100 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LI. No. 1309 



lie fully eonscioTis that his boasted material 

 inventions and discoyeries, his canoes and 

 battleships, his ovens, highways and machin- 

 ery, his microscopes, telephones, and tele- 

 scopes, his commerce, literature-science, and 

 art, are but improvements, or enlargements, 

 outside himself, of his own internal organs 

 and functions, and that he must use these cul- 

 tural instruments if he would use them con- 

 structively, in precisely the same ways his 

 vital organs are used in his bodily growth 

 and preservation. 



In their functioning, these cultural instru- 

 ments extend, deeper into time and farther 

 across space, the power of his sense organs 

 to discriminate between good and evil, and 

 increase the range and velocity of the load 

 his muscles, blood vessels, nerves, and other 

 bodily organs can move, or carry. In other 

 words they serve to increase the rate and 

 diversity of the mutually profitable exchange, 

 mental and physical, between the human mole- 

 cules of social life, and between man and 

 nature. They alone give man's social life its 

 cooperative unity and power, just as the co- 

 operative action of molecules, cells, and organs 

 give unity and power to his body. Their 

 saving and constructive action is contingent 

 on the growth and right usage of intelligence, 

 as the construction and preservation of his 

 body is contingent on the evolution of right 

 reflex actions and instincts. 



And now, in this twentieth century of the 

 historian's calendar — when the human blasto- 

 derm, for the first time in cosmic evolution, 

 has practically enclosed the terrestrial egg, 

 filling in all the habitable surface of this 

 cosmic yolk-sphere, establishing its capillary 

 network of highways, and its nerve plexus of 

 communication, joining its racial blood-is- 

 lands and national placodes into one organism 

 — ^humanity has ceased to be a germinal po- 

 tentiality, or a mere vision of the prophets. It 

 has become a present and very obvious reality, 

 and the academic flickerings of the philosophic 

 auroras are now sufficiently luminous to be 

 visible, as practical questions, to the poli- 

 tician. Indeed there is still hope that some 



rays may eventually pass the threshold of sen- 

 atorial sensibility. 



But the man of normal social instincts and 

 average intelligence, in spite of himself, is 

 now compelled to recognize this unity in 

 human life and nature, and the dependence of 

 that unity on the fulfillment of mutual rights, 

 of mutual services, and mutual obligations. 

 In this more humble state of mind, he does 

 not now ask "What will I do?" but "What 

 must we do ? " to preserve social life and social 

 structures. What is our protection against 

 the will to destroy? With destructive agen- 

 cies everywhere now at hand for those who 

 have the will to use them. What shall be the 

 compulsion to constructive action? 



The answers to these questions can not be 

 found in precedents, for there are no preced- 

 ents in the whole histoi-y of evolution for 

 man's present social conditions. The solu- 

 tion must be found in the intelligent appli- 

 cation of the elementary principles of ethics 

 and morality, principles which have their 

 roots in the biological and physical sciences. 



We must not accept Huxley's despairing 

 assertions that " cosmic nature is no school 

 of virtue, but the headquarters of the enemy 

 of ethical nature," and that " the cosmic 

 process has no sort of relation to moral ends." 

 To do so we should have wholly to ignore 

 the manifest creative power in cosmic action. 

 We may surmise, from internal evidence, the 

 irritation that provoked Huxley's brilliant but 

 unconvincing dialectics, and it may be said 

 that his point of view then, and the chief 

 target of his attack, is not ours now. 



And surely it is not for us " to fight the 

 cosmic process " even under a fighting Hux- 

 ley; nor on the other hand need we accept the 

 stoical philosophy of protective mimicry and 

 regard "living according to nature as the 

 whole duty of man " ; nor need we be horrified 

 at the thought of ethics as " applied natural 

 history." 



Eather is it our duty to understand nature- 

 action and to cooperate with it; to distinguish 

 between the minor tactics of evolution and 

 the grand strategy of evolution, and with our 

 own peculiar instruments be willing and 

 happy agents in its consummation. Man has 



