ACTIVE SOCIAL ADAPTATION 277 



Contrary to the school of Treitschke, Novicow holds that war is 

 not necessary to keep alive national spirit, but on the contrary, 

 that the collective desire for intellectual supremacy will prove far 

 more potent. Indeed the state is not the final form of human 

 association, he holds, but even now that form known as " na- 

 tionality," i. e., a group united by the bonds of cultural likeness 

 and sympathy. Such intellectual rivalry, moreover, will provide 

 the largest possible well-being and happiness, for intellectual 

 activity is the very quintessence of life and pleasure. 1 



To live signifies to think, to feel, to will, to act; and the more vibrant 

 the thought, the more profound the feeling, the more ardent the desire, the 

 quicker the action and the more rapid the changes, the more intense is the 

 life. . . . The law of acceleration which pervades all nature is also at work 

 in the evolution of societies. Passing from the physiological phase through 

 the economic and political, the struggle for existence ends with the intellec- 

 tual phase where it attains its greatest intensity. When the nations shall 

 have entered this struggle definitely, when the social transformations which 

 it demands shall have been completely effected, there will be an activity and 

 an intensity of movement throughout humanity in comparison with which 

 our actual existence will appear to be mere lethargy. 2 



The hierarchy of human struggles culminating in free assimila- 

 tion and in the provoking of imitation is shown in the diagram 

 on the next page. 



In a panoramic review of human struggles our author deduces 

 several laws: — 



(1) " Progress consists merely in abandoning the slower proc- 

 esses of adaptation to environment to adopt those that are more 

 rapid." 3 But as this change is wholly dependent on the increase 

 of knowledge and intelligence, progress may be defined as a pro- 

 gressive change from non-rational to rational processes or from 

 passive to active adaptation. 



(2) Self-interest has always been the mainspring of struggle 

 and progress yet the unlooked-for result has been increasing 

 advantage to the conquered and increasing social solidarity. 4 



(3) Methods and processes that are effective in the lower 

 phases of struggle are not effective in the higher, as coercion, 

 for example, in social assimilation. 6 



1 Les Luttes, pp. 327, 410, 434. 4 Ibid., p. 406. 



2 Ibid., pp. 328, 329. 3 Ibid., p. 404. 6 Ibid., p. 416. 



