THE CONSTRUCTOR 237 



the skill and labour by which this has been done are 

 withdrawn, nature, whose action never pauses, will 

 reassert sway, and convert the place into a wilderness. 

 The garden is a work of art, as is the house which 

 stands in it ; as is everything that man has produced. 

 And the effect of all that he does is to oppose, and, 

 for a time, arrest, the cosmic process, limiting the 

 area of ceaseless struggle and competition. Applying 

 this to human society, which, " at its origin, was as 

 much a product of organic necessity as that of the 

 bees," the "ape and tiger" instincts are found domi- 

 nant. It was based on selfishness. The race was to 

 the swift, and the battle to the strong. Even then, 

 however, in the earliest grouping of a few families 

 into clans or gentes, the blood-tie, whose source is in 

 the parent, engendered a sympathy which assured 

 unity, and, therefore, some restraint on individual as- 

 sertion. For sympathy is the germ-plasm of ethics. 

 Knowledge, the only begetter of a wider sympathy, 

 breaks down tribal divisions, and with the obvious 

 advantage which cooperation secures, enlarges the 

 narrow borders of primitive altruism, limits the area 

 of conflict, and mitigates the horrors of a state of 

 warfare which, at the outset, was chronic. But the 

 cosmic process is checked only locally and intermit- 

 tently. To this the state of mankind, after thou- 

 sands of years of advance from the feral state, wit- 



