THE INVOLUTIONARY ASCENT 101 



sonal responsibility. The one virtue left to us as 

 individuals in view of the biological chasm yawning 

 at our feet is loyalty, " our country ; right or 

 wrong, our country " for the way to the larger 

 loyalty is through the lesser. Civilisations at their 

 height are inevitably marked by vice; for vice is 

 the logical consequence of the impersonal attitude 

 toward one's fellows that necessarily goes with great 

 numbers and the compounding process. 



Although the social conscience is to be compre- 

 hensive of a greater good, until that conscience is 

 fully evolved there will doubtless be many Lusitania 

 wrongs of one sort or another. Since there is no 

 reconciling the standards of diplomacy with our per- 

 sonal ideals our only consolation while undergoing 

 the throes of integration is that Nature has evinced 

 an increasing purpose through all her creations for 

 the forming of a higher type of consciousness. 



Are the finer powers of personality then to count 

 for naught in this summing up process whose total 

 is the corporate consciousness? For answer let us 

 look back once more to the invariants of the life- 

 group. We find there was always the giving up of 

 self the functioning for a common cause. Ah, 

 but first there was a self worth the giving! Evolu- 

 tion saw to that. The period of differentiation was 

 a long one even for the cell, and it grew ever longer 

 as the unit rose in the scale of complexity. The in- 

 volutionary process was based at every rise upon 



