172 RECAPITULATION 



and was ascribed to the malign influence of an 

 enemy, exercised by magical powers. Each 

 death, then, involved at least one murder in 

 revenge ; and even in these days tribes are known 

 who are exterminating themselves by super- 

 stitious retaliations, because they consider them- 

 selves to be naturally immortal. Impelled to 

 seek a cause for everything that happens, they 

 are left to themselves to make the search; and they 

 connect together, as cause and effect, events which 

 have no relationship whatever to one another. 

 From similar errors of judgment have proceeded 

 the thousand superstitions that have not only 

 darkened man's intelligence and retarded his 

 progress, but have turned him in blind anger 

 against his fellows, and have made violence and 

 bloodshed the outstanding features of human 

 history. 



But if the past is dark there is light before us. 

 Man can improve himself : he is not merely a 

 completed link in a chain of evolutionary meta- 

 morphoses. His reason may be trained to discover 

 more and more accurately the properties of things, 

 and the properties of properties : it may be assisted 

 immensely by the accumulation of knowledge. 

 His will may be strengthened by self-discipline. 

 Habits, of mind as well as of body, may be 

 changed for the better. His advancement has 

 proceeded in the main from the birth of men of 

 originality, or " supermen " sports in the 

 parterres of convention whose novel ideas are 

 gradually adopted, sometimes because they are 

 endorsed by reason, but more often through the 

 influence of the impulse to imitate. It is owing to 

 the possession of this impulse that man can be 

 educated : the education of the young is a special 

 application of its virtues, the usefulness of which 

 will be greater or less according as it is directed to 



