208 COSMIC PIIILOSOPHY. [pt. ii. 



with an enormous sense of his own importance, easily roused 

 to paroxysms of anger, brooking no contradiction, disregardful 

 of the feelings of others, domineering over all within his 

 reach. The modern type is the man of mild personality, 

 shunning the appearance of self-assertion, slow to anger, 

 patient of contradiction, mindful of the feelings of those 

 about him, unwilling to " make trouble." Such is the con- 

 trast between the typical ancient and the typical modern ; 

 and it implies a prodigious alteration in the dominant ethical 

 feelings of the progressive portion of our race. 



This change, as we now see, has been wrought by the slow 

 but incessant modification of the social environment to which 

 each generation of men has had to conform its actions. The 

 altruistic feelings, finding at each successive epoch a wider 

 scope for action, have become gradually strengthened by use; 

 while the egoistic feelings, being less and less imperatively 

 called into play, have become gradually weakened by disuse. 

 And this change in the environment we perceive to have 

 been wrought by the continuous growth of the community 

 in size and complexity. Where, as among stationary tribes 

 of savages, there has been no such growth, there the moral 

 type of the primeval man is still to be found ; and where, 

 as among the stationary communities of Asia, there has been 

 growth in size without corresponding growth in complexity, 

 there the moral type is intermediate between that of the 

 barbarian and that of the inheritor of Roman civilization. 

 Thus the progress of society is a mighty process of equili- 

 bration or adjustment, in the course of which men's rules oi 

 action and emotional incentives to action become ever more 

 and more perfectly fitted to the requirements arising from 

 the circumstance of their aggregation into communities. 



Here we have arrived at a rudimentary conception of the 

 law of social progress, so far as it can be obtained from a 

 comprehensive historical induction, aided and verified by 

 deduction from a few fundamental truths of biology. The 



