COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



the ancient Turanian tribes of Central Asia. 

 A far more important step is taken when war- 

 fare ceases to be purely destructive and becomes 

 acquisitive ; or, in other words, when the vic- 

 tors, instead of massacring the vanquished, be- 

 gin to make slaves of them. By this step agri- 

 cultural industry is fairly brought into existence, 

 and the tribal confederacy becomes fixed in 

 location and enabled to increase indefinitely in 

 size at the expense of the less highly organized 

 communities in the neighbourhood. Under 

 these conditions the tribal confederacy may 

 grow until it takes on the semblance of an "ag- 

 gregate of the third order," as in China,^ or in 

 ancient Egypt, Assyria, Media, Lydia, and Per- 

 sia. I am expressing something more than an 

 analogy — I am describing a real homology as 

 far as concerns the process of development — 

 when I say that these communities simulated 



1 *« In every respect the Chinese constitution of society may 

 be regarded as a gigantic amplification of the constitution of 

 the family. The family is no doubt the constituent element of 

 which all societies are composed ; just as, in the body, all 

 tissues, nervous or muscular, are generated from the primitive 

 cellular tissue ; but whereas in other societies we find dif- 

 ferentiation into classes and institutions which have no direct 

 analogue in the family, in China we find far less of this, far 

 more of adherence to the primitive social tissue, to the patri- 

 archal type. On this type the village and the empire are 

 alike moulded." Bridges, in Essays on International Polity, 

 p. 401. 



364 



