310 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



it is an error to consider traditional progress as synonymous with 

 biological progress, or to suppose that the one implies the other 

 as a matter of course. Certainly the intellectual culture of 

 society ; the institutions which embody that culture ; the 

 mechanical progress which is its concrete result ; the industrial 

 and commercial development which are the accompaniments of 

 that mechanical progress ; the power of man over Nature, which 

 has its sources in the great increase of knowledge — all these can- 

 not be denied. And it would be equally foolish to attempt to 

 deny the great benefits which society has derived, and is deriving, 

 and will continue to derive, from the extraordinary development 

 of those non-biological factors which link one generation to 

 another independently of all physiological heredity. In a bril- 

 liant passage, Macaulay has thus recorded the benefits which 

 humanity has derived from the philosophy of Francis Bacon : 

 " It has lengthened life ; it has mitigated pain ; it has extin- 

 guished diseases ; it has increased the fertility of the soil ; it 

 has given new securities to the mariner ; it has furnished new 

 arms to the warrior ; it has spanned great rivers and estuaries 

 with bridges of form unknown to our fathers ; it has guided the 

 thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to earth ; it has lighted 

 up the night with the splendour of the day ; it has extended the 

 range of the human vision ; it has multiplied the power of the 

 human muscles ; it has accelerated motion ; it has annihilated 

 distance ; it has facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all 

 friendly ofiices, all dispatch of business ; it has enabled man to 

 descend to the depths of the sea, to soar into the air, to pene- 

 trate securely into the noxious recesses of the earth, to traverse 

 the land in cars which whirl along without horses, and the ocean 

 in ships which run ten knots an hour against the wind."^ But 

 all this vast and wondrous progress which Macaulay so eloquently 

 and so justly extols is progress in the domain of tradition, accord- 

 ing to our definition. And this progress in the domain of tradi- 

 1 Macaulay's Essays, pp. 403, 404 (popnlaredition). 



