COSMIC PHILOSOPHY 



ings would entail far greater damage to society 

 than the survival of these incapables. But in 

 surviving they constitute a growth of a lower 

 order of vitality, like a cancer implanted in no- 

 bler tissues, and their effort is to abolish a civili- 

 zation of which their own misery is, for the time 

 being, the inevitable result, and to reinstate that 

 primitive order of things in which the strong fist 

 and the strong passions were not yet at the mercy 

 of the keen intelligence and the large capacity 

 for toil. Here, as in the case of the abnormal 

 individual desires treated in the concluding chap- 

 ter of Part II., we find a number of unadjusted 

 cravings which natural selection can but imper- 

 fectly deal with, and which it must be left for 

 some process of direct adaptation slowly to ad- 

 just. An analogous though not entirely similar 

 explanation will apply to the case of Robespierre 

 and the Terror. 



But while such pathological phenomena can 

 by no means be explained as solely due to cer- 

 tain anarchical theories social and religious, it 

 still remains true that between the abnormal 

 social phenomena and the anarchical theories 

 there is a very close kinship — such that the 

 theory finds itself practically incarnated in the 

 social event, while it is through the anarchical 

 theory that the abnormal social event finds itself 

 redeemed from the odium attaching to sheer 

 criminal malevolence, and entitled to that slight 



33» 



