CHAPTER XI 
TRANSITION FROM PASSIVE TO ACTIVE ADAPTATION 
Up to this point our discussion has been confined very largely to 
passive adaptation in its various phases and processes and with 
good reason, for most men and social groups in most of their 
activities are devoid of forethought, yet our attention has been 
called repeatedly to the fact that social evolution is a process of 
increasing power of man over his material and spiritual environ- 
ment. 
Whether or not there is any break in the cosmic process war- 
ranting the distinction between passive and active adaptation is 
a mooted question, some holding that we have only new and 
increasingly complex combinations of mechanical forces, others 
holding that activity and consciousness go back to the primal 
cell, but the fact is indisputable that man as no other animal 
rebels against nature, fights, CONQUERS, in some sense and to some 
degree. Manas no other animal is a dynamo for the transforma- 
tion of mechanical energy drawn from the material environment 
to personal energy which reacts on that environment. In this 
respect individual men differ greatly, so do groups. Such 
materialistic monists as Ernst Haeckel tell us that man is noth- 
ing more than a dynamo, — a mere machine, — whose product 
in personal energy is strictly commensurable with the material 
energy transformed. This is Ward’s position as we shall see in 
the next chapter. ‘‘ Matter is dynamic,” he says, ‘f and every 
time that man has touched it with the wand of reason it has 
responded by satisfying a want.” But reason itself, according 
to strict monism, is only the most highly complex portion of the 
human machine and of the same stuff as all other machines, 
whether made of inorganic matter, or organic as in the vegetable 
and animal kingdoms. But granted, for the sake of argument, all 
that the monists claim; — granted that there was originally no 
distinct break between man and his pithecoid precursor, physical, 
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