Xxii HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



that social evolution progresses. For the more does social life 

 become complicated, the more will the fimdamental charac- 

 teristic of social life — i.e., the psychosocial phenomenon — tend 

 to develop itself. The intellectual powers of man, developed 

 throughout thousands of years of psychological interaction, are 

 thus transmitted from generation to generation ; each new 

 generation leaves upon this patrimony of society its particular 

 impress, and in the course of time an immense sum of forces is 

 engendered by social life. We see to-day these great social 

 forces subordinating to themselves the forces of Nature — ^heat, 

 light, electricity, water, the winds — and we see them " carrjdng 

 the science of healing, the means of locomotion and correspon- 

 dence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, everything 

 that promotes the convenience of life, to a perfection which our 

 ancestors would have thought magical." ^ We may thus say 

 that, if all social phenomena have their roots in vital phenomena, 

 the history of social evolution has been, nevertheless, the history 

 of one long effort on the part of the sociahsed individual to 

 emancipate himself from, and to subdue, those forces which 

 control so despotically the life of all the species inferior to man. 



But does this emancipation of the socialised human being 

 justify the conclusion that the latter it not subjected to, or is 

 subjected in a lesser degree to, the discipline which ensures 

 among the other species the exclusive survival of those indi- 

 viduals, whose constitution is adapted to their conditions of life ? 

 The reply must be emphatically in the negative. The human 

 being does not cease, because he is incorporated in a society 

 which is sui generis, to be an animal. If on the one hand the 

 faculties which have been developed by social life in the course 

 of countless generations differentiate him from all other 

 organisms ; on the other hand, by his individual constitution, 

 he is linked to all the innumerable animal ancestors which have 

 preceded him. Selection is a universal discipline of Nature, for 

 1 Macaulay, Essays, p. 325. 



