THE EELATION OF INSTITUTIONS TO ENVIRONMENT. 705 



indeed, it is in this noblest of organisms that plasticity or adjustability 

 to diverse conditions culminates — but the differentiation is intellectual 

 rather than physical, cerebral rather than corporeal. Men were dif- 

 ferentiated initially through arts of welfare by which they began 

 transforming environment to their needs; later, arts of pleasure were 

 developed out of the richness of a higher life, and for the first time in 

 the history of living things smiles and laughter came to be on the 

 earth ; and as mind grew through exercise, arts increased and multiplied. 



So human development differs in divers ways from the development 

 of lower organisms. In the first place, it is fundamentally intellectual ; 

 in the second place, it is collective rather than individual; and in the 

 third place, it tends directly, at first through convenience and later 

 through design, toward the modification of environment and the con- 

 quest of the earth for human weal. Yet the law of modification 

 remains essentially unchanged, for mental characters, like physical, 

 are shaped by interaction with environment. 



Since human development arises in arts, which are essentially collec- 

 tive, the career of the individual is in large measure subordinate to the 

 career of the group; and since the parts of the group are interrelated, 

 while groups are related among each other, the essential unit is the 

 organization rather than the organism. The primitive organization is 

 feeble and indefinite, perhaps to such an extent as hardly to distin- 

 guish man from lower animals; but as arts increase, and as internal and 

 external relations multiply, the organizations grow definite and laws 

 are gradually developed, and institutions, the last and best fruit of 

 intellectual development, are born. So the institution springs from 

 organization as organization is produced by arts, themselves the off- 

 spring of intellectual activity. These are the salient features of human 

 development through interaction with the external. While the funda- 

 mental features of human development are thus essentially distinct, it 

 is to be remembered that their germs are found in lower life. Many 

 insects, birds, and other subhuman things possess simple arts, many 

 gregarious and other animals are loosely organized, and among some 

 articulates and vertebrates the organization is so definite as to imply 

 law, none the less efficient because instinctive — indeed, just as the 

 ascent of the human organism may be traced through structural homol- 

 ogies with the lower animals, so the ascent of organizations may be 

 followed from a lowly beginning far down in the scale of biotic develop- 

 ment up to a splendid culmination in humanity and human institutions. 



THE RELATIONS OF ORGANIZATIONS. 



On humid and temperate lands and in shoal waters life teems, and 

 the bitterest strife is between organism and organism. In the sun- 

 parched and snow-mantled deserts of the laud surface and in the chill 

 deserts of the abysmal waters life scrimps, and the strife is between 

 organism and inorganic environment. Thus there is a law of strife for 

 the fecund district and another law for the desert. 

 sm 95 45 



