258 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. II. No. 35. 



may be asserted to have now universal ac- 

 ceptance among all peoples. The questions 

 on which people ditfer are as to how the 

 good of the nation is to be attained ; it is as 

 to methods, rather than objects, that diver- 

 sity of opinion has always prevailed. 



Even the individualist, when closely 

 pressed and not too callous, will agree to 

 this object of government, but he will insist 

 that this object, the good of the nation, is 

 attained by inactivity rather than by active 

 exertion of the government, by allowing 

 the individuals to work out their own sal- 

 vation (or damnation) amid the free and 

 unrestricted play of natural forces, rather 

 than by making them do so. Laissez-faire 

 instead of Faire-Marcher ! 



They overlook that the objects and the 

 motives which inspire the action of the in- 

 dividual as such are and will remain en- 

 tirely different from those of the aggregation 

 of individuals. As individual he will strive 

 and does strive to work out that 'unsocial 

 peculiarity of desiring to have everything 

 his own wajr and opposing others.' Beyond 

 the gratification of his own desires and an 

 interest in his immediate offspring and 

 perhaps in the second generation, he lacks 

 as individual, and naturally so, incentive 

 to advance or to calculate with the future. 

 It is only as citizen, a member of organized 

 society, as a social being, in community 

 with others, as a reasoner and philosopher 

 with conceptions of the objects and aims 

 not only of individual existence, but of so- 

 ciety as a whole, of the race, that he allows 

 considerations of the future to influence 

 his action, that he realizes the higher human 

 ideals; in this communal activity ' he feels 

 that he becomes more a man.' 



Social man, then,' is not satisfied alone 

 with the preservation of his species by 

 means of unconscious adaptation to its sur- 

 roundings, but consciously he adapts him- 

 self to his surroundings and, more than that, 

 he infiuences and adapts the surroundings 



to himself, nay, he infiuences the futui-e con- 

 sciously, and therein, if in nothing else, he 

 differs from the animal world and has out- 

 grown the laws of their development. 



How this has come to be so we need not 

 inquire ; it is so, that is enough. It is the 

 momentiun of education, of gradually ac- 

 cumulated tendencies that drives him on the 

 path towards social and ethical improve- 

 ment, with ideals in the future always be- 

 fore him. W]aat we call the feeling of duty, 

 which is the motive spring of most men's 

 altruistic actions, is nothing but this mo- 

 mentum, which the accumulated education 

 of generations has imparted to us and which 

 produces the conscious civilizatory progress 

 of the race, always setting up new ideals 

 when the old ones have been attained, or 

 when reason has dislodged them. 



This civilizatory tendency has been up- 

 held, however, only in the association, and 

 is lost sight of by the individual as soon as 

 he is dissociated and acts apart from his 

 fellow members. This sounds like a para- 

 dox, that the tendencies and desires of the 

 whole and its action should differ from the 

 tendencies, desires and actions of its parts. 



Yet even the sage of antiquitj^, Aristotle, 

 recognized that j'ou could never arrive at 

 the whole by a mere addition of the units 

 composing it, that while the prosperity of 

 the whole implied the prosperity of all in- 

 dividuals which it includes, yet in our 

 treatment of social questions we must pro- 

 ceed from the standpoint of society, not 

 from that of the individual, the welfare of 

 society could not be secured by attention to 

 individual claims. And we observe this 

 every day in larger or smaller assemblies of 

 men; the emotions, feelings, provoked in 

 the assembly lead to entirely different ac- 

 tions than if each member separately had 

 acted on his own motion. The feeling of 

 patriotism, which inspires many actions of 

 nations and is of a kind with the civiliza- 

 tory tendencies refei-red to, can hardly be 



