LAW OF FUTURE SPECIFIC AND SOCIAL EFFICIENCY 261 



Der Uehermensch, the Beyond-man, as the Child of the Future, 

 is the goal and sanction of eocial effort. The "law of nature" is 

 not behind but ahead of us. The wild cry of Rousseau for equality 

 is re-echoed by the saner demand of naodern democracy for equality 

 of opportunity — for the young. In securing the greatest happiness 

 or rather welfare of the greatest number, we now see that the '^ great- 

 est number" refers not so much to the majority now living as to 

 that still greater majority — the unborn. Society is not composed 

 of those now living, it represents the living as the servants of pos- 

 terity. "Society," Burke declared, "is a partnership not only between 

 those who are living, but between those who are dead, and those who 

 are to be born."^') And yet on the other hand we see such writers 

 as Huxley, Spencer and others so thoroughly saturated with the idea 

 of competition, laissez-faire, and struggle for existence that they 

 lose sight, very largely, if not wholly, of the great racial struggle 

 for future social efficiency. Huxley, in fact, pits the principles of 

 self-sacrifice against the "cosmic process" of struggle for existence^'^) 

 and Herbert Spencer regards the ideal of the future as a state in 

 which the interests of the individual shall become harmonized and 

 identical with those of society.(^) "From the sociological point of 

 view," he says, "ethics becomes nothing else than a definite account 

 of the forms of conduct that are fitted to the associated state, in 

 such wise that the lives of each and all may be the greatest possible, 

 alike in length and breadth. "(*) 



The importance of this process is rightly estimated by Benjamin 

 Kidd when he says, "What we see is that the highest manifestations 

 must be drawn into the vortex of this supreme confiict. In it we 

 stand at the very pivot of the evolutionary process in human history. 

 The whole content of systems of thought, of philosophy, of morality, 

 of ethics, and of religion, must in time be caught into it. It is in 



(1) Quoted by Kidd. Western Civilization, p. 123. 



(2) "Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on 



imitating the cosmic process, still less running away from it, but in combating it." 

 Huxley, Evolution and Ethics, Romanes Lecture. 1893. 



(3) Herbert Spencer. Data of Ethics, Chap. VIII. 

 (♦) Ibid., p. 133. 



