POWER IN CIVILIZATION 105 



theories of politics. Karl Pearson, whose horizon 

 is wider than that of Galton, may be distinguished 

 to be always more or less under the influence of the 

 same idea of the slow change and comparative 

 permanence of type in human society. The man 

 of the study and of the laboratory, whom he con- 

 siders to be the proper judge in these matters, knows 

 full well, Pearson tells us, that human society 

 cannot be changed in a year, scarcely in a hundred 

 years ; for it is controlled, he points out, by laws 

 of psychological influence such as temperament, 

 impulse, and passion relatively so unchangeable 

 in their direction that " no single man, no single 

 group of men, no generation of men, can remodel 

 human society." l 



Now one of the first steps necessary for a true 

 conception of the forces controlling civilization 

 and, therefore, to a true conception of the possibility 

 of an entirely new order of civilization, is to under- 

 stand that most of these assumptions about in- 

 born heredity as the basis of civilization have 

 no foundation in fact. They are, on the contrary, 

 directly in the face of incontrovertible facts of 

 quite a different significance. The increasing 

 interval between civilization and savagery does not 

 depend upon inborn heredity. The science of 



1 The Ethic of Free Thought, v. 



