GROWTH OF THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT. II 5 



recognition was little more than nominal. With so 

 restricted a body of fully-qualified citizens, i.e., with 

 so circumscribed an area of the social environment, 

 it is not astonishing that the structural perfection 

 of ancient states should have been far greater than 

 ours and the ideal far nearer : the ancient State 

 could represent a higher type of social organism 

 because it made no attempt to solve the problems 

 which perplex us. But we have successively admitted 

 the claims of children, slaves, and women, and with 

 the growing complexity of our social problems we 

 have sunk out of sight even of an approximate 

 solution in a quagmire of perplexities, in which we 

 are more hopelessly involved with every step in our 

 ''progress." Nor need the process stop with man : 

 in the laws for the prevention of cruelty to animals 

 there is marked a more than incipient recognition, 

 of the rights of animals, and already there are 

 thousands who resent the sufferings of vivisected 

 dogs as keenly as the most ardent abolitionist did 

 those of negro slaves, and there are more convinced 

 of the iniquity of vivisection now than there were 

 convinced of the iniquity of slavery one hundred 

 years ago. 



§ 16. But not only is the prodigious growth of 

 the social environment removing a harmony of the 

 social forces further and further from our sight, but 

 a parallel process is rendering harmony more and 

 more unattainable for the individual souL 



In the earliest beginnings of life, adaptation, in 

 so far as it exists, is physical or nothing at all. The 

 organism adapts itself directly to its environment or 

 it perishes. At a subsequent stage it is primarily 

 emotional and secondarily physical ; i.e. the pressure 

 of circumstances generates feelings which subse- 



