9^ NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



Nature makes for the individual. This truth is registered on the 

 tablets of the earth ; it lies also in human observation and in human 

 experience. Its recognition is of paramount importance; its ac- 

 ceptance sweeps away cobwebs of vagrant hypotheses which befog 

 the pages of writers on political and social economics. 



In the progressive line of development which in the present ter- 

 minates 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 safeguards 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; re- 

 mains 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 reproductive 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 in- 

 dividual type that all the powers outside it are imposing their 

 obstacles. 



This the geologist knows : There has been no cooperation in the 

 historic development of the life in which we are directly concerned. 

 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 limita- 

 tions 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 expres- 

 sions of the individual. And in the history of human life is it 

 aught else than the individual that has stood for the progress of 

 mankind? Was it the barons at Runnymede, was it some bill of 

 rights, some declaration 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 

 Shakspere, an incomparable Franklin, a rebellious Darwin, or the 

 historic twenty individuals, who have stood fur the progress of the 

 race? 



I say this only for the purpose of saying per contra, that the his- 

 tory 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 



