526 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



principles, which confer a sanction on the conditions in which 

 individual life is lived.^ If there be no such set of principles ; 

 if the individual, detached from all principles which confer a 

 higher value on life, be thrown on his own resources ; obviously 

 his life will be deprived of its value ; and society, by this very 

 fact of the reduction of the value of individual life, will have 

 its integration correspondingly impaired. For society can be 

 integrated only in proportion as the individual life possesses 

 value ; and, conversely, individual life can possess value only 

 if it has a sanction which transcends not only the individual 

 but society. If individual life is to possess an adequate 

 sanction, then it must derive its sanction from a social principle ; 

 or, rather, from a social principle which rests, in its turn, upon a 

 suprasocial basis. The expansion of the emotional nature of 

 man cannot receive sufficient satisfaction from an idealistic 

 principle which remains individualistic in its nature. But it 

 is precisely this fact — i.e., that supra-rational or idealistic 



1 Professor Marshall has laid especial stress on the importance of in- 

 dustrial life as a factor of social organisation and social stability. " The 

 quick decadence of Greece . . . was brought about by the want of that 

 solid earnestness of purpose which no race has ever maintained for many 

 generations without the discipline of steady industry. Socially and in- 

 teUectuaUy they were free, but they had not learnt to use their freedom 

 well ; they had no self-mastery, no steady persistent resolution. They 

 had all the quickness of perception and readiness for new suggestions 

 which are elements of business enterprise, but they had not its fixity cf 

 purpose and patient endurance. The genial climate gradually relaxed 

 their physical energies ; they were without that safeguard to strength of 

 character which comes from resolute and steadfast persistence in hard 

 work, and they sank into frivolity " {Principles of Economics, p. 19). 

 The economist, as Professor Marshall- has pointed out, must also take 

 account of ethical forces ; and, indeed, it appears to us strangely erroneous 

 to consider economic science as having no concern with moral problems, 

 and as being solely occupied with the material wealth of man. The very 

 foundations of industrial life are ethical in their nature ; for if it be true 

 that the discipline of steady industry is a moral factor of great importance, 

 such discipline can itself be acquired only by a race whose moral fibre is 

 excellent. It is only on the basis of social integration ensured by a supra- 

 rational organisation that the industrial structure can be established. 



