:n. 3CVUI,] THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIETY, 213 



liistory of scientific progress is in like manner the history of 

 an advance from a less complete toward a more complete 

 correspondence between the order of our conceptions and the 

 order of plienomena. Trutli — the end of all honest and 

 successful research — is attained when subjective relations 

 are adjusted to objective relations. And what is the con- 

 summation of moral progress but the tliorough adaptation 

 of the desires of each individual to the requirements arising 

 from the coexistent desires of all neighbouring individuals ? 

 Thus the phenomena of social and of organic progress are 

 seen to correspond to a degree not contemplated by those 

 thinkers who, from Plato to Hobbes, have instituted a com- 

 parison between them. The dominant characteristics of all 

 life are those in which social and individual life agree. 



Let us now examine more closely the relations between 

 the Community and the Environment. Prom the twofold 

 circumstance that life is liigh according as the organism ia 

 lieterogeneous, and also according as it is adjusted to sur- 

 rounding conditions, may be derived the corollary that the 

 lideroficncity of the environment is the chief j^foximate deter- 

 mining cause of social jJ'^'ogrcss. Thus we may understand 

 why civilization advances so much more rapidly in modern 

 than it did in ancient times.^ As Sir Charles Lyell observes; 

 " We see in our own times that the rate of progress in the 

 arts and sciences proceeds in a geometrical ratio as know- 

 ledge increases, and so, when we carry back our retrospect 

 into the past, we must be prepared to find the signs of re- 

 tardation augmenting in a like geometrical ratio ; so that the 

 progress of a thousand years at a remote period may cor- 

 respond to that of a century in modern times, and in ages 

 still more remote Man would more and more resemble tl)e 

 brutes in that attribute which causes one generation exactly 

 to imitate in all its ways the generation which pieceded 

 it.*'* That the process is here the same in social and in 

 * See above, p. 72. • Anliquity of Alan, p. 377. 



