222 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 
A geologist and botanist of authority, Professor Ward was an 
ardent admirer and disciple of Darwin, but in the controversy 
between the neo-Darwinian and neo-Lamarckian schools he 
ranged himself with the latter, holding that there was a “ bath- 
mic-force ” ever pushing out to larger life expression and to new 
forms, accepting also the principle of use-inheritance.' 
In philosophy a strict monist, he endeavored to interpret life in 
terms of the inter-action of mechanical forces. A great admirer 
of Comte, he made use of his “hierarchy of the sciences” and like 
Comte emphasized the affectional nature as the dynamic of social 
evolution, even conceiving feeling as a cosmic force, — a function 
of the world-soul. Unlike Comte with whom cosmic evolution 
culminated in humanity and whose philosophy eventuated in the 
worship of humanity as the Great Being, Professor Ward con- 
sidered humanity as but an incident in the cosmic process and the 
love of nature as the highest type of religious sentiment.? 
The greatest contribution of Professor Ward to social philos- 
ophy is his stress on the all-importance of the intellect in social 
evolution making possible permanent human achievement, this 
being the characteristic which differentiates man and society 
from lower orders of creation, and sociology from the other 
sciences. Nature in its processes, he holds, is wasteful. Man 
isan economizer.t He alone is an economic animal. To be sure 
human intelligence is rooted in animal intelligence, with no break 
in the process, but man is characterized by forethought, — telic 
activity. 
Our author endeavors to explain or at least describe the process 
by which the cosmic soul evolved into the human soul as fol- 
lows: — 
The birth of the soul was the dawn of the psychic faculty. It marks an 
era in the cosmical history of the earth. Dimly and imperceptibly it worked 
through the primordial ages in the Silurian mollusk, the Devonian fish, and 
the Mesozoic reptile, producing scarcely any modification in the normal 
course of biologic evolution. During all these vast eons of time the only 
organic products of beauty or utility were such as nature in her objectless 
1 Tn later life he accepted De Vries’ mutation theory. 
2 Pure Sociology, p. 430. 
3 Ibid., pp. 17 f. 4 Tbid., pp. 470, 471. 
