between ourselves and races of lower social development are greatly exaggerated, and even to a large extent fallacious; that they are not borne out by the facts as we find them; and that they must be held to have originated in the erroneous tendency to take as the measure of the mental development of individuals belonging to the civilised races that intellectual inheritance of civilisation which has been accumulated during a long series of generations in the past, and which is, strictly speaking, only to be taken as evidence of the social efficiency of the races which have accumulated it. Lastly, we have seen that in the rivalry of nationalities which is actually proceeding in our civilisation, existing facts do not appear to point to the conclusion that high intellectual development is the most potent factor in determining success. We have seen that certain qualities, not in themselves intellectual, but which contribute directly to social efficiency, are apparently of greater importance; and that in the absence of these qualities high intellectual development may even lower social efficiency to a dangerous degree, and so contribute to the decided worsting, in the evolution which is proceeding, of the people possessing it. When all these facts are now taken together, they undoubtedly tend to support, with a very striking class of evidence, a conclusion towards which we have been advancing in the preceding chapters. It would appear that when man became a social creature his progress ceased to be primarily in the direction of the development of his intellect. Thenceforward, in the conditions under which natural selection has operated, his interests as an individual were no longer paramount; they became subordinate to the distinct and widely-different interests of the longer-lived social organism to which he for the time being belonged. The intellect, of course, continues to be a most important factor in enabling the system to which the individual belongs to maintain its place in the rivalry of life; but it is no longer the prime factor. And it continually tends to come into conflict. with those larger evolutionary forces which, through the instrumentality of religious systems, are securing the progressive subordination of the present interests of the self-assertive individual to the future interests of society. The lesson of human history appears to be that it is these larger forces which are always triumphant. Natural selection seems, in short, to be steadily evolving in the race that type of character upon which these forces act most readily and efficiently; that is to say, it is evolving religious character in the first instance, and intellectual character only as a secondary product in association with it. The race would, in fact, appear to be growing more and more religious, the winning sections being those in which, cæteris paribus, this type of character is most fully developed. But, like all movements of the kind, the evolution is proceeding very slowly. One after another, races and civilisations appear to be used up in the process as it proceeds. When the intellectual development of any section of the race has, for the time being, outrun its ethical development, natural selection has apparently weeded it out like any other unsuitable product. Regarding our social systems as organic growths, there appears to be a close analogy between their life-history and that of forms of organic life in general. We have, on the one side, in the ethical systems upon which they are founded, the developmental force which sets in motion that life-continuing, constructive process which physiologists call anabolism. On the other side, and in conflict with it, we have in the self-assertive rationalism of the individual, the tendency-by itself disintegrating and destructive-known as katabolism. In a social system, as in any other organism, the downward stage towards decay is probably commenced when the katabolic tendency begins to progressively overbalance the anabolic tendency. A preponderating element in the type of character which the evolutionary forces at work in human society are slowly developing, would appear to be the sense of reverence. The qualities with which it is tending to be closely allied are, great mental energy, resolution, enterprise, powers of prolonged and concentrated application, and a sense of simple-minded and single-minded devotion to conceptions of duty. CHAPTER X CONCLUDING REMARKS It seems likely, when the application of the principles of evolutionary science to history comes to be fully understood, that we shall have to witness almost as great a revolution in those departments of knowledge which deal with man in society as we have already seen taking place in the entire realm of the lower organic sciences through the development and general application, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, of the biological theories enunciated by Darwin. It is evident that we are approaching a period when we shall no longer have the same justification as in the past for regarding human history as a bewildering exception to the reign of universal law-a kind of solitary and mysterious island in the midst of the cosmos given over to a strife of forces without clue or meaning. Despite the complexity of the problems encountered in history, we seem to have everywhere presented to us systematic development underlying apparent confusion. In all the phases and incidents of our social annals we are apparently regarding only the intimately related phenomena of a single, vast, orderly process of evolution. If the explanation of the principles governing the evolution of society which has been given in the preceding chapters is in the main correct, these principles must have an application far too wide to be adequately discussed within the limits to which it is proposed to confine this book. It has been no part of the aim of the writer, in the task he has undertaken, to treat the subject in its relations to that wider field of philosophical inquiry of which it forms a province. It only remains now to deal with a few matters directly arising out of the argument so far as it has proceeded. Emphasis has been laid throughout the preceding pages on the necessity for a clear and early recognition of the inherent and inevitable antagonism existing in human society between the interests of the individual, necessarily concerned with his own welfare, and the interests of the social organism, largely bound up with the welfare of generations yet unborn. The fundamental conception underlying the reasoning of that hitherto predominant school of thought which has sought to establish in the nature of things a rationalistic sanction for individual conduct, has always been that the interests of the individual either already are, or are immediately tending to become, coincident with the interests of society as a whole. The principles of this Utilitarian school have come down to us through Hobbes and Locke, and have been developed by a large and distinguished group of philosophical writers, amongst the more influential of whom must be counted Hume, Jeremy Bentham, and the two Mills. They will, in the future, not improbably be recognised to have received their truest scientific expression in the Synthetic Philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer. There can be no mistaking the central conception of this school. The idea of the identification of the interests of the Π |