to the emergencies by which it is ever 

 beset. The history of scientific progress is in 

 like manner the history of an advance from a 

 less complete toward a more complete corre- 

 spondence between the order of our conceptions 

 and the order of phenomena. Truth — the end 

 of all honest and successful research — is at- 

 tained when subjective relations are adjusted to 

 objective relations. And what is the consum- 

 mation of moral progress but the thorough adap- 

 tation of the desires of each individual to the 

 requirements arising from the coexistent desires 

 of all neighbouring individuals ? Thus the phe- 

 nomena of social and of organic progress are 

 seen to correspond to a degree not contem- 

 plated by those thinkers who, from Plato to 

 Hobbes, have instituted a comparison between 

 them. The dominant characteristics of all life 

 are those in which social and individual life 

 agree. 



312 



