1883.] Evolutionist Point of View . 649 
would be suicidal and decidedly criminal to check or traverse 
natural development in the earlier portion of life, yet no 
judicious, conscientious parent or educator seeks to hasten 
on the natural series of transformations. To foster in the 
child the thoughts of the youth, or to demand from the latter 
the deeds and endurances of the man, is a capital error. 
One of the deadliest sins of the modern organisation of 
society is that it sends young people to the workshop and 
the counting-house when they ought to be at school, and in 
return grinds them in “ standards ” when they should be at 
play. 
Proceeding from these analogies we may well ask whether 
in human communities, or in human society altogether, 
there does not come a time when change, if it occurs at all, 
is not regress rather than progress ? Whether it does not 
become good policy to resist, or at least retard, such changes 
instead of stimulating and urging them on ? Perhaps the 
essential principle of vigorous individual life may be looked 
upon as a kind of cohesive impulse which holds all the parts 
of the animal together in intense sympathy. As life decays 
this is no longer the case ; individual unity, as contrasted 
with the outer world, grows feebler ; injuries are less 
promptly repaired, and at last the system ceases to be a 
unity and is resolved into the general mass of matter, un- 
distinguished and undistinguishable. 
Very similar is the course of things in a human commu- 
nity : in its earlier days there is intense vitality or individu- 
ation pervading the whole ; gradually, as maturity is reached 
and passed over, this principle, which is known in a com- 
munity as tribal instinCt or patriotism, fades away; its 
different members feel less and less mutual attraction, and 
finally reach, in cosmopolitanism, a state closely analogous 
to the decomposition of the animal body and its cessation to 
exist as an individual. 
We find that the de-individualisation of the animal or 
plant is effected, or at least greatly accelerated, by certain 
microbia which set up in its tissues fermentations, — in other 
words, disease processes. If such germs have any degree of 
consciousness — and it might be unsafe to deny this alto- 
gether — they may possibly believe that they are doing an 
exalted and noble work, and leading the body which is the 
seat of their operations to a higher vitality. Are there not, 
in like manner, social bacilli, disease-germs which set up 
fermentations — i.e., agitations — in communities, and lead 
the body-corporate in the same path of decomposition ? It 
is to be remarked that certain advanced thinkers on social 
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