Febkuart 9, 1917] 



SCIENCE 



129 



eses which befog the pages of writers on 

 political and social economics. 



In the progressive line of development 

 which in the present terminates in us, the 

 procedure of nature has been one of only 

 limited concern for the family and of tried 

 out and abandoned experiment for social 

 partnerships and the division of labor. To 

 perfect the individual inconceivable safe- 

 guards have been thrown about him. The 

 individual is creation's unit in terms of 

 which all progress in life is to be reckoned. 

 With unsparing hand she makes and wastes 

 these units, both for her greater purposes 

 and those which we may call her lesser 

 ones. Units of purpose are wiped away to 

 make place for units of other purpose. Yet 

 the unit type remains; remains with its 

 full seeding of possibilities, armored for its 

 fight with double portions of food supply, 

 of sense organs, of locomotive means, with 

 an inexpressible superfluity of reproduc- 

 tive supply. Whether a given unit survive 

 till its work be done or perish in the doing, 

 it is the individual type that is at stake, it 

 is against this individual type that all the 

 powers outside it are imposing their ob- 

 stacles. 



This the geologist knows : There has been 

 no cooperation in the historic development 

 of the life in which we are directly con- 

 cerned. We may not yet know the trend of 

 many life lines for far in their history, but 

 wherever such lines are best known, within 

 the limitations of large natural divisions, 

 those that run through from limit to limit 

 and point the way both backward and 

 ahead, and those other lines collateral to 

 ours which have ended and determined 

 fruitlessly — these all can be conceived in 

 no other way than variant expressions of 

 the individual. And in the history of 

 human life is it aught else than the indi- 

 vidual that has stood for the progress of 

 mankind? Was it the barons at Runny- 



mede, was it some bill of rights, some dec- 

 laration of independence, some joint action 

 of human agencies that have been the 

 crowns of our achievements? Or was it the 

 Aristotle, the Plato, the Socrates, the 

 Christ, a solitary Shakespeare, an incom- 

 parable Franklin, a rebellious Darwin, or 

 the historic twenty individuals, who have 

 stood for the progress of the race ? 



I say this only for the purpose of saying 

 per contra, that the history of the excellent 

 life (and by that I mean the line of life 

 that is best perfecting its psychology), has 

 shown the futility of attempts at progress 

 through any other agency than the inde- 

 pendent individual. This is so important 

 a conclusion to every state taking cogniz- 

 ance of its dependence on natural laws that 

 it is highly essential to consider nature's 

 own alternatives to such individualistic 

 effort, her own experiments in trying out 

 other modes of ascending heavenward. For 

 ' ' individual liberty, ' ' said President Butler 

 speaking before the constitutional conven- 

 tion of this state, ' ' is the cornerstone of the 

 free state." That is the decree which is 

 written in burning letters on every mile- 

 post of the course of life. "The perfection 

 of the individual is the perfection of the 

 race" says Professor Hoffman, "but," he 

 adds, writing on the organization of the 

 state, "the individual can have no rights 

 or duties that conflict with the good of the 

 whole" — a supplement for which it is ex- 

 ceedingly doubtful that any substantiation 

 can be found in nature. 



(a) It has been my environmental con- 

 trol to study and, I hope, to learn some of 

 the lessons of life from their simplest and 

 most legible expressions^a result that has 

 come from living and laboring in a state 

 built from the early waters with their un- 

 differentiated expressions of life. The 

 panorama of successive early worlds of life 

 glows with the simple expressions of law 



