THE GRAND STRATEGY
OF EVOLUTION ?''

THE SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY OF A BIOLOGIST

BY

WILLIAM PATTEN, PH.D.

Professor of Biology in Dartmouth College, Hanover, N. H.

,o- 3

BOSTON

RICHARD G. BADGER

THE GORHAM PRESS

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY RICHARD G. BADGER

All Rights Reserved

HK

Made in the United States of America

The Gorham Press, Boston, U.S.A.

INTRODUCTION

The Household of Man — The Philosophy of War and the Phil-
osophy of Peace — The Purpose of a Righteous Peace — Unorganized
Humanity — The Grand Strategy of Evolution.

I. The Household of Man

THE roof of the world shelters a common household
for man and his fellow creatures. All its living rooms
are occupied and all its dwelling places are public
thoroughfares as well as private habitations. In this
household man can have no domestic secrets for visi-
tation and communication are available to all. Wisdom
and folly are publicly proclaimed, profits and losses
open to inspection. Every member of the human fam-
ily quickly learns that what is "right" for one is "right"
for the other; that what is "wrong" for one is "wrong"
for all; that what is profitable for one may be profit-
able for anyone. And profit is but another name for
growth, the goal of all endeavor.

While the great masses of mankind must still live
hazardously from day to day, moved to meagre profits
by momentary impulses and present opportunities, in-
creasing numbers are eagerly scanning the horizon of
human affairs in search of more profitable ways of
living, and finding them, they shall not be denied their
profits.

Eager roots may rend the hardest rocks in search
of profit. What social masonry may not be shattered by
the groping roots of social life in search of happiness?

iv INTRODUCTION

II. The Philosophy of War and the Philosophy
of Peace

Strange as it may seem, it was but yesterday that
these eager sentinels of the human flock were gravely
debating whether or no peace is more profitable than
war, and whether peace or war is the "natural state"
of man. The question so sharply formulated is both
pertinent and logical, for it covers the whole philoso-
phy of life. It covers, indeed, the whole philosophy
of evolution and the creative conduct of Nature. There
is no other alternative.

A convincing answer, either way, will profoundly
influence every phase of human life the world over,
for as intelligence dictates the strategy by which it may
conquer, so, in the long run, will the body act. But
to satisfy the intelligence, the answer must harmonize
with natural laws, for the grand strategy of man can-
not be different from the grand strategy of nature.
Evidently the problem lies within the domain of the
biologist.

He who is persuaded that "warfare" is nature's
method of evolution, that war is the "natural state" of
man and more profitable than peace, will say in his
heart: If war is profitable, then war is good; it is
"right" for man to make war, and so by all means,
let us have war; nation against nation, race against
race, brother against brother. Every man for himself
and every interest for itself; the secret or declared
enemy of every other interest and every other man.
Present obstacles alone shall postpone the attempt of
each to master or destroy the other. If it is right for
nations to war on one another, by the same token it is

INTRODUCTION v

right for citizen to make war on citizen; for friends and
neighbors to rob and despoil one another when safe
opportunities or dire necessity arise. If there is no
cause for war, invent one. A good war will hallow any
cause. There are no "rights" to be respected, no "obli-
gations" to be honored. Strategic positions and eco-
nomic conditions alone are to be considered, correctly
estimated, improved, and rightly utilized at the proper
time for self-preservation and self-aggrandizement.

There are no such things in the naked realities of
a natural life, nay there cannot be such things as faith,
loyalty, honor, self-sacrifice, mutual service, and benev-
olence. These are but empty words invented by man
for man's protective purposes; lies cunningly made to
look like truth for ornamental and polite social usages.
They are but conventional baits for the less intelligent;
traps for sentimental fools. Pledges and truces are
but resting spells, mantles of dignified hypocrisy, to
be worn only so long as they serve their purpose.

Wholesale and indiscriminate destruction, however,
would be unprofitable, and unwise. Like over-greedy
parasitism, it would leave nothing for the destroyer
to live upon. Only that shall be destroyed which is
an obstacle to the larger purposes of the conqueror, a
menace to his vital interests. Only that shall endure
which can be mastered by him and utilized, whose will
can be bent to his will. Only the masterful can thrive,
and only the strong should endure; their armor of
ruthlessness is the necessary means to an end that is
good; the more quickly that end is gained, the better.
Pity and mercy prolong miserable lives and cumber
the earth with unfit and useless beings; they are only
the misguided efforts of slavish minds that draw out

vi INTRODUCTION

the battle but cannot change the inevitable result.

All this and more, that by the struggles of war,
and by the eliminations of war, the best shall survive;
that the more intelligent may live on the substance and
labor of the stupid ; that the strong may grow stronger
and prosper in the land his God has given him. Be-
cause of his skill in combat, man has thrived and gained
dominion over all other animals. War is the source of
this profit. It is necessary to perpetuate war in order to
prevent the stagnation of an over easy life and to stimu-
late progress.

This, in brief, is the "philosophy" of war. Accord-
ing to many students of evolution, this kind of life is
the natural one for man. It is a philosophy that still
appeals to the intellect of many theologians, scientists,
and statesmen, even though they cannot bring them-
selves to act in accordance with it.

But if any man be persuaded that a state of peace is
truly profitable to man, and that war is unprofitable,
then will he say to himself and to his brother: "Peace
is good. Let us by all means make peace between us,
and let us forever keep the peace. What is good for me
is good for you ; it is also good for your children, and
for my children. Give me there of your strength to-
morrow, and I will give you here of my strength today.
Neither of us shall be a loser thereby, and each shall
duly profit in the common enterprise. I will truly tell
you of my adventures, of my going out, and my coming
in, of my successes, and of my failures; and you will
truly tell me yours. So shall we multiply our profits,
for each shall profit by his own experience and by the

INTRODUCTION vii

experience of his brother. So shall we both grow in
truth, in wisdom, and in our common knowledge. So
may we better act together in our common purposes.
"I will keep the faith, even as you will keep the faith,
with my life, it may be, for my goods, my life, and the
lives of my helpers, are dependent on the fulfilment
of your covenants, even as your goods, your life and the
lives of my helpers are dependent on the fulfilment
of my convenants. So shall we and our possessions the
longer endure.

"Our mutual faith, our loyalty, and our honor shall
be as a staff to lean upon; as girders over unmeasured
gulfs of time and space; as invisible bonds binding each
to each with hooks of steel, yet leaving each one free.
Our honor shall not stand upon compulsion; it shall
not require a witness, or a guardian, or other pledge
than honor; for the virtue in honor cannot be strength-
ened save by honor. So shall our honor be an insurance,
valid in full, at whatsoever time or place, against the
fickle winds of adversity. So shall we grow in stability
and security.

"Our common profits shall be as a reservoir that
shall be filled in times of plenty and drawn upon in
times of need. They shall be a heritage to the sons of
men, freely given and gladly received, to use and to
enjoy. So shall we grow in benevolence which is our
assurance of continued prosperity. So shall we, and
our children, and our childrens children, live long in
the land and grow in happiness. Our house of peace
shall be built by mutual service. It shall be founded
on truth and sheltered by justice. So shall fear, and
hate, and greed, not enter therein." Such, in brief, is
the philosophy of peace.

viii INTRODUCTION

III. The Purpose of a Righteous Peace

When the present conflict of moral and physical
forces has attained a new state of equilibrium; when
hate, and fear, and greed are for the moment impotent
to attack or defend ; men will seek, as never before, to
understand the causes of war, and to find the means of
avoiding it; for no further demonstration of the futility
of war for war's own sake will be required.

All the nations and peoples of the world, the con-
querors and the conquered, the innocent and the guilty,
will loudly proclaim the impel ative necessity of a last-
ing and a "righteous peace."

But, if they sincerely desire to establish a righteous
peace, they must first seek in their councils to reach
some conclusion as to the meaning of "righteousness,"
and the purpose of a "peaceful" life.

Rightness may not be circumscribed by any reli-
gious creed, nor by race or color; nor high or low de-
gree of wealth or poverty, weakness or strength, intelli-
gence or stupidity. Indeed it cannot be limited in its
scope to purely human affairs. The foundations of
Tightness lie deeper than man and his institutions.
Rightness has its roots in the physical and animal make-
up of man, in the sources of his origin, maintenance,
and growth. All the evolutionary processes which have
produced man must be right processes, as his actual
existence, his progress in the past, and the growth and
existence of his fellow creatures abundantly testify.

What then is the nature of these processes? Why
do we call them righteous? What shall we say of the
purpose of man? Why is he here? What is peace for?
What part does man play in the grand strategy of evo-

INTRODUCTION ix

lution? Can science, religion, and philosophy ever
come to any basic agreement on these very practical
questions?

To many practical souls, the philosophy of peace
is but an idle dream, an enticing but unattainable
vision. They truly say: "We have no such dreams.
The brothers we know have no such visions. They
only are wise who deal in realities, who see mankind,
and the world of things at large, as they are. Nature
and her ways, man and his ways are different; they are
what they are, and cannot be changed." With all that
we have no quarrel. But are we quite sure of our real-
ities? Do we surely know how nature grows and how
man grows? How both create and preserve their
products? Does man, consciously or otherwise, imi-
tate nature in his constructive ways; or are his methods
peculiar to himself?

Surely it behooves us to inspect our dreams and our
visions more carefully. It is doubtless true that there
are both peaceful and warlike ways in nature, as in man.
But which ones are the more creative? What kind of
things are more likely to be saved? What kind of
things are more likely to be destroyed? How do those
things exist, which do exist?

If our inspection is well and duly made, we may
perhaps be able to answer these questions with a greater
degree of accuracy; possibly to define "righteousness,"
at least from the standpoint of evolution; to formulate
a basic, creative law, and to define, in terms of progress,
the purpose of a peaceful life.

x INTRODUCTION

IV. Unorganized Humanity

The vital interests of man are for all men the same,
for all men spring from the same creative source, are
servants to the same creative ends, and are dependent
in the same ways upon nature, and upon one another.
But there is no court language of the mind in which
these interests can be intelligently discussed; no vocal
organ to utter the dictates of mans intelligence; and
no organic instruments to translate them into creative
action. The will and the physical power greatly to
serve mankind are at hand; but the elemental intelli-
gence, and the unity of purpose essential to constructive
action, are lacking. The quickening spirit of humanity
awaits the birth of its organic tabernacle.

Self-appointed delegates from civic and religious
domains, and from the outlying provinces of the phys-
ical and biological sciences, address the world's court
of public opinion virtually as strangers, and as alien
enemies to one another. Vaguely suspicious, and sus-
pected, they grow ever more voluble of shop and of its
technicalities; ever more secret, and inarticulate of
heart, and of its elemental purposes. To their busy
fellow men they appear to be the same old self-seek-
ers, but in some new, still more incomprehensible dis-
guise.

In this new Tower of Babel, church, science, and
state, call in vain to one another, for each uses a code
unacceptable, or unintelligible, to the other. Each
thinks of different things in similar terms, or of the
same things in different terms; and each emits an end-
less jargon of discordant notes and messages devoid of

INTRODUCTION xi

meaning to the body social. The deeper currents of
mental life, so essential to wholesome social growth,
stagnate at their sources, or their burdens putrify on
their meandering way. For the carriers of truth are
fickle agents; their inconstant hearts are empty, or
flatulent, or too weak to drive their lessons home. Basic
terms are seldom cashed at par, for the living thought
of man is ever clothed in dead, or dying words. And
these regal words of other days, laden with precious
memories, devitalized by use, mutilated by dogmatism,
or outlawed by the vital progress of ideas, are widely
quoted at fictitious values. There is no standard verbal
money rightly to measure the products of mental labor.
Thus the world's ambassadors to humanity, inspired
though they be with the spirit of service, are powerless
to accomplish their purpose. They are as strangers in
their own land, as immigrants in a crowded immigrant
district, mentally isolated from one another, and from
their fellow men. Inestimable potentialities, pitifully
unserviceable and unservable.

V. The Grand Strategy of Evolution

As the mental attitude of an immigrant is not with-
out value to his fellows, I venture to express the re-
sults of my own experiences, chiefly in the world of
animal life.

Let me say at the outset that I can discover no basic
difference, using the term in its physiological sense,
between the end or purpose inherent to all phases of
vital action, and the purpose inherent to all physical
or natural phenomena. In all cases, the purpose, or

xii INTRODUCTION

the result which is achieved, or to be achieved, appears
to be the same, and the ways and means of its achieve-
ment.

The universal end, or purpose in life, and in nature,
is to construct, to create, or grow. The ways and means
of accomplishing that end are mutual service, or co-
operative action, and Tightness.

The initial constituents of any growing thing, by
acting the more cooperatively, the better preserve them-
selves. These in turn cooperate to create and preserve
other constructive agents. But these creative and sav-
ing acts cannot take place unless the right things are
conveyed to the right place at the right time. When
these services are performed, the creative and saving
acts take place spontaneously, or automatically.

Creative Tightness, therefore, is a definite function
of time, and place, and of some inherent attribute.

Creative service is expressed in threefold terms —
conveyance in time (preservation and conservation) ;
conveyance in space ( relative motion) ; and Tightness.
Its value is measured in terms of the things created; it
is manifest in their material structure, or architecture,
and in their creative acts, or functions.

There is an abiding compulsion to the action of all
these factors which is cumulative, or progressive, pro-
ducing that increasing architectural organization that
we call nature-growth, or evolution.

Two reciprocal processes are always manifest in
this cooperative nature-action: construction and de-
struction; organization and disorganization. We may
also call these universal processes of give and take,
good and evil, anabolism and catabolism, egoism and
altruism. But as this nature-metabolism, as a whole, is

INTRODUCTION xiii

cumulative and progressive, there is but one all-pervad-
ing attribute of nature, namely, Tightness, which be-
comes manifest to us as constructive, or creative action,
or growth.

All our catalogs, which enumerate and classify na-
ture's content according to structure and action; our
histories and genealogies, which trace the course and
measure the march of world events; our habitats and
environments, which circumscribe the centres of co-
operative activities, are our more formal ways of ex-
pressing the fact that nature is divergent, rhythmic,
and spasmodic in its creative progress, punctuated in
time and place by variations in the rate, kind, or de-
gree, of things created.

In all these cases, the reciprocal egoism and altru-
ism, the creating and saving of self in order to give self
to some other creative act, is the essential process in
evolution. It is the perpetual source of nature's in-
creasing supplies and of her insatiable demands. It
is the basis of man's system of ethics and morality,
for in human affairs we call these same constructive
processes, righteousness, cooperation, altruism, service,
benevolence, and self-sacrifice.

In setting forth my own mental attitude toward
nature, as a purely personal record, I shall speak, not
as a scientist in the conventions of science, fortifying one
opinion with another, — that I cannot do, if I would, —
nor yet as a biologist, bringing, in testimony, some
fresh revelation of the laboratory; but rather as one
at last compelled to act as secretary to his own disor-
dered state of mind; putting into order those thoughts

xiv INTRODUCTION

and experiences which have come from one knows not
whence, or where, for the sake of a self-saving order.

Shaking "off those tangled oracles which ignorantly

guide . . ."

In "high neglect of what's denied or said
This way or that way, in doctrinal writ.
Troubled no longer by the priestly lore."

I have thrown the small verbal cash and other im-
pedimenta of my native province into the melting pot,
using wherever possible the irreducible sovereign
terms current in all mental exchange. And if you who
read will also, for the moment, lay aside your own
trappings, coming foot-free with me over some ne-
glected trails, it may be that we shall see more clearly
from our new point of view — and perhaps more con-
vincingly because of its scientific setting — that elemen-
tal truth which governs alike all the institutions of man
and of nature: The right to exist and the obligation to
serve are one and inseparable; for to exist is to give,
and to give is to receive.

CONTENTS

HAPTER PAGES

INTRODUCTION xiv

The Household of Man — The Philosophy of War and the Phi-
losophy of Peace — The Purpose of a Righteous Peace — Unor-
ganized Humanity- -The Grand Strategy of Evolution

PART I. THE ETHICS AND MORALITY OF EVOLUTION
I. BASIC FACTORS IN CONSTRUCTIVE ACTION 21-39

The Influence of the New Concept on Human Conduct — The
Varied Aspects of Nature as a Source of Mental Confusion —
Conflict and Tragedy, Competition and Destruction in Na-
ture— Benevolence and Mutual Service as Directive or Discip-
linary Agents in Nature-Action — The Continuity of the
Creative Process — Evolution a Triumph of Constructive over
Destructive Agencies — Cooperation and Conveyance, or Mu-
tual Service and Rightness, as Constructive Agencies in Evolu-
tion

II. THE EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUALITY 39-6i

The Individual and its Environments — The Creative Drift —
The Increment of Mutual Service and Rightness in Evolution —
The Growth Purpose in Nature-Action — The Decrease of
Chance and the Increase of Compulsion — Mutual Rights and
Mutual Obligations and the Categorical Imperative to Ex-
istence— The Egoism and Altruism of Individuality — The
Ethics and Morality of Nature-Action as a Guide to Individual
Conduct — The Components of Individuality

III. FITNESS AND ADAPTATION 62-81

The Criterion of Fitness— The Different Kinds of Fitness —
Fitness by Design, and Fitness by Mutual Influences — Tem-
porary and Permanent Fitness — The Measure of Organic
Fitness — The Measure of Social Fitness — The Adaptation of
Vital Actions to Good and Evil — The Evolution of Fitness and
Adaptation — Adaptability in Nature-Action, as a Universal
Creative Tropism

PART II. NATURE'S SYSTEM OF SELF-ADMINISTRATION
" AND SELF-CONTROL

IV. LIFE: ITS ORIGIN, AGENCIES, HABITAT, AND

GROWTH 85-113

Preparation, Materials, and Forces— The Cosmic Formula for
Life — Life's Cosmic Sanctuary — Life's Directive Discipline —
Life's Freedom — The Growth of Freedom — The Instruments
of Freedom — Growth: its Insistent Power; Organic Wealth, its
Source and its Uses; the Demands of Growth; Checks and Re-
leases to Growth; Development, or Simultaneous Increase in Vol-

xvi CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGES

ume, Diversity, and Mutual Service; Limitations to Growth;
Growth by Multiplication or Dissociation and by Combination,
Reunion, or Association; Profitable, Cooperative Mergers; Un-
profitable Mergers, Parasitism — The Creative Cadence or the
Formal Accents of Organic Growth — Stability of Individual
Life Essential to Social Life — The Growth Rhythm: Individual
Growth, Fragmentation, Regeneration, Association

V. NATURE'S DUAL ADMINISTRATIVE SOVEREIGNTY. .114-128

The Dual Sovereignty of Individuality, .or Internal and External
Autonomy— The Internal Administration of Life — The External
Administration of Life — The Federal Administration of Life —
The Insurance of Life

VI. BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 129-167

The Constructive Metabolism of Egoism and Altruism — The
Merging of Egosim and Altruism into Organization, and its
Emergence as the Augmented Altruism of Larger Individuals —
The Entail System in Sexual Reproduction: Life's Entailed
Estates; the Entailed Habitat; the Germ, or Entailed Principal:
Quick Assets, or the Endowments of Organic Capital to Em-
bryonic Life; the Nutritive Income and Forage Dividends of
Youth — Bisexual Cooperation as an Agency in Parental Benev-
olence: Sex, and Sexual Divergence; Female Attributes; Male
Atrributes; The Functional Attributes of Germ Cells; Bisexual
Cooperation— The Merging of Parental Altruism into Nature
Altruism and Social Altruism: the Larger Creative Values of
Bisexual Divergence and Bisexual Cooperation; the Unity
and Cooperative Duality of Plant and Animal Life; the Post-
Sexual Period of Parental Life as an Agency in Social Inheri-
tance; Evolution as the Product of Altruistic Action; Intelli-
gence not an Essential Factor in Altruism — Directive Discip-
line: Cosmic Discipline; Directive Discipline of the Germ;
The Cumulative Discipline of Organized Endowments, Struc-
tural and Bionomic; Education; The Compulsion of Intelli-
gence; Discipline in Civic Government, in Religion, and in
Science — Summary of Chapters I-VI

PART III. THE ARCHITONICS OF EVOLUTION

VII. ARCHITECTURE IN NATURE AS THE EXPRESSION OF

COOPERATIVE NATURE-ACTION 171-187

Knowledge expressed in Architectural Terms — Architecture
and Function — Architectural Diversity a Prerequisite to
Evolution — Reciprocal Relations between the Architecture of
the Individual and its Response to its Environment — Ar-
chitectural Values and Cooperative Balance — The Divergent
Architecture and Cooperative Unity of Plant and Animal
Life — The Compulsion of Established Constructive Methods

VIII. VITAL ACTION VERSUS NATURE-ACTION AS EX-
PRESSED IN ARCHITECTURAL PLANS AND IN
PHYLOGENY 188-210

Phylogeny — Architectural Values as Expressed in Main Lines
and Collateral Lines of Evolution — Architectural Problems, and
the Increase of Power through Architectural Improvements —

CONTENTS xvii

CHAPTER PAGES

The Architecture of Inorganic Growth — The Architecture of
Organic Growth — The Architecture of Plant Life — The Ar-
chitecture of Animal Life — Unicellular Growth (Protozoa) —
M ulticellular Growth — Radial Structural Plan (Ccelenterates
or Jellyfish) — Spiral Growth and False Radial Symmetry
(Molluscs and Echinoderms)

IX. THE TRIAXIAL SYSTEM AND THE GREAT HIGHWAY OF

ANIMAL EVOLUTION 211-251

The Triaxial System of Structural and Functional Gradients —
Its Methods of Internal Readjustment and Betterment —
The Material and Functional Register of Vital Betterments:
The Old Mouth and the New; Gills, Lungs, and Heart; The
Blood; The Nervous System — The Decline of Metamerism and
the Centralization of Functions — Architectural Tropism, or
the Orientation of Triaxial Organic Gradients to the Triaxial
System of Gradient Action in the Outer World: The Asym-
metry of the Outer World; the Orientation of Triaxial Vital
Architecture to World Architecture; Tropic Action; Triaxial
Architecture as a Tropic Reaction System and as a Product
of Tropic Action — Other Registers of Constructive Action;
Instincts, Intelligence, Cultural Implements — Cultural Reg-
isters

X. THE ARCHITECTURE AND COHESIVE POWER OF

SOCIAL LIFE 252-282

Limitations to the Growth of Man as an Individual, and the
Physical Limitations to his Organic Instruments — The Dis-
tinctive Organs of Social Life, Manual, Visual, Vocal, Auditory,
and Mental, and their Cooperative Unification — The Merging
of Man's Sense of Self with his Physical Instruments and Ma-
terial Properties — The World-wide Unification, Physical, Or-
ganic, and Mental, of the Nineteenth Century: the Comple-
tion of the Social Blastoderm; the Increment of Power; the
New Receptors and Perceptors; the New Ways and Means of
Conveyance; the Orientation to a New World and the New
Mental Freedom — The Compulsion to Social Cooperation —
The Consciousness of Social Possessions as the Compelling
Creative Power in Social Construction and Social Preserva-
tion— Summary of Chapters VII-X

PART IV. THE ARCHITECTONICS OF MENTAL EVO-
LUTION

XL THE ORIENTATION OF MENTAL IMAGERY TO NATURE-
ACTION AS A MEANS TO CONSTRUCTIVE CONDUCT 285-301

The Cooperation between Conduct, Cosmic, Organic, and
Mental Action — The Egoism and Altruism of Mental Life,
Learning, and Teaching — The Parallelism between Mental and
Physical Evolution — Mental Imagery as a Self-Constructive
Function — The Evolution of Mental Imagery— The Imagination
as an Instrument of Conveyance. The New Freedom and the
New World — Basic Concepts. Creation, Growth, Obedience,
Service, Profit — The Tests of Veracity

xviii CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGES

XII. THE COMPULSION OF NATURE-ACTION IN SCIENCE,

RELIGION, ART AND GOVERNMENT. 302-327

The Compulsion of Intelligence — The Expression of Nature's
Self-Constructive Ways in Man's Self-Constructive Social
Laws — Mental Reorientation — The Militant Phase of Intelli-
gent Action — Fear as a Counter Evil — The Conservation of
Mental Rightness through Education — The Creative Value of
Truth as the Expression of a Natural Creative Law — The Co-
operative Factor, Mental and Moral, in Animism — The Tend-
ency to Unify and Simplify Natural Phenomena — Rightness as
a Saving and Directing Agency in Mental and Physical Ac-
tion— The Community of Purpose in Science and Religion

PART V. THE ARCHITECTONICS OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION

XIII. MENTAL IMAGERY AS A FACTOR IN SOCIAL GROWTH 331-357

Conflicting Social Philosophies, Old and New — The Distorted
Philosophy of the Biologists — Business Philosophy — Germany's
Militant Kultur — The Permanent Mental Incentive in Social
Regeneration — Mental Limitations and Unadaptive Social
Growths: Primitive Social Life of the Australians; Christian-
ity, Buddhism, and Hinduism; The Cultural Inequalities of the
Greeks — Science and the New Democracy — The New De-
mands of the New Freedom

XIV. CLASS FUNCTIONS AND VOLUNTARY SUBMISSION TO

LEADERSHIP 358-376

Class Differences a Necessary Condition to Social Cooperation —
Social Metabolism and the Conveyance of Social Power —
Social Cleavage and the Delimitation of Social Units — Social
Motives and the Compulsion of Achievement — The Construc-
tive Usage of Intelligence in Social Growth: Mental Dominion;
Mental Democracy, or Equality of Authority; The Delegation
of Functional Authority and Voluntary Submission to Leader-
ship

XV. THE NEW LEVIATHAN 377-411

Quickening World-Life — The Mosaic of World-Life, Functional
and Morphological — The Evidences of Organized World-Life —
The Ways and Means to a Purposeful World-Life — The State
as a Sphere of Cooperative Action — The Evolution of Social
Covenants — The Government of the State: the Autocratic
State; the Democratic State — Education as a Directive Agency
in Social Egoism — The State as a System of Cooperative
Functions: Social Reproduction; Social Metabolism; Social
Betterments — The Extension of State Functions into Inter-
national Functions

SUMMARY 412-413

APPENDIX 415-425

INDEX 427

PART I

THE ETHICS AND MORALITY OF
EVOLUTION

THE GRAND STRATEGY
OF EVOLUTION

CHAPTER I

BASIC FACTORS IN CONSTRUCTIVE
ACTION

The Influence of the New Concept on Human Conduct — The
Varied Aspects of Nature as a Source of Mental Confusion — Con-
flict and Tragedy, Competition and Destruction in Nature — Benevo-
lence and Mutual Service as Directive, or Disciplinary Agents in
Nature-Action — The Continuity of the Creative Process — Evo-
lution a triumph of Constructive over Destructive Agencies — Co-
operation and Conveyance, or Mutual Service and Rightness as
Constructive Agencies in Evolution.

I. The Influence of the New Concept on Human

Conduct

THE theory of evolution is now accepted by all
classes of intellectual leaders. Its transforming in-
fluence has penetrated society far beyond the point
where the theory is formally recognized, or the mean-
ing of the term even vaguely understood. It has de-
stroyed old standards for the interpretation of life,
erased old formulas for the conduct of life, and has
compelled us to seek new standards and formulas more
in harmony with nature-action; ones based on the best
teachings of the old religions and on the best of the new
science; and ones that shall not be in downright con-

21

22 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

flict with the dictates of common sense, nor with the
vision of the modern prophets who foresee the coming
of a new man.

It is, therefore, time to inquire more deeply into
the meaning of the processes common to the evolution
of living and non-living things. What, after all, con-
stitutes world progress and how is it accomplished?
In what directions are the great evolutionary streams
of plant life and animal life moving? What are the
ethics and morals of nature, if indeed she has any?
What has science to offer the trustees of tradition in
place of that which she has destroyed? What have
students of nature learned, however elemental, that
shall be to all mankind a fundamental truth and a
guiding principle to constructive action? Is man to
live and grow by using the same methods all other
things in nature use, or must he create out of his own
compelling needs new methods of living, new princi-
ples, new laws of conduct, that are solely applicable
to himself?

To these questions science has given conflicting an-
swers, for nature has many different sides and science
sees them through many different eyes.

II. The Varied Aspects of Nature as a Source of
Mental Confusion

Nature, indeed, is so vast, so intricate, and in many
respects so inaccessible that science can see but a very
small part of her; and since no one science can long
preserve its images undimmed, nor adequately utilize
the vision of other sciences, man's mental picture of
nature is a mosaic patchwork of flickering images; a

FACTORS IN CONSTRUCTIVE ACTION 23

changing, composite caricature, which exaggerates her
most conspicuous features, her most dramatic, and most
recently discovered phases.

But yesterday, nature seemed to be the unchanging
product of a precipitative creative fiat; today, the still
changing product of endless growth. Tomorrow, what
will the image be? Which science will then throw the
high lights of nature on the mind of man? Which one
then will cast the shadows?

The great naturalists of the preceding generation
— those brilliant students of the interwoven lives which
play their various parts on shifting scenes of forests,
field, and shore — gave us our first vivid picture of an
ever changing nature. It was largely their testimony
that won the verdict for evolution. After the great
naturalists came the modern biologists, aiming to ex-
plore the source of life, and in the seclusion of the labor-
atory seeking to obtain a nearer and a better view of
nature in accouchement; now scrutinizing with micro-
scope and blazing lights the minutely woven fabric of
egg, and sperm, and embryo; now, watching the first
throbs of nascent life in cell and organ; now, by artful
and instantaneous killing, striving in their order to
fix the mincing steps of life for more deliberate inspec-
tion; now striving to view the steps of life in action;
and again, by mimicking the different processes of life,
hoping to catch their meaning, or perhaps the meaning
of life itself.

The field naturalists and the modern biologists
survey a particular phase of life through a particular
mental facet, and each school has evolved a more or less
rigid formula for the things it most clearly sees. The
Lamarckians chiefly see the inheritance of acquired

24

characters, the moulding influence of habit and of the
external environment. The Darwinians see little else
than "natural selection" and the "survival of the fittest."
The Weismannians see an omnipotent "germ plasma,"
the creator, mute and unquestionable of all things liv-
ing. The morphologists see their own cubist diagrams
more clearly than living, growing organisms. The
cytologists, breeders, and experimentalists see little
more than their own thumb-nail sketches of the minute
machinery of life and heredity, of Mendelism, chromo-
somes, and eugenics.

• • • • •

The precise methods of modern biologists give us
commendably accurate pictures of some particular
point, or phase, of life as it is at the present moment.
But they have not clarified man's social problems, nor
given us large pictures of the processes and products
of evolution. They lack perspective, and cannot take
the place of the more comprehensive, descriptive, or
historic sciences, such as geology, paleontology, and
comparative anatomy, which show us approximately
what life is now, as a whole, what it was like in the
remote past, the wonderful progress it has made and
the order of its accomplishment.

Thus man's mental attitude towards nature is the
product of a complex mosaic vision. The very multi-
plicity and changing intensity of the nature-images
formed by modern science have created among scien-
tists and laymen much mental confusion, augmented
by a prevalent belief that certain points of view, and
certain methods of studying nature, are more truthful
and trustworthy than others.

It is clear that the historic, microscopic, telescopic

FACTORS IN CONSTRUCTIVE ACTION 25

and panoramic methods of nature study have their re-
spective virtues as well as the defects of their qualities,
for each shows important things the other fails to re-
veal. In their attempts to portray nature, biologists
often forget the weakness of the one and fail to utilize
the strength of the other. By thus limiting their field
of vision, by exaggerating the minute, the local and
the dramatic incidents of life, they seriously neglect
the most significant teachings of nature, although they
are familiarly and universally proclaimed by her.

III. Conflict and Tragedy, Competition and
Destruction in Nature

The picture of nature painted by the field natur-
alists was a warring, hostile nature, "red in tooth and
claw with ravin." Its merciless "struggle for exist-
ence," its wanton destruction and tragic incident deeply
moved both scientist and layman and greatly influenced
the conduct and the interpretation of human life.

But the attention of the naturalists was chiefly focused
on the fifth act of life's drama, not on the body of the
play; on the inevitable collapse of imperfect life sys-
tems, not on the upbuilding of cell on cell, and life on
life, during long preliminary constructive periods.

They gave us the familiar picture of life's tragic
side, and, like all one-sided representations, it was but
a caricature, true, indeed, to the life they portrayed,
but misleading in the omission of the larger truth.
They showed us the shameless selfishness, the fruitless
toil and suffering, the wanton wastefulness of life and
the endless competition in strength and skill, in shift-
ing alliance with hypocrisy and deceit; with blind

chance in the background awarding death to the van-
quished and to the victor life's bitter spoils. With
master strokes, and with the convincing accuracy of
the trained observer, they painted the "disastrous
chances" of a tumultuous life, the "moving accidents
by flood and field," the spectacular catastrophes of
failure.

But they did not portray the benevolent processes
of construction, the peaceful cooperation, the careful
conservation, and the successful sacrifice of self to
higher service. Some writers have indeed recognized
the element of benevolence in the cooperation that
forms such a conspicuous feature of many social organ-
izations; but usually it has been regarded as something
peculiar to a few highly organized animals and to
man, not as something inherent to all stages of organic
and inorganic nature.

IV. Benevolence and Mutual Service as Directive, or
Disciplinary Agents in Nature-Action

But a new phase of nature's primeval method, a new
instinct, is now seeking expression in the heart of man.
It demands more and more insistently the "humani-
tarian" methods of cooperation, altruism, and mutual
service. The hand hesitates to obey the heart's com-
mand because the false prophets of science still dictate
the use of nature's crudest, least effective methods, say-
ing that progress can be made only through competition,
through mastery by brute force, or by strategy, through
selfishness and the license of freedom uncontrolled. I
challenge this interpretation of the order. It is not
the real teaching of life nor of nature. It places the

FACTORS IN CONSTRUCTIVE ACTION 27

emphasis in the wrong place and on the wrong thing.
It measures the cost, but not the gain. It counts the
failures but ignores the manner of achieving success.

There is nothing new in "humanitarian" methods.
These methods are as old as the universe. With these
methods, the universe was built. Evolution is a process
of more and more effective cooperation. All manner of
living is a fabric of cooperating services. In every
sphere of nature, chemical or physical, organic, social,
or "spiritual," and at every stage in its progress, evolu-
tion is achieved through union, not disunion; through
construction, not destruction; through harmonious
action, not discord; through organization, not
disorganization; through cooperation, not compe-
tition; through the bondage of service, not the
license of freedom; through service that leads to
more service, not through dominion and freedom from
service.

The processes that produce evolution, as distinct
from those that do not, are essentially benevolent and
moral processes; for evolution is a progressive triumph
of "right," or constructive methods of self-giving. In
nature every forward step in construction and conser-
vation is a creating and saving process, whether it be
the union of cosmic matter to form solar systems, or
atoms to form chemical compounds, or cells and or-
gans to form a body, or man to form society. In all
cases the forward step is the result of a successful giv-
ing, or surrender of self to form a part of something
that is larger and better equipped for a wider and
longer service. Every living thing has its two great
phases of egoism and altruism; one when it is getting
or receiving all it is; the other when it is giving all

28 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

it has. The broader, more elaborate, more enduring,
each life is, the longer and more elaborate is the proc-
ess of giving by the parents, and of receiving by the
offspring; and the better all organs of both parents
and offspring cooperate for a wider service of the whole.

Nor does "blind chance" rule in nature, for the
dice are loaded in favor of things in the "right" time
and place, as against those in the wrong time and
place; in favor of those things which act constructively
as against those which do not. In its broadest sense,
constructive processes, even if they are due primarily
to "chance," are cumulative in their results, and in-
creasingly directive in their disciplinary influences, be-
cause of the better balance, or stability, of each new
constructive product; and because the larger unit tends
to control the smaller unit and to incorporate it into
its own system.

Progressive union and stability, progressive cooper-
ation, organization, service and discipline are, there-
fore, inherent properties of life and matter.

V. The Continuity of the Creative Process

Thus mutual service is the great creative, disciplin-
ary, and saving force in nature. It tends to give com-
munity and harmony of action to her constituents, ex-
pressing itself in an evolution that inevitably leads to-
ward the fulfilment of their inherent possibilities.

Creation then is the birth of new things through
the mutual services of pre-existing things. Its product
may be a new star, a chemical compound, an inanimate
machine, a living mechanism with the properties of
growth and renewal, or any one of the many kinds of

FACTORS IN CONSTRUCTIVE ACTION 29

cooperating groups, or associations, of men. We may
not correctly use the term "Creative Evolution," for
there can be no creation without evolution, and no evo-
lution without creation. The ceaseless flow of creative
services is evolution, and evolution is serial creation.

While nature's methods of creating are always the
same, the qualities of her products are always different,
and the extent of her creative resources are as unpre-
dictable today as they were yesterday and as they will
be tomorrow. The cooperative union of hydrogen and
oxygen to produce water creates a new substance with
new qualities and new potentialities for world service
in no wise comparable with those of its constituents.
This familiar process is no more or less mysterious than
the cooperative union of a much larger number of ele-
ments to form protoplasm, with its newly created prop-
erties called "vitality."

As the chemistry of cooperating elements creates
new chemical bodies, with new properties and new
powers for world service, so the super-chemistry of co-
operating lives creates new organisms with their new
powers for world service. These new properties of
the "living body," or of a group of men called a "team,"
a college, a city, or a state, constitute what is called the
"soul" or "spirit," or attribute of that group. All
these "new things" are unlike any of their constituent
parts, hence they can be measured, or compared, only
in terms of themselves.

The only attribute common to all of them is their
inherent power to grow, or to create more new things.
The only measure of their powers is the extent of the
cooperative services that created them, and the creative
value of the new servants they in turn create.

3o GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

Science, therefore, finds no time, or place, or thing
set apart and alone sanctified by one instantaneous, all-
embracing creative act. Cosmic evolution and organic
evolution, the growth of suns and stars, of earth, and
plant, and man, are continuous parts of one process.
The more formal chemistry of earth and sea and air;
the flowing chemistry of protoplasmic cell and organ;
the moulding discipline of associated nerve and muscle,
eye and hand ; the alchemy of associated lives in nature's
household, are but different phases of one continuous,
all-pervading process of creation.

Nebulae stiffen into stars and suns give birth to
drooling planets, larva smeared. Throbbing tides of
sea and air, the heart beats of a planet, drive the nu-
trient ocean to the mountain skeleton and through the
capillaries of earth, clothing her ribs in clay and spread-
ing her first gardens of ooze. Earth labors in her
kitchen and with equal skill in synthesis brings forth
atoms tied in stable squads and marching regiments;
crystals, straight-edged and steadfast; proteids and al-
bumens, with rounded forms and yielding sides; danc-
ing specks and wriggling threads, prophets of the life
to come; sprawling, self-constructing, self-consuming
protoplasm, free to rove, or wrapped in rigid walls,
or bound in glowing brotherhoods of cells together;
polyp and snail; worm and crab; fish and frog; bird
and ape, and at last naked, hand-free, high-headed man,
armored and armed with conscience and with vision.
Scrutinize as best she may, science finds no seam in this
universal fabric; no patchwork of dead and alive, hon-
ored or dishonored, in creation; no barriers between
what was, and is, and shall be.

FACTORS IN CONSTRUCTIVE ACTION 31

VI. Evolution a Triumph of Constructive over
Destructive Agencies

The universal conflict of constructive and destruc-
tive agents to which we have referred has held the at-
tention of man from the very outset of his conscious
life.

It has been the theme around which he has tried
again and yet again to construct a workable scheme of
life; ever drawing from the furnace of his experience
the bitter ashes of failure together with the golden
residues of profitable adventures; ever building them
into the foundations of his science, his philosophy, and
his religion.

The more primitive theories of life and cosmogeny
were largely the product of introspective analysis. Man
freely interpreted the phenomena of nature in terms of
himself, thus attributing to familiar objects, to plants
and animals, superhuman powers. The heroic ad-
ventures, the arbitrary likes and dislikes of these mas-
terful sun gods, and thunder gods, and wilful reptile
devils provided both an easy explanation of nature's
mysteries and an obvious source of profit. Through
respectful conduct, through solicitation and bribery,
it seemed possible to purchase their good will, or their
allegiance, or at least their benevolent neutrality, in the
battles of life. Thereby was provided the best way, and
indeed to them the only intelligible way, of avoiding
that which is evil and obtaining that which is good.

But while man, from time immemorial, has carried
his appeals for help, for right and justice, straight to
the supreme court of nature, it was but yesterday that
he succeeded in drawing from her, in the doctrine of

32 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

evolution, a clear declaration of general principles,
and a broad outline of nature's methods. Evolution
was a new explanation of cosmogeny, based on. per-
manent natural laws, wherein fickle, man-made gods
and demons played no part.

Here, for the first time, the hope and the firm be-
lief, so widely entertained in all stages of man's intel-
lectual apprenticeship, that the good, or creative, agents
would ultimately triumph over evil, was unconsciously
placed on a firm foundation. For we now see, what
was not so clearly perceived in the first excitement of
the discovery, that evolution has no meaning if it is not
a perpetual demonstration of the slow but cumulative
triumph of right, or creative forces.

VII. Cooperation and Conveyance, or Mutual Service

and Rightness, as Constructive Agencies

in Evolution

Any basic concept of cosmogeny, therefore, must
assume that there is some universal creative process
back of evolution, and should express that process in
comprehensive terms, applicable alike to physical, or-
ganic, social, and mental phenomena.

Biologists, the chief exponents of evolution, are ac-
customed to think of organic evolution only, and of
that largely in terms of natural selection, mutations,
and germ plasma. But in the great domains of astron-
omy, geology, and chemistry, in science, religion, and
government, and in a host of other domains, all of
which are the products of evolution, these terms are
inadequate, or do not aptly apply. Natural selection
"and the survival of the fittest are perhaps the broad-

FACTORS IN CONSTRUCTIVE ACTION 33

est terms used in the biological sciences, but the pro-
cesses so designated have no creative value. The terms
merely imply that a definite sequence of products en-
sues, or affirm the self-evident fact that something al-
ready created is selected for survival, or that it endures.
They do not suggest how it was created, why it survives,
or wherein its fitness lies.

I shall try to show that there is but one answer to
all these questions; that there is but one creative proc-
ess common to all phases of evolution, inorganic, or-
ganic, mental, and social. That process is best de-«
scribed by the term cooperation, or mutual service.

While the term cooperation expresses a most strik-
ing and fundamental attribute of nature, yet it is as
impossible to define cooperation as it is to define grav-
ity, or chemical affinity. In all such cases, we can
affirm only what things do, not what they are. While
we cannot explain why things cooperate, it would ap-
pear that all knowledge and all knowable things are the
products of mutual influences, or reciprocal services.
This action can be expressed only in terms of the things
so created, or in the methods of their creation. The
methods themselves can be expressed only in relative
terms of service, Tightness, and progress, that is in terms
of more or less service performed in the conveying of
the "right" things, to the "right" time and the "right"
place, for constructive purposes.

The power to create something new, when these
services are fulfilled, is something universal and inex- J
haustible; something standing apart, in human knowl-
edge, from every other attribute of nature.

The law of cooperation is expressed in the simple
yet marvelous fact that when two or more things,

34 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

whatever their nature may be, are brought into a defi-
nite time and space relation to one another, and then
act together cooperatively, a new thing appears, which
could not otherwise exist, having new qualities, new
cooperative powers of its own which did not previously
exist in its constituents.

Chemical action is often set apart as something
quite different from all other activities because of its
familiar, instantaneous, creative power. Water, for
example, which is formed by the cooperative union
of hydrogen and oxygen has no resemblance to its iso-
lated constituents. It has very remarkable properties
of its own, and these new properties are of the greatest
cooperative value in world construction, for without
their peculiar services, terrestrial organization, proto-
plasm, and vital action, as we know them, would be
impossible.

The difference between the creative power of chem-
ical cooperation and other forms of cooperation is in
the agents, periods of fruition, and results, not in their
basic methods. We are not accustomed to think of the
creative power of mass action, because we have no con-
venient way of measuring its progress or its products;
yet these products have properties as different from
their constituents as those of chemical action. A solar
system, for example, has attributes and powers that can-
not be defined, or measured in terms of its members,
or of its ultimate chemical elements, for a solar system
is not merely an aggregate, or the algebraic sum of its
various elements and qualities; it is something differ-
ent from any one of them, and something more than
all. It is a system, a new type of individuality with

FACTORS IN CONSTRUCTIVE ACTION 35

special creative powers of its own. In the same way,
protoplasm may be regarded as a system of cooperat-
ing proteids and of other agents, within and without;
life is its distinctive attribute. An animal is a system
of cells and organs cooperating with one another and
with their environments. A state is a group of human
beings systematically cooperating with one another and
with their environments. In each case, the individual
is created by the cooperation of its inner parts and their
outer media. It endures only so long as that inner and
outer cooperation continues and only so long as the
individual, as a whole, continues to cooperate with its
environment. According as one or the other of these
cooperative systems declines or fails, senility appears,
followed by death and dissolution.

The term conveyance is used to signify the transfer,
in time or place, of any material, power, or agency.
Where a creative, or saving act follows as a result of this
conveyance, a service to that end is performed. Con-
veyance may be brought about by "chance," or by a
more or less elaborate -series of acts which are them-
selves cooperative, as for instance by the transfer
through space, or the conservation through time, of
materials and power by means of cosmic activities;
by terrestrial and atmospheric circulation; the distribu-
tion of animals and plants, of organic foods; of "germ
plasma" during the process of reproduction; the cir-
culation of the products of digestion and respiration in
the alimentary, vascular, and secretory systems ; by the
distribution of nerve impulses and the conveyance of
information through the conserving and distributing
agency of science, literature, and art, and by the distri-

36 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

bution of a host of other things, upon whose right con-
veyance the whole fabric of life and creative power
depends.

The objection may be raised that cooperation im-
plies a conscious, intelligent act. So it does, usually,
but not always. An act may be cooperative, no matter
how it is initiated, or whatever the nature of the actors
may be. Strictly speaking, although preeminently co-
operative, human intelligence is powerless to complete
a cooperative act. Intelligence is merely a more direct
and certain method than blind chance, or trial and
error, of finding the "right way" to let things do the
desired act themselves. It is the purposeful opening
and closing of certain channels of conveyance, thereby
permitting a serviceable, creative act to take place.

The chemist, for example, cannot make an atom of
hydrogen cooperate with one or more atoms of oxygen,
or alter in any way the nature of the cooperative act
that may take place between them. All he does is to
act as an agent of conveyance, a servant to remove
obstructions and to bring the two elements into the
"right relations" to each other. When that is done,
the elements themselves automatically enter into a co-
operative, or chemical union, in accordance with their
specific qualities, and in so doing create something
which is different from either constituent. This atomicj
union is a truly cooperative act, because it cannot b<
performed by either element alone. It must be per-
formed in concert, by a mutual exchange of services^
each element giving something of itself, we know
what, to the other, and receiving something, we knoi
not what, from the other. Thus each in its own pe-

FACTORS IN CONSTRUCTIVE ACTION 37

culiar way, is an altruistic servant to an ulterior crea- 1
tive act.

Subscription to the Red Cross, to take another ex-
ample, may be a highly intelligent act, but it does not
fulfil its creative purpose till the whole machinery of
cooperative social life has been set in motion and the
right splints and bandages, the right foods and medi-
cines are put into the right places at the right time,
and the maimed and helpless in other ways are cared
for. Then and not till then, the disordered organism,
it may be, completes the long series of cooperative acts
by healing itself. Under the compulsion of these serv-
ices the ultimate saving and healing act is automatically
performed by the cooperative actions of the living tis-
sues and organs.

But the full value of this elaborate system of Red
Cross conveyance does not lie alone in the resultant
saving of life and alleviation of human suffering, great
as that may be. It has far greater creative potentialities
than that. Its chief social value lies in the potential
creative power which is resident in the spontaneous or
voluntary service of man to man. This spontaneous
spirit of mutual service, always manifest in some
measure when men are rightly brought together, is the
chief attribute of man. It is the creating and saving
factor of human society and of all man's social insti-
tutions.

All these creative acts, on analysis, resolve them-
selves into service and Tightness. What we call intelli-
gence may or may not be present. Nature's creative
methods and results are in no wise affected thereby.
Gravity, light, and chemical affinity, being what they

38 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

are, could not create anything in any other way than
they do, even if they were intelligent agents rightly
performing creative services; and human intelligence
cannot act creatively without rightly using these physi-
cal attributes. Or, to put it in another way, atoms and
molecules, in their constructive processes, act as they
would have to act if they were intelligent agents.

What we call benevolence is the giving of some-
thing to something else. It cannot be accomplished
unless that something is first created and then conveyed
across time and space to something else. If this giving
and receiving is rightly done, a new creative act takes
place. Human intellience cannot modify or qualify
this final act in any way; it merely serves as a supple-
mentary instrument to guide these agencies into, con-
structive channels.

A mother bird, a prosaic hen, for example, gives
herself, her life and bodily powers, to storing up food
and germ plasma in an egg, out of which, with the co-
operation of the opposite sex, comes the next genera-
tion. This is altruism; something done, something
sacrificed, for something else, intelligence or no intel-
ligence. To do so is of no advantage to that particular
bird, or to her mate; but nevertheless they could not
have come into being without this system of mutual
services. They would not have acted differently, or
the result have been different, in those respects, if they
had used benevolent foresight and intelligence. Per-
haps the same result might have been attained more
surely and economically for the hen and her chickens,
if the process had been guided by a more selfish in-
telligence; but in that case the prodigal hen would not
have been as serviceable to man, or to other animals.

FACTORS IN CONSTRUCTIVE ACTION 39

Two thousand years ago, a philosopher discovered
a great constructive truth. His acts and words con-
veyed it to his followers. They in turn translated vital
acts and verbal symbols into dead material forms, into
zigzag lines on parchment, and piled up stones and
monuments. And these helped to preserve the truth
from generation to generation, and carried it from race
to race and land to land, and then and there again made
truth the guide to vital action. To convey that thing,
devoid of force and substance, across the centuries and
around the world, much labor and machinery was de-
manded. Without the services of those material in-
struments the philosopher would have lived and died
to little purpose.

CHAPTER II

THE EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUALITY

The Individual and its Environments — The Creative Drift — The
Increment of Mutual Service and Rightness in Evolution — The
Growth Purpose in Nature-Action — The Decrease of Chance and
the Increase of Compulsion — Mutual Rights and Mutual Obliga-
tions and the Categorical Imperative to Existence — The Egoism and
Altruism of Individuality — The Ethics and Morality of Nature-
Action as a Guide to Individual Conduct — The Components of
Individuality.

I. The Individual and its Environments

WE think of all such things as atoms, molecules,
plants, animals, society, the earth, or the solar system,
as more or less isolated things, or individualities, each
composed of other things, parts, or units, all moved
and organically held together by reciprocal, or cooper-
ative action. As we can form no concept of action save
in terms of material things, and no concept of struc-
ture without some coherent power, our impotence in
the face of fundamentals is at once exposed. Matter
and energy, time and space, themselves indefinable
save in terms of themselves, constitute, therefore, our
last mental refuge, our initial foothold and starting
point for the analysis of nature's grosser creative ways.

As the universe is the environment of all it con-
tains, so the individual is the more immediate environ-
ment of all its constituent parts. All these different
environments, each one enclosing smaller individual-
ities within itself and each one itself enclosed in larger

40

THE EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUALITY 41

ones, are merely other names for diverse spheres of
enveloping conditions, or for different arrangements of
matter and energy in time and space.

Each environment, therefore, includes and excludes
certain things, and in accordance therewith creates and
preserves, prevents and destroys. It limits and local-
izes the individual thing both by creating it when and
where it is, and by setting the boundaries to when and
where it cannot be. What therein is possible and im-
possible is thereby determined.

An individual, then, is a particular part of the uni-
verse in contrast with the whole. Its existence pro-
claims the fact that it is a localized sphere of cooper-
ative activity in a cooperative environment. It is a
resultant of both positive and negative factors. It is
created and sustained by cooperative and destructive
conditions within itself, and by cooperative and destruc-
tive conditions outside itself. Without these localizing
creators and delimiting destroyers the individual could
not exist, for without the one, it could not come into
being and without the other, it would be coextensive
with the universe.

Thus the distinction between the internal and ex-
ternal environment -of any individual is a matter of
mental convenience only. Both environments are con-
tinuous, and cooperatively one; each, in its own way is
directive and creative.

II. The Creative Drift

As we grow in knowledge and experience we be-
come more and more conscious that all the appar-
ently separate acts of nature in reality form one con-

42 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

tinuous creative process which flows out of an unlim-
ited past, through the present, into a limitless future.
While infinitely varied in local expression, in its larger
phases this process persistently maintains a common
direction, or drift, which may be expressed by the word
progress. Progress, unlike time and space, is not uni-
form throughout, or isotropic. Like a living organism
it is the expression of a graded absolute change, as well
as of relative changes ; it has dimensions and symmetry,
a beginning and an ending, a head end and a tail end, as
it were, which differ in their products. Progress, there-
fore, like a growing organism or a social institution,
can be measured only in graded terms of things suc-
cessively created.

As we extend our concept of progress by looking
farther and farther into the past toward the beginning
of all things, the complex and varied individualities
of today appear ultimately to dissolve, setting all their
constituent elements free. Cooperation, apparently,
then vanishes in the nullifying conflict of universal
"freedom," and all nature assumes the primordial sim-
plicity, continuity and uniformity of elemental chaos.

Our first concept of individuality as something con-
sisting of groups of cooperating parts then gives way
to a new one, that of ultimate initial units, infinitely
small and infinite in numbers, but apparently finite in
kind; and yet another unit, or whole, that comprises
them all.

This larger unit, or cosmos, is but an impotent,
meaningless aggregate, without real unity, unless we
assume that its constituents actually cooperate with one
another to that end. If they do not, the unity, if such

THE EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUALITY 43

there be, must be merely the unity of universal conflict.
Or, if we attempt still further to merge the infinitely
small and the infinitely large into a supra-absolute one,
both vanish into something wholly incomprehensible.

Here, then, our analysis of nature's beginning ends
in insuperable barriers. But this brief analysis is not
without value if it serves to emphasize that the present,

diversity

cooperation

00

PERFECTION

Compulsion
Stability
Power
Unity

architecture

00

FIGURE i. DIAGRAM TO ILLUSTRATE THE CONCEPT OF EVOLUTION. Note
the involved dual concepts of relative and absolute, positive and negative,
and the opposing gradients converging towards zero and diverging toward
infinity.

44 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

as well as the initial motive power in nature, or the very
thing which everybody wants to know about, is never
found. It always escapes us, or is always concealed in
insoluble residues.

If we now turn our attention in the opposite direc-
tion and try to follow up the creative processes of
nature farther and farther into the future, we seem to
reach quite a different conclusion. In place of the con-
tradictions and the sense of mental impotence involved
in our concept of a creation beginning in universal con-
flict, in minuteness, vastness, sameness, and emptiness,
we reach the concept of creative fulness and variety, of
infinite organization and unified cooperative power,
where the imagination may rest with some sense of
security and familiarity. In other words, we picture
to ourselves a nature which approaches nearer and
nearer to a final condition where all her separate indi-
vidualities merge into one stable, organic whole.

This concept of a creative drift from the futile con-
flict of chaos toward a more stable structural organi-
zation and unity is the central idea of evolution, and
the general recognition of this phenomenon is the dis-
tinguishing characteristic of the scientific and intellec-
tual thought of modern times.

This idea of evolution carries with it the corollary
that nature herself develops, or "grows up," or pro-
gresses, in much the same way as do all her constituent
individualities, such as the sun, a human embryo, or a
social institution.

THE EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUALITY 45

III. The Increment of Mutual Service and Rightness

in Evolution

The supreme attribute of nature, therefore, is per-
petual growth, or the creation and organization of new 1 J \
individualities on an ever larger and more enduring 1
scale. To that end she is ever building in advance
the foundations of her enterprises; sowing abroad the
ambassadors of her secret purpose; ever creating and
destroying, but never falling back to quite the old
levels, nor failing to surmount the new.

But wherein then is the gain? What is it which
grows, and wherein is the profit? How can we express
the idea of creation without running counter to that
inexorable law of conservation, the bed rock of science
and experience, which declares that the total content
of those indefinable things called matter and energy is
constant, and can neither be created nor destroyed?
Even so, is not the creative power of nature equally
manifest in the overwhelming fact of evolution and
organization? Does not better "organization," which
is the physical expression of better cooperative action,
always create something new, some architectural in-
dividuality, which could not have existed without it,
and which did not previously exist in the cooperating
agents? Gain, then, there is, if life and organization
and architecture is an advance over chaos.

But the gain which springs from the organization
of materials and forces, which otherwise were mere
aggregations, is due primarily to some "improvement"
in their relative distribution, resulting in what we can
only designate as the "right"1 distribution for creating

1 See Rita, (Hindoo) way of the world, and Too, a Chinese equivalent.

46 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

that particular product, or individuality. On the other
hand, we must designate every other condition as the
"wrong" one for that particular purpose. Hence no
other general term, in spite of its misleading connota-
tions, so aptly expresses those conditions essential to
creative returns as Tightness.

The profit, then, in evolution is Tightness, or the
finding of the right way to convey the right thing atj
the right time to the right place. The tangible archi-
tectural profit of this mutual service and Tightness is
the thing thereby created. The universe is, therefore,
an organism only in so far as there are in it righteous
conveyors of materials and power to creative ends.
Nature's potential creative power, its power to grow, is
infinite and insatiable; and growth proceeds in all its
individualities as fast as they can find the right vehicles
to supply their demands.

There is a graded substratum, so to speak, of right-
ness and cooperative action which is cumulative, or
wherein the gains have been more permanent and abso-
lute; and a more superficial stratum which flickers like
a flaming atmosphere with the rise and fall of the newer
creative products, or with the success, or failure, of the
newer creative enterprises.

It is the finding of more stable, balanced or endur-
ing constructive ways that lays the more permanent
foundations for new constructions, making further evo-
lution possible, and ultimately making that possibility
a reality.

We may readily imagine the basic qualities of
nature to be different from what we believe them to
be and then in our minds construct a consistent sys-

THE EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUALITY 47

tern of philosophy, or mathematics, on that basis. But
nature cannot build in that way. She has no make-
believe systems. She must create with things as they
are. Man cannot build a bridge, nor does nature create
a living organism, on a four dimensional system of ge-
ometry. This constructive test is our test of reality.

Hence apparently every new creative process, every
forward step in evolution, is the product of finding a
better way of conveying materials and power from a
less useful to a more useful condition, from a non-co-
operative to a cooperative one. The very fact that
growth and progress is a reality is, in itself, a declara-
tion of creative dividends; it is nature's proclamation
of that righteous, pathfinding attribute which glorifies
matter.

IV. The Growth Purpose in Nature- Action

This process of nature-growth is "purposeful" in
the same -sense that the physiological acts of a plant, a
worm, a frog, or a human being, or any of their parts
or organs, may be purposeful, or self-constructive acts;
for nature-growth is the product of the cooperative acts
of many different things, the purpose of which, or if
you prefer, the end, or result of which, is the creation,
preservation, and growth of nature's individuality and
of all her constituent individualities. In this broader
concept of nature-growth, light and gravity, vitality,
genes, and gemules, heredity, intelligence, "selection,"
social conduct, and all the rest of the growth-machinery
of life portrayed by the physicist and biologist may be
regarded merely as local, or special manifestation of
a common creative agency.

48 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

V. The Decrease of Chance and the Increase of
Compulsion

In all these cases, whether in nature as a whole, or
in any one or more of her constituent individualities,
the prevailing characteristic of growth, progress, or
evolution, is the decline of chance, isolation, and uni-
formity, along gradients which converge more and
more, and for longer and longer periods, toward a
vanishing point in zero; while the gradients which
represent the increase of diversity, cooperation, law and
order and compulsion rise more and more toward a
maximum in infinity.

It is the local, as well as the general progress of
these constructive processes over the destructive ones,
which we speak of as the triumph of "good" over "evil,"
or of the "right" way of doing things over the "wrong"
way, and the goal toward which this progress moves
we speak of as perfection.

In the initiation of new individuals, it may well be
that finding the constructive way is largely due to the
"chance" distribution of creative elements and forces.
The result, when the way is found, cannot be due to
"chance." It was determined by some previously es-
tablished virtue in the cooperating agents.

When, for example, elements unite to form com-
pounds, or cells to form organisms, or men to form so-
ciety, the union may or may not be due to chance, ac-
cording to the limitations we put on our definition of
"chance." But the inherent capacity in each case so
to unite, and the inherent qualities of the products of
union, are definitely determined by the pre-established
qualities of the cooperating units.

THE EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUALITY 49

With the onward march of evolution, therefore,
"chance" is always a diminishing factor, determination,
or compulsion, an increasing one, because cooperative
ways once found, thereby create new units smaller in
numbers but larger in content than any of their own
constituent parts, and these units have special directive
qualities of their own and more comprehensive influ-
ences.

A hundred million people, for example, each one
living, so far as it is possible to do so, a free and in-
dependent life, will expend their vital energies sel-
fishly, that is to no common purpose. Each one will
exhaust itself in beating against the walls of its narrow
environment; in haphazard, balanced conflicts, like
so many peas in a hopper, or like atoms bombarding one
another in a gaseous medium.

There let life be as fast and strenuous as it may, it
will still remain local and futile. So long as it is not
increasingly cooperative, there can be no accumulation
of power, no summation of influences, no organized in-
struments of conveyance, for the influence of each in-
dividual is immediately neutralized by that of his
neighbor.

But when those hundred millions are organized
into a cooperative social unit, as, let us say, in our own
country, the fleeting, insignificant powers of many
separate individuals are summed up into great currents
of activity, or into great unified social functions, such
as commerce, science, literature, and art, which ever
draw to themselves new agencies, and grow in power
until their determining influences become world-wide
and permanent.

This diminution of "chance" and the increase of

50 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

compulsion and of specific opportunities, or what we
call law and order, is one of the chief characteristics
of evolution. It is due to the cumulative stabilizing
power of cooperative action. It is an automatic, pro-
gressive process, growing by incorporating into itself
its own profits.

VI. Mutual Rights and Mutual Obligations and the
Categorical Imperative to Existence

The very factors which create one individual, in
doing so may prohibit, destroy, or create many others.
Thus "good" and "evil" always have a limited, or
tentative value when applied at a particular time or
place, or to a particular individual. But since all these
individualities, large or small, simple or complex, are
nature's sole instruments for the creation of other,
larger, or still more complex individualities, their crea-
tion and preservation is an essential preliminary to
progress, or to the attainment of a larger end by more
comprehensive methods. The larger values of good
and evil, therefore, are revealed only in the larger
creative results.

Thus the "rights" of all the varied individualities
of nature to security and to the full expression of their
individuality rest on the fact that their power of self-
expression represents nature's accrued creative profits
in those investments. The aggregate of those profits,
at a given time, represents nature's only available capital
for constructive services in other enterprises. An essen-
tial condition to progress, therefore, is the creation of
diverse individualities, and the safe-guarding of their

THE EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUALITY 51

"right" to existence. Otherwise there would be no
constructive agents with which to build.

On the other hand, as the existence of every indi-
vidual thing depends on the services of its constituent
parts, so the power of those constituent parts to exist,
and thereby to fulfil their purpose, depends on the re-
ceipt of services from their colleagues. Therefore, to
give and to receive service, or the fulfilment of mutual
rights and obligations, is the categorical imperative
to existence.

VII. The Egoism and Altruism of Individuality

The prevalent belief that selfishness and dominion
play the chief creative role in nature growth is an error
which springs partly from the laymans shallow estimate
of evolutionary values, and partly from his failure to
recognize the creative and saving processes of social
life.

This error has been greatly strengthened by a sim-
ilar lack of discrimination on the part of the biologists,
for it might well appear from their analysis of life at
large that chance, competition, selfishness, and aggres-
sion, were the chief factors in organic evolution, and
the real causes of a successful life wherever it may have
been achieved.

Following these suggestions, real or implied, states-
men, philosophers, and scientists, as a rule, have as-
sumed that the altruistic methods involved in the ethics
and morality of man belong to a different domain, or
differ fundamentally in origin and in character from
those utilized by nature in her creative processes.

The rapid growth of evolutionary doctrines in the

52 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

past generation, while liberating religious thought,
initiated a strong intellectual movement away from
the "impracticable idealism" of an "artificial" social
system, toward the so-called "realities" of a larger
world life, and led to the widespread worship of a new
God, a fictitious Nature-God, created by the biolo-
gists in the image of their own distorted mentality.
The present over-emphasis of selfishness and the clash-
ing of moral and intellectual purposes in social life
are chiefly due to this error. The violation of the finer
moral instincts incident to the practice of these teach-
ings is condoned on the ground that selfishness is a
necessary condition to social progress, and the misuse
of power is justified by an appeal to the ruthless struggle
for existence and the dominion of force in nature. But
there is no justification whatever for such an appeal.
Ruthlessness and selfishness there is in nature, on every
hand, but they are no more creative and preservative
there than in human society. In fact, as we shall pres-
ently show in more detail, in all her constructive pro-
cesses nature is preeminently altruistic and benevolent.
Her creative power and her power of sustained pro-
gress is wholly dependent on her multitudinous sys-
tems of organized endowments.

Every living thing, for example, is dependent on the
mutually beneficial acts of its own internal organs.
Every living thing receives from nature at large and
from its forebears the initial impulses and germinal ma-
terials that give it life and being. Every living thing
is insured against the inevitable hazards of a complex
world by the measure of food given to it in embryonic
life by its parents; by the measure of parental forag-
ing, protection, and foresight devoted to it during the

THE EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUALITY 53

youthful stages of its existence; and by the measure to
which it can draw upon the profits of its colleagues and
upon the reserve capital of the world at large.

The destruction of a thousand, or tens of thousands
of eggs, that one may live and grow, is not, as so
often assumed, evidence of nature's ruthlessness in
methods or purpose. No animal can be justly con-
victed of selfishness, that devotes, consciously or other-
wise, the most active periods of its life to the prepara-
tion of thousands of food-laden eggs, the better to in-
sure the welfare of another life yet to come. Rather
is it the convincing evidence of lavish parental benev-
olence to a future end, but a benevolence, it may be,
as yet undiscriminating in its methods of administra-
tion. Every living thing is absolutely dependent on
endowments of this character, endowments which are
nothing more or less than the organic surpluses, or
profits of individual life, conveyed with variable pre-
cision from one life to another. The countless eggs
and young that fail of their more specific purpose, de-
voured by predatory life, may still be regarded as resid-
uary legacies to life at large, unwilling though it may
be, nevertheless a legacy of otherwise unusable incre-
ments from one life to another. This undiscriminat-
ing benevolence is one of those universal interlocking
devices by which every individual life is in some meas-
ure sustained, devices without which the larger unity
and continuity of nature life would be impossible.

Power itself, whether physical, organic, or intellec-
tual, is always a product of the cooperation of smaller
powers, and wholly meaningless except as an endow-
ment to further cooperative enterprises. And so also
it is with the altruistic idealism of man. It is a spir-

54 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

itual endowment from the one to the many, for its fruits
mature for those who have it not rather than for those
who do. Idealism is in truth based on realities and
endures because of its saving services and creative
power. It is their clearer vision of the creative drift
which impels the leaders of men to take their
characteristic expectant mental attitude, rightly ori-
ented to face the life-giving currents of world events.
This positive orientation of leadership to world prog-
ress, this idealism, is the mother of practicality, for it is
the explorer, the pioneer, the long-range director, and
hence the benefactor of mankind in all creative intel-
lectual movements. But egoism, or self-aggrandize-
ment and self-preservation, the effort to attain the
fullest freedom of self-expression, always has been,
and doubtless always will be, the primary law of evo-
lution. It is a basic condition to progress because in
that way only can the necessary instruments to progress
be preserved. Self-sacrifice and benevolence, or the
giving of self in cooperative action to a larger end, is
a secondary law; but secondary in sequence only, not
in dignity, nor in creative power. Self-sacrifice is a
higher law only in that it pertains to higher levels of
progress; for it in turn depends on the utilization of
the fruits of egoistic action. In other words, self-pre-
servation is not the end and aim of creative power, but
merely the necessary means to a larger creative result.
The individual saves itself in order that it may give
itself to a larger purpose. The fulness and variety of
these products of self-preservation constitute the con-
structive endowments of nature.

In the social life of man, commerce, literature, and
art, as well as science and religion, are all common car-

THE EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUALITY 55

riers in a benevolent creative service. They are vehi-
cles which know no barriers, individual, local, racial,
or national. Their limitations are in their own powers
of conveyance and in the power of the recipients to
utilize their gifts. But that does not mean that the
idiosyncrasies of time and place, of race, or quality, or
nation, can or should be dissolved, or equalized. On
the contrary, they should always retain that egoism
which gives them individuality. For if different social
or national units are not preserved, and their unlike
qualities emphasized, or given adequate freedom of self-
expression, they cannot be utilized as cooperative parts
of larger individualities; there would be no resources
for future reorganizations on an international scale.

From this point of view, "fitness" has a new and a
deeper meaning. The "fittest" is not merely 'the one
most likely to survive because it cooperates best to its
own selfish ends; it means something more than that.
In this deeper meaning of the term, the fittest is the one
which, in its survival, provides the means to a new and
a still larger end. The "struggle for existence" is a
struggle of the individual to find the right way out of
the obstructive conditions created by its own growth
and by that of other individuals, in order to give itself
to a larger life.

Thus the larger purpose in life and evolution, the
ever receding goal of all endeavor, is escape from the
older bondage into the newer bondage of a larger serv-
ice.

This universal give and take for some ulterior con-
structive act; this self-surrender of individualities in
order to make larger and more enduring individuali-
ties; this investment of self in a purpose beyond self,

56 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

which cannot be realized till self is swallowed up and
consumed in posterity, is a basic attribute of nature-
action, the ethical and the moral factor essential to all
phases of growth and evolution.

Whether all these acts are conscious or intelligent
acts is here immaterial. The outstanding fact remains
that in this universal system of reciprocal egoism and
altruism, where common profits are endowments to the
future, lies the secret of nature's creative power, the ex-
planation, so far as explanation is possible, of her
strategy.

VIII. The Ethics and Morality of Nature Action as
a Guide to Individual Conduct

It is not without significance that man's chief desire
is to accomplish something, and his chief satisfaction
in life is the feeling that he is in some way a creative
power and an instrument to progress. To best satisfy ;,
that desire, man must look to nature for instruction.
He must seek in nature his guide to constructive and;
saving conduct, for the age-long processes which have
created the multitudinous forms of life are thereby
standardized as righteous and moral processes.

By the intelligent contemplation of this long series
of creative events, man may best hope to gain some in-
sight into the constructive conduct of nature, and to find
some index to her standards of Tightness. In the final
analysis, her creative methods alone can give him a se-
cure basis for his own systems of ethics and morality.
They will be to him his guide to profitable living, not
only as an individual, but also as one of nature's asso-

THE EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUALITY 57

ciated creatures, and as a member of human society.
For the unity and continuity of nature, and the inter-
changeability of her agents, excludes the presumption
of multiple standards of ethics and morality, one for
the living, another for the non-living world; one for
plants and animals, and another for man.

Intelligence is the product of evolution. It has
no power to alter the methods that created it. It may
accelerate them, for it is quicker and surer than blind
trial and error in finding the right way to growth and
progress. To live more profitably than a plant or an
animal, man must use his own distinctive instrument
to find the creative way, and, finding it, he is compelled
to obey its dictates. He cannot refuse if he would.

But yesterday, speaking of evolution, a distin-
guished, but an evidently perplexed biologist said to
me that he was satisfied to study life on a plot of ground
big enough to stand upon. That kind of intensive
study will doubtless keep some biologists happily en-
gaged as long as life is worthy of contemplation. But
it will be of little profit to him or to any one else,
unless some one stands over him, aids him, and directs
him in the common interests. For rightly to appraise
a point, or estimate the constructive value of a chromo-
some, man must needs have perspective.

And when we do survey the world of varied things
about us on a comprehensive scale of time and space,
much of the meaningless detail and the apparent waste
vanish in creative investments. The fact which stands
out with convincing clearness is that nature in her evo-
lutionary convulsions always makes some permanent
constructive gain; that evolution is a progressive crea-

58 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

tive process. The monuments to nature's creative
strategy, wherein victory is expressed in growth and
organization, are in us and all about us.

To say that evolution is' unethical or unmoral is to
destroy the basic value of the terms by arbitrary limi-
tations to their meaning. It carries the assumption
that human conduct stands in a domain apart and that
the agencies which influence man to his own welfare
and profit are different in kind from those which con-
trol the constituents of his body, or those of animals
and plants, or those of inanimate nature. And if right-
ness and morality are divorced from all physical agen-
cies, or from the results of their acts, then the terms
have no tangible meaning whatever.

We are therefore compelled to assume that since
evolution is a progressive creative process, the things
that do act constructively act rightly. That, it is true,
gives us no definition of what Tightness really is, other
than that it is the constructive, or creative way of doing
things. That is the way in which we shall use the
term.

We shall use the terms morality, behavior, conduct,
or constructive action in the same broad way. It may
sound strange to speak of the morals of an atom, or of
the way in which a molecule conducts itself. But in
the last analysis, science can draw no fundamental dis-
tinction between the conduct of an animal, a bullet, or
a freshman, although there may be more unknown fac-
tors involved in one case than in the other. The things
that chiefly concern us, as scientists, or as teachers, or
as laymen, are the questions : What makes things act
as they do? What are the acts they in turn produce,
and how can man profit by that knowledge? In so

THE EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUALITY 59

far as all such acts, or conduct, are constructively right
or wrong, and take some part in the destruction, or con-
struction of something else, they cannot be divorced
from the domain of ethics and morality.

IX. The Components of Individuality

As every constructive process necessarily requires
services of various kinds, rightly performed, the es-
sential factors at every stage of evolution are service
and Tightness, and the things or agents in which these
qualities are resident. Everything newly created,
every forward step in progress, or evolution, must
therefore be the product of service, and in turn must
represent some addition to nature's system of service-
able things. And these new services cannot be per-
formed without some new discovery, or invention, or
achievement, in doing things rightly. The greater the
creative progress, the larger and more intricate in
structure things become, -so the more varied and sup-
plementary are the services required, the greater the
number of things that must be rightly done, and the
more surely and persistently they must be executed.

Everything in nature, therefore, every molecule,
star, animal, or social group, is the product of various
services to that extent rightly performed. And each
one of these things is itself an instrument to further
service, a promise of new things to be created by them,
and by their products.

Thus the services and Tightness involved in the cre-
ation of any particular thing always present a more
or less pyramidal series, the more general, elemental,
and enduring phases of the creative process at the be-

60 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

ginning, or base, the more fluctuating and special, at
the end, or apex.

In the construction and preservation of a worm, for
example, the chief sets of factors involved are: (i) the
constructive action of the physico-chemical elements of
matter and force; (2) the solar system and other heav-
enly bodies created by them; (3) the earth and its va-
rious components and activities, such as climatic and
other changes, its various habitable media and pro-
vincial qualities; (4) plant and animal life, as a whole,
and particular kinds, or groups, of individuals; (5) the
parts and organs which constitute the bodily structure
and internal life of the worm itself; and (6) conduct,
or behavior, or the external life of the worm as an in-
dividual unit, in relation to all its cosmic, organic, and
social surroundings. All these interwoven construc-
tive agencies are essential to the creation and preserva-
tion of the worm.

Man is built on the same broad pyramid of mutual
services and constructive Tightness, but a great many
more have been added to them, notably those of the
higher plants and animals, and of his more complex
bodily functions and organs, specially his hand, intel-
ligence, and articulate speech. By their instrumental-
ity and by the accumulated services of countless human
beings rightly performed, the new systems of servants
were created, such as science, literature, art, govern-
ment, by which the man of today lives and has his
being.

These countless supplementary services, rightly per-
formed for the individual man by the social institu-
tions of mankind, are as much a sustaining part of his
individuality as those of his own brain, or of his own

THE EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUALITY 61

eyes. Take away from the man of today his science
and he would fall to the level of the witch-doctor, and
his protection against disease, or the vicissitudes of na-
ture, would be reduced to incantations and a bag full of
amulets.

Take from him the knowledge of the right way to
make fire, and he would fall below the level of the
cave man; the mantle and the sword of his culture
would vanish, the arteries and nerves of his social life
wither away. Rob him of his cerebral hemispheres,
and he would fall below the intellectual level of the
frog

CHAPTER III

FITNESS AND ADAPTATION

The Criterion of Fitness — The Different Kinds of Fitness — Fit-
ness by Design and Fitness by Mutual Influences — Temporary and
Permanent Fitness — The Measure of Organic Fitness — The Meas-
ure of Social Fitness — The Adaptation of Vital Actions to Good
and Evil — The Evolution of Fitness and Adaptation — Adaptability
in Nature-Action, as a Universal Creative Tropism.

I. The Criterion of Fitness

THE familiar phrase "Survival of the fit and elimi-
nation of the unfit," has played and still plays an im-
portant role in evolutionary theory. But it is an elu-
sive verbal formula whose imposing garment of unes-
sentials and its silence as to what we really want to
know make it so comprehensive and self-evident, its
emptiness so dangerous. It is virtually but another
way of saying that whatever is exists because it was so
created, and the thing which survives is that which is
fit to survive. What the creative and preserving factors
are, the questions of real significance, are left unasked
and unanswered. Hence all the theories of evolution
upbuilt on selection, such as germinal, physiological,
or natural selection, are fundamentally evasive and of
little scientific, or moral, value, in so far as they con-
tain no general implication as to what constitutes "fit-
ness," how things are created, how they are saved, why
destroyed, and to what end, or purpose, they do, or do
not, exist.

62

FITNESS AND ADAPTATION 63

But these difficulties vanish, and the familiar con-
cept of evolution, as an aimless, unethical process, dis-
appears, when we recognize that cooperation to that
end is the creative and saving power of individuality.
That cooperation is always expressed in terms of serv-
ice and Tightness, or the conveyance of the right thing
to the right thing, at the right time and place. That
the fittest is the one whose component parts cooper^
ate best, and that his struggle for existence is a struggle
to find a better cooperative or constructive way. ThaT
things endure because they continue to cooperate, and
are eliminated, or disappear, when they do not. That
structure is both the material and dynamic expression
of cooperative action. That growth, or progress, is
merely cooperation on a larger and better scale. That
the rate and extent of evolution is measured, not in
terms of change or power, but in terms of service and
Tightness, or in terms which express the creative value
of those changes. That cooperation is right because it
is constructive, creative, preservative, and progressive.
And that finding the right cooperative way to create-
and preserve larger, or more complex, individualities
is the essential preliminary to each and every stage of
evolution.

Thus mutual service and Tightness are the creative
and preservative factors in evolution. Therein is the
index to the universal end, or purpose, in life, and in
nature; the criterion of "fitness" and the basis of man's
ethics and morality.

II. The Different Kinds of Fitness

Fitness and adaptation are the conjuring terms with
which the biologist performs his most deceptive tricks ;

64 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

and they are performed so convincingly that he often
deceives himself, as well as others. Like many other
exhibitions of the conjuror's art, the illusion is due to
the unobserved substitution of one thing, or of one
value, for another; in this case, by substituting one
meaning of the terms for another. This is the more
difficult to detect since fitness and adaptation may be
very broadly applied. They have very subtle, as well
as very obvious meanings ; they may be variously quali-
fied by chance, incidental results, and designs ; and the
fitness and adaptation may be fulfilled either before-
hand, or presently, or at some future time, or in some
other place.

Using the terms in their broadest sense, we may
say with equal propriety:

(1) That wheels, cogs and axles, springs, pawls,
and catches; steam, fire, and electricity are fit to make
certain kinds of machines; that such machines are fit
for man's use and profit and that man himself is fitted
for the profitable usage of machinery.

(2) That the atoms in a grain of starch, by virtue
of their own peculiar attributes, are fitted beforehand
to cooperate with one another and thereby produce a
substance called starch ; and that starch is fitted before-
hand for human food in the sense that it was one of
nature's standard products long before man appeared
on the face of the globe ; and that subsequently, man was
fitted for the consumption of starchy foods.

(3) That the stream is fitted to its bed, and the bed
to the stream, and both fitted for profitable usage by
plants and animals, and by man.

(4) That plant life, as a whole, is fitted to animal
life as a whole, both living thereby cooperatively, each

FITNESS AND ADAPTATION 65

serving the othei with materials and forces that could
not otherwise be provided ; and that on and around this
broader mutual fitness and mutual service are built
many minor fitnesses and services. That both plants and
animals, at all times, are fitted to live in a very narrow
stratum of terrestrial conditions between earth and air,
and these narrowly prescribed conditions are eminently
fitted to sustain life.

III. Fitness by Design and Fitness by Mutual
Influences

In this usage of the terms fitness and adaptation, the
idea may be conveyed, or implied, that there is a pre-
meditated design and a designer involved; that man,
for example, was expressly made in such a way that he
can and does utilize machinery to his own profit, and
that man himself designs and makes machines expressly
to that end.

Whether man was designed to use machines, we do
not know. But we do know that, in that sense, no ma-
chine ever purposely designed and made another ma-
chine for its own uses, although machines, as contingent
parts of human life, grow like living organisms, by the
summations and adaptations of countless mutually ser-
viceable constructions and inventions. All that man
does, in any case, is to select certain fitting materials and
forces already in existence, the qualities of which are
already established and which he can in no wise change,
shape them, and put them rightly together. If they
are rightly moulded and rightly put together, the vari-
ous parts will cooperate just the same, whether put to-
gether by accident or by design. Each part will per-

66 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

form a service for the other, and all together may
perform a common resultant service which man still
further supplements by using it in cooperation with his
organic mechanism, to enlarge his own life.

Or it may be implied that fitness and adaptation is
the mutual moulding of one thing by the other, so that
each thereby becomes better fitted to act cooperatively
with the other and so acting produces something which
finds a place in the world where it may exist.

In the case of the river and its bed, many creative
and cooperative factors are involved. On the one hand
there are the chemical and physical properties of water,
and the volume and rate of precipitation. On the
other hand, there are the physical and chemical char-
acters of the terrain, its elevation, slope, and vegetation.
And back of all these are the more fundamental cosmic
conditions of heat, light, gravity, daily, seasonal and
other periodic changes. All these factors acting to-
gether have produced, at a particular time and place,
a particular stream of water, in a particular channel,
each adapted to the other, and both, it may be, adapted
in a particular way to sustain life. In this case, while
the course of the current may be in part determined by
the terrain, and the terrain more or less sculptured by
the current, so far as we know, neither the attributes
of water, nor those of the constituents of the terrain
are modified, or moulded, in any way thereby. The
fitness of the river to its bed is chiefly and more imme-
diately due to the mutual influences of water and ter-
rain whereby both the direction of the stream and the
contours of its bed are modified or changed. This
process may be checked, or accelerated, extended or
diminished, by the cooperative action of many other

FITNESS AND ADAPTATION 67

forces and agents remotely connected with that partic-
ular river, or its terrain.

If it is difficult here to trace the chain of cause and
effect to the sources of fitness and adaptation, how much
more difficult is it to trace them in the rivers and
streams of life?

It is evident that in forming our judgments of vital
processes, we cannot limit the scope of our vision to any
one aspect of life, or to purely vital phenomena only.
The windows of our mind must look in all directions
upon the world about us. The reader may be assured
that the biologist, with such an outlook, studies even
the simplest problems of life in no other attitude than
one of profound humility. But he jealously guards his
provinces, and is chiefly moved to dogmatism by the
petty dogmatism of others.

IV. Temporary and Permanent Fitness

In the larger sum of more elaborate adaptations, it
is easy to confuse secondary, incidental, or perhaps even
for the moment useless, fitness with that which is more
fundamental and universal. In the case of man and
his machines, for example, it is evident that while iron
is fit for many cooperative mechanical uses, it is also
fitted to form the chief constituent of the earth nucleus.
It is also fitted to form a vital constituent of all living
tissues. It cannot readily become unfitted for these
basic purposes, owing to the stability of its qualities.
But by the very same tokens, in a rapidly advancing
life, iron may quickly become unfit for many mechan-
ical uses when a better material to these ends becomes
available, or when man himself becomes capable of

68 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

making better usage of different materials. Wood,
flint, bones, copper, iron, steel, and aluminum are ma-
terials which in this way may become fit, and ultimately
unfit, for special constructive purposes.

It was, doubtless, a happy combination of chance
events that led someone, somehow and somewhere, to
discover the right way to make fire. But there is noth-
ing, in that sense, accidental in the attributes of fire,
or in the attributes of those things influenced by fire,
or in the ways they are influenced by it. Nor is there
anything accidental in the fact that once the right way
of liberating fire was discovered, the latent fabric of
civilization itself was set free and progressively upbuilt
by its services. Through the more or less durable fit-
ness and adaptability of such agencies, and these cumul-
ative cooperations, the great currents of nature's crea-
tive power have themselves been profoundly influenced,
and new kinds of fitness and adaptability successively
created.

V. The Measure of Organic Fitness

It may be urged that the bacteria are just as fit and
well adapted for self-preservation and growth as the
elephants; or that a yeast plant is just as successful in
its way of living as an orchid is in its way. That is
true. But the measure of life. is not in efficiency alone,
or in size, or in fitness. Every cooperative system must
be efficient to the point of self-preservation, else it
would not exist. The question is, what kind of fitness
and adaptation leads or has led to larger constructive
results, to a greater sum of cooperating services; to a
more extensive system of conveyance ; to better contact

FITNESS AND ADAPTATION 69

with, and cooperative response to the world at large;
and still endure. These methods are measurable only
in the sum total of organic services rightly performed.

The yeast cell is no doubt an extraordinarily com-
plex system in miniature. It produces something like
a score of different enzymes, or about all of these re-
markable substances known to science, and some of
these enzymes have a profound influence, for good and
evil, on the social life of man. But the yeast does not
appear to profit directly, or in due proportion, from
its own products. It has no neuro-muscular mecha-
nism, like that of animals, by which it can move about,
or respond to its environments ; and yet it is more widely
distributed over the earth's surface than any of the
higher plants or animals.

On the other hand, the orchid is a much larger, and
on the whole, a much more elaborately constructed
plant. Its methods of fertilization have long been the
stock examples of cooperative fitness and adaptation
for special purposes; and yet the orchids are not espe-
cially abundant, nor widely distributed, nor vigorous
plants, nor very serviceable agents to life at large. The
brilliant and varied colors of its flowers, their bizarre
shapes, their perfumes and nectars which lure the "buc-
caneering bee," or some other unwilling agent, to con-
cealed traps and time-set springs, finally letting him
go his way, besmeared and bepollened in the service
of the plant, are indeed marvels of adaptation. And
yet the humble potato gets the same service performed,
at least as efficiently, if not in such a flamboyant manner.

Thus the fitness and adaptation of the yeast plant,
potato, and orchid, are not measured by the construc-
tive and saving services performed for themselves

70 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

alone. It includes their larger cooperative values.
Man receives far more basic services from yeast and
potato than from the orchid and gives far more thought
and labor to them in order to provide the ways and
means to set their powers free.

In spite of its extraordinary adaptations, the orchid
does not have a particularly strong hold on life. Its
profits and losses are apparently too evenly balanced to
endure except under most favorable circumstances. Its
most characteristic inventions for living suggest the
marvels of the patent office rather than the homely
devices of approved utility. These wonderful inven-
tions work, sometimes, but not surely, nor economically.

Sexual life abounds in these bizarre inventions, for
sex, especially in social life, must carry an enormous,
and ever growing amount of baggage, and heavy
draughts must be made on the resources of life to keep
this baggage moving and self-supporting.

When these properties of sex grow too cumbersome
for the essential journeys of life, or their administra-
tion too costly, they become self-destructive burdens,
defeating the very purpose they serve. If, under such
conditions, the organism still endures, it is in spite of
their extravagances rather than because of them.

The subtle influence of sex is felt in all phases of
life, high and low, constituting a basic and all pervad-
ing vital motive. Indeed the consummation of the
sexual function is the primal obligation of life, and in
its services are enlisted, as propaganding lures and
stimuli, the chief pleasures and ornaments of life. Nor
would we have it otherwise. But when these secondary
characters and functions usurp the resources of life to
no effect, when they pervert, or inhibit, the primal func-

FITNESS AND ADAPTATION 71

tion of reproduction, life automatically returns to a
more primitive, or a more economic level.

VI. The Measure of Social Fitness

We can readily imagine a kind of human society in
which the basic principle of the orchid's invention is
fully utilized. Let us picture to ourselves how it might
work out. In such a society, over the gateway to his
domicile, the advertising lover displays his erotic sym-
bols, and from his windows discharges alluring and sug-
gestive perfumes. Wafted up the community avenues,
conveyed by servant light and air, his missiles cross
the pathway of some official receptive agent called, let
us say, a guardian of the peace. In most human com-
munities this constituent normally has a positive reac-
tion to such stimuli. That is, he automatically orients
himself to their line of propagation, and, with unerring
instinct, follows their sensuous trails to their source.
So it is in this case. Passing under the gateway, still
led by servant eye and nose, he enters the lover's cham-
ber. Overcome by the splendor of his surroundings,
he is temporarily diverted from his purpose and pauses
a moment to survey the repast, expressly fitted, appar-
ently, for himself. In making a preliminary exami-
nation of the nectars set before him, he inadvertently
presses a concealed button, which automatically regu-
lates the movements of a trap door beneath the spot
where the investigations must necessarily take place.

As the inclination of the trap door quickly changes
in response to the pressure on the button, the investi-
gator, moved by a stronger will than his own, falls into
a refreshing bath. Here, one of the chief purposes of

72 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

the mechanism is accomplished, for in the momentary
confusion which follows, the astonished official is
anointed with resinous materials, one of the by-products
of the household, and by this fitting instrument are at-
tached to his person, as it were by accident, the lovers'
tokens.

The whole reaction of the official is now reversed.
What formerly attracted now repels. He suddenly be-
comes what is known to the experimental biologist as
negatively thigmotactic. Under the influence of this
reaction he hastily leaves the house and seeks the shelter
of more familiar surroundings, incidentally conveying
the virile tokens to an expectant lover in his own house-
hold. Thus a regular channel of conveyance may be
established between two imprisoned lovers; for the in-
nate reactions of these state officials are not seriously
injured, or permanently destroyed by the performance
of their incidental functions. In fact, their experiences,
on the whole, are enjoyable and profitable to them, and
they are not overburdened by the consciousness of their
incidental services.

Judging from the way similar devices in the or-
ganic world are exploited to the limits of their capacity,
it is not perhaps impossible that out of some such in-
genious aid to sexual conveyance, a new class of animals
might arise, and on it a new kind of civilization be up-
built, not greatly different from our own. In that case
every detail in the maze of events might be highly
elaborated and beautified through the process of nat-
ural selection. Lyrics might be sung in their praises ;
comedies and tragedies written to caricature their in-
evitable incidents; scientists might earn their pittance
in measuring and cataloging its civilizing materials and

73

forces ; statesmen solemnly enact international laws for
the regulation of the laws of nature, and great defensive
wars might be heroically waged over some menace to
ancient prerogatives, over freedom of action, or over
local differences of opinion as to which particular vari-
ation of the procedure was right and which was wrong.
There is no limit to the chain of cooperative fitness and
adaptation, that might be linked up in this way, so long
as every link in the chain was self-sustaining.

But the naturalist is familiar with many cases in
the organic world of reality, where the machinery that
develops around a given function ultimately outgrows
its purpose and defeats its own aim, like "vaulting am-
bition that o'erleaps itself and falls on the other"; or
like an animal whose defensive armor, by overgrowth,
becomes a prison, or a killing burden; or like one that
destroys itself and the sources of its own maintenance
by over-greediness; or as in man where over-physical,
or over-intellectual development, may each destroy the
other and thereby defeat their individual and their
common purposes.

So in the case of the hypothetical society we are con-
sidering, it would be of little moment which social
group was right, and which was wrong on any partic-
ular question, or which nation had evolved the more
"kultur," or had the more elaborate civilization, art,
science, or literature, if one of them concealed within
itself some basic moral, or cooperative, defect. Only
that one could endure, wherein the real purpose of all
this social machinery of mutual services is rightly ac-
complished, that is, in this particular case, when lovers
are cooperatively united, and the ultimate messengers
of love safely reach their destination.

74 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

The same principles govern the evolution of all
phases of social life. Human society, as it is in reality,
in spite of all its social fretwork and its .orchid-like
conventions, must remain a mere shell, hollow of heart,
so long as social conventions and social trappings are
over magnified, and enjoyed solely for their incidental
products, while their real purpose in life is ignored,
or not fulfilled. And civilization itself will collapse,
over and over again, in partial death, crushed under
the weight of its own super-structures, destroyed down
to its more stable foundations by domestic and foreign
wars, and by failures in the conveyance of vital neces-
sities, so long as it is not supported by the girders of
mutual faith and mutual service. For the extent of its
growth and the measure of its self-sustaining power is
wholly dependent on the extent to which mutual rights
are protected and mutual obligations fulfilled. And
in human society, where intelligence is the chief con-
structive instrument, these services must not be left to
chance; they must not be wholly incidental, trap-door
services; nor the unwilling services of unconscious
agents ; but the deliberate, joyous acts of those who have
the will to create social institutions, and know how
their purpose may be accomplished. Therein lies the
real test of social fitness and the creative possibilities
of social adaptations.

VII. The Adaptation of Vital Actions to Good
and Evil

The chief difference between animate and inani-
mate things, between plants and animals, high and low,
is in the degree of profitable response to their environ-

FITNESS AND ADAPTATION 75

ment. This response is expressed in constructive, co-
operative actions, and may be measured in these actions
only. That is, in the relative change of form and posi-
tion of various parts, and in the architecture and move-
ments of the whole organism from one time, or place,
to another.

These constructive actions of the physical and or-
ganic world constitute the currents and counter cur-
rents of nature's perpetual flux. Science has no means
of measuring them except in terms of themselves, for
there is no absolute standard of value, either for direc-
tion, length of time, or extension in space. The north
star, the radius of the earth, or the revolution of the
earth in its orbit, which we use as our standards of
measurement, are themselves the expression of chang-
ing action in things already constructed.
. The terms commonly used to indicate these con-
structive processes and their opposites are good and
evil. These terms are rarely used by scientists in their
more formal discussions, nevertheless no other terms
can quite fill their places. Substitute terms either
mean precisely the same thing, or conceal beneath a
cumbersome, unfamiliar terminology the very idea the
scientist wishes to convey.

When we say, for example, that something is good
or evil for an animal, all we mean is that it is more or
less constructive and preservative for that animal, jor
more or less destructive. So it is with all our measure-
ments, they always express in some way the degree of
constructive or destructive action, in positive or nega-
tive terms, in reference to that particular thing; that is,
in terms of good and evil.

Thus in spite of the infinite variety of narure-ac-

76 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

tions, there is no way to measure, or define, or classify
them except in terms of what they do constructively,
or destructively. For that reason, every one is ulti-
mately compelled to use the basic, all-embracing terms,
good and evil, or their equivalents, to express the re-
sults of his experience. Science will gain far more
than she will lose by including these elemental terms
in her vocabulary.

In animal behavior, there are but two really signi-
ficant classes of acts, or movements ; one leading up to
what is good for the animal, the other away from what
is evil. One kind of action results in growth, or the
enlargement of the individual ; the other, in saving it,
or by avoiding or preventing its destruction. One kind
of action, in the main, leads up the supply lines to their
sources, the other down the danger lines, away from
destructive agencies. In one kind, the increasing stim-
ulus of food and the increasing attainment of well-
being and power lead the animal directly toward the
source of the stimulating constructive agencies; in the
other, the increasing stimulus of ill-being and the loss
of power, lead the animal away from the source of
that particular stimulus, into neutral territory, but
otherwise in no particular direction, nor into any par-
ticular place. Thus one kind leads from many direc-
tions to a few good things ; the other, away from a few
evil things, in many directions. One, therefore, directs
and centralizes; the other distributes. One ultimately
unites the animal with its bodily materials and powers,
such as food, light, and oxygen, or with its comple-
mental sex; the other repels it, or divorces it from de-
structive, or offensive agents. One ultimately leads it
in the pathways of further cooperative actiont increas-

FITNESS AND ADAPTATION 77

ing profit, and a larger and longer life; the other leads
it away from those things that prevent cooperative ac-
tion, and that diminish life and power. All other re-
actions are neutral, or of secondary value. The per-
sistence of these reactions tends to open or uncover the
pathways of constructive living, and to hold the animal
to its dual course, a course which more and more surely
leads toward that which is good and away from that
which is evil.

In other words, the fundamental tropism of plants
and animals to things that are good for them is positive,
and to the things that are bad for them is negative.
This dual reaction, or behavior, is cumulative in its
effects, and inevitably leads to the discovery of better
ways of doing things ; to more adaptive reactions to the
external world, and thereby to a longer and more cer-
tain tenure of life. The same principles apply to each
part and to each organ of any animal, or plant, and to
each member of any social aggregate.

The local growth, for example, of fur, or feathers,
gills, or lungs, of valve, muscle, or nerve, which thereby
better aid and protect the animal ; and the increase in
numbers, and in power, of soldiers, laborers, bankers,
preachers, and scientists, which thereby better aid and
protect society, is in each case the resultant of this dual
response of individual parts to their environment, the
resultant of their successful avoidance of what is evil
to them and the attainment of what is good for them.

Each part, or organ, of every cooperative system
thereby tends to grow indefinitely. But when it at-
tains the maximum of growth consistent with the wel-
fare of the whole, upon which it ultimately depends,
its growth is checked automatically.

78 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

Thus all response, or movement, or growth, is meas-
urable in the sum total of many constructive and de-
structive processes. The actual condition attained in
any given case must represent, therefore, a positive, or
plus, quantity in the attainment of good, or of con-
structive profits, else it could not exist.

Hence that which is good for any organism is pre-
cisely and adaptively directive, giving it more power
and stability. Evil is indiscriminately distributive and
tends primarily to decrease power and stability. The
good which resides in evil is the spur which impels
things within the influence of the good. Good and
evil, therefore, are the reciprocating functions of right-
ness, and both are essential to progressive adaptation
and constructive action.

VIII. The Evolution of Fitness and Adaptation

The evolution of mutual service and Tightness and
the evolution of fitness and adaptation are coincident;
in fact, each is a manifestation of the other. That is
to say, the prerequisite to every evolutionary process
is the creation of the fitting things to that constructive
end; and coincident with growth or evolution, progres-
sive adaptation must have taken place, or the right ways
must have been successively found to perform those
constructive services.

What we call fitness and adaptation in reference to
any particular thing, or circumstance, may be some-
thing: (i) fundamental, absolute, and enduring; or
(2) transitional, serving as a stepping stone to higher
constructive levels, and then gone forever; or (3) im-
mediately constructive; or (4) apparently encumber-

79

ing, neutral, or sterile of immediate results, but yield-
ing its products in deferred dividends. These adap-
tive fitness are the by-products of something else or
of other constructive acts. They can be measured only
by their creative power, actual or potential.

Man, as an individual, is more or less fitted to his
social and physical environments, as a flower, or a na-
tion, is fitted to its physical and social surroundings.
But the number and complexity of the fitnesses is much
greater in one case than in the other. Man, for ex-
ample, is made up of a greater number of internal parts
than the plant, all of them marshalled in groups, and
classes, and organs, mutually moulded and fitted to one
another in one cooperative, bodily service; as a con-
stituent of nature-life, he is fitted to a greater variety
of external things, and to more subtle, more fleeting
external events; and, as a member of human society,
he is fitted to his brother members for a great variety
of social services wholly lacking in every other phase
of nature-life. Hence he does a greater variety of
things ; his life is larger and quicker, more resourceful
than that of any other organism, and he is a living part
of a much larger cooperative system.

IX. Adaptability in Nature- Action, as a Universal
Creative Tropism

The world of action is revealed to us as an archi-
tectural system, a universal network of physical and
chemical organization ; it may be on a gigantic, endur-
ing scale in terrestrial and cosmic affairs, or on an
infinitesimal, more fugitive scale in the affairs of atoms
and molecules. In every direction, these graded, struc-

tural series lead to fathomless depths, far beyond the
reach of human knowledge. And within this world-
wide, physico-chemical system, apparently apart
from it, but in reality blending with it, and supported
by it at every point, are the various series of plant and
animal organizations called life.

Pervading both these living and non-living sys-
tems, like a corrosive or consuming atmosphere, is an
ever present disorganization; a universal incomplete-
ness of administration, and a mocking instability of
purpose, where chance creates and chance destroys, or
nips in the bud the tender shoots of new-sprung enter-
prise.

But in this universal strife, constructive action al-
ways wins, always increases its power by holding on
to some of its gains. For evolution, as we can clearly
see in retrospect, is not a process of creating something
out of nothing; but a process of mutual moulding, giv-
ing and receiving, yielding, and advancing into new re-
lations, and thereby constructing new things, themselves
adjustable to new constructions. It is the finding of the
right way through the shifting maze of nature-action,
out of a nullifying chaos into a more dynamic order,
and the incorporation of its profits into larger units,
or individuals. This universal attribute of adaptation
is in reality a universal creative tropism, or a turning
toward the right ways of constructive action, and using
them constructively.

Nature-life, as a whole, is the resultant product of
the mutually adaptive life of plants and animals, high
and low, large and small, to one another and to inani-
mate nature. From its beginning, nature-life has grown
in volume, in security, in power, and in freedom ; but

FITNESS AND ADAPTATION 81

at various rates, because its innumerable constituents, at
different times and places, have attained different de-
grees of fitness, and have made adaptive discoveries and
inventions of very unequal value.

Science is a fourfold record of these actions. Her
historians describe their sequence in terms of past
events; her morphologists, the products, in terms of
architecture, form, or structure; her physiologists, the
acts in the process of consummation; and her prophets
affirm, or deny, the continuity of these acts into the un-
explored, or inaccessible domains of nature-action.

In the forward look of prophecy, science sees the
continuation of the same processes; that is, a gradual
increase of concerted, automatic action, and a decrease
in the destructive power of chance.

This universal adaptability of nature's content
makes the consummation of her creative ends inev-
itable. It is an inexplicable power, but one ever mani-
fest to us as growth and progress.

PART II

NATURE'S SYSTEM OF SELF-ADMINISTRA-
TION AND SELF-CONTROL

CHAPTER IV

LIFE: ITS ORIGIN, AGENCIES, HABITAT,
AND GROWTH

Preparation, Materials, and Forces — The Cosmic Formula for
Life — Life's Cosmic Sanctuary — Life's Directive Discipline — Life's
Freedom — The Growth of Freedom — The Instruments of Free-
dom— Growth: Its Insistent Power; Organic Wealth, its Source
and its Uses; the Demands of Growth; Checks and Releases to
Growth; Development, or Simultaneous Increase in Volume, Di-
versity, and Mutual Service; Limitations to Growth; Growth by
Multiplication (dissociation) and by Combination (reunion or
association); Profitable, Cooperative Merges; Unprofitable Mer-
gers, Parasitism — The Creative Cadence and the Formal Accents of
Organic Growth — Stability of Individual Life Essential to Social
Life — The Growth Rhythm: Individual Growth, Fragmentation,
Regeneration, Association.

I. The Preparation for Life. Its Materials and Forces

LIFE is not an act apart, nor is it the product of any
specific time, or place, or material. It is the offspring
of the physical world; a transient phase of creative
power in the universal whole.

To make way for terrestrial life, nature labored on
a universal scale. Matter was the warp and energy
the woof of her growing fabrics; constellations were
the patterns.

Elements joined in elemental forms, and with ele-
mental motions harried the fields of space, growing in
power. Mass grew in mass, and momentum in mo-
mentum; each drawing the other to itself in mutually
regulated rotations; sweeping the heavens on their en-

85

86 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

circling course; clearing the pathways of light for
future generations.

Out of the nebular pull and thrust, and meteoric
collision came the germs of celestial spheres and a
measure of celestial order. In the wide womb of the
cosmic night commingling, nebular gamites the germ
plasma of the sun and her family of planets engendered.

From the sun, the earth its substance inherited, and
received in her household its nurture. In communion
with its mother sun, and with its twin sister, moon, the
fcetal earth acquired its form, its features, and its mo-
tions ; was cradled in its orbit, bathed by the recurrent
light of day, disciplined and caressed by the changing
seasons, till the initial cleavage of its growing substance
divided the assembling airs, the lands, and the waters,
into serried layers and graded masses, according to
their attributes.

Thereby was built for life a home terrestrial, and
stable. And there in rightly tempered beds, in nutrient
nooks and sheltering crannies, quickening plasmas
grew, and multiplied, and overflowed, tincturing the
shallow seas with their opalescent swarms, and spread-
ing their verdant flush over the face of the rising earth ;
and there life was nourished and sustained by the in-
come from a brotherhood of stars.

The flesh of the earth, the flash, and the pull, and
the grip of the sun, the moon, and the stars, is the
steadfast substance of life and its unfailing power.

II. The Cosmic Formula for Life

As the germ-plasma of the egg, subject to its en-
vironments, determines the nature of its ensuing life,

AGENCIES, HABITAT, AND GROWTH 87

so in like manner the earth's initial ingredients, and
their environments, determine the nature of the earth's
issue. The elements which constitute the land, the
sea, and the air, and those larger celestial forces which
regulate the earth's activities, were established in, and
around the earth-egg in fixed proportions; and their
distinctive attributes were insured to the germinating
earth as life's heritage, long before protoplasmic life
could exist thereon, or endure. These agencies deter-
mine the nature of terrestrial life today, and they will
determine the nature of that life which the earth shall
bring forth in the fulness of time.

The cosmic formula for the evolution of life was,
therefore, explicit and imperative. To compound that
formula, time and space, materials and power in
abundance were demanded, with stability in founda-
tions, exactitude in the quantity of ingredients, ever-
lasting integrity in their qualities, and unremitting
service.

III. Life's Cosmic Sanctuary

But life occupies a very small place in the universe.
It stands on a meagre franchise of the elements, a frail
terrestrial film in an infinite sea of death; a beneficiary
of stability and order in a tiny sanctuary. For life
could suffer but little deviation in the sun's radiant
power, or in the moons tidal pull, and still endure ; but
little change in the size, position, and movements of
the earth; or in the volume, and composition of the
earth's atmosphere; or in the proportion of land to
water; or in the upheavals, and circulating movements
of its substance. Nor could life suffer any omission
of its constituent elements ; nor the substitution of one

88 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

for the other; nor any fickle fluctuations in the basic
qualities of heat, light, and electricity, of hydrogen,
oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide, her chief agents
and constituent which for untold ages have passed in
and out the gates of life and death, unchallenged and
unchanged.

IV. Life's Directive Discipline

The immutable barriers that confine life's fluttering
excursions express but the stability of its habitat. Be-
cause the inexorable whole faithfully preserves the ex-
act terms of its franchise, it is possible for life to endure
within its narrow habitat. As this habitat is narrow,
and flanked with death, it disciplines and directs the
life it shelters. Since life is hedged about with re-
strictions and unfailing discipline, every living thing
is forced to retreat from the road that leads to destruc-
tion, and again begin the search for a better way to
live. It is compelled to give and to receive that service
which creates and preserves, or be exterminated.

V. Life's Freedom

But within the boundaries of its cosmic sanctuary,
and beyond its primal obligations, life is free to act,
free to grow, free to appropriate what and where it
may to its own salvation and aggrandizement. And
within this common sanctuary are many smaller sanc-
tuaries, wherein every living thing and every living
part finds its measure of seclusion, of freedom, and
opportunity for self-expression. Freedom to vary in.
form and motion in response to its changing structure

AGENCIES, HABITAT, AND GROWTH 89

and environment; freedom to play, to experiment, or
explore, and to follow the never-ending labyrinth of
life and hope renewed that opens up before its prog-
ress. It is this special franchise of individual liberty,
within a universal prison, that is the joy of life and its
guiding hand.

Thus each atom and each cell has a specific measure
of freedom within the sanctuary wherein it exists.
Through the exercise of that freedom of action it
tests and explores its environment and finds the ways
that lead to more constructive action. The same free-
dom, for the same purpose, is given to the organ, indi-
vidual, species, family, state, and nation.

Thus in all stages of life, freedom and bondage,
variation and stability, the radical and the conserva-
tive, work together for progress. Discipline and re-
straint conserve the old ways; freedom finds the new.

VI. The Growth of Freedom

But the barriers within which life resides are not
impregnable. In its traffic with nature, life is free to
look beyond its tenement walls ; free to receive direc-
tive agencies from afar, and thereby free to enlarge
its heritage. By this universal attribute of profitable
exchange, life grows in volume and complexity. Its
increase in volume by assimilation is merely the in-
crease of its servant organs; and the greater the pre-
cision and the power of life's organic machinery, the
freer are life's bodily movements, the wider is the range,
and the more rapid the rate of its exchange. And as
they increase, the prison walls of life recede. The win-
dows which look out on the universe, and which admit

90 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

its messengers, grow larger and clearer. By strength-
ening its servants of sensory response and bodily mo-
tion, life works its way to physical and spiritual free-
dom.

"For Nature, crescent, does not grow alone
In thews and bulk; but, as this temple waxes,
The inward service of the mind and soul
Grows wide withal."

VII. The Instruments of Freedom

Thus there is no freedom without service given
and service received. Freedom without the one or the
other is but another name for death. Freedom grows
only so far as the instruments of service grow in power
to serve, and only so far as they actually perform their
services.

To the amoeba, the jelly-fish, or the worm, the
"world" is the franchise of an hour in a drop of water;
a niche in the rocks for a season; or a home in the sea
for a decade. To man, the "world" is the universal
whole of time and space, for their content are his to
explore and to utilize. And therein lies our measure
of freedom and attainment. For what we call the
higher animal is the one which lives in a larger world;
the one with more discriminating organic instruments
for the discovery of good and evil, instruments of
greater power and certainty in getting the good things
and avoiding the bad ones. These are the chief dif-
ferences between the jelly-fish and the worm, the worm
and the crab, the fish and the reptile, the monkey and
man, the herd and the clan, the state and the empire.

AGENCIES, HABITAT, AND GROWTH 91

The growth of freedom ever awaits the growth of
service.

VIII. Growth

1. Its Insistent Power. Self-enlargement, as we
have seen, is a universal property of matter. It is
primarily dependent on the attributes of the agents
whose cooperative union produces individuality and
growth, a basic fact which lies beyond explanation.
But growth is most commonly associated with life. It
is indeed its most fundamental attribute, for all living
things, such as protoplasm, cells, animals, plants and
human society, ever tend to increase in volume by the
capture of more constituents, whenever and wherever
they come into appropriate contact with them.

This lurking, ever insistent power of growth re-
sides in every living thing, and in all its constituent
parts. It is ever straining against the bonds which
temporarily hold it in check; ever producing the over-
flowing abundance of life's machinery; ever creating
and recreating the infinite number and endless variety
of plants and animals ; pouring out with lavish hands
the apparently useless wealth, the ornament, the beauty,
and the luxuries of life.

2. Organic Wealth. Its Source and Its Uses. It is
this primeval bounty and savage waste which is so
confusing to a narrow, utilitarian philosophy; which
leads one to wonder what it is for; to envy the wealth
bestowed on others; to look with suspicion on every
structure not frankly created for some obvious specific
purpose; or to assume too readily that structural wealth
was created by its owner for himself; or that it must

92 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

be in some way immediately made use of when created.
Nature, however, does not move in such petty and
obvious ways. On the contrary, the newer properties
and working capital of life are invariably the by-prod-
ucts, or surplus products of life. They may, or may
not find a use. In any case, while they may or may not
be of immediate harm, they cannot, at the very outset
of their being, cooperate in giving aid and comfort to
the whole. That comes, when it comes, later, and then
only by mutual adjustments to a new end, or purpose.

It is the readjusted part, or organ, which has at
last attained a fitting place and function in the or-
ganism; and the perfected plant, or animal, which has
at last found a fitting place in the maze of social life,
on land or sea, which excites our admiration; amazing
us with its stability and the perfect adaptation of
means to a given end. On the other hand, the wealth
of nature in living things, and the overloading of
animal life with armament and ornament, still con-
founds us by it apparent lack of present usefulness, or
future purpose. But this constant over-production, and
the accumulation of reserve organic capital, releases
life from a too rigid hand-to-mouth existence, giving it,
as it were, a leisure margin of safety, which, sooner or
later, is utilized to explore new fields, and to find there-
in the ways and means for a larger life.

3. The Demands of Growth. So far as the biolo-
gist is able to determine, all vital action depends, pri-
marily, on the cooperative response of protoplasmic
constituents to one another, and to their outer world.
This response is manifest in the changing chemical
composition of protoplasm, in its internal streaming,
change of form, and locomotion.

AGENCIES, HABITAT, AND GROWTH 93

This characteristic vital action is the visible expres-
sion of a reciprocal exchange; certain materials and
forces from the other world, entering the protoplasm,
usually through specific doors or passageways, and
ultimately reaching every living part. Certain other
things are discharged from these parts into the outer
world, through their own specific exits. Life endures
only so long as this cooperative exchange endures. On
the whole, it is a profitable one, that is, more is re-
ceived and retained than is given off; otherwise growth,
the chief manifestation of living things, could not take
place.

All vital processes, therefore, require for their con-
tinued being definite materials and forces from the
outer world. Every living point, however minute and
remote that point may be, must receive within a de-
finite period its due share of food, air, and stimuli;
and harmful agents must be excluded, or removed, else
it will cease to live or to grow.

Thus all living things, and all their organs, by
means of this process of self-insulation and assimilation,
tend to acquire a definite localization, and structural
individuality. That is, they tend to grow in their own
likeness through their power to select and add to them-
selves other things like themselves; they are protected
against contamination, or dilution, or perversion, by
their power to reject and exclude.

This process of growth tends to go on indefinitely,
subject to the new demands created by growth.

4. Checks and Releases to Growth. But just there
a new factor inevitably arises ; for growth cannot take
place without changing the original conditions under
which growth was initiated. This change is brought

94 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

about: (i) by reducing the more available supplies;
(2) by making it more difficult for constructive ma-
terials to reach all the growing points in the larger
organism; (3) by making it more difficult to remove
waste, or encumbering, materials. (4) Some points, or
organs, must necessarily be more favorably situated
for this give and take than others, and they will grow
differently, or faster than the others. In this way, the
initial internal cooperative balance of the whole or-
ganism is sooner or later upset, and this organic un-
balancing produces a fourth check to growth. Growth,
therefore, in all kinds of growing things, however
great and inexhaustible the potential power of growth
may be, is inevitably checked by its own success.
Growth will go on, provided some improvement in
mutual services takes place, or "happens," or is found,
due either to betterments in the instruments of ex-
change, or to a better arrangement of them in time
and space. If not, disorganization increases, and death
or disintegration inevitably ensues. Growth may then
take a new start with somewhat different materials, or
under somewhat different conditions, and the whole
process may be approximately repeated, possibly with
better success than before.

5. Development, or the Simultaneous Increase in
Volume, in Diversity, and Mutual Service. Thus no
conceivable method of growth can proceed in the same
manner, nor can it continue to produce the same re-
sults. With each increment in mass the modifying
effect of the whole on each constituent part is more
and more effective; and with each increment in vol-
ume, the distance from one extremity of the growing
body to the other, the differences in age between the

AGENCIES, HABITAT, AND GROWTH 95

youngest and oldest constituents, the differences in en-
vironment between the central and peripheral parts,
become greater and greater, and the time required to
serve the more widely separated constituents becomes
longer and longer.

Hence the longer growth continues, the more the
original conditions of growth are altered, and the more
the rate of profitable exchange is diminished and the
expenditures in exchange increased. Conditions are
constantly arising, therefore, where, in order to meet
the local difficulties of distribution and exchange,
either new kinds of materials must be added, or new
methods of growth adopted, or both, if growth is to be
maintained.

Thus, however simple or elemental the method of
growth may be in the beginning, or whatever may be
the initial character of the growing materials, increase
in mass and volume automatically creates development,
or the unfolding of new characters. In other words,
growth inevitably proceeds from the simple to the com-
plex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, be-
cause the progress of mere aggregation inevitably
creates more complex and heterogeneous conditions
for the associated units. Conversely, all methods and
stages of development, in their origin, rest on the ulti-
mate simplicity of the cosmic germinal stuff.

All problems of growth and exchange must be
solved, as indeed they are, in the order in which they
arise, the earlier ones in a more and more precise and
certain manner, otherwise there would be no later ones
to solve. Hence in every growing body, the growth of
new parts, and the formation of an adequate and dur-

96 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

able service of conveyance for them must take place
simultaneously, and along approximately parallel lines.
For growth and conveyance automatically control each
other, since the point, or cell, or organ, or individual,
not properly supplied, either ceases to exist, or does
not come into being; and the one unhindered in its
self-expression, and freely served, grows up to the full
capacity of its distributors.

The members of a growing community of cells are
subject to precisely the same kind of conditions as
human beings in a growing city, or nation. In both
cases, the conditions inevitably created by growth ap-
proach nearer, and nearer, to an ultimate balancing
point which lies somewhere between the minimum rate
of local consumption and the maximum efficiency of
the available conveyors.

The rise and fall of this point marks the oscillation
in the progress of evolution and organization. It rises
as the ways and means of conveyance increase, and falls
as they diminish. But while there is no limitation to
the potential power of growth, or to the demand for
constructive materials, there are very definite limita-
tions to the available supply and to the rate of their
conveyance.

In other words, all kinds of growing things demand
more supplies and better protection. The additional
requirements for income, outgo, and exclusion cannot
be provided without better administration in the sys-
tem of conveying supplies to the sources of demand,
the removal of waste, and the exclusion of harmful
agencies.

It is this ever present potentiality for growth, which
is perpetually checked, or thwarted, by its own sue-

AGENCIES, HABITAT, AND GROWTH 97

cesses, and again liberated when better ways of supply-
ing its demands are found, that produces that orderly
progression from simple to complex, from disorgani-
zation to organization, which we call development, or
evolution. This eternal conflict of growth with itself;
this right readjustment of vital administration to its
own demands, and its failure to meet them, constitute
life and death, good and evil. It is the consistent
triumph of constructive methods over destructive ones
which makes growth and development the dominant
characteristics of life and nature.

6. Limitations to Growth. At each succeeding
stage of growth, the keeping out of harmful agents, the
removal of those produced within, the discovery, and
the capture of supplies, and their equitable internal
distribution, demand more and more elaborate cooper-
ation and exacting service. Moreover the variety of
possible ways in which these vital constructive prob-
lems may be solved gradually becomes more and more
limited, or compulsory, while the constructive proc-
esses of growth follow one another in more definite
sequence and with a greater degree of stability and
regularity.

But in spite of all the varied combinations and re-
adjustments that may be made, ultimately every grow-
ing thing reaches a more or less definite balancing point
between supply and demand where further growth is
impossible. This is clearly indicated by the fact that
all the most familiar objects in nature, such as atoms,
molecules, chromosomes, nuclei, cells, polyps, insects,
man, etc., never grow beyond well-defined limits in
mass, volume or organization. It may be assumed,
therefore, that it is impossible to maintain the con-

98 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

stituents of such bodies in a self-sustaining cooperative
union beyond those limits.

In plants and animals, this balancing point be-
tween supply and demand is fixed within comparatively
narrow bounds ; it cannot rise above a certain level be-
cause of the following limitations: (i) the limited
variety of those things it is possible for living bodies
to appropriate, to assimilate, or to utilize in their in-
ternal economy; (2) the limited structural strength of
their necessary constituents, such as protoplasm, muscle,
cellulose, chiten, or bone; (3) the limited power of
response to the outer world, in the organs of sense;
(4) the limited range and speed of transmission in
nerves; (5) the limited power of the alimentary, cir-
culatory, and excretory organs to overcome the increas-
ing resistance to distribution and exchange; and (6)
the limited power of life to conserve its gains.

In human society, owing to new and very excep-
tional conditions, the balancing point between supply
and demand is rising rapidly. The rate at which so-
ciety has grown, or the rate of profitable exchange be-
tween man and man, and man and nature, has increased
with extraordinary rapidity in modern times because
these inherent disabilities of life's organic instruments
have been rapidly overcome by the invention of count-
less new physical instruments, of far greater power and
precision, made of wood, stone, metal, glass, and other
materials of like nature; and because man has utilized
his science, literature, and art, the immortal conser-
vatories of human experience, in an elaborate process
of cooperative social life. Everywhere, coincident with
this social growth, appear the arteries, the veins, and
the nerves of domestic and foreign commerce and of

AGENCIES, HABITAT, AND GROWTH 99

social intercourse. They are the new agents which
convey the nourishing and sustaining agencies of so-
cial life ; they are the essential instruments for the dis-
tribution of diversified local products to the ultimate
growing points; they lengthen, ramify, and enlarge
with social growth, and society grows only so fast as
they better penetrate the great barriers of time and
space which separate man and nature, race and color,
the living and the dead, and establish between them the
life-giving channels of exchange.

7. Growth by Multiplication (dissociation] and by
Combination (reunion or association] . The balancing
point in protoplasmic life is quickly attained within
the relatively narrow limits familiar to us in unicellular
life. When a cell reaches its maximum size and com-
plexity, no further growth in volume, or in organic de-
velopment, can take place except by subdivision, or
fragmentation; these fragments then grow up to the
same individual limitations as before, thereby produc-
ing more cells, distinct from one another, but of a sim-
ilar kind. This is what we call growth by multipli-
cation, or regeneration. But there is still a thircT
method of growth both in volume and complexity, due
to various amalgamations, or associations, of multi-
plying cells. Two or more cells may be completely
amalgamated with one another, as in the case of germ
cells ; or many generations of cells may remain in touch
with one another, still retaining their individuality, and
thus forming colonies, or multicellular bodies, com-
posed of millions of cooperating cells definitely ar-
ranged, it may be, into cooperating systems of tissues
and organs. Then these multicellular organisms may
multiply, and their offspring combine again and again,

ioo GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

in many different ways, to form still larger, less co-
herent groups, thus leading up to the many different
kinds of cooperative social growth, social multiplica-
tion, and social amalgamation.

These three basic methods of vital growth: (i)
growth in unit volume and in unit organization; (2)
by multiplication or dissociation, and (3) by cooper-
ative union and organization, or association, are fam-
iliar ways of growth and development, every phase
of the process having its own peculiar limitations.

Justly to appreciate these larger methods of growth,
we must clearly recognize that individuality and unity
do not depend on the existence of different parts either
at the same time, or near the same place, or on their
bodily contact and cohesion, but on the continuity of
their cooperative action and mutual services.

There are invisible avenues of exchange which
everywhere permeate nature, knitting separate lives to-
gether into a complexly woven fabric. They are of
infinite variety, of the most subtle and enduring char-
acter, and as intangible as life itself. Like wireless
impulses, they may have no fixed abode, nor substan-
tial boundaries, yet they are as sure and effective in
their services as blood-vessels, nerve fibres, or ocean
cables.

These ways and means of upbuilding nature life
are overshadowed by the more obvious isolation and
conflicting interests of highly individualized lives. It
is only when animals and plants live in more immediate
relations with one another, or when they are held
closely together by common physical bonds, or when
they are merged with one another in the more intimate

AGENCIES, HABITAT, AND GROWTH 101

communion of social life, that this phase of growth
stands out with unmistakable clearness. Nevertheless
this merging of life with life through connecting sys-
tems of conveyance and mutual service is one of nature's
most common and effective methods of growth.

There are a great many different ways of bringing
this about; but the creative value of the mergers al-
ways depends more on the duration and cooperative
efficiency of the system than on the duration of the
cooperating individuals, or the intimacy of their union.

8. Profitable, Cooperative Mergers. In the com-
mensal merger, for example, different kinds of animals,
such as a jelly-fish and a worm, a vertebrate and an
invertebrate, may be united in life-long companionship
under a common menage.

In the symbiotic merger, widely different kinds of
plants, such as algae and fungi, are so interwoven in a
life-long physical contact as to form one inseparable
organic body (lichens).

There is also the merging of all the offspring from
the same parents into a single vital system. In such
cases many sister cells, or polyps, or zoids, form com-
pound organic units, or colonies, held together, under
a common system of self-insulation, in life-long unity
by common physical bonds, and sustained by living
channels of communication and exchange.

Then there are innumerable cases where different
kinds of life are partly blended into one through do-
mestication. Although there may be no physical con-
tact, or intimate communication with one another, yet
the life of one has become largely dependent on the life
of the other, as in the man-dog, man-wheat, and man-
horse association.

102 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

There is also the union of one life with another in
marriage, and in the many other cooperative associa-
tions of individuals, that constitute herds, flocks, fami-
lies, tribes, and states.

There is also the fruitful nuclear exchange, or the
mingling of the substance of two individuals into one,
common among lower plants and animals, called con-
jugation. And finally, in sexual reproduction, there
is the almost universal method of uniting the male and
female germ cells, and their chromosomes, to form a
new being, or ovum, whose greatly increased powers of
life and growth are doubtless due to some adaptive reor-
ganization of its constituent parts.

We may regard this universal merging of male and
female cells in sexual reproduction, and the cooperative
association of male and female organisms in the higher
phases of life, as an attempt on the part of each to
capture and assimilate the other for its own aggran-
dizement, or growth. This attempt results, like so
many others of like nature, in mutual adaptation and
mutual service, or in united action for a larger creative
result.

In all these cases, the individual profits and losses
of cooperative living are fairly equally divided, and
the methods of living are such that each constituent
life becomes largely, or wholly, dependent on the other.
The transaction is mutually serviceable and profitable,
for each one gives the other, through a great variety
of channels, some of its own powers, and the combined
lives thereby acquire new capacity for world service
which the constituents alone could not possess. It is
one of the larger phases of growth.

9. Unprofitable Mergers. Parasitism. But this is

not the case in the familiar parasitic unions where one
animal, usually a lower one, lives on or within a higher
one, and largely at its expense. The association may
be a temporary attachment, or a life-long union, as
intimate as that of different organs of the same animal.
But it is never a profitable partnership; it is not co-
operative living, or mutually serviceable; the net con-
structive result is always something lost, never some-
thing gained.

Parasites, as a rule, are of good antecedents; the
degenerate descendents of animals which once possessed
the means of living free and independent lives. As para-
sites they live at the expense of some more active and
more highly organized animal than themselves; im-
mersed, it may be, in the food its host has captured and
digested for its own use, and dependent for transpor-
tation and protection on its host's superior freedom of
movement, and its superior power to fight the battles
of life.

The only important functions to be performed by
such an animal as a tapeworm, for example, are to
make sure of its own position in life, and by not com-
pletely destroying its host, to insure a similar sinecure
for its descendants.

The methods by which such highly specialized
parasites maintained their position in life are exceed-
ingly intricate and cunning devices, more elaborate in
some respects than those utilized by their more highly
organized hosts. But nothing is really gained thereby,
for the methods are not broadly constructive. They
are based on the robbers' doctrine, and the gamblers',
of how best to gain something for nothing. But the
successful parasite, after all, does pay too large a price

104 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

for what it gains. It does, indeed, gain a relatively
secure position, and acquires enormous powers of
growth and reproduction. But the more its system of
parasitic living is perfected, the more it loses through
degeneration. In extreme cases, it may lose its digestive
organs, sense organs, brain, and appendages, and thus
practically all its powers of responsive movement, and
its freedom of action.

Whether the degeneration, in a given case, is wholly
due to the parasitic mode of life, or whether an already
crippled organism is compelled to adopt the only
method of life by which it is then possible for it to
survive, is not altogether clear. Both factors have
doubtless played some part. But the point is imma-
terial here, for in any case the degeneration is both the
index and the product of diminished cooperation.
Viewed from the standpoint of growth and evolution,
it is clear that the combination of two lives, one acting
as host, the other as parasite, is an unrighteous, non-
constructive act, because the product of previous con-
structive action is thereby in part destroyed, and the
possibilities of further construction greatly diminished,
or prohibited.

Thus all parasitic mergers are inherently non-cre-
ative, and tend toward mutual destruction, rather than
toward mutual growth and mutual self-preservation;
for the more successful the robbery of one member by
the other, to that extent the power of service in both
members is diminished. And the attainment of better
defensive and offensive means by one, against the other,
means correspondingly bad conditions, or death, for
both.

This growth principle applies to any aggregation
of units held together by more or less equitable give
and take, and common interests. If cooperative action
is increased through mutual adjustment and mutual
benefit, it binds the group more firmly together into
more stable, organic unity. If it decreases, resulting
in mutual disadvantage, the group inevitably breaks up
into smaller groups, or partnership in it is wholly dis-
solved.

In the man-dog, or man-wheat, combination, and
in many others of like nature, the conditions are very
different. Here the components have interests in com-
mon. The union, although not organic or physical, is
nevertheless highly constructive, or creative. Each
constituent, in proportion to its own development,
serves the other so much the 'more, and creates new
powers in it. Thus the product of the union grows,
and tends to acquire larger powers for world service,
which could not have been acquired separately.

In the man-dog combination, for example, the dog
is given a share of the greater security and larger free-
dom acquired by his human partner, and new powers
are created in the dog through his association with,
and his service to, man. On the other hand, man re-
ceives additional security, stability, and freedom of
action, through the peculiar physical and sensory pow-
ers, the affection and the intelligence of the dog; and
new and broader mental powers are created in man
through his service, sympathy, and affection for his
faithful comrade.

The cooperative union of these two lives, therefore,
creates a growing power for world service. The po-

io6 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

tential* powers of life are thereby enlarged, and its
larger possibilities in a measure realized.

The same thing is true of the man-wheat combina-
tion, even though its constituents are so unlike in all
which concerns their origin and the conditions which
surround their individual lives.

Thus organic progress can never be achieved
through any form of parasitism, wherein the parasite
purchases a cheap, momentary success of assured place
and volume of growth at the expense of a more highly
organized host, and the loss of its own organic struc-
ture and freedom of action. Even if a condition is
established, that permits the continuation of both lives
in unison, where one does all the giving and the other
all the receiving, no new power of service is born of
the union. A man-tapeworm association is in no wise
a more widely serviceable or effective instrument than
a man and a tapeworm not in association. It is clear
that parasite and host do not yield a common profit.
It is always a losing game for both participants.

The same conditions underlie all forms of associ-
ative competition. Complete success of either compe-
titor tends to create a condition of dominion, or slavery,
ending in the extinction of the other, or of both com-
petitors. The competitor that grows, and earns his
survival, always does so because there is better cooper-
ation in his own affairs than in the one that failed.
Neither competitor can survive and continue to grow,
without improving its self-saving, cooperative system;
and both can do so only through concessions and mutual
service in their common interests.

AGENCIES, HABITAT, AND GROWTH 107

IX. The Creative Cadence and the Formal Accents
of Organic Growth

All the phenomena of development to which we
have referred are ultimately expressed in organic ar-
chitecture and organic action. But the force behind
all these phenomena, the force which compels the
marching and counter-marching, the structural balanc-
ing and unbalancing, is the basic power of growth,
and the cooperative action upon which it depends.
This cooperative action is manifest in all bodily move-
ments, in the functioning of vital organs, and in their
rhythmic checks and releases. Its accumulated achieve-
ments in constructive Tightness are impressively dis-
played in the unswerving leadership of germinal ma-
terials, and in the long procession of upbuilding, con-
structive acts in the growing embryo. It is because
each system of cooperative action tends, sooner or later,
to attain a relatively balanced condition of income and
outgo, that definite forms, and more or less stable struc-
tures, are produced, which may be recognized by the
morphologists, and classified by them into branching,
graded series, roughly indicating the historic sequence
of their creation, and the relative creative value of the
various ways of cooperative action.

Nothing more clearly shows us, or more concisely,
the real unity of nature-life, and the way life has grown,
than the great phylogenetic trees of the animal and
plant kingdoms, as they have been reconstructed for us,
in their main outlines at least, by the biologists. When
we have fully grasped what they signify, we shall not
so much question whether one phase of life is higher
than the other, or lower; whether the stem is more im-

io8 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

portant than the root, the egg-germ than its food-yolk,
or the leaf than the flower. Rather will it be our chief
desire, both as laymen and as biologists, to discover how
each life serves the other; how each one comes, and
how it goes; what are the expanding buds and what
the withered fruits; and what, to us, is the message of
the whole.

But such condensed, graphic representations of bio-
logical knowledge show us something more than a mere
genealogical tree of animal and plant life. So far as
it is an approximately correct record of what has taken
place, it also represents the successive rise and decline
of internal organs coincident with the rise and decline
of new kinds of animals and plants, and new ways of
living. The knowledge of that historic sequence is just
as firm a basis for the interpretation of causal rela-
tions as the observed order of events in a laboratory
experiment.

For life cannot grow in vacuo. It must climb, if at
all, step by step on the solid footing of stabilized co-
operative improvements which permanently sustain
life at each higher level. A definite sequence of pro-
gressive steps, each one rightly made, is therefore im-
perative.

This serial order in nature-rightness is the basis of
all our interpretations of natural phenomena. It car-
ries its own explanation — all the explanation that can
be given. Science aims to ascertain, as nearly as may
be, what that sequence of creative Tightness was in or-
der that she may infer what it shall be. For genesis
is the logic of science; the source of all intellectual
sympathy with nature-action, and the sole justification
for prophecy.

AGENCIES, HABITAT, AND GROWTH 109

But evolution cannot be uniformly progressive, for
organic innovations have widely different creative
values, and produce widely different rates of growth,
giving rise to that deceptive appearance of discon-
tinuity which leads us to classify events or objects into
larger or smaller categories according to the degree of
their resemblance.

After making due allowance for irretrievable losses,
and for our fragmentary knowledge, it is still evident
that the things we are trying to express in our classi-
fications are these very differences in the rate of con-
structive action, upon which the rate of evolution de-
pends. In others words, the unequal creative values
of the various improvements in organic service are the
punctuation marks in nature-growth, and the cause of
its creative cadence. The periods of more rapid pro-
gress, which follow after these improvements, appear,
in perspective, as larger or smaller gaps in the flow of
creative events. The more stable cooperative read-
justments give visible expression to the more enduring
anatomical characters which are the distinguishing
marks of species, genera, classes, etc.

For that reason, every large class of animals is
necessarily separated from its nearest of kin by what,
to the discriminating eye of the morphologist, may ap-
pear to be a wide structural gap. But, on analysis, it
is seen that the real difference is not in itself a large
one, although it is always a highly cooperative one,
carrying with it, of necessity, a multitude of other
changes.

Whenever, therefore, the right ways, or better, or
more serviceable ways, of conveyance are worked out,
or "happen" more growth and higher levels of devel-

i io GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

opment are quickly attained. Hence this onward
march of organized growth is divided into many un-
like stages; into epochs, eras, and periods; into units,
organs, systems and classes; and into longer, or shorter,
genetic series, such as embryonic, phyletic, and ortho-
genie, in accordance with the constructive value of
some particular improvement in service. Moreover the
development of every system must wait the passage
of stormy events, or the coming of their fruits. It
must wait for the growth of new parts; till the new
and the old are cooperatively adjusted to one another;
till the stronger are adequately served by the weak,
and the weak by the strong.

Thus while the flow of creative processes is unin-
terrupted, the creative rate is modulated by various
creative phrases and cadences; breaking up into what
we call different kinds of living things, created at dif-
ferent times and places, endowed with unequal oppor-
tunities, and with unequal constructive values.

X. Stability of Individual Life Essential to Social Life

It is evident, therefore, that reunion and associative
growth, whatever the value, or nature, of the associated
units may be, cannot be definitely established until the
possibilities of cooperative improvements in these units
approaches its limitations, and their structures and
organization have acquired some measure of stability.
Conversely, no association can endure unless it is built
on a degree of stability, or integrity, in its constituent
units sufficient to insure continuity of associative co-
operation.

Hence all growth and progress is concerned pri-

AGENCIES, HABITAT, AND GROWTH in,

marily with the stability and welfare of the constituent
unit, or the individual; secondarily with that of the
aggregate, or system; ultimately with both in equal
measure.

If we would trace the evolution of organic growth,
or analyze its forces, or control its results, we must fix
our attention on the individual units and on the admin-
istration of their internal and external affairs, as they
are successively submerged in larger and larger com-
pound units. We must always bear in mind that the
highest living organisms are composed of innumerable
individuals of various grades and orders, each living
within its own circle of internal and external environ-
ments; and that the most primitive individuals, the
minutest and humblest parts at the bottom of the whole
fabric, are the foundations on whose integrity and
welfare the entire super-structure is built.

It would be as impossible to produce protoplasm
out of chemical elements without fixed attributes, or a
living body out of cells devoid of functional stability,
as to upbuild a social body out of human beings with-
out some basic stability in their physical organization
and some assurance of their moral integrity.

XI. The Growth Rhythm: Individual Growth, Frag-
mentation, Regeneration, Association

In our final survey of nature growth, we wish to
emphasize the fact that growth always proceeds in
definite rhythmic order, or in repeated sequences of
four progressive phases. In the first phase, through
the agency of its internal and external system of profit-
able exchange, the individual ultimately attains its

maximum development, or growth, in volume, com-
plexity, and stability. In the second phase, growth
tends to attain its maximum by increase in numbers,
or by division, fragmentation, or dissociation. In the
third phase, these subdivisions, or fragments, again
grow up, by regeneration, to their respective limita-
tions. In the fourth phase, these individualities unite
to form cooperative associations, or new growing indi-
vidualities of a higher order. And so on indefinitely,
into the highest phases of social growth. Although
these four phases of growth overlap and interlock in
many ways, they necessarily follow one another in the
order indicated.

To give specific examples. Cells, as individuals,
have their specific growth phases and limitations, fol-
lowed by their fragmentations, regeneration, and asso-
ciations. Then follows the development of the bodily
product of these associations; their ultimate subdivi-
sion, their regeneration, and their association into colo-
nies, or social aggregations. On a higher scale, man
has his own limited growth phase as an individual;
growth by sexual fragmentation, fertilization, and re-
generation, and so multiplication in numbers. Then
follow the combinations of human individuals to form
various social aggregates, followed by their growth,
their dissociative divisions or multiplications, and their
cooperative unions, etc.

But if growth proceeded in this way indefinitely, all
the available materials essential to organic growth
would soon be exhausted, or tied up in the lowest stages
of growth. It cannot proceed indefinitely, because
each individuality has only a temporary hold on its
possessions, and because there is a perpetual exchange

AGENCIES, HABITAT, AND GROWTH 113

between high and low, the new and the old, the living
and the dead.

Since growth always tends to outrun its administra-
tive inventions, every growing system ultimately
reaches the 'limit of its capacity for conveyance and
self-maintenance. When that point is approached,
the growing system hesitates in its career, and with
diminishing power and increasing disorders, declines,
through senility, into that more complete fragmentation
we call death or dissolution. But since the basic power
of growth is in no wise destroyed by death, and because
the profits of individual life are in some measure con-
served after death, life still maintains its continuous
rhythmic progression; an alternation of partial death
and complete regeneration and, it may be, the surpass-
ing of all previous records of achievement. For every
new life, as a rule, starts on a little higher level than
its predecessors, and with greater resources at its com-
mand.

CHAPTER V

NATURE'S DUAL ADMINISTRATIVE
SOVEREIGNTY

The Dual Sovereignty of Individuality, or Internal and External
Autonomy — The Internal Administration of Life — The External
Administration of Life — The Federal Administration of Life — The
Insurance of Life.

WE have seen that growth is a basic attribute of
nature, the expression of an inexhaustible latent power,
ever waiting a new birth of freedom in the perform-
ance of some specific service. It is manifest in the
automatic construction of nature's individualities; its
working capital is the accumulated profits of past serv-
ices dedicated to further constructive enterprises.
These processes are administrative in character, and
are used in common by the organic and inorganic
worlds of supply and demand; growth itself creating
the new means to fulfil the new demands.

Nature's administrative system necessarily involves,
therefore, some way of insuring the integrity of her in-
dividualities, their conveyance through time and space,
the usage of them as endowments to larger ends, and
the attainment of those ends through restrictive and
directive discipline.

I. The Dual Sovereignty of Individuality or Internal
and External Autonomy

Growth depends primarily on what we call
"chance," or accidental combinations, which, after all,

114

NATURE'S DUAL SOVEREIGNTY 115

merely mean that ultimately the right constructive
things come into the right constructive relations. But
why is it that there is so little evidence of chance in the
products of growth ; that is, in the constructed, or grow-
ing things? Why is it that with the progress of evo-
lution, all the constituent parts of a living thing become
more stabilized in structure, and regulated in their
functioning, if the fate of these constituents was orig-
inally governed by chance? The biologist is con-
stantly confronted and confounded by this dilemma,
for nature offers him an equally pointed denial and af-
firmation of freedom and repression, mechanism and
vitalism; spontaneity in the new, determination in the
old ; of internal autonomy, and external control. He
clearly sees the reign of disorder in the smaller affairs
of life, and with equal clearness the reign of order in
its larger affairs; the initial lack of direction in ele-
mental parts, and the ultimate direction of elemental
parts within the resultant whole; the lack of purpose-
ful action in life's constituents, and the intelligent, pur-
poseful conduct of the living organism. He is an ex-
pert witness to the perpetual contradiction of life by
death, and to the perpetual contradiction of death by
a recurrent life.

Here we touch the very heart of nature-c6nduct,
and if we look intently we may catch some glimpse of
her methods of self-construction and self-control.

These apparent contradictions are due to the fact
that at every stage of growth, there is created within
every growing thing some new phase of communal life,
some new phase of environment, which governs the
action of these constituent parts. For since no growth
can confine its products to a single point, and since all

ii6 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

growth is consecutive, not instantaneous, it is impos-
sible for all parts of a growing body, or all members
of any social institution, to be precisely alike in rela-
tive location; or in their relative time of advent; or in
many other conditions incidental to growth. These
conditions inevitably determine what these parts are,
what they must do, and the things they may, or may
not do. The same laws govern the growth of the outer
world in which these individuals must live. That is,
nature-growth successively imposes on itself its own di-
rective discipline, giving to each individuality a sov-
ereignty of its own, and a different sovereignty to its
outer world.

This sovereignty of the inner life enables the indi-
vidual to find a place in the outer world where it may
live and grow. On the other hand, the outer world
invites the peaceful penetration of its domains; but it
subjects all additions to its own resources to its own
sovereignty. Thus the administrative system of nature
is always expressed in dual form. Apparently its sov-
ereignty is always divided against itself ; the individual
for itself, and all the rest of the world for itself.

But this dual selfishness and independence is ulti-
mately mutually serviceable and mutually directive.
In reality, it is cooperatively unified into one creative
process.

As each component part of any individual, and each
component part of its outer world, exists under differ-
ent conditions, all of them necessarily grow in differ-
ent ways, bringing internal interests into perpetual
conflict with one another, and the individual, as a
whole, into conflict with the changing conditions in its
outer world.

NATURE'S DUAL SOVEREIGNTY 117

Every living thing, therefore, must make its prog-
ress, if at all, in three principal ways: (i) by better co-
operation in its inner life; (2) by better cooperation
in its outer life; and (3) by better cooperation be-
tween its inner and outer life. These betterments lib-
erate individual growth, enlarge the individual, and
increase its directive influences on its outer world.

II. The Internal Administration of Life

The chief problem for the internal administration.
of life is how to create the best internal environments
for the conduct of its own affairs, or the most effective
machinery for the internal distribution and assimila-
tion of its constructive materials and forces. It does
not change the nature of these' problems, if the life in
question is that of a single cell, a flower, a worm, or
a society of human beings; or if the requisite construc-
tive materials and forces are molecules, or proteids, or
petroleum, or ideas.

The historic and descriptive sciences, such as pale-
ontology, comparative anatomy, embryology, and
physiology, tell us with unmistakable clearness that
all these internal improvements in life are brought
about by so reconstructing and rearranging the various
bodily members, such as nerves, blood vessels, appen-
dages, etc., as to produce more economic and equitable
bodily services, and the better to carry on the increased
traffic these improvements both create and demand.

The chief point to be observed is that each admin-
istrative improvement, no matter how ft is initiated,
whether by some change in the position or structure
of organs, or by some addition or subtraction, or by

ii8 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

new combinations of germinal materials, inevitably
quickens or releases some new form of growth, local
or general. These new products may, or may not, be
of immediate constructive value, but in any case their
presence upsets preexisting relations, and inevitably
creates, elsewhere, new checks, or releases, to the lurk-
ing power of growth. Moderate impact, stress, and
strain modify the growth of the parts so affected, and
thereby modify their resistance, or their response, to
these strains and stimuli. All actions and reactions
tend to take the shortest route, and the easiest way. The
pathways of exchange are laid out,, cleared, and
strengthened by using, and they are preempted, or com-
mandeered for service, according to their cooperative
value and prior constructive necessity.

Thus growth itself creates a diversified internal en-
vironment, and this internal environment controls the
progress of growth, because it controls the administra-
tion of supplies to its constituent parts. Each point
that is better served promptly responds by increased
growth, and increased power of service. It dwindles
when poorly served; and as it dwindles, so do its de-
mands for service. Thus the service of the served
flourishes apace; and the servant is fortified by his own
service. But the servant that is unserved perishes, and
his power to serve perishes with him.

III. The External Administration of Life

Thus while the internal environment of the indi-
vidual is self-created, this is by no means the case with
its external environment. Life cannot create, nor can
it modify, except to a very limited extent, its external

NATURE'S DUAL SOVEREIGNTY 119

environments. It cannot temper the seasons ; nor con-
trol the physical nature of its habitat; nor radically
change the character and distribution of its food sup-
plies ; nor alter the basic attributes of its fellow beings.

Life itself must seek out and find the best environ-
ments to live in, rightly using its instruments of dis-
covery, and its machinery of response, to keep in touch
with those constructive agents, mental and bodily,
which the external world holds in readiness for the
service of life.

Life can endure only so long as it yields to these
larger agents upon which it depends, and builds itself
up in harmony with the more rigid medium in which
it exists. The chief problems in the administration
of its external affairs, therefore, are how to avoid, or
exclude, those things which are harmful; how to seek
out, and appropriate, or associate itself with, the things
which are serviceable; how to submit to the counter
currents and turbulent eddies created by the unequal
progress of the world at large; and thereby itself make
progress in the performance of its services.

Hence whatever progress life actually has made in
its external affairs has been made by better usage of
the products of world-growth, and by improvements in
the ways and means of self-insulation, or protection
against them. That means better response to them;
better locomotion toward them, or away from them;
better communication, and more profitable exchange
with them.

All these improvements have their origin in the
shifting conditions of the outer world, where each part
grows, as best it may. The improvements exist, and

120 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

are improvements, because they are more cooperative,
and more constructive in their effects. They cannot
come into being, or at most but temporarily, if they
are destructive to the internal organization of life; and
they cannot endure without still further improvements,
keeping pace with the progress of the external world,
which itself moves onward, in its own way, with irre-
sistible momentum.

The long story of these manifold adjustments and
devices is partly told by those branches of science, fa-
miliarly known as natural history, and by the more
modern science of cecology.

IV. The Federal Administration of Life

When these two administrative systems are approxi-
mately balanced, a definite rate of growth or, exchange,
ensues, constituting for the time being what is called
fitness, or adaptation for existence.

But this rate is never uniform, in whole or in part,
because the internal and external improvements are
never of equal creative value; because other condi-
tions, within and without, are constantly changing, and
these changes are not necessarily dependent on one an-
other.

There must be some ways and means, therefore, of
restoring the cooperative balance between the inner
and outer life whenever it is unduly upset. For lack
of a better term, we shall call these ways and means
the federal administration of life.

The two systems control each other in something
like the following manner: As we have already indi-
cated, better internal administration produces either

NATURE'S DUAL SOVEREIGNTY 121

more growth, or more rapid exchange, making heavier
demands on the external administration, or commis-
sary side of life, and more quickly exhausting the at-
tainable supplies. If they cannot be obtained, inter-
nal improvements will be of no avail. To meet these
new internal demands, the external administration must
invent, or find, new ways and means to supply them.
That is, there must be some improvement in the power
of capture, either by increasing the surface exposure
relative to volume, or by increasing the powers of dis-
covery, or locomotion, or orientation, or the power of
discrimination between good and evil.

Locomotion is an expensive function. To be profit-
able, it must yield returns something over and above
the costs of transportation ; and the larger the body to
be moved, the greater the required velocity, and the
more that velocity must be changed, or regulated, the
more it costs.

When such improvements in capture are made, and
the internal demands are for the moment satisfied, a
new state of equilibrium between the two systems will
be attained, only to be again upset by some new gain,
or loss, in supply or demand.

Thus there is a perpetual see-saw between the com-
missary department of life, and the assimilation de-
partment. The system for the capture of supplies is
always under compulsion, as it were, to meet the new
demands of growth; and growth always uses its surplus
supplies to create new things, which themselves pro-
vide new ways and means of consumption and which
consequently create new demands.

According to the Tightness of the federal adminis-
tration, a rise in the rate of exchange, or the volume of

122 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

growth, or both, will ensue, with longer periods of bal-
anced income and outgo.

As losing systems of exchange cannot come into
being, the systems that actually do exist are either bal-
anced systems, or profitable ones, or those that have
been profitable.

Thus the administrative problems of self-construc-
tion are everywhere the same; the same for a college,
a city, a nation, a factory, or for a human being, that
they are for the humblest plant, or animal, or for the
world of life at large. They are problems of the ways
and means to liberate the latent creative powers in the
inner and outer life of each constituent part. These
ends are always attained by the same means, by mutual
services, by self-imposed discipline, and by construc-
tive Tightness.

A college, for example, is a unit, or organ, within a
still larger unit, the state. Each of these units has its
own peculiar structures and functions, subject to its
own internal sovereign conditions. Each unit helps to
create and preserve the other, and although each is a
distinct individuality, both are cooperatively one.

The quality of the college is always manifest in what
it does; by what it selects, or draws to itself in self-
construction; and by what it eliminates, or excludes in
self-protection. Its inner life is expressed by the life
of its constituent elements, or in the digestion, convey-
ance, and assimilation of constructive agents, bodily
and mentally, drawn from the outer world. The con-
stituents themselves create the restrictive and directive
influences peculiar to its internal environment; upon
their mutual services, and upon the right construction

NATURE'S DUAL SOVEREIGNTY 123

of its machinery of service, the life and growth of the
college depends.

The external life of the college is largely expressed
in parental solicitude for its offspring and in the cap-
ture of new supplies. To these ends the state invites
invasion of her opportunities and forage on her re-
sources, subject always to her sovereignty. The col-
lege neither creates these opportunities and resources,
nor controls their character, distribution, or require-
ments, although it may contribute something to them.
It must find these opportunities with its own instru-
ments, and use these resources as they are.

Any marked improvement in the inner, or outer,
administration of the college will at once liberate
growth in some particular, and thereby create some dis-
turbance in its system of give and take, supply and de-
mand. Something comparable with the federal ad-
ministration of life may then intervene to restore a more
equitable balance of cooperative services. In that case,
the criterion of equity, and the effect of the readjust-
ments, if rightly made, will be the betterment of mu-
tual services between the college and the state, and
thereby the better welfare of all their constituents.

Man upbuilds all his social institutions in this man-
ner, and in doing so he merely follows, consciously or
unconsciously, the same administrative methods every-
where used by nature in her constructive processes.
How far "chance," compulsion, and intelligence enter
therein, no one knows. In any case, the constructive
results would not, nor could not, be greatly different
from what they are, without some radical change in the
whole constructive system. In human society, a great

124 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

many different constructive and directive agents are
utilized, and while man is more discriminating in his
selections and exclusions than any other animal, he
brings to his labors no new materials or forces, and no
other franchise than a little freer usage, through his
intelligence, of nature's resources in constructive right-
ness.

V. The Insurance of Life

What we sometimes call natural phenomena, or na-
ture-action, is the weaving of many different kinds of
events and materials, springing from infinitely remote
sources, into a moving-picture fabric, whose larger,
more stable patterns we may sometimes see and feel, but
never the smaller, or more fleeting ones ; nor the basic
things which make the web, and do the weaving. Each
element of the fabric is subject, on its way, to variable
incidents ; and when that occurs, something within our-
selves may be sensibly modified; some pattern may
abruptly change, or disappear.

We are so accustomed to the apparent stability of
natural phenomena, that it is the change of pattern,
the "accident" and the eclipse, which most command
our attention, making minor incidents appear the ma-
jor. We see the threads of life vanish, swallowed up
in new constructing; but we may not see the new con-
structions, nor the way in which they are constructed.
Thus we often mistake the making of chips, for the
making of buildings. Because a thousand fish eggs die
where one survives, does not mean that their destruc-
tion was the motive, or that it was useless, or that it was
necessary, in order to make the survivor any better, or
more fit to live. And it does not mean that, seeking to

NATURE'S DUAL SOVEREIGNTY 125

imitate nature, we should make, let us say, a thousand
pairs of shoes, and destroy all but one pair in order that
a good pair may be saved. The misfortunes of life are
not the essential things. Organic evolution consists in
utilizing the scraps; in reducing the percentage of
error by the actual performance of the process of liv-
ing and dying; making one in a million, one in a hun-
dred, or one in a still smaller number fit to survive
by more surely finding and preserving the right way
to live. This progress in Tightness can only be at-
tained by accumulated improvements in the adminis-
tration of the vital processes; improvements in mutual
services which insure a larger and larger percentage of
survivals by reducing the waste and the liability to
error.

The unbroken continuity of life through untold
ages is due to the basic security and the well-ordered
life which has been assured to its individuals and to
all their subordinate parts. The continuity of life, and
its future progress depends on the perpetuation and the
improvement of this method of insurance.

In all phases of life, the liability to errors of in-
ternal adjustment, and the liability to uncontrollable
accidents from without, is directly proportional to the
extent the scaffolding of life and nature has been
erected. That is to say, the rate of liability to errors,
and to accidents, gradually increases with growth until
a point is reached where life becomes impossible, or
death inevitable.

On the other hand, life is insured against these er-
rors and accidents inversely to the extent of its prog-
ress. All the initial, fundamental processes of life
have been so effectively covered by the protective in-

126 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

surance of right living that they have acquired great
regularity and stability. It is along the frontiers of
an expanding life, or wherever young life is experi-
menting with new combinations, invading new terri-
tories, and adopting new methods of living, that life
fluctuates most rapidly, or flickers with its minor suc-
cesses and failures. There its aims are exploratory,
the failures are many, and the gains may be exceedingly
small, or fleeting. Once perhaps in an aeon, or in a
great geologic era, is some unusually constructive in-
novation crowned with a new class of enduring progeny.
The internal administration of every individual life
is insured by several sets of mingled, or overlapping
agencies: (i) In part by better "heredity," or by the
conservation and usage of right constructive materials.

(2) In part by better self-insulation and self-protec-
tion, or by that discriminating appropriation, exclu-
sion, and expulsion which tend to create and main-
tain a better internal medium for the conduct of life.

(3) In part by larger endowments. The endowments
may provide an active capital for consumption during
the early stages of life, or a regular income in the form
of parental and social services rightly performed for
the individual at prescribed periods in its development.

(4) In part by a more rigid discipline which begins
in the egg and extends throughout life. This disci-
pline is the product of definite physical and chemical
conditions established within the growing body, which
compel life to follow approved channels in a prescribed
manner and in a prescribed sequence.

Thus the internal administration of all forms of
life, as for example a plant, an insect, a human being,
a city, or a great institution, is very largely self-insured,

NATURE'S DUAL SOVEREIGNTY 127

because it is very largely self-created and self-con-
trolled. That it is not wholly so, is due to its depend-
ency on its external environment.

A molecule of water, for example, is self-con-
structed, self-controlled to the extent that it is created
through the cooperative action of its constituent parts.
But it cannot exist or endure unless it happens, or is
placed in, or finds, the right environmental conditions
to that end. So it is with a living thing, or any other
object. Hence the administration of the external life
is not and cannot be self-insured or self-determined,
for no individual life either creates or controls, except
to a very limited degree, the world in which it lives.

The external life is insured, like the internal life, by
several sets of agencies: (i) In part by the long estab-
lished order, and the basic quality, of the cosmic and
terrestrial environments of life. The nature of these
environments, their universality and durability is in-
sured by their own constructive methods; over them,
life has had, and can have, no measurable control. (2)
In part by life's self-constructive and self-saving usage
of the varied ways and means provided by nature as the
legitimate and compelling heritage of life. (3) In
part by the directive discipline of the external world
which irrevocably prescribes when, and where, and
how life may, or may not, exist. It is only by avoiding
that which is evil ; by seeking, and finding, that which
is good; by yielding, not breaking, under superior
forces; by obedience, or submission to the dictates of
the established physical, organic, and social order, that
individual life can attain cooperative conformity with
nature action, and rightly use her resources in a com-
mon creative purpose.

128 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

These external conditions are of infinite variety.
They insure to every individual specific opportunities
for self-aggrandizement, and thereby insure its useful-
ness. They also impose upon every individual spe-
cific restrictions.

CHAPTER VI

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE

The Constructive Metabolism of Egoism and Altruism — The
Merging of Egoism and Altruism into Organization, and its Emer-
gence as the Augmented Altruism of Larger Individuals — The Entail
System in Sexual Reproduction: Life's Entailed Estates; the En-
tailed Habitat; the Germ or Entailed Principal; Quick Assets or
the Endowments of Organic Capital to Embryonic Life; the Nu-
tritive Income and Forage Dividends of Youth — Bisexual, Coopera-
tion as an Agency in Parental Benevolence: Sex, and Sexual Diver-
gence; Female Attributes; Male Attributes; the Functional Attri-
butes of Germ Cells; Bisexual Cooperation — The Merging of Par-
ental Altruism into Nature Altruism and Social Altruism: the Lar-
ger Creative Values of Bisexual Divergence and Bisexual Coopera-
tion; the Unity and Cooperative Duality of Plant and Animai Life;
the Post-Sexual Period of Parental Life as an Agency in Social In-
heritance; Evolution as the Product of Altruistic Action; Intelli-
gence not an Essential Factor in Altruism — Directive Discipline:
Cosmic Discipline; Directive Discipline of the Germ; the Cu-
mulative Discipline of Organized Endowments, Structural and Bio-
nomic; Education; the Compulsion of Intelligence; Discipline in
Civic Government, in Religion, and in Science — Summary of
Chapters l-Vl.

BACK of all evolutionary processes lies a univer-
sal compulsion to constructive action. It is manifest
in three definite ways: (i) by increasing restrictions;
(2) increasing guidance; (3) increasing freedom.
That is, nature always forbids the constructive usage
of some ways; inexorably compels the usage of others;
and leaves still others open to trial, subject, however,
to contingent gains and losses, or rewards and punish-
ments. Or. to express it in still another way: nature

I2Q

130 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

compels all her constituents to follow certain construc-
tive ways temporarily open to trial ; but they are ways
which must be retained and further followed, if those
means which the right way provides are utilized. All
other ways she guards with destruction. These pre-
determined possibilties and impossibilties constitute na-
ture's directive discipline.

I. The Constructive Metabolism of Egoism and
Altruism

Let us consider, in somewhat more detail, the way
in which life takes advantage of its opportunities; how
it creates a working capital; and how it preserves and
augments that capital through reciprocal egoistic and
altruistic action. For egoistic and altruistic principles
are everywhere present in nature's constructive proc-
esses. We have already referred to them as two
phases of world service, or as self-service and super-
service.

Social life, using the term in its broadest sense, is
merely an enlargement, or extension of protoplasmic
life. In both cases, vital action is expressed in meta-
bolism, or the mutual exchange of products. In proto-
plasm, it is the exchange of protoplasmic products be-
tween protoplasmic constituents and between them and
the outer world; that is, between the anabolic, up-
building, or egoistic parts, and the catabolic, breaking
down, up-giving, or altruistic parts. In social life,
it is the exchange of social products between social con-
stituents; between up-building and up-giving human
beings; between plants and animals; old and young;
the living and the dead. In human social life, we call

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 131

this traffic in constructive materials between man and
man, and man and nature, commerce, or culture.

If growth results therefrom, there must be some
profit in the transactions; something must have been
gained. What is that gain and where does it come
from?

We may recognize four different phases in vital
growth: (i) increase in the mass, or volume, of the
individual in question; which merely means an in-
crease in the number of its constituent parts; (2) mul-
tiplication, or increase, in the number of individuals,
which means an increase in the total number of con-
stituents; (3) increase in the power of each individual,
which means better organization, or the summation of
mutual services between their .constituent parts; (4)
increase in the power of the aggregate, or of the social
group, which means its better organization and the
summation of mutual services between the constituent
social individuals. This process of growth may pro-
ceed indefinitely, but not necessarily to the same degree,
in any two or more of its phases.

All this increase in living constituents, in their vol-
ume, numbers, and power, represents, at any given
period in evolution, the world's supply of organic capi-
tal, which in turn represents the total product, or the
accumulated profits, of countless individual lives and
of their constituent parts.

Whatever vital power this aggregate of organic
capital may have is dependent on the range and volume
of its exchange in time and space; its endurance de-
pends on its power to preserve its gains; its growth, on
its power to add new gains to the old.

All these gains, material and directive, must come

primarily from without, either from cosmic agencies
previously constructed, or from other parts, or mem-
bers, of the social aggregate, previously constructed.
And when we say they "come from without" that means
that there must be some adequate machinery, or ways
and means of conveying these constructive agents from
their own creative, or initial, source, to that time and
place where they play their respective parts in new
constructions.

This whole process is in effect an organized system
of benevolence, or of cumulative endowments, the only
difference between its more primitive and its more spe-
cialized stages being in the kind of profits conserved,
and conferred by one individual on another. It is
nature's way of giving something previously construc-
ted, and conserved, to some other constructive agency.
It will be evident, on careful consideration, that be-
nevolence of this basic character must be present in all
kinds and phases of growth.

For benevolence is the giving of self to some other
self. It always implies some previous creative, or self-
constructive act, the possession of the thing so created,
and its conveyance, or transfer, from a previous pos-
sessor to another agent for further constructive usage.
This possession of a thing implies the opportunity for
usage of it in self-construction. When its creator, or
possessor, fails to use it in self-construction, it automat-
ically ceases to be a part of his system, or individuality,
and becomes the property of some other system, it may
be with better opportunities for its constructive usage.

Hence a gift is commonly valued for its durability
and its utility. But it is especially valued for the source
from which it comes, because in addition to these values

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 133

it is a token of cooperative sympathy, and the assurance
that a larger unity of purpose exists between the giver
and the receiver than in either one.

Every gift carries with it its own compulsion and
directive influence to these larger purposes. Benev-
olence, therefore, has a disciplinary value, as well as an
additive one.

Thus all benevolence has a dual aspect: self-creat-
ing and self-giving; the receiving of endowments for
self-construction, and the giving of self to new con-
structions. This is egoism and altruism. Egoism,
which in its nakedness we call self-aggrandizement,
self-preservation, and self-service, is the primary obli- »**iv\-
gation of every individual ; the initial source of nature's
constructive capital. It is a prerequisite to altruism,
for the larger and more righteous the self-constructing
service of the individual, the more the individual will
have to give; the greater will be his directive influence
on other things.

Thus the profit in evolution is some gain in the
Tightness of self-construction. That power cannot be
preserved except it be rightly added to, or conferred
upon some other constructive agent which rightly uses
it. The profits will be cumulative, or nature's capital
in organized agencies increased, provided the cost of
conveyance does not exceed, or wholly consume, the
constructive gains.

This rhythmic exchange of power between indivi-j
duals; this metabolism of self-constructive egoism am
self-giving altruism, is nature-life. If it increases ii
intensity and stability, if the social life of nature ac-
tually grows in possessions ; or if, as we say, evolution
takes place, it must mean that on the whole individual

134 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

life profits by its living and confers on its colleagues
and offspring something more of constructive right-
ness than it received. It must mean that the system of
conservation and endowment, that the constructive
value of gifts and the range of their influences, and
the power of conveying mutual services, grows, or in-
creases.

This nature-growth, or evolution, is not so evident
in the increased power of the individual itself, great
as that may be, as it is in the accumulated endowments
of nature's organized capital thereby made available
for its uses.

II. The Merging of Egoism and Altruism into Or-
ganization, and Its Emergence as the Augmented
Altruism of Larger Individuals

The reciprocal process of self-creating and self-
giving merges imperceptibly into cooperative action,
into organization, and the creation of larger individ-
ualities. The giving and receiving tends to react profit-
ably upon the giver and receiver and to unite more
and more intimately the ego and the alter, into one.

When benevolence attains its higher stages, it be-
comes more and more difficult sharply to distinguish
between its different phases and their constructive re-
sults, or purposes; that is, between the self-creating
and the self-giving; between the gifts and their con-
veyors, or their possessors; between the creating, the
receiving, and the using of the gifts ; between the com-
mon profits derived from the transaction and their con-
structive value to any one or more of the agents in-
volved.

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 135

Every living thing displays this blending of self-
creating agents and their gifts into one organic struc-
ture, and their mutually benevolent acts into one co-
operative, or vital, process, in a very intricate, but
most convincing way.

In a highly organized animal, for example, the
different kinds of cells, nerves, muscles, glands, etc.,
create and give up, receive and utilize, their respective
gifts without any clearly defined break, or interrup-
tion, in the process. The whole complex of things
possessed in common we then unhesitatingly look upon
as one thing, or the body of the animal, and all their
cooperative services as one process, its life.

By these ways and means the animal lives and grows,
and itself becomes a source of benevolent services to |
its own world of living and non-living things. The f
altruism of the individual animal is merely the over- •
flow of its constructive profits, the extension of the in- j
ternal altruism, of its internal system of metabolism and
profitable organic exchange, beyond the formal limita-
tion of its own body into the outer world of other things.

We should not allow our analysis of these basic '
processes to be confused by the thought that human,
or animal intelligence is a necessary, or an essential
factor in them. The creative power of benevolence is
the same, with or without intelligence, provided the
right constructive way is found. Intelligence is merely
a name for a quicker, more certain, more highly or-
ganized method of finding the right way to use egoism
and altruism constructively.

In the great world of nature-life, with its count-
less lives on different structural levels, benevolence
flows in hidden streams, or openly cascades from over-

136 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

flowing lives to other lives in different times and places.
Where the fountains and the tributaries of benevolence
are thus exposed, they may be more easily analyzed.
This is especially true of life's reproductive rhythm,
and of all those intermittent springs of life and death
which fill the reservoirs of nature's vital capital and
maintain their brimming measures.

III. The Entail System in Sexual Reproduction

Sooner or later every individual organism meets
internal conditions which automatically check and ul-
timately prohibit the continuity of life in that par-
ticular individual. These conditions inevitably pro-
duce those disabilities of maturity which culminate
in senility and death.

Life as a whole is sustained, and has been sustained
through ages past, by countless renewals, that is by
the generation of new living individuals to take the
place of those about to die. But these new individuals
do not start from the very beginning, or from an initial
condition like that whence the first life sprang. They
start from a new base, from a definitely attained van-
tage point, the germinal cell, the egg, or seed, far be-
yond the initial one, and aided, it may be, by an elabo-
rate equipment for the nourishment, protection, guid-
ance, and discipline of the new life.

From these new starting points, it is possible for
such things as a flower, a polyp, insect, fish, or human
being, to reproduce with unfailing precision, in a few
days, months, or years, new individuals very much
like themselves, although it required many millions

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 137

of years to produce the kinds of things to which they
belong.

Why is there such an enormous difference between
the time required to produce a particular kind, or
class, of animals or plants, in the first place, and the
time required for that class to reproduce itself?

The difference undoubtedly lies in the starting
points; in the fact that one had to create its own means
and to find out the right ways. The other had its
means given to it ready made; its ways were so pre-
scribed, so directed, and so enclosed, it was compelled
to follow them. This means that life is able to con-
serve its ways and means of living, and to make its
discoveries and inventions in constructive Tightness an
accumulative property, a material, or structural en-
dowment and a guiding hand to a future life. This
rhythmic parental egoism and altruism is a basic form
of benevolence.

Life, like science, literature, and art, creates for
posterity an ever growing heritage which gains in sta-
bility as it gains in Tightness. It creates an essentially
immortal endowment of physical properties and di-
rective discipline which insures the progress and con-
tinuity of life, despite the death of its producer. Indi-
vidual life uses these endowments as stepping stones,
or as advanced points of departure for the creation of
a new life on a higher level. By means of these im-
mortal endowments, the constructive processes of life
make their permanent gains over the destructive pro-
cesses of death. On these permanent foundations are
erected the super-structures which make for progress
and immortality.

We may never know precisely how this is done; it
is one of the great mysteries of life and nature. But
we know it is done. We know that nature has pre-
pared a place where life exists, endures, and becomes
enlarged. We know that the germinal principle of life
with its increment, a working capital and fixed income
with their increments, and the beaten pathways of con-
structive conduct, straightened by restrictive discipline,
and approved by success, are its dower.

There are always three great overlapping phases
in the life of every individual organism: (i) That of
receiving all that the individual has and is; (2) that
of preserving and augmenting these endowments; and
(3) that of giving them with their increments to their
offspring, or to life at large.

The first may be called the entail phase, the second
the growth phase, or the phase of self-enlargement,
and the third, the phase of self-giving.

Life's Entailed Estates. In recent years we have
gained an inspiring insight into the correlation between
the acts of fertilization, the architecture of germ cells,
and the products of selective breeding. These dra-
matic revelations have led some biologists, and many
laymen, to exaggerate the significance of genetics, in
the narrower meaning of the term, and dangerously
to neglect the larger aspects of life and nature.

But there are many other factors which have an
equally significant influence on the reproduction and
the evolution of life, and so far as possible all these
factors, in due proportions, should be borne in mind.
The chief factors are as follows:

i. The Entailed Habitat of Life. The habitat
common to all life, with its provincial variations, is

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 139

the gift of cosmic agencies to life. To these previously
prepared habitats, and their prescribed order, life must
conform all its activities, and from their resources de-
rive all its materials and forces.

2. The Germ, or the Entailed Principal of Life.
These estates are the parental and racial germ-plas-
mas, or chromosomes, or whatever they may be, which
constitute the more stable organic basis of life. Each
life receives them, ready made, from a long line of
ancestors, shelters and husbands them temporarily,
and then gives them up, reimpressed, to posterity. They
are the immortal, vital sparks, tended by mortal fires,
which ultimately leave the parent body and, reen-
kindled by cooperative union with one another, initiate
a redirected life.

In the higher animals, the larger part of this ger-
minal material is doubtless of the same physical and
chemical nature as that which has been the common
heritage of animal life for many millions of years. Its
constructive power has been gradually enlarged by
successive changes, additions, or improvements, and
each enlargement has become definitely stabilized, in
the sense that under widely different conditions it al-
ways grows up, if at all, in very much the same ways,
and produces the same kind of things as those from
which it came, with, it may be, something more.

The germ plasma of the human egg, for example,
is man's heritage from the whole gamut of animal lives.
It is very largely the product of their fostering care,
and at every stage of its growth into a human being it
bears the stamp of their impressions. It always grows
into a living thing, at first fundamentally like all other
living things; and then in its further up-growth takes

i4o GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

on, in definite succession, the more and more particular
^semblance of a jelly-fish, worm, arachnid, fish, reptile
and mammal ; and finally the semblance of its more
immediate human ancestors, more or less qualified
throughout by its own personal peculiarities.

In all cases, a very small part of this material, per-
haps a small fraction of one per cent, if we may so
estimate it, is less stable. Its fluctuations are visibly
expressed in those minor details which constitute the
last finishing touches, as it were, to a particular stage
of development, or which distinguish one particular
species, race, or individual, from another. It is these
relatively minor variations which now so absorb the
attention of the specialists in genetics, narrow their
horizon, and envelop their teachings in obscurities.

Although the germinal material plays such an im-
portant part in the upbuilding of the animal body, and
there has been a very great increase in its directive and
constructive power, that increase cannot as yet be di-
rectly measured in terms of germ-plasma, that is in its
structure, or volume, or quality. The germ-plasma of
the simple animals and plants is not recognizably dif-
ferent in kind, or less complex in structure, or less
voluminous, than that of man. In all cases the germinal
material itself is microscopic in volume, its basic struc-
ture and its basic mode of action inaccessible. The
differences are measurable only in terms of growth, or
in the things they ultimately produce. These proper-
ties are in marked contrast with those of all the other
estates which form a part of life's heritage.

3. Quick Assets or the Endowments of Organic
Capital to Embryonic Life. An essential part of the

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 141

endowments to a new life is the active working capital,
or quick assets, in which the vital spark is laid.

It is a highly concentrated food, freely available
for immediate consumption, and specially prepared
by the parents (not intentionally of course, although
the result is the same) to meet the first demands of the
new life. Although stored up inside the egg in the
form of fats, and oils, and proteids, etc., and although
it may be mingled with the germ, it does not form an
organic part of the germ, at least not more so than with
man, buildings, food supplies, and bank accounts, form
an organic part of the heir that makes use of them.
Like man's inherited estates, it represents the conserved
surplus products, 7or profits, of organic parental labor;
it is a parental surplus which, rightly utilized, insures
the continuity and progress of its own life. This
transfer of parental profits to the egg ensures the other-
wise helpless embryo against starvation and accidents.
It facilitates the processes of self-construction; recti-
fies and accelerates growth by placing beforehand the
right materials in the right places for the constructive
usage of the embryo. To each new life, it obviates, for
the time being, the necessity and the otherwise insuper-
able dangers of having to discover, by itself alone, the
right way to live.

There is no more impressive aspect of evolution f
than the progressive increase in the volume of this*
working capital, as well as in its Tightness, or in the
improvements in its timeliness, placement, and quali-
ties. In its mere volume and in its power to provision
a long developmental journey, the food materials which
are stored up in the egg of the higher animals, a bird

\

142 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

for example, or those which in the mammals are regul-
arly supplied to the foetus by the circulating maternal
blood, may be some millions of times greater than that
in the lower ones. The difference in the Tightness is
not so easily measured, but consideration of all the
numerous factors involved may convince one, perhaps,
that it is of a commensurate order.

4. The Nutritive Income and Forage Dividends of
Youth. To the working capital deposited in the egg,
or provided for the embryo by placental nutrition, may
be added further endowments in the form of post-natal
income and forage dividends. They are derived, in
part, from secretions of the parent body, such as mam-
mary glands and other organs, cooperatively adjusted"
to cosmic, climatic, and germ cycle periods; and in
part from a percentage of the raw materials captured
by the parents, or by the social group. All these re-
sources are subject to draft at sufficiently frequent ancf
regular intervals; and the income from them is better
insured, increased in volume and variety, and spread
over a longer and longer period of growth, with the
progress of evolution. Here also the great increase in
the volume and Tightness of parental endowments is
one of the most striking phenomena in evolution, and
long familiar to even the most casual students of nature.

IV. Bisexual Cooperation as an Agency in Parental
and Social Benevolence

i. Sex, and Sexual Divergence. Let us consider
for a moment the respective roles played by sex in the
growth and organization of life.

The characteristic differences between males and

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 143

females have their origin at the very roots of the ani-
mal and plant kingdoms. But whatever causes may
have initiated these differences, as they increase, the
power of either sex to perpetuate itself is gradually
lost. Sexual cooperation then becomes the only way
to preserve the dual life.

Individual life may be regarded as definitely ini-
tiated with the cooperative union of the male and fe-
male germ-cells respectively contributed to the new life
by male and female parents.

A part of the combined germinal fund is used in
constructing the body of a new parent; the remainder
is domiciled within that parent till it may be safety
surrendered to its complementary germ-cell in the con'
struction of the next generation.

The intervening period constitutes the period of
parental growth, a period which begins in the youth-
ful egoism of acquisition and self-construction, and
passes over into the period of parental altruism when
all its powers are utilized in the interests of its ger-
minal ward. For each sex ultimately draws on all its
resources to guard its respective trust funds, and to
convey them to a time and place where they may best
live and grow. Each sex also contributes to these ger-
minal funds it own special endowments in the form
of foods, containers, and administrative labor.

The almost universal distinction between male and
female parents rests on the basic fact that each one is
the product, as well as the conveyor, of a special kind
of germ plasm, each kind producing a different type of
metabolism, and consequently differently constructed
bodies. Thus the organic profits, which respectively
accrue to males and females during their lifetime, are

i44 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

expressed in different terms, or in different parental
powers, which ultimately serve different purposes in
the reproductive act.

2. Female Attributes. In the female type of organi-
zation, there is usually a marked tendency to conserve
the surplus products of vital labor in relatively durable
compounds, such as fats and oils, starches, sugars, and
albumens. These products accumulate in the maternal
tissues; some of them are ultimately conveyed by the
bodily fluids to the ovaries and deposited in the ova as
an initial food supply to meet the first demands of the
growing embryo. From time to time, further contri-
butions may be made to this initial supply which are
conveyed by the blood, or other parental agencies, di-
rectly to the offspring.

Generally speaking, the food supply stored up in
the egg is greatly increased with the progress of evo-
lution, till in birds and reptiles, for example, it reaches
an enormous volume. In these animals, the heavily
provisioned eggs are largely left to themselves; or
nests and shelters are built for their reception, and the
parents intermittently guard, or incubate them, as best
they may, while attending to their own welfare.

But in the highest vertebrates, like the mammals,
a fundamental improvement is made in the administra-
tion of parental benevolence, which opens up an entirely
new field of progress; for it largely obviates much of
the inevitable waste and inherent dangers of the old
system. In this more economic system of the mam-
mals, the eggs and young are not heavily provisioned
beforehand. Instead they are kept within the body of
the mother at a constant optimum temperature; and
supplied with nourishment directly, and continuously,
from her own blood, which also carries away the waste

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 145

products of the embryo. Thus the mother is left with
a greater freedom of movement in her own behalf,
while at the same time all her vital resources may be
quickly mobilized in behalf of her young.

This elaborate, direct action system of parental al-
truism, in which parental nutrition, respiration, excre-
tion, incubation, protection, and transportation are ef-
fectively combined into one prolonged organized ser-
vice, is still further supplemented by suckling the
young, and feeding them in other ways, for a consid-
erable period after birth; by carrying them about from
place to place; and by guarding and guiding them,
without stint or limit, up to the full extent of parental
powers.

3. Male Attributes. The male on the other hand
is generally a physiological spendthrift, expending, as
fast as they accrue, his organic profits in bodily ac-
tivity, and in exuberant local growths. Hence, as a
rule, the male is smaller, more active, more profusely
ornamented, than the female.

These initial defects in his character, so to speak,
are the sources of his virtues; the means by which he
ultimately makes his own peculiar contributions to
life. His persistent extravagance in architectural de-
tails, in color, and in action is in reality a recurrent
investment for the discovery of more particular phases
of constructive action. It provides him with the varied
equipment essential to a life of exploration and ad-
venture. Ultimately many of these apparently wasted
efforts and useless properties, find their constructive
outlets, and are utilized as cooperative instruments not
only to a larger life for himself, his mate, and for his
offspring, but for life at large.

146 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

4. The Functional Attributes of Germ-Cells. Sim-
ilar differences in size and in locomotor activities are
also the distinguishing attributes of the male and the
female germ-cells, or spermatozoon and ovum. The
ovum, with its stored-up energy in material form, is
larger, in many cases millions of times larger, than
its complemental sex cell; but the number is smaller.
This costly endowment cannot be economically moved
on its own power. Its great weight and volume forbid
extensive locomotion; its great organic value forbids
its use in hazardous explorations.

The sperm cells, on the contrary, are never large
depots for food. They are always very small, very
numerous, and very active; taking advantage in num-
bers, and in locomotor powers, to seek out, find, and
unite with its complemental germ.

5. Bisexual Cooperation. Sexual divergence is a
good example of what is meant by the term "finding
the right constructive ways." It is evident that im-
provements in parental benevolence demand the crea-
tion of a greater organic surplus, greater storage capa-
city for it, and greater power and freedom of move-
ment in its instruments of conveyance. But these attri-
butes are mutually incompatible; for combined in a
single individual each tends to defeat the other. The
only way to develop all these attributes is to separate
them, develop each one on its own resources, and then
recombine them, by means of cooperative action across
longer reaches of time and space, into a single func-
tion. Nature has discovered this way to increase pa-
rental benevolence, and she exploits it to the highest
degree in bisexual divergence and bisexual coopera-

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 147

tion. It is another phase of subdivision and reassocia-
tion applied to functional attributes.

The peculiar qualities of the female parent are
always the first ones to be drafted by evolution into the
service of the racial germ plasma; for her associations
with the new life, by virtue of those qualities, are
necessarily more intimate, her gifts more substantial
and of more immediate constructive value than those
of the male.

The male qualities are secondary, or supplementary
in character, although not necessarily of secondary
value. Hence the smaller size of the male and the
wider range of his activities was from the very outset
utilized in finding the female, and in conveying its
germ plasma to its destination. For, obviously, this is
the most economic way of bringing the two kinds of
germ plasma into cooperative relations.

The more subtle powers of the male, as an adminis-
trator of foreign affairs; or as a vagabond explorer,
and knightly ambassador to an outer world far beyond
the reach of female activities, was not primarily avail-
able as an asset to the new life. These potential powers
of the male were drafted into the service of life at com-
paratively late periods in organic evolution, after the
peculiar structures and properties of the masculine
body had found the cooperative ways better to direct
his guardian and exploratory activities.

Thus, in the main, femaleness sets apart and con-
serves a fraction of her germinal estates; provides for
them quick assets in adequate amounts out of her
own bodily surplus; makes the ova safe depositaries
for these endowments, and then secretly advertises
their location. Maleness answers the advertisement,

148 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

and out of his own resources provides the means, and
finds the ways, to add his powers to hers. The trans-
action is profitable; but the common, or resultant profits
go elsewhere than to the partners in the undertaking,
chiefly to their common offspring.

V. The Merging of Parental Altruism into Nature
Altruism and Social Altruism

I. The Larger Creative Values of Bisexual Diverg-
ence and Bisexual Cooperation. It is evident that
bisexual divergence and bisexual cooperation are essen-
tial factors in the constructive processes of evolution,
or nature growth. For heredity, in its broader sense,
is the reproduction of individual life out of specific
germinal materials, supplemented by all the adminis-
trative acts of a bisexual life. But not in that alone is
comprised the whole creative significance of sex.

The creative value of a bisexual life, in contrast with
asexual life, cannot be limited to the mere function
of fertilization; to sexual commerce in chromosomes;
or to the resultant expression of that commerce in Men-
delian terms of form, color, and numbers. Its full
significance is to be found in its ultimate exteasion into
much larger social functions.

Primarily, better cooperation between the two sexes
depends on better mutual services, and mutual aggran-
dizement in those secondary sexual attributes essential
to the perpetuation of themselves in their own imme-
diate offspring.

Secondarily, this parental aggrandizement finds
larger outlets for its altruism than family life; for all
kinds of individual profits, not merely germinal ma-

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 149

terials and strictly parental functions, have their con-
structive value and find their altruistic outlets as social
assets. But even in the highest forms of animal life
there is no formally organized machinery for extending
this altruistic action beyond the immediate offspring
into the social phases of life at large.

2. The Unity and Cooperative Duality of Plant
and Animal Life. Something of this kind, on a very
large scale of time and space, is accomplished by the
familiar commerce between plant life and animal life.
It will serve to illustrate what we have in mind when
we speak of the larger creative value of dual functional
divergence.

The functional unity of these two great divisions
of the organic world is based on the mutually profit-
able exchange of their characteristic products.

The conservation of organic power in starch, sugars,
wood, coal, and oil, and the peculiar nutritive, respira-
tory, medicinal, and constructive properties of many
other products of plant life, are indispensable to ani-
mal life. On their part, many plants, especially the
higher ones, are largely dependent on animal life for
their nutrition, distribution, or fertilization. In this
dual functioning, there is a prevailing tendency mutu-
ally to strengthen and accentuate the characteristics of
each other, and thereby to make each one more de-
pendent on the other. In these respects, the peculiar
attributes of immobility and conservability in the plant
kingdom, and of instability, locomotion, and explora-
tion in the animal kingdom, have the same divergent,
complementary, and cooperative relations to each other
as the male and female attributes in sexual cooperation.

On this more general exchange of plant and animal

1 5o GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

gifts and the common usage of each other's powers
depends the existence and unity of the great social life
of nature. Its continuity is wholly dependent on the
ultimate fruition of this individual self -constructive-
ness and self-surrender to this larger purpose.

3. The Post-sexual Period of Parental Life as an
Agency in Social Inheritance. In animal society, par-
ents are of little value after the reproductive period,
except as food for life at large. The prolongation
of life after it has reproduced itself is to be regarded
primarily either as a necessary margin of safety which,
for economic reasons, must be, cut down to the narrow-
est margin, or as a vital surplus for which no profitable
investment for saving, or enlarging, racial life is for
the time being available.

There are many cases, familiar to the biologist,
where, for a relatively long preliminary period, the
parents are elaborately equipped for voracious feeding,
and wholly devoted to the rapid accumulation of an
organic surplus. Then all this equipment rapidly
changes and they become wholly devoted to reproduc-
tion and the surrender of their surplus to a new genera-
tion.

But when this second purpose is accomplished, the
specialized machinery of sex, such as wings, legs, copu-
latory organs, glands, sense organs, and nervous sys-
tem, which have so well served to discover each sex
to the other, and to bring them and their respective
germ-cells into cooperative action, is disorganized and
lost in death, it may be with the sexual act, or shortly
after that act is consummated.

In many invertebrates, in mammals, and in prim-
itive man, the older members of the social group, or

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 151

those which normally have fulfilled their reproductive
functions, are deliberately destroyed by their former
associates; or they are excluded in various ways from
the giving and receiving of social services. In these
'cases the prolongation of the post-sexual period of life
is determined, apparently, not by insuperable organic
difficulties within the individual, but by external con-
ditions, or by difficulties in social administration,
which, so long as they are unsolved, prevent the further
utilization o'f the sexual equipment as an altruistic
agency.

Here, as in so many other cases, the power of
growth outruns the power of administration, and this
surplus of an over-long life, with its potentially valu-
able equipment, awaits its creative opportunity.

But, broadly speaking, with the progress of evolu-
tion, the increasing momentum of highly organized
growth tends to save, or prolong parental life more and
more beyond the period requisite for the mere con-
summation of its self-repeating function, or the endow-
ment of its offspring with necessary reconstructive ma-
terials and moral resources. In man, the post-sexual
period is of considerable duration, and under modern
social conditions it is finding specific outlets into larger
fields of altruism, and its value as a creative social fac-
tor is rapidly increasing.

This is chiefly due to man's more recently discovered
ways of conserving the profits of his vital activities,
and to his innumerable inventions for conveying them
to mankind as material, mental, or spiritual gifts.

By these inventions and discoveries, the creative
possibilities of mental and physical labor were enor-
mously diversified and multiplied; the social value of

i52 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

man's activities, other than those of his mere muscular,
or combative, or reproductive powers, was greatly in-
creased ; and human society, rather than the family, or
the class, became the beneficiary of these labors.

That is to say, in human society the expenditure of
parental labor to construct a home, a storehouse, high-
way, or machine; to domesticate the land and make it
safe for family life is so much vital power conserved
in human properties, as maternal labor is conserved in
egg-yolk, or as sunlight is in coal.

This over-constructiveness of parent life survives,
locked in the reservoirs of social culture, long after the
producer has ceased to be. It is then no less a vital
part of the body social, than it was a part, before, of
parent life. And in due season other workers add more
constructions to it, whereof the identity of the giver,
like a grain of starch in the granary of seed, is lost
in the assembling of the common store. These ma-
terial properties therefore are to social life, as are to
racial life the fats and oils assembled round the germ.
They are the mingled, unspent profits of individual
laborers; their surplus constructive capital overflow-
ing into social reservoirs as a social heritage. Accu-
mulating in the tissues of the body politic, they insure
stability and continuity to social life, and a rising level
of constructive capital to build upon.

So also it is with man's discoveries of nature's con-
structive capital in the bounteous outer world, the in-
ventions for its better usage, and those betterments in
social conduct which add to social life new powers of
regeneration. All these rare fruits of exploration and
experience are discoveries in constructive Tightness
made by individual human beings, chiefly in the ex-

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 153

ercise of their respective sexual functions. They are
discoveries of the right ways and means to do things;
of enlarging their individual lives. But the creative
power of that Tightness lives in the records of the events,
and in the things discovered, or created. These ma-
terial symbols by means of which science, literature,
and art have grown; these libraries, monuments, and
instruments, which by themselves are but dead things,
waste pigments of nature-action, unmeaning shapes and
noises, in vital union with the hand and mind of .man,
are subtle agencies of spiritual conveyance in social life,
as man's organs are the instruments of his intelligence.

The special value of this social heritage is in its
stability and democracy; in the fact that its elements are
not conserved in perishable protoplasmic form within
the narrow limits of parental bodies, or for the benefit
of their immediate offspring only. On the contrary,
they may have the strength and durability of stone or
steel and may be perpetually renovated by eliminations
and additions outside the living body of man. And so
far as they represent discoveries in constructive right-
ness, or truth, they are not exhausted, or impoverished,
by general usage, but multiplied thereby.

But the highest creative powers of man, that is his
technical skill, his wisdom, and social vision, attain
their culmination toward the close of his sexual life, and
may endure beyond it into the period of his greatest
freedom of thought and action. This period of his
fullest development, which the narrow utilitarianism
of primitive life would minimize, or destroy, has been
unconsciously retrieved by a growing feeling of fellow
sympathy; by a purposeless and apparently wasteful
social benevolence which knew not the creative power

154 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

of its own altruism, nor the nature of its returns to
posterity.

For when man, or woman, is released from all but
the more immediate demands of egoism, from the more
imperative summons of sex and the purely reproduc-
tive obligations of parenthood, then further expres-
sions of the distinctive attributes of sexual individuality
become social assets of the highest value. They be-
come, indeed, spiritual endowments expressed in the
disciplined and chastened idealism of the mature artist,
or the social worker, or whatever his, or her profession
may be called, whose creative purposes extend far be-
yond self, or family, or race, or nation, and whose over-
flowing constructive powers are the supreme gifts of
life, freely given to life at large.

4. Evolution as the Product of Altruistic Action.
From this brief survey of the chief factors in parental
and social regeneration it is evident that animals and
plants grow upwards and outwards by means of many
cosmic, racial, parental, and social endowments. These
endowments are always the outgoing products of con-
structive action in the physical world, and in the great
world of life at large. They are in part real gains;
something absolute, inevitable, and final; not only in
the material things actually constructed by nature, but
in her ways and means of constructing them. Without
this basic accumulative attribute of nature, wherein
profits are expressed in better mutual service and in
Tightness, there could be no evolution, or progressive
organization. There could be no structural gain other
than mere aggregation. No individual thing could
contribute to any other thing. There could be no be-
nevolence, or altruism, because there would be nothing

to give. Each thing would wholly spend itself in
egoism. The system of exchange would be nothing
more than a universal system of mutual robbery; a
mere passing of properties to and fro between thieves,
the agents, the process, and the products, either remain-
ing forever on the same level as at the beginning, or
sinking to a still lower level dissipating whatever
power there might be in futile action.

There is no way to estimate, or to measure this
growth except in terms of service and Tightness; or in
terms of something constructed and preserved; some-
thing rightly given, and rightly received.

5. Intelligence Not an Essential Factor in Altru-
ism. That this creative system is not based on in-
dividual consciousness, or on the purposeful acts of
intelligent beings, so far as that is true, merely emphas-
ized its significance. For any act, to be intelligent,
must be profitable in purpose. That purpose can be
realized only when it is, in effect, a cooperative, self-
constructive, or self-creative act.

Man's existing social system is in no sense a product
of previous deliberation on his part, or the mere ful-
filment of his purposes, however intelligent they may
have been. In fact, man has always been unconscious
of what he was building, and doubtless always will be,
for the seed can never know its own fruit. As a pro-
fessed philanthropist, or as a would-be benefactor of
his fellow creatures, man is not an innovator, but an
unconscious imitator of a universal creative method,
using, under its compulsion, whatever intelligence he
may have as a special instrument to accelerate the
accomplishment of natures purposes.

The three great agencies of social benevolence:

156 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

science, literature, and art— Lwere not primarily the
products of a conscious necessity, nor primarily benevo-
lent in purpose, although apparently from the very out-
set of their evolution they have been strongly impreg-
nated with idealism. As idle amusements, as aimless
exploratory activities, they sprang spontaneous from
the soil of masculine and feminine leisure. But today
they contain within themselves the riper elements of
altruism and benevolence; for they are distinctly cre-
ative and preservative in purpose ; both the instruments
of conveyance, and the conscious missionaries of their
own products.

Commerce, their sister system, stands on a lower
level, for it is rarely creative, or altruistic, in purpose,
and was ever lacking in idealism. Its conscious pur-
pose is self-profit, frankly seeking larger opportunities
for unequal exchange. It is, as yet, in the egoistic
stage of self-construction, and as yet largely unconscious
of its altruistic social function. But it cannot prevent,
even when it would, the overflow of its profits into social
benevolence.

That man in his supreme moments, has attained to
even this degree of comprehensiveness in his altruism;
that he is conscious of his own creative power and is
moved, in spite of himself, by a deliberate will to world
service, is perhaps the most significant event in organic
evolution.

V. Directive Discipline

Mingled with the material endowments to the new
life are other assets, less tangible to be sure and not so
easily measured, but some of them at least of equal im-

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 157

port. It will be convenient to consider them as a
whole under the above heading.

The directive influence of an old and well estab-
lished business on the partners to it increases with its
organized momentum and that of the social system in
which it has developed. He who holds an inherited
position in that business is thereby subject to certain
negative restrictions and positive compulsions, and en-
dowed, perforce, with a part of the constructive right-
ness of both systems which he and his forbears helped
to create.

So also it is with the momentous creative business of
nature. Every individual endowment, or addition to
that system, is subject to its directive influence; and
the endowment itself carries with itself its own restric-
tions and compulsions to constructive action.

i. Cosmic Discipline. In this sense the cosmic
system imposes its corrective discipline on life at large,
and from the very outset rigidly defines the limits of
its habitat, and the scope of its activities. Within
these broad restrictions and compulsions, physical and
chemical, provincial and climatic, life is free to grow
as best it may, subject only to those ever narrowing
limitations which life itself imposes on itself with in-
creasing precision. But otherwise the cosmic environ-
ment is a blunt tool that has little or no power to di-
rect the internal structural plans of life, or to inter-
fere with the detail of its domestic economy; for plants
and animals, when subject, for age-long periods, to
either essentially the same, or even to widely different
provincial conditions, still preserve the same wealth of
variety in structural details, as well as the construc-
tive peculiarities of their class and order.

158 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

2. The Directive Discipline of the Germ. That
thing which the germ tends to become, depends first
on its own peculiar attributes of structure and qual-
ity; and second, on the time and space relations to one
another the products of its growth are compelled to as-
sume at each successive stage. The germinal materials,
apparently, impose this directive discipline on their
products, as long as growth continues.

But the volume, or quality, of the final product can-
not depend on the number of such germinal units orig-
inally present in the germ, for if that were so the same
results would sooner or later follow from the growth
of one unit, or a hundred, or a thousand. Neither can
the variety of unlike structures in the final product de-
pend on the variety of initial germinal units; for other-
wise there would be no progressive organization, no
successive change in form and structure and quality,
and no unlike creative values in time and space.

The changing internal conditions created by
growth, and which govern all the constituent orbits of
conduct, cannot be conveyed from one generation to
another in the same sense that the initial germinal ma-
terials with their attributes are conveyed. They are
conditions, however, which must necessarily arise in
some definite sequence, and to which the actual hered-
itary materials must submit, or in accordance with
which they are compelled to express their own activi-
ties.

3. The Cumulative Discipline of Organized En-
dowments, Structural and Bionomic. The germinal
endowments of life cannot exist by themselves alone.
They are wholly dependent on other endowments, such
as rightly constructed foods, right kinds of protecting

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 159

envelopes, and the right placement of them in time and
space, which in varying degrees always go with them.
What the new life then becomes is not merely a larger
germ product, but a resultant serial product due to the
cooperative action of the germ with all these initial and
serially added contributions.

The influence of specific containers, more volumi-
nous yolk mass, and a constant food supply, to which
the germ must adapt its growth, is very considerable, to
say nothing of other modifying conditions; and their
directive influences and compulsions may continue long
after the agents themselves have bodily disappeared.

And when at last the embryo is hatched, or born, it
comes under the directive compulsion of another set
of agencies, that of the great world of plant and ani-
mal life. These external, bionomic environments were
created by the growth and multiplication of all the
constituent members of life at large. They regulate
and control the individual in much the same manner
that its internal environment regulates and controls
the life of its constituent parts, but in a less rigorous
degree.

It is evident that the internal environment of every
individual thing, whether it be a molecule, an animal,
or a social aggregate, is more directive and exacting
than its external environment, for it is more homogene-
ous, it contains fewer conflicting elements, fewer ene-
mies and neutrals; all its constituent parts have a nar-
rower common interest, and all of them cooperate bet-
ter to a common end, than those of the outer world.

But, as we have already seen, there is no definite
boundary between these inner and outer environments
of life. The two are always bridged by channels of

160 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

cooperative exchange; and the inner environment is
constantly encroaching on the outer. It is always en-
larging its domains and increasing the range and power
of its directive influences by enlarging its altruism, by
merging more and more intimately and completely one
life with another by the better performance of mutual
services.

In this way the older external environments of germ
units, the gifts contributory to them, and their prod-
ucts, successively pass over into the newer internal en-
vironments of a larger organism, and the external en-
vironment of the individual into the internal environ-
ment of society.

4. Education. All these enveloping spheres of in-
fluence, which are the products of the life that has
passed, take on the role of creating and directing factors
in the life to be. In other words, the dynamic reaction
of the conditions created by the growth of life at large
on the life of its individual constituents assumes the
function of a moulding discipline that forbids and com-
pels; that educates, and persistently leads the individ-
ual life into established pathways of self-saving and
self-constructive action. It thereby tends to make what
were originally free, or voluntary actions, and the suc-
cessive chance discoveries and inventions in construc-
tive and self-saving Tightness, compulsory.

Whenever we follow the long sequence of unerring,
self-constructive vital processes in any growing indi-
vidual, we clearly see this directive discipline at work;
for there the compulsion of Tightness is displayed in
miniature, summed up in quick development; its ac-
cumulated gains epitomized in lawful, creative action.
We see it in the rigid discipline of the cloistered em-

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 161

bryo, safely insulated, and secretly schooled in a
special environment of its own; walled up in egg-shell,
nest, or uterus; shut off from the minor incidents of
the outer world; locomotion and practically all other
movements, or functional responses to outside stimu-
lants prohibited; subject to a constant, prescribed diet,
and subject to the fixed chemical and physical condi-
tions essential to its growth.

To this rigid, intra-cameral discipline of the se-
questered embryo is added from time to time through-
out the ascending scale a larger and larger measure
of parental care, and social guidance, which extends
over longer and longer periods. When the embryo ul-
timately breaks the walls which held it in solitary con-
finement, and as larva, tadpole, or infant escapes, it
is only to enter a larger school, under the broader shel-
ter of parental care, and with the greater freedom of
parental and social discipline; and thence, still tread-
ing a fixed, invisible maze, it is led by instinct and lured
by sense, up to the still larger freedom of maturity;
into the larger cage of life, barred by circumstanding
death.

5. The Compulsion of Intelligence. In the
higher animals and in man, these compulsions are still
expressed by life itself, in its more intricate self-sav-
ing, or intelligent reactions to them. Intelligence then
becomes the medium of compulsion to righteous action ;
truth and knowledge, the agencies of that compulsion.

6. Discipline in Civic Government; in Religion;
and in Science. No man can escape the directive dis-
cipline established for him by the evolution of life at
large; nor from the more particular discipline imposed
upon him by the momentum of social growth. The re-

suit of these restrictions and compulsions are tangibly
expressed in more or less growth, or in terms of life
and death. They may be wholly unrecognized, or
manifest only in the degree of organization, or in cer-
tain saving instincts, habits, and customs, which are
automatically, or involuntarily obeyed; for to obey
them augments and preserves; to disobey, destroys.
What we call man's science, religion, and government
is the more or less formal recognition of this nature-
discipline. They are the attempts to express it in hu-
man terms of profit and loss.

Hence with the growth of intelligence, self-regu-
lating restrictions are formulated briefly and broadly
to define the limits within which the human individual
may, or may not act without detriment to himself.
Within those self-imposed limitations to conduct, real
or imaginary, lies his freedom.

But to fulfil its function as an instrument of social
evolution, using nature's methods as a guide to self-
construction, human intelligence must also formulate
constructive social mandates.

7. Civic Discipline. Man's system of self-govern-
ment, as expressed in civic, or social laws, is primarily
broadly prohibitive, and broadly permissive; rarely ex-
plicitly mandatory. Out of this common legal basis,
two opposing tendencies periodically arise and decline
in varying degrees ; but on the whole, both make some
permanent gains, for profit is the common goal of all
endeavor.

One tendency is to impose more and more specific
mandates on the many for the exclusive profits of a
few. The other, to eliminate all mandates, that in
more equal freedom for all there may be more equal

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 163

profits for all. In purpose, both tendencies are wholly
egoistic ; but the one, unchecked, leads to death in des-
potism; the other, unchecked, to social chaos, and to
death in social disintegration.

But democracy is always open as a way of retreat
from despotism to the more stable basis of equal rights;
and despotism is the way out of disintegration to the
more stable basis of unity in compulsory service.
Neither tendency can wholly accomplish its purpose.
The resultant of both is some gain for each, in unity,
stability, and mutual service.

This resultant increase, or common profit in better
cooperative action through the striving of the few with
the many and the many with the few, in alternating
partial failure and partial success for each, is a univer-
sal creative law, applicable to all constructive processes.

It is not surprising that the Constitution of the
United States, formulated as it was with the spirit of
democracy in the ascendent, contains no specific man-
dates; while individual freedom, and equal rights be-
fore the law, are strongly emphasized. In that re-
spect, it does not constitute an organic contract between
men comparable with that contract which is inherent
in every natural object, or organized body in nature;
for in all such bodies, each and every constituent part
of that body must give to the other constituents and
must receive from them, specific services to a common
end, otherwise that object cannot exist, or endure. In
other words, the constitution is not a purposeful co-
operative covenant, or compact, wherein each and every
citizen agrees, and thereby recognizes his obligations,
to perform specific services for the state in return for
specific services performed by the state for him; or

164 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

one wherein the partners to the agreement are purpose-
fully cooperating for a specified common result. No
specific obligation to contribute services to the other
under penalty of diminished returns from the other is
therein laid upon either state, or citizen. Certain ways
in which either the state, or the individual citizen, may
act without liability to legal penalties are specified;
and the penalties are specified that may be legally im-
posed upon either one if either acts in specified ways.
But otherwise no specific obligations are recognized by
them in legal terms, or can be legally exacted from
them ; no common purpose in civic law is defined ; and
no specific system of morality, or of constructive con-
duct, is legally required. It is often assumed, not
without protest, that these moral omissions in civic law
are adequately provided for in ordinary intelligence,
or may be supplied by universal education in the ele-
ments of science and religion, and the duties of citi-
zenship.

8. Discipline in Religion. Religion is more speci-
fic in its mandates, less specific in its restrictions, than
democracy.

In early Christianity, the concept of religious dis-
cipline is said to be based on a cooperative covenant be-
tween Jehovah and his chosen people in which there
was recognized the obligation to serve God in return
for his blessings. At a later period in the evolution
of Christianity, the covenant was expressed in the
promise to save all those who believed in Jesus. The
basic concept of Christian morality was mutual serv-
ice, under the directive discipline of a superior power,
and with the prospective alternative of receiving the
greatest possible reward, or the worst possible punish-

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 165

ment. That mutual service carried its own creative re-
wards was not so strongly emphasized. "Ye shall
serve the Lord, thy God, and He shall bless thy bread."
"Be thou for the people." . . . "Thou shalt teach them
ordinances and laws and shalt shew them the way
wherein they must walk, and the work that they must
do." "Six days shalt thou labor." "Thou shalt love
the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy
soul, and with all thy mind." "Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself."

The democratic state does not make corresponding
demands on its citizens. . A citizen of the United
States, it is true, may not legally work on Sunday, and
he must pay taxes, if he has taxable property; but, ex-
cept perhaps in times of the greatest emergencies, his
civic laws do not compel him to labor on any day; or
to accumulate taxable property; or to love and honor
his country; nor do they show him the way wherein
he must walk and the labor he must do.

9. The Directive Discipline of Science. Science is
more explicit in its restrictions and compulsions than
either civic or religious governments ; for science com-
prises all man's knowledge of nature-action, and all
man's intelligent efforts rightly to obey her dictates the
better to profit thereby. It seeks to define in its law-
giving, not only what may and what may not be profit-
ably done, but precisely what must be done, if it be
done profitably. It aims to measure the rewards of
Tightness, as well as the punishments which follow
every violation of nature's constructive ways. Science,
in a passing stupor, is the new Moses, receiving out of
the black and angry clouds of political dissension, na-
ture's more explicit dictates, to be translated by science

1 66 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

into terms of human conduct. In this new covenant
with nature, made with man through the agency of his
larger experience and larger intelligence, therein again
is expressed the promise that nature will serve him,
guide him, and bless him with all her powers if he
will but believe in her, and serve her, and obey her.
That promise is made in the axiom that the right to
exist and the obligation to serve are one and insepa-
rable. It carries with it the categorical imperative to
create and grow in power through mutual service. For
nature has but one purpose in all — growth; and but one
government — of all, by all, for all.

VI. Summary of Chapters I-VI

All the currents of constructive nature-action are
subject to the same directive discipline. Whatever the
agents may be, stars or corpuscles, man or cell, physi-
cal, social, or spiritual forces, the cumulative compul-
sions and restrictions of time and space, mass and
quality, progressively limit their spheres of operation,
unify and stabilize their combinations, and guide them
in gradient sequence to creative action.

Cooperation is manifest, both statically and dynam-
ically; the one in more stable structure, form, or sub-
stance; the other in change of form, in conveyance, and
exchange of properties. Exchange that is profitable,
or constructive, that stabilizes and preserves, is service-
able. The profits are in constructive Tightness. When
these profits are localized and cumulative, they are ex-
pressed in egoism, or in self-growth, or in the progres-
sive creation of some new individuality.

Mutual service is organization. It thereby creates

BENEVOLENCE AND DISCIPLINE 167

a larger unity, and a larger individuality out of smaller
ones. Service that flows out of one individuality to
another we call benevolence, or altruism. When a con-
structive way is found, we call it the right way, or right-
ness, because it is creative and preservative to that ex-
tent.

The increase of organization, or of mutual service,
mutual restraint, and mutual adaptation, is what we
call progress, or evolution. It is expressed, not only
in the growth of individualities, but, in a larger way,
by the increase of their fitness for mutual service; by
that rhythmic sequence of egoism and altruism, of give
and take, of life and death, of gain and partial loss,
which constitutes the metabolism of nature-life, and
which is the source of nature's accumulating profits in
constructive Tightness and creative unity.

PART III
THE ARCHITONICS OF EVOLUTION

CHAPTER VII

ARCHITECTURE IN NATURE AS THE EX-
PRESSION OF COOPERATIVE NATURE-
ACTION

Knowledge Expressed in Architectural Terms — Architecture and
Function — Architecture Diversity a Prerequisite to Evolution —
Reciprocal Relations between the Architecture of the Individual and
its Response to its Environment — Architectural Values and Cooper-
ative Balance — The Divergent Architecture and Cooperative Unity
of Plant and Animal Life — The Compulsion of Established Con-
structive Methods.

I. Knowledge, Expressed in Architectural Terms

IN nature, form and action, matter and energy, past
and future, internal and external, are one and insepa-
rable; each is a reciprocal manifestation of the other.

Hence statics are no more, and no less, significant
than dynamics; morphology than physiology; observa-"
tion than experiment; history than prophecy. In any
case the biologist must interpret all vital action in ar-
chitectural terms, or in terms of material things vari-
ously distributed in time and space; and all material
structures in terms of past or future action. The as-
tronomer, chemist, statesman, and philosopher, and the
so-called practical man, or layman, are subject to the
same mental compulsion. One has no different mental
instruments to work with than the other.

Man's stature, mental and physical, is his formal
reaction to his own outer world of nature-action; his

171

172 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

understanding is the measure of himself, in fractions of
the whole, which he himself is compelled to express
in architectural terms of history and prophecy, massed
in gradient vanishing lines around a centre within him-
self where past and future join.

II. Architecture and Function

A house, for example, is a sturdy skeleton of walls
and beams, rightly resting on and holding up each
other. Its base is stable earth; it is held to earth by
gravity. Gravity is also the orienting, directive power
which chiefly limits and prescribes its architectural
plan and the usage of its structures; for acting in rec-
tilinear, radial paths, it points the chimneys to the
skies, and dictates where cellar, chamber, and attic
shall be, and where the exit and entrance.

Subject to these basic conditions, a house may grow
in serviceability, if new constructive elements are
rightly added to it. But the extent to which it may be
enlarged by man, still serving as a safe and fitting dwell-
ing for him, will depend on the kind of materials util-
ized, and on the structural plan followed in its con-
struction. That is, on the points and angles of addi-
tions; on the possibility of uninterrupted renewal,
strengthening and remodelling appropriate to its in-
creasing size and more varied uses; on its resistance to
enemy attacks, to shifting sub-soils, to earthquakes, va-
grant storms, and other perturbations of nature's more
normal action. Rightly done, a hut may grow into
a city of enduring palaces ; otherwise it must forever
remain a hut; a temporary shelter, crumbling in ad-
versity, perhaps to be at once rebuilt, but always sub-

ARCHITECTURE— NATURE-ACTION 173

ject to its inherent architectural limitations, which in
turn strictly limit the upbuilding of its inhabitants.

So it is with all the housings of life. To preserve
its integrity, to insure its continued growth and the
continuity of its shelter, every living thing must itself
make its own additions to itself of definite things in
definite ways, and its own eliminations. It must
rightly orient itself to the more stable cosmic agen-
cies, such as heat and light, and air and gravity; pro-
vide for its necessary renewals and remodellings ; lay
out its own internal lines of incoming and outgoing
products; and keep itself in touch with the shifting
lines of world traffic all about it. That all this really
is done, is clearly displayed in the architecture of liv-
ing things, that is in their structural plans, and in their
functioning, or their ways and means of handling their
constructive materials.

This constructive action is less in evidence where
it is most constant and most evenly balanced, as, for
example, in a crystal, or stone; here the minute con-
tributory acts, and the multitudinous actors cannot stir
our sensibility; only the sum is sensible, producing in
us the preponderant impression of solidity and un-
changeability.

It is most impressive where the actors, or function-
ing organs, are visible, or tangible bodies, themselves
moving in measurable orbits under mutual influences,
as the planets and satellites of our own solar system,
or the cilia, heart, blood corpuscles, legs, or wings,
of a living organism, moving with monotonous, rhyth-
mic repetition in definite channels, or pathways.

These orbits of moving planets, organs, or corpus-
cles, may be swayed by passing influences, the imme-

174 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

diate sources of which may or may not be recognizable,
producing, according to the degree of disturbance, or
control, what we call determination, perturbation, con-
duct, or behavior; or, briefly, more or less constructive,
or destructive, action.

When the pathways are less distinct, less frequently,
or less regularly utilized; when moving objects are
widely separated in time or space, and mutual influ-
ences are less in evidence, as in the great social system
of plant and animal life, or in the narrower social life
of man, the impression of architectural unity is reduced
to the vanishing point, and no longer commands our
attention. Each individual thing then appears to act
independently, or in ways peculiar to itself; yet the co-
operative coherency and structural unity is still there,
as inexorable as ever.

It is because of the infinite variety of architectural
details, precise and definite in each individual thing,
and in all their subordinate parts, that this apparent
freedom and precision of movement is possible.

It is evident that no one individual thing can con-
tain all the necessary functions, or instruments, of con-
struction. Hence, whenever one method of growth at-
tains its own constructive limits, its products must then
themselves become constructive instruments, or agents,
playing their respective roles on a more comprehensive
scale.

If a jelly-fish had all the wisdom of Solomon, it
could not utilize that wisdom in self-saving or self-con-
structive acts. The external agencies necessary to in-
telligent action cannot gain access to a jelly-fish; but
even if they did, the jelly-fish could not respond to them

ARCHITECTURE— NATURE-ACTION 175

in a helpful or self-saving way. Neither the receivers,
nor the conveyors, nor the other actors, rightly con-
structeH to that end, are present.

A creative genius, with nothing but gelatinous in-
struments to work with, could not rise above the physi-
cal limitations of his instruments, or above the creative
power of the things which he is able to give and to re-
ceive.

III. Architectural Diversity a Prerequisite to Evo-
lution

Thus life cannot advance in the same directions, nor
at the same rates, nor to the same degrees. It thereby
acquires the structural diversity on which its coopera-
tive action depends. If all the constituent parts of an
animal were exactly alike, or on the same dead level
of structure, the animal could not exist. This is like
assuming the impossible to be possible, for the very
essence of vitality is the cooperative action of an in-
finite number of parts in multitudinous variety. And
just as these diversified powers are essential to the crea-
tion and preservation of each individual life, so also are
many different species, orders, and classes of living
things essential to the creation and progress of life as
a whole.

Life, therefore, had to bide its time, and await the
vital and social organization of its countless armies of
animal and plant life progressing on a world-wide
front; wait till its pioneers had themselves constructed
the organic instruments that would enable them to find
the ways and means which nature keeps in reserve, or

176 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

provides, in due season, for life's usage. And today
life still bides its time and awaits the performances of
specific social services.

IV. Reciprocal Relations Between the Architecture

of the Individual and Its Response to

Its Environment

But how is it possible for such a great variety of
living things to exist side by side in what appears to
be the same external environment? Why is it that
many of them live on the same structural level in dif-
ferent environments; and again, why do some advance
in structure, others fall to lower levels, and still others
remain practically stationary for indefinite periods?
It will help us to answer these questions if we bear in
mind the difference between the nominal habitat of the
individual and the real one ; between the architectural
materials which are utilized, and the structural plans
which have been adopted in each particular organism.

The environment of any living thing, using the term
in its commonly accepted meaning, does not represent
the whole content of the place wherein it exists. It com-
prises only those parts of it to which the living thing
responds, and with which it comes into constructive
relations. In this sense, two things may live side by
side in the same habitat, and yet have their being in
different environments because they do not react to the
same agencies in them, and because they are not active
parts of the same system. The tree does not live in the
same environment as the bird that nests in its branches ;
nor does the dog live in the same environment as his
master, even though he lives in companionship with

ARCHITECTURE— NATURE-ACTION 177

him ; nor does the boy live in the same environment as
his father, even though he dwell with him in the same
household.

This functional isolation, independence, and dis-
tinctive behavior of individual life is due to its distinc-
tive internal architecture. That is what, in effect,
limits and defines the content of its outer world, not
the presence, or absence, of things actually in it. In
other words, the sources of individuality are internal,
not external; and the infinite diversity of nature-life
lies primarily in its multitudinous variety of individu-
als, not merely in their environments. Therein lies a
special significance in numbers, giving to them some-
thing more than a mere summational quality. This di-
versity of life is based on the axiom that two things can
not occupy the same space at the same time; conversely,
no two individuals can be alike. The increasing di-
versity in individual life, which inevitably follows in-
crease in numbers, is a perpetual invitation to make
profitable usage of it. Only when the invitation is ac-
cepted, and cooperative action with qualitative sub-
division of labor takes place, does the possibility of
creating a higher life become a reality.

Thus it is that an animal, like any other balanced
system of cooperative action may endure in a world
of many changes and yet take little or no part in them.
On the other hand by virtue of some apparently insig-
nificant internal readjustment peculiar to itself it may
move rapidly onward and upward leaving its fellows
behind in the old life and environment So chang-
ing, it may enter a new world without changing its
nominal habitat because these internal structural
changes bring it for the first time into cooperative re-

178 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

latioris with things it could not before utilize, or with
new agencies which for it did not before exist.

V. Architectural Values and Cooperative Balance

From every main line of progress, many side
branches or collateral lines of evolution arise. The
point where a larger or smaller branch diverges from
the main stem represents a period when some particu-
lar method of growth, or building material, or habitat,
was definitely adopted; and the number and extent of
the secondary branches arising therefrom represent the
constructive products of that experiment, and testify to
the creative possibilities of the change.

Any estimate of these gains must be based on all
three of the fundamental requirements of organic prog-
ress, i.e. (i) increase in content, or volume; (2) im-
provements in internal administration; and (3) im-
provement in external administration. Increase in any
one respect is largely dependent on the other two ; but
increase in volume is the less restrained, the more prim-
itive, or the initial one of the three processes. It tends
to exceed the other two, and in excess automatically
checks their progress. On the other hand, successful
inventions in administration accelerate growth in vol-
ume which ultimately neutralizes the effects of the
invention and restores a new cooperative balance.

Thus any condition which disturbs the pre-exist-
ing methods of cooperative action checks or releases the
ever-lurking powers of growth, and leads to over-pro-
duction or under-production, the result of which may
be either organic stability, or decadent evolution, or
extinction.

ARCHITECTURE— NATURE-ACTION 179

In the development of a tunicate, or a barnacle,
for example, there is evidence of unusual internal
changes in the rate of growth and the character of its
various organs, which necessitate a return to a simpler
mode of life than that of its progenitors. The admin-
istration of its purely digestive processes is little im-
paired; but the secretion of thick cellulose walls, or
of lime-filled chiten, is developed to an extraordinary
degree, so that they no longer act as protective enve-
lopes, but as prison walls, or sinkers, or cumbersome an-
chors, thereby compelling these animals to adopt a ses-
sile, or stationary, life. Moreover the blood vessels
and excretory organs fail to complete the normal meas-
ure of their growth, greatly reducing the efficiency of
internal exchange; and the degeneration of the eyes,
brain, and locomotor organs cuts down cooperative
contact with the outer world, and reduces the external
administration of life to a minimum.

Organic degeneration of this character, as well as
organic progress, involves many changes and effects
difficult to distinguish from one another; and some of
them no doubt are due to remote changes in the con-
structive germinal materials. But whatever the causes
may be, a simpler life is always a necessary result of
the lack of organic instruments, or a disturbance of
their cooperative balance; while increased freedom of
action is an inevitable accompaniment of better organs
and better organic cooperation.

That the architectural materials used by growth
have far-reaching effects on the life of the organism
is also shown by the difference, as a whole, between
plant life and animal life. Animals, as a class, stand
on a higher cooperative level than plants because of

i So GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

their greater freedom of movement, and their profit-
able response to more subtle internal and external ac-
tions.

This is very largely due to the fact that all plant
cells are enclosed in cellulose walls, often of great thick-
ness and rigidity. Plants have never been able wholly
to shake off this element in their make-up ; and this ele-
ment has persistently restricted their mode of growth,
their nutrition, and their power to receive, and respond
to, external stimuli. Plant cells, coated with cellulose,
apparently cannot be spun into nerve fibres, or mus-
cles, or blood corpuscles, or eyes and ears, like those
so almost universally formed from the naked cells of
animals; and all the resources of time and place, hered-
ity and environment, have been powerless to remove
this firmly established disability. Nevertheless, this
very disability has been widely utilized at every stage
in the evolution of plant and animal life.

A pig stands on a much lower level, architecturally,
than man because, among other reasons, the adminis-
tration of its commissary functions is largely dependent
on cloven hoofs, and on the rooting efficiency of a blunt
and clumsy implement. The traditional methods of
the pig, while not exclusively his own, have helped to
perpetuate a flourishing race of highly organized ani-
mals. But his hoofs and snout, as purely mechanical
instruments for the administration of foreign affairs,
cannot compare in efficiency with the hands and tongue
of man, because owing to their anatomical position,
structure, and internal organic connections they can-
not bring the animal into cooperative contact with the
outer world in as many different ways or do as many
different things. No conceivable improvement in in-

ARCHITECTURE— NATURE-ACTION 181

telligence, environment, or morality could remedy these
individual defects, or enable these organs to sustain
such a free and diversified life as that of an ape, or a
human being.

• • • • •

In all these cases and in many others that might be
cited, a fixed cooperative balance between all the vital
processes of life is never attained. Organic balance
is constantly fluctuating, the threatening deflections in-
dicating unequal progress in one or the other of the
great vital functions ; the return toward a more stable
norm, indicating the restoration of equality in the prog-
ress of all. In other words, the organic balancing
point of individual life is never central ; the living or-
ganism is always longer on growth than on adminis-
tration. The latter is always behindhand, and by re-
adjustments and compromise is constantly striving, as
it were, to catch up with growth in order to meet the
demands of its increased content.

. • • • •

But it is a familiar fact to the morphologist that
there are inherent limitations to the modifications and
readjustments that can safely be made in a given struc-
tural plan, or method of growth, after it is once estab-
lished.

The nature of these limitations can be but roughly
determined, if at all; but their existence is clearly in-
dicated by the limited development of their products
after a prolonged period of trial ; and by the fact that
another method, under apparently similar external con-
ditions, and in a very much shorter time, gives infi-
nitely larger returns.

1 82 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

VI. The Divergent Architecture and Cooperative
Unity of Plant and Animal Life

In its upbuilding from a common beginning, life
has found, strangely enough, but two main lines of
architecture open to it, the plant line and the animal
line.

This basic duality of life is the more impressive in
view of the multiplicity of structural types in the do-
mains of purely physical and chemical phenomena. In
no other domain of nature are there two such distinct
classes of phenomena, each standing so much apart
architecturally, yet each so complemental function-
ally to the other. Therein lies the secret of this archi-
tectural duality, for the mutually sustaining attributes
of plants and animals, like those of the male and fe-
male sex, are of such a character that neither could
exist without the other, and neither could alone per-
form the work of both. Thus plants and animals cre-
ate a common life, held together, not in formal archi-
tectural unity, but in labile cooperative action.

The distinctive inventions of plant and animal life
have been persistently followed up, and apparently ex-
ploited to their utmost possibilities.

For every plant and every animal, blindly or other-
wise, seeks to avoid that which is destructive to it, and
failing, dwindles away, or vanishes in extinction.
Every plant and every animal, aimlessly or otherwise,
seeks out and tests every nook and cranny of fitting
opportunity for further growth, and finding it, the fur-
ther grows, the more firmly holds to the more enduring
help, to the more saving shelters of the world at large,
and to their more bounteous conveyors ; fitting itself to

ARCHITECTURE— NATURE-ACTION 183

them, as roots to the texture of the soil, or as leaves
to the temper of the wind and sun ; clinging to them as
a child clings to its mother and moulds itself to her
larger ways; or as a fish clings to the waters and fits
itself to the idiosyncasies of their life-giving pools and
currents.

Thus what we carelessly call the "vital" organs, or
living tissues, of a given plant or animal are in reality
but a very small part of its sustaining resources; for
every organism is a pensioner to the labor of its outer
world of living and non-living things; and is tied to
its beneficiaries by countless visible or invisible archi-
tectural bonds. These bonds may be cancelled, in our
more direct discourse, but they should never be for-
gotten.

We may picture this process of animal and plant
evolution as a growing tree with two main branches,
and a common stem representing the common stock in
which the two great lines of plant and animal life have
their origin. The two main lines of growth become
more and more widely separated in character, because
plants and animals utilized in their architecture widely
different constructive materials, and different methods
of assimilation and growth.

As the whole animal kingdom and the whole plant
kingdom are come from the same common stock, are
of equal age, and have had equal rights and equal op-
portunities to utilize the franchise of earth, and sea, and
air, whatever difference there may be between them
must be in architectural methods and constructive ma-
terials, not in opportunity. That is, the difference, let
us say, between a flowering plant and a mammal must

1 84 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

be due primarily to the difference in the potential pow-
ers of the materials and methods utilized in growing,
not to any extrinsic circumstance.

But the incomparably larger results attained by ani-
mals individually are by no means wholly due to the
creative powers of their own germinal materials or
methods of growth. They are due in large measure to
the supplementary activities of the whole plant king-
dom, for plants supply, and they alone can do so, the
essential structural materials for animal life. And ani-
mals reciprocate by performing indispensable services
for plant life. In fact, each supplements the other
and both act like two different organs performing their
respective functions in unison for the common body
of nature life.

From this point of view, there is no reason to as-
sume that somewhere, or somehow, the plant made a"
mistake, so to speak, in the adoption of an inferior, or
vegetative, method of living, one that cani never attain
the freedom and versatility of animal life; and one
whose highest product is a fruit, or a flower, beauti-
ful, it may.be, and serviceable to both plant and animal,
but without intelligence. But even so, the fruit and
the flower play but a minor part in the service of plants
to animals. It is the plant's basic method of living
which is the more fundamental and important thing,
as essential to the evolution of consciousness and intelli-
gence as sense organs and nerves. For plants are the
living bridges which unite man constructively to the
sun and the soil; over these busy bridges, nature sends
her merchandise from the inorganic to the organic
world, from the physical to the spiritual and back
again, tying all nature traffic into one.

ARCHITECTURE— NATURE-ACTION 185

We need not enter into a technical discussion of
the differences between plant and animal life. They
are fully described in most text books of biology. Very
briefly stated, and without reference to well-known ex-
ceptions that do not seriously affect the general rule,
they are as follows: In plants, the living protoplasm
is enclosed in woody chambers, or cellulose walls,
through which only soluble foods may pass. In ani-
mals, these woody envelopes are absent and solid foods
may be taken into the body, and particles of suitable
size may pass freely into the living cells. Plants have
certain instruments, which, in cooperation with light,
transform inorganic solutions into living protoplasm.
Animals cannot do this. They must live on the prod-
ucts of the plant, or on other animals that live on plants ;
and their foods must be broken up, dissolved, and dis-
tributed in roundabout ways before they can be util-
ized in the construction of animal protoplasm. Plants
use carbon dioxide and liberate oxygen. Animals use
oxygen and give off carbon dioxide. Plants have no
muscles, nerves, and sense organs. These are the chief
instruments of animal life.

These characteristic instruments of plants and ani-
mals rigidly restrict their respective manners of living,
but open to each resources unavailable to the other. To
the plant, they open to self-constructive usage the physi-
cal powers of heat and light and the chemical materi-
als of air and soil, but bind them to the soil, and to the
sun, for they are the sources of their nourishment.
The animal is restricted to plant products for its foods;
but it is free to move from place to place, sustaining
itself by rightly following the trails of countless subtle
influences which have no existence for the plant.

i86 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

The plant, in the main, is nerveless, senseless, and
stationary; enclosed in wooden chambers and fed by
a cosmic circulation which delivers its products at the
tiny doors of expanding leaves and groping roots. The
plant is essentially inert because it is impervious to
the more complex events in the world outside itself. It
cannot quickly move into the pathways of profit nor
away from destruction. The tree cannot respond to the
inviting valley, the threatening axe, nor the oncoming
fire because it does not possess the architectural res-
onators requisite to these ends, nor the other internal
machinery requisite for the purposeful application of
its own power. It cannot, therefore, receive the warn-
ing messengers from the outer world, nor answer their
invitations in self-benefitting, or purposeful move-
ments. It can only drift with the currents and eddies
of the outer world; a passenger of the winds, the
waters, and the bees; or cling to the stable shores of re-
current cosmic events, dependent on their flotsam
bounty.

But the animal in the main is nervous, sensitive, and
active. Moving from place to place, it seeks out its
own salvation, largely impelled by its own internal
powers, guided by its own instruments. Its inner life
and structure is upbuilt in exact conformity with par-
ticular external acts of a very complex and subtle na-
ture, or with the dimensions and energy of a multi-
tude of specific vibrations and forces. Its distribution
in time and space tends to follow the distribution of
these agents. Its coming in and going out is in profit-
able response to the source, and the line of propaga-
tion, of a particular perfume, a cry, a flash of color, a
song, a sign, a word, or an idea.

ARCHITECTURE— NATURE-ACTION 187

VII. The Compulsion of Established Constructive

Methods

It is evident that as these two lines of life become
more firmly established, all further progress, or im-
provements, must be built on and around the basic
principles of these two inventions. For the plant,
therefore, the problem of life is to discover a better
use for its own peculiar instruments; to find a more
fitting place for itself in the sunf or soil, or water, and
to enter into more profitable relations with other forms
of plant and animal life. In so far as it succeeds in
doing so, in those respects it grows and so becomes more
specialized, its structure more specific, or divergent.
The same is true of animal life in all its varied phases.

CHAPTER VIII

•

VITAL ACTION VERSUS NATURE-ACTION

AS EXPRESSED IN ARCHITECTURAL

PLANS AND IN PHYLOGENY

Phylogeny — Architectural Values as Expressed in Main Lines
and Collateral Lines of Evolution — Architectural Problems and
the Increase of Power through Architectural Improvements — The
Architecture of Inorganic Growth — The Architecture of Organic
Growth — The Architecture of Plant Life — The Architecture
of Animal Life — Unicellular Growth (Protozoa) — Multicellula?
Growth — Radial Structural Plan (Coelenterates of Jellyfish) — Spir-
al Growth and False Radial Symmetry (Molluscs and Echino-
derms) .

No individual can contain within itself all the dif-
ferent instruments, or do all the different things, essen-
tial to a higher life. That is clearly shown by the
evolution of plants and animals. Historically these
two towering life-kingdoms have been upbuilt side by
side on a united front. Each kingdom follows its own
distinctive structural plans and uses its own distinctive
materials, but both progress by common agencies, and
both are everywhere strengthened by interlocking bonds
of mutual services.

The same is true on a smaller scale within each king-
dom, for at every level of their respective upbuilding,
divergent outgrowths are formed of unlike architec-
tural value. • According to the nature of the materials
utilized, the patterns they form, and the manner of
assembling their materials, these varied genetic growths

1 88

VITAL ACTION VS. NATURE-ACTION 189

may form the minor parts, the wings and flying but-
tresses, of social life, or the walls on which the super-
structures stand. For the better ways of construction
must ultimately yield the larger returns; and, con-
verselyj the actual products of a particular construc-
tive method must be a measure of its constructive right-
ness.

I. Phylogeny

Using this basic principle as our guide, we may
recognize two chief kinds of evolution: (i) the great
phylogenetic trunk lines which lead more or less di-
rectly upward from the lowest to the highest achieve-
ments in the plant and animal world; and (2) the nu-
merous collateral lines, or side branches, with their
countless ramifications which end in organisms on a
similar, or lower structural level.

In the evolution of animal life, with which we are
here particularly concerned, it is not always easy to
distinguish these collateral lines from the main line of
evolution. But it is very important that we should be
able to do so, for the ways and means of progress util-
ized by the different classes of animals will have for
us the utmost scientific and moral value. They alone
can tell us why or how, the greater constructive powers
attained by man and his predecessors have been
achieved, and how we may best utilize that knowledge
for our future guidance.

We have elsewhere 1 discussed this problem in a
technical way; we shall here briefly discuss some of
its broader aspects.

'See "The Evolution of the Vertebrates and Their Kin."

190 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

II. Architectural Values as Expressed in Main Lines
and Collateral Lines of Evolution

Under the term collateral evolution are included
all the multitudinous bypaths of creation; the groping,
exploring, trial-processes which arise as divergent off-
shoots from the main lines of evolution and lead
through branching and narrowing paths into the wild-
erness of created things. Each major offshoot repre-
sents the automatic working out, under the influence of
various external environments, of some particular in-
ternal condition. In the organic world it is the resolu-
tion of some particular plan of internal organization
into a suite of different kinds of plants or animals, each
individual being the combined result of minor varia-
tions in its own constituent parts and in those of its
environment.

The various conditions which may arise, and be
expressed in organic structures, are due to two funda-
mentally different sets of causes, namely: (a) to the
internal conditions created in a definite sequence as a
result of growth, or the accumulation of newly formed
parts; and (b) to the slower, more widely diffused cos-
mic and social changes arising outside of the organism,
whose influence on organic structures is fleeting, or gen-
eral, and whose specific local effects may appear only
after a prolonged period of action.

The march of events in the internal and external
domains of life takes place, therefore, under very dif-
ferent influences and at very different rates, and they
may have widely different constructive values.

Each offshoot, or phylum, may resolve itself, in the

VITAL ACTION VS. NATURE-ACTION 191

course of ages, into classes, orders, and families, and
some of them, it may be, into a great number of spe-
cies, or varieties, which differ among themselves in
minor details of size, form, and color, or in their mode
of action. But even when subjected to widely differ-
ent external environments, for many millions of years,
the basic structural plans, the modes of growth, and
the vital processes peculiar to the larger classes never
change. Hence it is clear that material constitution
and architectural plans may have great stability and far
more influence in determining the character of lineal
descendants than any events likely to take place in the
world external to them.

All these side branches to the great tree of evolu-
tion, these divergent types of structure and modes of
growth, with many of which nature has been experi-
menting since the very earliest recorded periods, have
either ended in defeat, or are doomed to defeat, in
the sense that they are themselves forever excluded
from attaining the highest phases of organic develop-
ment; although they may serve and have served as con-
structive agents, or as subsidiary aids, to a higher evo-
lution along other lines.

Some leads have been fruitful, as the octopus, the
ant, and the bee. For a while, their progress in struc-
tural and psychic evolution was rapid and promising,
but they soon reached the fulness of their possibilities,
and their further progress now appears to be definitely
limited. The different types of structure represented
respectively by the oyster, the snail, the worm, and by
other less familiar forms, began their periods of trial
many millions of years before the first fish-like verte-

1 92 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

brates appeared, yet they and all their descendants are
still moving in essentially the same cycles of growth
and reproduction, and on the same low level of vital
organization, as before, while the descendants of the
tribe of arachnids, and fishes, out of like environments
of seas and shores, have soared into man.

The tunicates, the sea-urchin, and the sea-lily are
still leading a semi-vegetative existence, doing essen-
tially the same kind of things, with essentially the same
kind of organs, in much the same kind of surroundings,
that they did many millions of years ago, standing ex-
amples of organic defeat through too successful stabil-
ity. Still other types of organization have long since
ceased to exist. Their dead frames are living evidence
that "that way madness lies," for extinction is na-
ture's "reductio ad absurdum" to all upright enter-
prises.

Failure of individual life to make sustained prog-
ress is due, therefore, to some defect, or failure, in in-
ternal organization. With further growth, these de-
fects are revealed; the weaker bonds are severed; co-
operation fails, or service "o'erleaps itself and falls on
the other."

Nature's highways and byways are strewn with the
wreckage of dead, stalled, or stranded enterprises that
have been checked, or defeated, through failure to meet
some one of the fundamental demands of a sustaining
unity. We may not be able to detect the flaws in meth-
ods, or materials, nor for our present purpose is it in-
cumbent upon us to do so, for the specific enterprise
which reveals no measurable progress on the clock of
ages sufficiently testifies to its own defeat. Destruc-

VITAL ACTION VS. NATURE-ACTION 193

tion may not immediately follow error, or the failure
to attain these larger ends. The sentence, so to speak,
may be suspended, and a term of probation allowed
under the restrictions entailed by the error, till a new
sphere of usefulness is found.

In many cases, however, the sources of failure- are
patent enough. It is the old story of little victories
big with defeat. Stories of over-service, or misdirected
service, or service that excludes cooperation, or will
not combine to give more service. Of unbalanced
growths that clog the channels of conveyance and shut
out the access of service. Armor of overgrown spine
and coat of mail that no longer support or protect, but
imprison, or crush to earth, or suffocate. Weapons of
overgrown tooth and nail, of hoof and claw, and horn
and spear, that no longer rightly strike, but compro-
mise with vain threats and useless lowerings, and cul-
minate, at last, in monstrous self-destroying burdens.
Service sinking to servitude, and acquisition to rapac-
ity, destroying both the master and the slave, the robber
and his prey. Cooperation swerving into competition,
and friendship into enmity, those fruitless cycles of
unending struggle between the pursuer and pursued,
seeker and hider, aggressor and defender; that have
no outlet but mutual destruction, or a deadlock of per-
petual reprisal. Over-stability that stagnates in immo-
bility, and over-freedom that rots in license.

These types of organization were doomed to defeat
at the very outset of their career, for their methods of
cooperation were economically unsound, and inca-
pable of sustained progress. Their possibilities were
soon blockaded, or exhausted, resulting in endless repe-

194 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

tition; in labyrinthine meanderings through a maze
of shifting, short-lived opportunities; in vain flutter-
ings against a dead wall of circumstance. They never
have found the open road to progress, and if youth, after
untold millions of years and opportunities, could not
find the way through, over, under, or around, it is not
likely that old age will be able to do so; for organic
evolution stiffens with age; it never can shake off its
past, nor change its initial structure and manner of do-
ing things. It is, therefore, life's cooperative response
to the outer world through the medium of its own spe-
cific architecture, not the architecture of the external
world, that primarily determines the duration and ef-
ficiency of organic life. Cosmic environment, from
the earlier phases of organic evolution, has been prac-
tically stable and broadly permissive for all kinds of
life, provided life could find the right ways to use it.
But the economic, or social environment has greatly
increased in complexity as a result of the increasing
numbers and internal development of individual life.
Hence all living things must first conform to the de-
mands of their cosmic environment, next to the de-
mands of their own internal structure, and ultimately
to the demands of their social environment. But social
environment is more plastic, its demands are less im-
perative, more yielding, and more readily avoided than
those of the other two. Hence all the older structural
types have survived great social changes; few could
survive a considerable change in internal organization;
and no form of life could survive a radical change in
its cosmic environments, such as heat, light, oxygen,
diameter of earth, etc.

VITAL ACTION VS. NATURE-ACTION 195

III. Architectural Problems, and the Increase of
Power Through Architectural Improvements

The instruments of animal life are of special sig-
nificance to us because through them man has acquired
his own distinctive powers. We shall therefore en-
deavor to show in this and the following chapters: (i)
how man's distinctive powers have been upbuilt by
means of his organic instruments. (2) Wherein the
power of those instruments is permanently limited.
(3) How science has added to them a new order of
physical instruments. (4) How these new physical in-
struments have opened up to man's constructive usage
an inexhaustible source of world power, thereby cre-
ating with unparalleled rapidity a wholly new phase
of world life.

The basic invention of animal life, as we have al-
ready indicated, was one which gave to it greater free-
dom of movement and the power of profitable response
to the activities of a larger world. To that end, the
chief bodily instruments of animal life are discriminat-
ing receivers and conveyors. That is to say, they are
specialized sense organs, such as smell, touch, taste,
seeing, and hearing, so constructed that they respond to
particular agents of the outer world, and to no others;
connecting nerves to convey the impulses so received
to their respective terminals; and muscles and other
organs which, on receipt of these impulses, in turn act
in such a way as to assist in the conveyance of requisite
materials to and from the bodily sources of supply and
demand; and also to assist in the conveyance of the
whole body (locomotion) toward what is good and

196 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

profitable for it, and away from what is evil, or de-
structive to it.

The evolution, or enlargement, of this neuro-mus-
cular mechanism of animal life cannot take place, how-
ever, without a corresponding increase in all those other
instruments which minister to them, such as the sup-
porting, protecting, alimentary, respiratory, circula-
tory, and excretory organs. Provisions must further be
made for a sinking fund, or for organs of reproduction,
by means of which the whole system may be rebuilt
when the old one has become too rigid, or has ex-
hausted its power of profitable adjustment.

The basic problem in the evolution of animal archi-
tecture, therefore, is to find a method, or plan, of growth
and repair which may be continued indefinitely. That
plan must provide the maximum number of different
bodily sites, or locations, for the necessary organs, and
at the same time permit unlimited alterations and im-
provements in the position and size of these organs,
as occasion may favor or demand. All this must be
accomplished without serious interruption of vital proc-
esses, and must always yield a sufficient margin of
profits to be invested in new adventures and new con-
struction. As we shall presently show there is but one
method of growth, the triaxial system, which meets all
these requirements. That system is utilized through-
out The Great Highway of Organic Evolution which
leads from the lower forms of animal life up to man.

IV. The Architecture of Inorganic Growth

There are many different methods of growth in in-
organic, as well as in organic, or living things. We

VITAL ACTION VS. NATURE-ACTION 197

will briefly consider some of those more pertinent to
our discussion. Many inorganic things, crystals, for
example, grow by accretion, or by the addition of suc-
cessive layers, rows, or chains, of similar molecules
to a relatively fixed outer surface, like the addition of
bricks in regular sequence to a wall. The resultant
form of the wall, or the crystal — whether or no it
be flat, rod-like, polygonal, or spherical — will depend,
among other things, on the initial form of the struc-
tural elements, the points and angles of their placement,
and the degree of their stability.

A physical body like a sun, or a planet, may grow
in volume, mass, and diversity, by capturing, in its
movements through space, other cosmic bodies, or par-
ticles, which then become the architectural elements
of itself. They may form relatively fixed parts on
its outer surface, or they may be digested by chemical
and physical agencies, distributed by circulatory move-
ments, and their elements finally rearranged in graded,
concentric layers, according to their respe-ctive attri-
butes, the developmental stage of the celestial body, and
the cosmic environment in which it is growing.

These so-called "dead bodies" and all their con-
stituent parts are held to their orbits, or in their respec-
tive places, by overpowering, interlocking forces, both
within and without. The very conditions which give
them their peculiar architectural stability, prohibit
their labile organization, or at least prevent the profit-
able usage of their own powers as in an animal or
plant.

Thus a crystal may grow in size by accretion, or by
the superficial addition of other individualities to it-
self, cnly when other powers outside itself bring the

198 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

right constructive materials to it, or overcome its sta-
bility and compel it to move into right constructive
environments. Even then its growth does not meas-
urably alter, or disturb, in any essential respect, its pre-
vious structure, or action ; nor can the crystal utilize its
own increase of power better to orient itself to its outer
world and to move into a more saving and self-construc-
tive environment.

But, so far as science can now determine, this dif-
ference between the methods of growth, or in the self-
constructive power of "living things" and "dead things"
is not in the presence or absence of any particular ma-
terials, or quality, but in their architecture; that is in
the formal ways their elemental powers are organized;
for all the nature-powers science can recognize, or
identify, are apparently universal and interchangeable.

V. The Architecture of Organic Growth

In all living things the new and the old are con-
tinually coming and going, or shifting their relative
positions. In the inmost recesses of living protoplasm,
the older structures are not merely eroded and new
chemical elements added to the eroded surfaces, but
new corpuscles, or atoms and molecules, interpolate
themselves, by intussusception, between the old, either
taking the places of those removed, or crowding those
that remain into new places. The process of intus-
susception is like the removal and addition of the mem-
bers of a family, or fraternity, or the inhabitants of
a city, or nation. The same methods of internal re-
adjustment, removal, or repair also prevail among the

VITAL ACTION VS. NATURE-ACTION 199

larger structural units of the living body, such as cells,
blood vessels, nerves, and other organs, except that these
changes take place more slowly. They are comparable
to the rearrangement of streets, service pipes, and
houses, which is constantly going on in a developing
city.

Thus one of the basic attributes of living things, as
distinct from dead things, is their relatively greater
freedom of self-constructive action, their more labile,
purposeful organization. The constituents of a living
organism are free to move about among themselves,
and the organism itself, such as an animal, a family, or
a tribe, may move from place to place on its own power,
subject to definite restrictions ; but the internal method
of organization, and the constitution of the system,
which alone can give this freedom of action must and
does remain relatively stable.

But a living plant, or animal, like a village, city, or
nation, never grows at the same rates at different times,
or in all its different parts to the same degree, because
all their constituent parts have a distinct individuality
of their own. By virtue of that individuality, growth
always takes place faster in some places, or in some
directions, or in some qualities, than in others.

A village may grow into a city in many different
ways. But in whatever manner it may grow, its in-
dustrial and other vital centres, however conveniently
they may have been located and cooperatively bal-
anced in the beginning, will become unbalanced and
very inconveniently located with the growth of these
various centres, or with the mere increase of popula-

200 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

tion. If readjustments in the ways and means of con-
veyance are rightly made to meet these new conditions,
growth may safely continue indefinitely; if not, it will
be automatically checked by unbalanced, or inequi-
table exchange, or something may "yield of itself," or
break, or some more general catastrophe may occur.

A village, for example, may grow in length along
both sides of a common road, in single storied houses.
Or, as the population increases, it may expand right
and left, by the more or less regular addition of suc-
cessive cross streets with their supplementary lines and
channels of conveyance; or up and down, by the suc-
cessive additions of deeper cellars and successive stories.
The relative rate and direction of growth will thus de-
termine the shape and structure of the city as a whole,
and the distribution of its chief lines of conveyance; or
it will determine, as we say, the architectural plan of
the city and the way in which its vital services respond
to the demands of growth.

But the older the city, and the more firmly its
method of growth is established, let us say along radial,
parallel, zigzag, or vertical lines, or if built of stone
in place of wood, the more difficult or dangerous it will
be to make radical changes in it. Although the more
imperative readjustments and improvements may be
made at subsequent periods, the original materials and
methods of growth, and the location of its great civic
centres will long remain, affecting the economy of its
life in varying degrees; a permanent check, or an invi-
tation to further growth; a serious handicap, or a po-
tential source of profit, as the case may be.

So it is with the growth of all living organisms.

VITAL ACTION VS. NATURE-ACTION 201

VI. The Architecture of Plant Life

Beauty in architecture is the manifest Tightness in
the ways and means of accomplishment in the face of
adversity. Nowhere in nature is this structural beauty
so apparent to the casual observer as in a growing plant
or flower. Its very existence, every aspect and attitude
of form and color, the inmost texture of leaf, and stem,
and root, and branch, is the triumphant expression of
a fundamental Tightness of being; of a successful re-
sistance to the stress of nature-action, and a right usage
of nature-action in self-construction.

In its architecture and well-being is sharply dis-
played that dual sovereignty to which we have already
referred ; that is, the existence, in the plant itself, of a
definite vital purpose, so far successfully accomplished,
and the existence, in its outer world, of a lawful, com-
pelling action to which it must submit. It is this
beauty of a triumphant vitality, so clearly expressed in
the stability, economy, and utility of every growing
thing, that man is forever trying to express in his own
architecture.

Thus the housings of mankind, when rightly built,
display in the position, shape, dimensions, and dura-
bility of their walls, roofs, doors, windows, chambers,
and passage ways, the vital, sovereign purpose of their
inhabitants, as well as the sovereign action of gravity,
heat, light, wind and rain; the sources from which they
come; the directions in which they act; man's usage of
them and his defense against them. Man's life and art
is beautiful only so far as it manifests this Tightness of
usage and defense. More or less than that is ugliness.

202 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

It is not our purpose to discuss the various architec-
tural plans utilized by plant life. Their ways and
means of growth are comparatively uniform and bear
less directly on our problems than those of animals.
It will be sufficient to indicate, in one example, how
their achievements, as individuals, are definitely limited
by their initial constitution, the sources of their profits,
and the methods they must use to gain them.

The more highly organized plants, for example,
have been compelled to adopt a distinctly dual, or
double ended system of growth, one set of organs in
the soil, a different set in the light and air. Thereby
special administrative difficulties are incurred in the.
conveyance and exchange of their respective products,
the receipt of their supplies and the storage of their
surplus.

The roots must build their defensive lines against
the poverty, and the varied texture of the soil, and draw
from the soil its nourishment. The leaves must spread
their receptive fabrics to the sun and air, and construct,
or seek, their own defense against them. To these ends,
the plant makes large usage of its own dead and waste
materials, and preserves them within itself for support
and transportation.

All these exigencies of the plant's inner life and
outer world place definite limitations on its powers of
growth, that cannot be exceeded without disaster. The
weight and area of leaf and branch cannot exceed
the sustaining power of stem and soil; nor can the
excursions of the roots and leaves in search of profit
exceed the limits of profitable exchange between
them.

The Tightness of its living, the degree of its free-

VITAL ACTION VS. NATURE-ACTION 203

dom, the usage of it, and the ways in which it meets the
demands of the outer world, and the limitations laid

FIGURE 2. DIAGRAM TO ILLUSTRATE How THE ARCHITECTURE OF A PLANT
(supposed to be located in the northern hemisphere) is THE FORMAL EXPRES-
SION OF A DUAL ACTION SYSTEM, one internal, the other external. It is
intended to show that the thing we recognize as a growing tree is the
tangible expression of a profitable differential exchange between rootlets
at one extreme, leaves at the other, each located in a different circulating
medium, air and soil. The chief actors are the sun, air, weather, and gravity,
on the one hand, and on the other the new conditions successively created
by the progress of growth from an initial point, such as shading, imprison-
ment, support, and the necessary extension of the lines of exchange. The
chief compelling and limiting factors are indicated, their lines of action,
and the conformity, or orientation, of the whole vital action system to them.
Social factors are not indicated.

upon it by its own over-shadowing growth, is, and must
be, displayed in all its architecture, if we could but see
it and read it rightly. See diagram, fig. 2.

204 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

VII. The Architecture of Animal Life

Animal structure is exceedingly complex and diffi-
cult to visualize without long experience and famil-
iarity with it; nevertheless, so far as it is accessible, it
affords us the most tangible record of vital achievement
and the best measurement of its progress.

The progress of life, for example, is more convinc-
ingly shown in the structure of an amoeba, jelly-fish,
worm, crab, fish, mammal, and man, than it is by their
actions, methods of living, or in their manifestation of
intelligence, because in all living things the basic pur-
poses and functions of life are the same, growth and
self-preservation. We cannot picture, or measure,
naked acts, or purposes, or intelligence. But physical
structures may tell us how far acts are constructive, and
to what extent purposes have been accomplished; and
the ways and means of their accomplishment must
always be expressed in terms of structure.

VIII. Unicellular Growth (Protozoa)

The simplest form of animal life is a single cell, a
tiny speck of cooperating proteids, and other substances.
With little apparent distinctions of parts and organs, it
performs all the essential acts of animal life, such as
moving, feeding, growing, respiring, excreting, repro-
ducing, and dying. Now stirred by the passing inci-
dents of riotous surroundings; now driven in rhythmic
cycles by waxing and waning heat or light, and atomic
migrations. Or swirling air, or water, sweep it here
and there; bringing the vital agencies of the world to
its very doors, or conveying it to the world's commodi-

VITAL ACTION VS. NATURE-ACTION 205

ties; penetrating its inmost recess, cleansing and heal-
ing its secret fabric.

All the chief architectural forms and structures
possible to a one-celled life have doubtless been real-
ized; and apparently the best that nature can do within
such limits is shown by the minute, unicellular organ-
isms called Protozoa. Wherein lie all those limita-
tions which prohibit their individual increase in vol-
ume, in organization, and vital power, we may only
surmise, and need not argue here; but the existence
of those limitations we may not question.

IX. Multicellular Growth

One of the great innovations in the methods of ani-
mal life was the union, or the cohesion, of the offspring
of parent cells to form social aggregates, or multicel-
lular organisms. This simple innovation opened up a
new world of possibilities, produced a larger unit of
life, and gave rise to a new order of animal life on a
much higher level of organization than before. The
very act of union took something away from the old
freedom of the cell ; restricted its power of individual
action, and conferred upon it new powers, and a new
freedom common to all. The groups of cells thus
formed had common interests, common dangers, and a
common external environment. A new stability was
acquired through action and reaction in unison; new
powers were gained through sub-division of labor, and
by greater economy in the performance of vital pro-
cesses.

Every further increase in the number of cells cre-
ated a more and more particular and exacting environ-

206 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

ment for its members as regards contact, pressure, dis-
tribution of materials, and the nature of the stimuli
received from within and without.

Such cells acquire, therefore, a more constant, or
fixed, relation to one another, and definite physical and
chemical conditions are established in and about them,
which henceforth determine many of the things they
may or may not do, and what they must do. Hence
cells, which may be potentially alike, when separated,
must become an organized society of different kinds
of cells, if united. Otherwise they must disband, or
never could have united.

X. Radial Structural Plan (Goelenterates, or
Jelly-fish)

If we assume that a certain group of cells is grow-
ing in a homogeneous medium, or environment, and
that the increase in numbers is approximately equal
in the three planes of space, spherical bodies will be
formed, in which unlike conditions for cell life appear
along concentric rings and radii, in accordance with
the geometric properties of spherical bodies. As a re-
sult of these local conditions, special kinds of cells
should arise locally, such as muscles, nerves, and sense
organs, arranged in more or less regular geometric pat-
terns, fig. 3. And this actually does take place in all the
coelenterates (jelly-fish) ; and something similar to it
in the corresponding stage of growth in all the higher
organisms (gastrulation and germ layers, ectoderm,
mesoderm, entoderm).

But a symmetrical sphere, if it is ever formed, does
not persist. The aggregate always presents some

VITAL ACTION VS. NATURE-ACTION 207

asymmetrical modifications, or unlike poles, oral and
aboral, and with peculiar zonal and radial growths.
Some phases of these bodily specializations are doubt-
less correlated with the peculiarities of special environ-
ments, or modes of life, and above all with the fact
that the external environment, as a whole, is never

FIGURE 3. DIAGRAM OF THE RADIAL ARCHITECTURAL PLAN (Coelenterate,
or jelly-fish, t, tentacle; s.o., sense organ (eye or ear); g, germ cells;
m.a.t common opening for mouth and anus; n.m.r., neuro-muscular ring.

either homogeneous or symmetrical. It has a perma-
nent asymmetry and a gradient differentiation of its
own, in four important respects: (i) as regards the
lines of gravity; (2) the source of light; (3) the rota-
tion of the earth on its axis, and (4) the marked dif-
ference between its underlying and overlying media,
or solid earth below and atmosphere above, with their
consequent effects on circulation and diffusion.

These asymmetrical, gradient constants of the outer
world are the same ones which play such an impor-

2o8 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

tant part in the architecture of plant life, fig. 2, but
animal life makes different usage of them.

In any case, the jelly-fish, and all others of their class
(at one time the super-animals of the organic world)
are upbuilt on this so-called radial plan, with a com-
mon central opening for intake and discharge, and
with multiple structural elements appearing accord-
ing to definite laws along radial lines, like spokes to a
wheel, or in circumferential lines and zones, like the
hoops and staves to a barrel.

Thousands of species of jelly-fish have been pro-
duced, differing among themselves in a great variety
of minor ways, but all of them have this relatively
simple organization, and still have their organs ar-
ranged on this radial and concentric zone plan.

It is highly significant that whilst the radial type
of multi-cellular growth was among the very first
to appear, and was evolved many millions of years ago,
it has never produced any known animal, retaining this
plan of structure and method of growth, more highly
organized than a polyp, or colony of polyps. This
certainly cannot be due to lack of time, nor environ-
ment, nor opportunity, for in a very much shorter time,
and in much the same kinds of external environments,
all the higher forms of animal life, such as crabs, mol-
luscs, fishes, and mammals, have been evolved.

While the mere association of cells is a wonderfully
creative process, it is clear that there must be some in-
herent conditions in the radial method of growth which
prohibit the attainment of the higher possibilities of
life; and that all the agencies of time, environment,
natural selection, and heredity have been powerless
against them.

VITAL ACTION VS. NATURE-ACTION 209

Some of these inherent obstacles to progress are
manifestly of a purely physical or economic charac-
ter: (i) the presence of a common alimentary entrance
and exit which creates confusion and prevents unin-
terrupted linear streaming, serial treatment, and
graded distribution of alimentary materials; (2) the
lack of internal diversity, due to the fact that in a typ-
ical radiate, or in a truly spherical body, there is the
maximum volume relative to surface, and the minimum
diversity in internal relations. Every point on the
same circumference is potentially like every other point
on it, and for every point on a given radius there is a
homologous point, under like conditions, on every other
radius; (3) spherical bodies offer excessive resistance
to locomotion and internal exchange; and (4) a radial
arrangement of receptors and affectors is not capable of
a highly discriminating response to the agencies of the
outer world.

With growth and increased demands, these disa-
bilities increase so that, ultimately, equitable convey-
ance, to meet all the varied requirements of supply and
demand, becomes impossible.

XI. Spiral Growth and False Radial Symmetry

If this radially symmetrical system, for any reason,
becomes structurally unbalanced, it may lead to some
form of spiral growth, which cannot again attain a
balanced symmetry, except the ends unite in the same
plane to form a ring. This may, in effect, then give
rise to a false, or secondary, radial type with the same
disabilities as before.

Spiral growth is common in the great class of mol-

210 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

luscs ; and false radial symmetry is peculiar to the great
class of echinoderms, fig. 4.

These two methods, as well as the pure radial type,
inevitably lead to serious mechanical difficulties in vital

'-•a.

FIGURE 4. DIAGRAM OF THE METAMORPHOSIS OF A STAR-FISH LARVA, to
illustrate unequal bilateral growth and the conversion of an initial bilateral
symmetry into spiral symmetry and ultimately into the false radial sym-
metry characteristic of the echinoderms.

administration, and it is not surprising that, in spite of
their immense antiquity, these three great classes of ani-
mals remain on a low level of organization, forever
handicapped by their constructive methods and ma-
terials.1

1 See "The Evolution of the Vertebrates and Their Kin."

CHAPTER IX

THE TRIAXIAL SYSTEM AND THE GREAT
HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION

The Triaxial System of Structural and Functional Gradients — Its
Methods of Internal Readjustment and Betterment — The Material
and Functional Register of Vital Betterments: the Old Mouth and
the New; Gills, Lungs, and Heart; the Blood; the Nervous System
— The Decline of Metamerism and the Centralization of Func-
tions— Architectural Tropism, or the Orientation of Triaxial Or-
ganic Gradients to the Triaxial System of Gradient Action in the
Outer World: the Asymmetry of the Outer World; the Orientation
of Triaxial Vital Architecture to World Architecture; Tropic Action;
Triaxial Architecture as a Tropic Reaction System and as a Product
of Tropic Action — Other Registers of Constructive Action, Instincts,
Intelligence, Cultural Implements — Cultural Registers.

IN "The Evolution of the Vertebrates and Their
Kin," we have shown that man is the culminating prod-
uct of a long genetic line called The Great Highway
of Animal Evolution. It emerges from the coelenter-
ate stock, probably as a special modification of the
radial mode of growth, and in successive adaptive in-
crements leads by way of the more primitive arthro-
pods, such as the phyllopod Crustacea and marine
arachnids, up to the ostracoderms (a wholly extinct
class of animals forming a paleozoic connecting link
between the invertebrates and the vertebrates) through
them to the fishes, amphibia, reptiles, and mammals, to
man, where it culminates in its logical constructive lim-
itation, figs. 7 and 8.

Throughout this great phylogenetic line, there is a
common architectural plan and a consistent method

211

212 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

of differential growth, which we call the system of tri-
axial gradient increment, or briefly the triaxial system.
The progress of this growth system, in its main out-
lines, may be followed historically through the great
geological eras where each notable organic increment
is coincident with, or has its returns in, the appearance
of a new class of animals, and a new measure of vital
freedom.

And today, in the embryos of all the higher animals
belonging to this system, we may see how they rapidly
retrace the same self-constructive ways, and repeat, one
by one, in due order, the main architectural innova-
tions which were chiefly characteristic of their ances-
tral classes.

It is evident that a growth system which can con-
sistently produce such results as these must contain
within itself some constructive principle of great sig-
nificance, not found elsewhere in the organic or inor-
ganic world.

In this chapter, we shall discuss this method of
growth and try to point out wherein this constructive
principle lies.

I. The Triaxial System of Structural and Functional

Gradients

A constructive vital system, to attain the maximum
results, must be able to meet the increasing demands of
its own growth as they arise, and at the same time keep
in profitable conformity with the permanent demands
of the outer world.

These demands from within and from without are
voiceless, it is true, but they are forever insistent, and
they must be fulfilled, if the system is to endure.

HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION 213

There is apparently but one way to meet these basic
demands and thus overcome those narrower construc-
tive limitations so characteristic of the inferior types
of vital organization. That way is the triaxial (or
apico-quadrilateral) system of growth.

In this constructive system, as in the other systems
we have considered, growth begins by the successive
divisions of an initial cell, or ovum; but the multi-
cellular body thus produced always grows unequally
in the three planes of space, producing a more or less
cylindrical body with six unlike sides, progressively
upbuilt on three right-angled, gradient axes.

The two opposing ends and four opposing sides are
radically different in structure and function, and be-
come respectively head end and tail end, right and left,
neural and haemal sides. These basic architectural
and functional distinctions never change, and they can
be easily identified in all animals of this structural
type, down to the lowest invertebrates, to their earliest
embryonic stages, and in some cases to the egg itself, figs.
5 and 6.

This architectural system meets the basic demands
of growth in ways that no other conceivable system can
do, more particularly in the following respects: (i)
It may be permanently and profitably oriented to the
three great systems of world action in which it lives;
first and foremost, to gravity, the one universal, direct
acting constant in the world at large; to light, second
only to gravity in its straight line action and the con-
stancy of its source, even though the angles of incidence
may vary, and the flow be intermittent; and finally to
the great terrestrial, tangential planes in which are va-
riously distributed, or move in horizontal directions,

214 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

8

FIGURE 5. DIAGRAM TO ILLUSTRATE TRIAXIAL GROWTH. A. seen from the
neural side, B, from the haemal. The metameres formed at the growing
point, g. p., (blastopore, teloblasts, telopore) are indicated by numbers:
Growth to right and left of the median neural line is indicated by arrows;
serial homology and bilateral symmetry, by letters, those on one side being
the mirror image of those on the other. Cephalization, or the specializa-
tion and breaking down of metamerism at the head end, has already
begun. The figure is based on the arachnid type of triaxial growth.

the chief sources of life's constructive supplies, and the
chief sources of danger. (2) It provides maximum
economy in the grouping of all the great organic sys-
tems of conveyance and support, such as nervous, ali-

HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION 215

Ne.

?# *? J? 141$ 16 2718 1920

/ '/ / / //

Ho.

FIGURE 6. DIAGRAM OF TRIAXIAL GROWTH. A, from side; B, in median
longitudinal section; C, in cross section in the region of the ninth metamere.
Letters and numbers as in fig. 4. Arrows indicate main lines of conveyance,
locomotor, vascular, alimentary, and nervous. In B, the chief systems of
medianly located organs are indicated, showing their linear arrangement.
In C, bilateral symmetry, the lines of concentric growth, and the relation
to gravity are indicated. Note the repetition of metameric organs in the
middle region of the body and the decline of metamerism on the haemal
surface at either end. The figures are based on the arachnid type of growth.

mentary, vascular, excretory, muscular, and skeletal.
(3) Maximum economy of locomotion. (4) Maxi-
mum internal diversity. (5) Maximum opportunity
for increase in volume without loss of these attributes,
or serious detriment to them. (6) Maximum opportu-

216 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

nity for readjustments and repairs without serious in*
terruption to life.

In general, the body, in animals of this type, is
more or less cylindrical, larger toward the head, and
tapering toward a growing point at the tail end. It
is divided transversely into a series of similar compart-
ments, or segments, or metameres, each of which may
contain a complete set of all the more important vital
organs, unless, it may be, some of them have been
locally suppressed by secondary changes. These or-
gans, such as eyes, legs, muscle-blocks, and kidneys, or
nephridia, appear in pairs, one member on the right
side of the metamere, the other in a corresponding po-
sition on the left, figs. 5-8.

In typical cases, the paired organs of various kind:
extend in graded, linear series over the whole body, or
at least over very considerable portions of it. Tru;
members of a given series are often referred to as iden-
tical, or homologous organs, serially arranged.

The alimentary canal, for the reception, consecu-
tive treatment, and distribution of food materials, runs
lengthwise through the middle of the body; the mouth,
or the entrance to the canal, at the head end; the exit,
or anus, at the tail end.

Along one surface of the body is formed the double
chain of ganglia and nerve fibres, or the brain and
spinal cord, a.a. which constitutes the chief architect-
ural landmark in animal morphology, and serves to
identify this surface, as the so-called neural surface,
whatever position, in reference to gravity, the body may
assume in active life. From the pair of ganglia in
each metamere are given off, right and left, the pairs of

nerves which supply the various parts and organs with-
in that metamere.

On the opposite, or haemal side of the body, run-
ning parallel with the alimentary canal and spinal cord,
is the great vascular distributing canal, or primitive
heart tube. Its paired blood vessels, with the paired
nerves, form approximately parallel, hoop-like, con-
ducting channels around the alimentary canal between
it and the outer surface of the body.

We recognize in this type of animals, a wholly new
architectural unit, the metamere, each one approxi-
mately complete in itself. The whole body primarily
consists of a chain of similar metameres, organically
united, each link in the chain subject to the local con-
ditions of its bodily position, and ultimately express-
ing them in the varying development of its component
parts.

While growth may take place at any point in this
system, the system is chiefly remarkable for the fact that
organs around the head end are the first to be formed;
and each new metamere makes its appearance as a dis-
tinct entity at the tail end, just behind the one pre-
viously formed. No basic alteration of this order of
precedence is known to occur.

Hence the body always consists of a graded, linear
series of metameres, in one, two, three, order. Whether
there be two or three, or several score, the one nearer
the head end is the older, the one behind it, the
younger; and each metamere retains its serial identity
throughout life.

On the other hand, the neural axis is always more
precocious than the haemal, so that differential growth

2i8 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

in each metamere proceeds in a, b, c, d, order, to the
right and left of the median neural axis, the older
stages being nearest the median line, the youngest, far-
thest away, or nearest to the haemal surface; see dia-
gram (figs. 5 and 6). Thus with growth in volume,
there is a longitudinal, gradient increment from head to
tail ; transverse gradient increments to the right and left
of the neural axis towards the opposite ha3mal side; and
a radial gradient increment from the centre to the pe-
riphery. Hence the name, triaxial gradient increment.

It is evident that no two points in such a growing
system can ever be alike, either in their historical, or
spacial relations; or in their functional conditions; or
in their potentialities. For every cross section will
display a condition a little younger than that in front
of it, and a little older than that behind it; and in every
cross section the lines drawn from a central point to
all the peripheral points will be divided into two mir-
ror-image sets, right and left; each set forming a graded
series of radial lines extending from the neural to the
haemal side, and each line representing a series of
points at graded distances from the centre of the body,
or from any object in the outside world, fig. 6. C.

We may regard this triaxial system, if we choose, as
a system of points, graded in their potentialities, in ac-
cordance with the geometric properties of that system
and in accordance with their functional relations to a
permanent asymmetry in the outer world. In the liv-
ing body, these potentialities are expressed in archi-
tectural details arranged in right and left longitudinal
series, in right and left transverse series, and in over-
lying concentric strata. Hand in hand with these dis-

HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION 219

tinctive local structures and conditions, necessarily go
distinctive local functions.

Thus the features which distinguish this system
from all others are : ( i ) the multiplication of similar,
but not identical sets of organs in longitudinal and in
transverse series (metamerism) ; (2) The formation
of concentric strata and intervening spaces around a
central axis (germ layers and coelomic cavities) ; and
(3) the extension of the three great systems of convey-
ance throughout the body, parallel with the main axis of
growth, the alimentary in the middle, the nervous sys-
tem on one side, the vascular on the opposite one, with
various other organs arranged in symmetrical pairs on
the right and left. A more perfect system for differen-
tial functioning is inconceivable, for all agents, contents,
or commodities of each system are inevitably subject
to gradational treatment, selection, or distribution,
along each one of the infinite number of gradient lines
in the system, no two of which are alike.

As growth proceeds, it is always possible to mod-
ify or improve cooperative action by local increase, or
diminution, at such points as the increasing exigencies
of supply and demand may call for.

It should be noted that on the basic necessity of this
point for point correspondence in different individual
organisms having similar architectural plans, rests the
whole science of morphology and physiology, making
it possible for us to "identify" corresponding structures
and functions in different kinds of individuals, and at
different periods of their development.

220 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

II. Its Methods of Internal Readjustment and
Betterment

In this system of growth, as well as in every other,
the vital problems of a large body cannot be solved in
the same ways as those of a small body. Hence growth
cannot go on unless concurrent local readjustments and
betterments are made within the sytsem to meet the
new conditions created by its own growth. The cri-
terion of the Tightness of these readjustments is their
creative returns. Here, as elsewhere, in accordance
with the universal constructive law, those organs which
better cooperate with one another, or serve one another,
and thereby the whole, the longer endure and grow so
much the more; those which do less than that, dimin-
ish, or give way to other organs more happily situated
on their respective gradients.

To the morphologist, or to the student of animal
architecture, the evolution of the great arthropod-ver-
tebrate stock, where this method of growth and or-
ganic readjustment prevails, is therefore the age-long
history of more or less intermittent increments in bod-
ily volume and organic power due to the successive ad-
dition of new groups of metameres at the posterior end
of the body; the local rise, decline, or combination of
metameres; the localization of certain functions and
organs, or the apparent transfer of them from one po-
sition in the body to another; the up-building of new
and the down-breaking of old partitions, and the conse-
quent opening, closing, diverting, dividing, or enlarge-
ment of the channels of exchange!

Whenever these local readjustments are of excep-
tional cooperative value, just as in commercial or po-

HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION 221

litical affairs, sudden eruptions of growth ensue, ac-
companied by still other readjustments which neces-
sarily follow in their train; and great classes, orders,
or families of animals may arise therefrom, differing
among themselves in countless details, but all of them
upbuilt on some particular modification of this basic
architectural plan.

In some of the lower forms of bilateral animals
(clams, oysters, and certain worms) the entire body
may consist of but a single metamere, and although, in
some instances, such animals may become very volumi-
nous, no one-compartment animal, highly organized,
or with great freedom of movement, has ever made its
appearance.

There are also certain worm-like animals (anne-
lids) whose body may consist of a long array of meta-
meres, all very much alike, and each one supplied with
a complete set of the more essential vital organs, such
as eyes, legs, kidneys, germ-cells, ganglia, etc. No ani-
mal of this kind ever attained a high grade of organic
efficiency, no doubt because of the very multiplicity of
parts doing essentially the same things, and because one
part either does not, or is unable efficiently to serve the
other.

On the other hand, in the long series of animals
which lead more directly up to man, figs. 7, 8, the body
may consist of from two or three metameres to a hun-
dred or more ; but with each addition, there is generally
a marked local diversity of parts in the older, more
cephalic ones, and better centralization of organic serv-
ices. To follow these changes, even in the barest out-
line, one must make a careful comparative study of the
anatomy, physiology, and paleontology of all those

FIGURE 7. DIAGRAMS, CORRELATED WITH THE GEOLOGICAL TIME TABLE,
illustrating the growth of the triaxial system of gradient functions. The
chief architectural innovations are indicated as they successively appear
in the different classes of animals which probably form the more direct
ancestral stock of the higher vertebrates, these innovations attaining their
logical conclusion in man.

The main events indicated are: (i) the rise and decline of metamerism,
or the increase in the number of metameres successively developed at the
tail end, their increasing destinction in the middle region of the body
(arachnids) and their gradual break down, or fusion with one another,
toward the head end and haemal side; (2) cephalization, or the con-
centration of a large number of bodily metameres, about 15-20, to form
the "head" in the higher classes (y.y.&z.z.) ; and (3) the coincident centrali-
zation and redistribution of the great systems of bodily functions. Note
the persistent reduction in the number of metameric organs performing
similar functions, or their combination into a single system, and their shift
of position to more fitting locations with the general increase in growth.
The chief functions centralized toward the head end are the nervous and
sensory ones (gustatory, visual, auditory, and olfactory). The locomotor,
L, excretory, ex, and sexual, centralize at the opposite end; and the respira-
tory, R, digestive, D, and circulatory, C, toward the centre of the body.
The assumed duration of geological time is indicated in ratios of million
year periods, M.

HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION 223

224 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

FIGURE 8. THE SAME AS FIGURE 7, SEEN IN MEDIAN SECTION. The chief
events indicated are: (i) the closing of the old gateway to the gut and the
opening of a new one in the region of the cephalic navel, c.n.; (2) the in-
folding of respiratory appendages of the phyllopod to form arachnid gill
sacs, or lung-books; their rupture into the alimentary canal in fishes,
their subsequent atrophy and finally the substitution of lungs to take their
place; (3) the origin of the chief ductless glands, the pituitary body from
the remnants of the old oesophagus, and from an ancient excretory organ,
pf, pf; the pineal gland from the median eye, p.e., and the thyroid gland,
th, from a segmental outgrowth of the alimentary canal ; (4) the meta-
morphosis of the primitive heart tube into the four chambered heart; (5)
the metamorphosis of three pairs of arthropod appendages into the man-
dibles, maxillae, and pre-maxillae of vertebrates; (6) the rise of the
notochord, nch, neural arches, n.a,, and cartilagenous cranium, cr, in the
arachnids, and their further growth into the vertebrate column and skull
of vertebrates; (7) the rise of excretory and genital organs and their ducts
in the anterior end of the body and their successive transfer toward
the posterior end; (8) the establishment of the main divisions of the brain
in the phyllopods and their persistent growth into the characteristic sub-
divisions of the brain in the higher vertebrates.

HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION 225

of

H.M ammo/I 4,

226 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

classes of animals which constitute this great trunk
line of organic evolution.

The structural gaps which here and there divide
this long genetic series into classes, phylla, or orders,
generally represent relatively rapid organic improve-
ment in some particular which has quickly gained a new
stability and yielded large returns in minor variations
of it.

For this reason we seek in vain to bridge them, es-
pecially the more creative ones, with the same degree
of completeness we do elsewhere, for these gaps are
probably real ones, accentuated by perspective, not nec-
essarily fortuitous gaps in our records, or in our knowl-
edge.

These forward movements are rarely due to the
formation of new chemical substances, or to the acqui-
sition of essentially new powers by individual cells, for
the fundamental properties of life are very much alike
in all cell communities, high or low, large or small.

Sense cells and nerve cells, for example, may not
be appreciably more delicate in their individual re-
sponses, or essentially different in their modes of ac-
tion, in the higher classes of animals than in the lower;
and there is apparently little difference in the actual
processes of digestion, in the making of new living ma-
terials, or in the production of bodily movements
through the agency of muscle, and nerve, and sense
organ. On the other hand, improvements in the social
life of cells, due to their cooperative organization,
may be very great indeed, and they afford the biologist
the most striking evidences of progress.

HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION 227

III. The Material and Functional Register of Vital

Betterments

A few examples will serve to illustrate some of the
different ways in which these organic readjustments are
actually made, the creative results which spring from
them, and the ways in which they are registered.

I. The Old Mouth and the New. The closing
of the old invertebrate mouth and the formation in the
vertebrates of a new one to take its place is a case in
point, fig. 8.

In the arachnids, the stomodaeum, or the oral end
of the gut, passes through the nervous system, between
the right and left roots of the forebrain. In the ver-
tebrates, it always lies outside the nervous system, and
wholly in front of the forebrain. What has doubt-
less happened is this. In the immediate ancestors of
the vertebrates, the old mouth became practically use-
less, owing to certain cumulative growth factors, and
a new one was formed out of an ancient, but transitory,
entrance to the alimentary canal, which originally
served a wholly different function. Many subsidiary
factors were involved in the event, and we can still see
some of them in actual operation in modern arachnids.
For example, the progressive constriction of the
oesophagus, by the growth of the surrounding brain,
ultimately compels all those with relatively larger
brains to suck their food in liquid form through the
narrowest possible opening, or give up eating alto-
gether. This clearly indicates that in this class of ani-
mals further enlargement of these two vital functions
has reached a mechanical impasse. On the other hand,
this now wholly useless oral opening still survives in

228 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

all modern vertebrates, including man, as an otherwise
meaningless passage-way through the floor of the brain
(infundibulum and saccus vasculosus), a permanent
register, in its proper place, of this great creative event.
p? and pt2.

It is evident that immediate and far-reaching re-
sults are contingent on an open or shut factor of this
nature. It is not surprising, therefore, that the ulti-
mate shutting up of this passage-way should be coin-
cident with the onset of a great organic reformation,
and the abrupt appearance of a new class of animals,
such as the fish-like vertebrates. But it had still fur-
ther creative significance, for without this closing up
of what had come to be a very inconvenient gateway
to the gut, the growth of the brain, as we see it in the
higher vertebrates and in man, would have been a
physical impossibility.1

2. Gills, Lungs, and Heart. The rupture of gill
chambers into the alimentary canal was another sim-
ilar event, of immediate and far-reaching importance
in the evolution of fishes; and it still dominates their
internal economy, as well as that of the embryonic
stages in all their more modern descendants.

But the gills of fishes, so long as they are retained
in their characteristic form and place, are an insuper-
able barrier to further evolution. Their position is
fundamentally wrong, from a mechanical standpoint,
both in relation to the heart and the alimentary canal,
and seriously restricts their further functional devel-
opment. For the delicate respiratory capillaries of the
gills are directly, and dangerously, interposed between

1 For further details see "The Evolution of the Vertebrates aud Their
Kin."

HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION 229

the heart, which supplies the driving power for the cir-
culation of the blood, and the main arterial channels
which supply the body. On the other hand, the re-
spiratory currents of water, entering the mouth and
passing out through the necessarily large gill clefts,
seriously interfere with the passage of foods through
the mouth to the stomach, and with the usage of this
part of the alimentary canal for digestive purposes.

But when new and larger blood channels were
opened up, leading into the air bladder, a new respira-
tory organ, the lungs, was established in a safer and
better functional position. Lungs were then substi-
tuted for gills; a double circulation for a single one;
and the heart and the general arterial system thereby
acquired greatly increased powers of service. This
relatively simple readjustment in the direction of the
blood current which, with other accompanying
changes, made it possible separately to regulate the
blood pressure in the lungs, and in that of the general
arterial system, was of great functional importance. It
is the chief cooperative event which marks the transi-
tion from fishes to the amphibia and reptiles; and the
register of this change is still preserved in the embryos
of all their descendants. But its effects did not stop
there; it also opened the way for a terrestrial, air-
breathing life, and for the hot, even-tempered blood
of the higher vertebrates. The subsequent changes in
the direction and volume of the blood currents, and the
influence of the new mode of impact on the walls,
valves, and openings of the heart, were doubtless im-
portant physical agencies in completing the four cham-
bered heart which came later, making it possible to
deliver the rich supply of arterial blood directly to

230 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

the head, an essential condition to the growth and nu-
trition of the brain in man and in the higher verte-
brates.

When we consider this sequence of events and con-
ditions in the evolution of the vertebrate heart, as re-
vealed to us by comparative anatomy and embryol-
ogy; observing in it the structural changes which fol-
low one another in due and logical order, as though in
response to physical forces; when we consider the
gradual rise of chambers and valves, inlets and out-
lets, mechanically correct in form and place for their
specific services; and the correlated rise and decline of
gills, the growth of lungs, and many other organs, who
shall say that we are not at the same time passing in
review the very cooperative agencies which bring them
about, if we only had the sense to discern them.

How futile then it is, and essentially unscientific
in spirit, to ignore such factors because they are struc-
tural, or merely morphological, or phylogenetic ; and
to assume, as some apparently do, that it is simpler, or
easier, to explain them by the far-away god "vitality"
or "heredity," or by counting the beads on a rosary of
chromosomes !

3. The Blood. Blood is one of the most impor-
tant vital agencies of conveyance. Its constructive, or
creative, power is dependent not only on the arrange-
ment of its conducting channels, their nervous, mus-
cular, and physical attributes, but on what the blood
itself contains, its rate of movement, and its volume,
the direction in which it flows, and the way it ulti-
mately affects the life of the various kinds of cells it
serves. Here the improvements in service are not ex-
pressed in such obvious architectural features, but

HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION 231

rather in chemical and physical changes and in many
remote functional adaptations, the result of which is
obvious enough, but the contributory agencies exceed-
ingly difficult, or impossible, to locate, or analyze.

Briefly, and speaking in very broad terms, one of
the first great improvements affecting the social life of
the cell was in limiting the free access of sea water to
the interior of the cell community, using in its stead
a very similar chemical fluid, as a vehicle for its prod-
ucts.

At first this forerunner of true blood was driven
aimlessly to and fro through irregular body cavities by
spasmodic bodily contractions. After a long period
of evolution, this service was performed by a
rhythmically contractile tube, or primitive heart, which
drove the blood in definite circulatory movements
through specially constructed channels leading to and
from definite stations.

A common system of internal transportation was
thereby established, which supplied each cell with
nourishment from a common store and removed its
waste materials. These obvious improvements in the
circulatory system, with many others, finally delivered
these primitive animals from the limitations of the sea
and made life in inland waters, on land and in the air,
a possibility, and ultimately a reality.

During other periods of evolution, covering many
millions of years, countkss other improvements from
time to time were made, to meet the increasing de-
mands of the growing body. New kinds of blood cells,
chemical agents, and organized bodies of the most va-
ried and subtle character were contributed by differ-
ent bodily organs to the basic fluids of the blood, mak-

232 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

ing the blood itself a veritable physical and chemical
laboratory.

Finally the common blood stream was divided qual-
itatively into venous, lymphatic, and other special car-
riers; old stations of give and take were cut off and
others provided with increased facilities. And with
all these betterments in service, the pressure, the local
rate of flow, the nutritive contents, and the tempera-
ture of the blood were at last so artfully regulated as
to provide for each one of the countless millions of
bodily cells, according to their individual necessities,
the optimum conditions, apparently, for the perform-
ance of their functions.

Many of these improvements were purely mechan-
ical devices, gross architectural readjustments of purely
material things, yet they are no more, or less, signifi-
cant in their constructive Tightness, than the less tan-
gible nervous and biochemical devices, or the altogether
intangible "vital" ones.

It was through the agency of all these achievements
in internal conveyance, and many other contributory
services of a similar character, that the higher phases
of life, as we see it in birds and mammals, became a
possibility and then a reality; a life capable of the most
sustained, strenuous, and varied activities ; one that had
freed itself from the dominion of the sea and shore,
and was now freed from the dominion of the tropics,
and of the changing seasons; for at last life had cre-
ated within itself an approximately right environment
for its constituents, and the freedom of the earth and
the air was opened to them. •

4. The Nervous System. In the long history of
the arthropod-vertebrate stock, there has been a per-

HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION 233

sistent improvement in the two great systems of convey-
ance, vascular and nervous, which is very impressive;
but the material, or anatomical, evidences of these im-
provements are very different. In one case, it is very
largely a visible increase in the relative volume of the
nervous system and the number of nerve units; in the
other, the rise of a multitude of striking architectural,
mechanical and chemical devices.

That is to say, the evolution of nervous conveyance,
of reflexes, instincts, and intelligence, is not evidenced
so much by striking architectural changes in the brain
itself, as by the steady increase in the number of those
particular coordinating cells which unite all the other
systems into one, and which facilitate and supplement
their cooperative actions. This in itself is a very sig-
nificant fact, and stands out in sharp contrast with the
evolutionary history of all other functions. For every
other system has its own formal, or material register of
progress, chiefly in its anatomical structure. The nerv-
ous system alone is a material register of the coopera-
tive actions of all the other systems.

Hence the increase in volume of the cerebral hemi-
spheres, where these coordinating cells are chiefly lo-
cated, gives us a single tangible measurement of the
evolution of organic cooperation and constructive
Tightness. For the hemispheres represent, like any other
representative body, the functioning of the whole or-
ganism. Their more special function is to discrimi-
evil, and to direct and regulate the services of each
nate between what is good for the whole, and what is
part in the best interests of all.

The cerebral hemispheres are the chief intermedi-
aries between the administration of the inner and of

234 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

the outer life, and their mere increase in volume, what-
ever may be the cause of that increment, rather than
the arrangement, or the architecture of individual cells,
most easily and surely measures the march of organic
cooperation from class to class, throughout the whole
gamut of animal evolution, fig. 8.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the great dif-
ference between man and the anthropoid apes is not so
easily measurable in terms of vital energy, bodily form,
keenness of sense, or the efficiency of any one organic
function, as it is in purposeful directive power, and
in the volume of nervous material in which that direc-
tive power is registered.

That directive power, in cooperation with the
wholly different powers of tongue, and eye, and ear,
and hand, derived from a multitude of wholly differ-
ent organic sources, is the chief creative agency of social
institutions.

IV. The Decline of Metamerism and the Centraliza-
tion of Functions

We have selected these special cases to illustrate
the ways and means of organic progress in the arthro-
pod-vertebrate stock. Any of the other vital func-
tions, protective, excretory, sensory, or locomotor,
might have been used for this purpose, and would have
shown the same mingling of mechanical, chemical,
and "vital" innovations.

But while, for the sake of convenience, the improve-
ments in a single system may be considered separately,
it must not be overlooked that each bodily system is
wholly dependent on, and influenced by, all the others.

HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION 235

In fact, in any forward step in evolution, it is
hardly possible for the biologist to determine which is
cause and which is effect. We are rarely, if ever, able
to decide whether improvements in any one system of
functions precede or follow those in the others. The

FIGURE 9. FACE OF AN EMBRYO FROG, showing the three pairs of primitive
jaws derived from their invertebrate ancestors, and their union to form
the jaws typical of the vertebrates. (From Patten, Evolution of the Verte-
brates and Their Kin.)

FIGURE 10. FIGURES ILLUSTRATING THE MODE OF GROWTH OF THE HUMAN
FACE. A, human embryo, a little more than a month old, showing the traces
of invertebrate jaws in the mandibular, m.d., maxillary, m.x., and pre-
maxillar)-, p.mx., arches. B, embryo a little less than two months old, with
the preceding parts nearly united. C, mouth of adult, the cupid bow contours
showing its elemental structure. From Patten, A Problem in Evolution,
Pop. Science, 1913.

very dependence of one on the other makes their re-
spective changes appear to be coincident. But we can-
not doubt that whenever any improvement in the serv-
ice of one part takes place it demands and receives
some compensating service elsewhere.

236 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

When we survey the evolutionary process as a
whole, we see all along this great genetic line the ex-
pression of these demands; and we see their ultimate
fulfilment expressed in: (i) a consistent increase in
bodily volume; (2) in centralized organic power, and
(3) in a self-constructive adjustability to the more va-
ried and subtle agencies of the outer world. It is not
difficult to recognize those cases where considerable
attainment has been made in some one of these three
respects, but without corresponding attainment in one,
or both, of the other two.

Measured by these three standards, no other animal
can compare with man in perfection of bodily organi-
zation. And it is very doubtful whether the physical
and chemical properties of protoplasm, under the pre-
vailing terrestrial conditions, would to advantage per-
mit the further evolution of a physical body notably
different from what is generally regarded as the ideal
man.

In the concurrent race between mere growth in
volume and better organization, the general tendency
is to produce more like metameres at one end of the
body, only to be progressively specialized by the di-
verse conditions towards the other end, where special
demands are made for service, and better returns are
given for service rendered.

In accordance with this developmental law of sup-
ply and demand, the principal sense organs and the
main centres for nerve control grew up at the oldest
anterior end, rightly clustered around the main en-
trance to the body; and the three longitudinal systems
of conveyance became more firmly established in their
respective positions. As the body grew in volume, the

HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION 237

heart, locomotor, respiratory, sexual, excretory, and di-
gestive organs became greatly altered in relative size
and relative position, and all of them gradually with-
drew from their primitive centres of activity in the
head, leaving that important region almost exclusively
to the receptive functions and to the main centres of
nerve control. Some of them, such as the heart, lungs,
and locomotor organs, centralized their activities at
such points as the services to be performed demanded;
the kidneys, reproductive and other organs, where
functional location is not so imperative, taking their
positions at otherwise unoccupied regions of the body.

The general effect of all these organic readjust-
ments was to transform the growing series of more or
less independent metameres into a more unified body
wherein each important function was performed by
that one set, or pair of organs which was so situated
as to give the maximum bodily service. It was like
changing a long row of tenement houses into one resi-
dence, with centralized systems for the receipt, prep-
aration, and distribution of common necessities.

The ultimate location of each centralized function
is determined by various factors; chiefly by priority
of origin, which in turn is determined by the neces-
sity of prior activity in primitive or in embryonic life;
by the imperative demands for a special location, in
order rightly to perform its work; and by the univer-
sal organic law that the main lines of growth coincide
with the most available channels of conveyance.

I have described these changes more specifically in
"The Evolution of the Vertebrates and Their Kin." A
careful consideration will show us that in man no fur-
ther morphological or functional changes of this kind

238 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

are possible, for this long series of organic adjustments
has reached its logical conclusion.

It is evident, for example, that the chief segmen-
tal sense organs, such as the visual, auditory, and ol-
factory organs, cannot be reduced to less than a single
pair, for a single pair, bilaterally symmetrical, as we
shall presently show, is absolutely essential to the per-
formance of their orienting functions. Nor can they
be more centralized around a common point of intake,
or in a position more suitable for head-first locomotion.

On the other hand, organs like the locomotor ap-
pendages, which in primitive invertebrates may be
situated at the anterior end of the body, or arranged like
many pairs of oar-like legs on either side, or as two
pairs nearer the centre of the body, as in fishes, rep-
tiles, birds, and mammals, cannot be advantageously
reduced to less than a single pair, nor moved farther
back than they are in man. The same is true of the
excretory and reproductive organs. And finally the
necessarily voluminous lungs, heart, liver, and diges-
tive organs cannot be more centralized, or have their
dead weight better placed, or balanced, for safety and
economy of locomotion than they are at present.

I have tried to show the chief events in this rise and
decline of metamerism in a series of diagrams, figs. 7
and 8.

V. Architectural Tropism or the Orientation of Tri-
axial Organic Gradients to the Triaxial System

of Gradient Action in the Outer World

i

We have indicated in preceding sections some of the
exceptional advantages which give triaxial growth its
impressive aspect of constructive Tightness. Or, other-

wise stated : the utmost degree of organic evolution can
be attained by the triaxial method of growth, and by
no other ; or, triaxial growth is the only way in which
maximum organic development is possible.

But constructive Tightness must have its external as
well as internal aspect. That is, any architectural
plan, to have superior constructive value, must con-
form in a superior way to the influences of the outer
world from which all its constructive supplies are
drawn.

The triaxial system fulfils both these basic require-
ments: (i) In its unequalled power of growth and
progressive internal organization; (2) In that, archi-
tecturally and functionally, it is the only system which
can be oriented in a profitable way, on the one hand,
to the more constant, and on the other, to the more vari-
able lines of gradient action in the outer world. Ulti-
mately it does become so oriented.

More specifically, this architectural Tightness is
manifest: (i) In the coincidence of the axis of locomo-
tion with the main axis of growth, and with the three
longitudinal trunk lines of organic conveyance, nerv-
ous, alimentary, and vascular. (2) In the location of
the chief directive receptors, such as the visual, chemo-
tactic, and auditory organs, in single pairs centralized
at the anterior end of the body; with the affectors, such
as muscles, appendages, and other organs, arranged in
graded linear series symmetrically paired, and appar-
ently with definite functional connections, point for
point, between these receptors and affectors. This
functional connection is made by means of paired con-
ductors (neurones, nerve fibres) extending longitudi-
nally, as well as right to left and left to right, which

240 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

offer graded resistance to the passage, or outlet, of
nervous impulses.

I. The Asymmetry of the Outer World. Fully
to appreciate the significance of this organic architec-
tural system and the way it acts, we must know some-
thing of the architectural system of the outer world to
which it must, and does, make a profitable response.

In the outer world of gradient action, all the actors
are very unequally and asymmetrically distributed, not
only in time, but in the three planes of space. Their
ways and means of acting across time and space are
very different; their directive influence, and their con-
structive power, of very unequal value. Hence, first
of all, life must be permanently adjusted, or oriented,
to the major directive influences in this outer world of
action, and be free to respond to its minor, or more
variable influences, good and evil, as they arise.

The most dominant and constant actors in the outer
world are the sun and the earth; one chiefly acting on
life by means of gravity, the other by means of light;
both agencies are propagated practically instantane-
ously, and along essentially radial lines, or lines at
right angles to the earth's surface. All the innumer-
able other actors, so far as life is concerned, are more
variable in power and more intermittent in their ac-
tion, and are distributed with great irregularity within
the tangential terrestrial plane, between the solid earth
and its more fluid envelopes. There they act either
directly on life, as physical or material bodies in mo-
tion, such as circulating air and water with their trans-
ported contents; or as independently moving objects,
such as other plants or animals; or they may act indi-
rectly on life by means of individually transmitted vi-

HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION 241

bratory action, or chemical emissions, such as sound,
odors, color, etc. All these influences, in the main, are
propagated in this horizontal plane, in north and south,
east and west, or intermediate directions, at gradient
rates and with gradient momentum.

2. The Orientation of Triaxial Vital Architecture
to World Architecture. The definite orientation of the
triaxial system to this world action system is seen in the
stable relation of the neuro-haemal axis to the two most
constant directive agencies of the outer world, that is, to
gravity, the more constant and dominant one, and in a
lesser degree, to light, the less constant one.

While in the arthropods the normal, or functional,
position of the body during locomotion is such that the
neural side may be directed either upwards or down-
wards (depending largely on whether the animal is
in a walking, or swimming, position) in the verte-
brates, it is almost without exception directed up-
wards, or away from the earth's centre of gravity. In
either case, the whole body is architecturally and func-
tionally balanced, other things being equal, only when
the neuro-haemal axis is parallel with the lines of
gravity. This force is universal ; it casts no shadows,
and all bodily actions are subject to its unvarying in-
fluence. Hence this architectural and functional ori-
entation should be, and is, the most universal and stable
of all morphological and physiological phenomena.

Light has less pronounced architectural influence
on the body than gravity; for while light, in the main,
comes on rectilinear paths from above, it is subject to
many local and periodic variations, due to terrestrial
motion, incidental reflection and refraction, and com-
plete absorption. It is in the extraordinary variation

242 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

in absorbtive area, in location, in fixation, and in mova-
bility of the 'visual organs, that a fitting architectural
response to these more specific demands is chiefly mani-
fest Hence, when the body is in its normal position,
whether its neural side is up or down, the windows of
the body are generally turned toward the chief sources
of light, or can be so turned, without rotating the body
on its longitudinal axis. But while the dimensions,
dioptric properties, and other attributes of the eyes
may readily change in response to the demands of the

FIGURE n. DIAGRAM TO ILLUSTRATE THE FUNCTIONAL ORIENTATION OF THE
BALANCED TRIAXIAL SYSTEM OF VITAL ARCHITECTURE TO THE UNBALANCED
SYSTEM OF NATURE ARCHITECTURE. A, side view of an arachnid-like animal.
B, cross section of the same in region III, but with the paired eyes of
region I, and the paired trunk muscles of region V and VI projected onto
the same plane. Both figures are structurally oriented to the dominant
actors light, S, gravity G, and to the compass points of the great tangential
plane with its irregularly distributed minor actors.

In B, the balanced effects of a luminous point at s*, are indicated and
the unbalanced effects when the point is shifted to /, J1 and s*; I.e., and
r.e., right and left eyes; ap.m., paired appendicular muscles; ep.m., and
hp, epaxial and hypaxial trunk muscles (myotomes.)

outer world, the inner ends of the optic nerves never

change their relative points of attachment to the brain

throughout the whole vertebrate and arthropod stock.

But when the neuro-haemal axis is parallel with

HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION 243

FIGURE 12. DIAGRAMS OF AN ARACHNID-LIKE ANIMAL SEEN FROM THE
HAEMAL SIDE, to illustrate the mechanism of reorientation in the triaxial
system. In A, the balanced effects, right and left, of a luminous point at a,
are indicated, and the unbalanced effects of a luminous point at a\ In B, a
balanced condition is automatically reestablished in relation to the point a,
by the more vigorous action it has produced in the left appendicular muscles
of the head region, and in the myotomes on the right side of the trunk
and tail regions.

Note the difference in the action of the head and trunk muscles neces-
sary to bring about this bodily reorientation to an asymmetrically placed
stimulus.

the radial lines of gravitational action, as it normally
all the paired receptors and affectors are then, and

is

only then, rightly oriented to the great horizontal plane

244 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

of life's terrestrial environment, whence radiate from
countless individual centres, right and left, the inter-
mittent influences of light, sound, and chemical emis-
sions, to which life must for the moment adjust itself
in order to live with them in profitable relations.

Owing to this gravitational orientation and to this
symmetrical structure and arrangement of right and
left receptors and affectors, balanced cooperative ac-
tion, or rectilinear locomotion inevitably follows,
other things being equal, so long as both right and left
sides are subject, from without, to the same influences.
But when that outward symmetry is disturbed, bodily
reorientation, or various degrees of rebalancing action
necessarily follow, such as swerving, or circus, move-
ments to right and left, toward or away from the mo-
mentarily dominant actor.

A waltzing body, like a rifle bullet, might move
faster, it is true, or straighter, or have greater stabil-
ity, or greater power of penetration, but it could not
keep its "eye on the ball" or on its objective, nor could
the objective remain in that constant regulative touch
with the living body, which is so essential to directive
control.

Exactly mated pairs of organs, acting either against
each other, or in unison, are in many other ways capa-,
ble of the highest degree of cooperative action, an es-
sential factor in their functioning being their right and
left symmetry.

In many coelenterates, worms, and molluscs, where
directive locomotion, or even any locomotion at all,
is little in evidence, there may be an extraordinary
number of visual organs (two hundred, or more, in
some cases), either irregularly distributed over the

HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION 245

surface of the body, or located on radial axes. But if
we bear in mind the necessary correlation between
vision and precisely regulated locomotion, we can read-
ily see why, with evolution, there has been a progres-
sive reduction in the number of eyes, while an exact
right and left symmetry in the one remaining pair is
persistently retained. In exact locomotor reactions to
light, it is apparently essential to establish a point for
point correspondence, right and left, between the outer
world and the internal system of response. This re-
sult can be obtained with one pair of symmetrical
image forming visual organs, but not with several pairs,
nor with asymmetrically, or radially, distributed or-
gans (Fig. 3).

Thus when animals built on the triaxial plan are
normally oriented to the outer world of action, the
body, like a weather-vane, is always impaled on some
one of the vertical lines of gravity; but it is relatively
free to turn its face toward any actor on the horizon,
and to move like an arrow, head-first into the winds of
circumstance.

We can now, perhaps, see more clearly the neces-
sary correlation between vital architectural plans and
world architecture. For any animal built on this
structural plan, in order to be in its most effective po-
sition for purposeful action, must have its two major
axes of organization, neuro-hsmal, right and left,
rightly oriented to the two major axes, radial and tan-
gential, of terrestrial organization. We can also see
that this triple polarization of the triaxial vital system
is nothing more or less than the expression, in archi-
tectural terms, of a threefold qualification of life's free-
dom of movement (radial, tangential, and compass

246 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

turning) and the definition of its field of opportunity
for self-constructive action.

Here again, the dual sovereignty of life is expressed
in its own architecture, and in that of the external
world of action to which it responds, and in which it
has its opportunities, and its limitations.

3. Tropic Action. Conduct often appears to be
the expression solely of an internal sovereignty, acting
independently of external conditions.

But the sovereignty of the external world is clearly
seen under controlled experimental conditions, that is
when a given organism is subject to one predominat-
ing influence, all others, so far as possible, being neu-
tralized, removed, or duly accredited.

External sovereignty is then .manifest in a definite
vital response, commonly called a tropism, which may
be immediately expressed in terms of motion, or loco-
motion, or less immediately in terms of growth. Many
kinds of tropism are recognized, such as geotropism,
heliotropism, chemotropism, etc.

By means of these prearranged experiments, the
biologist seeks, as it were, to dissect the action of the
environment, or to analyze the behavior of an animal,
for much the same reasons, and in much the same
ways, that the chemist seeks to analyze, quantitatively
and qualitatively, a chemical compound; that is in
order more clearly to reveal its constituent actors.

Under such specific conditions, vital structures may
definitely orient themselves to what, for the time be-
ing, is the dominant line of external action; or the or-
ganism moves, or grows, in very different ways in

HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION 247

respect to them. It may grow, for example, directly
away from the earth's centre of gravity, like the stem
of a plant; or towards it, like the roots; or, like many
animals, it may move in straight lines, up, or down,
the invisible lines of gravity; along a beam of light;
or along a radiating line, or trail of chemical emission,
or diffusion, etc., either toward, or away from its
source. Or it may be made to swerve from a balanced
attitude, or straight line action, one way or the other,
in gradient response to gradient changes in direction,
or relative intensity of the source, or sources, of in-
fluence.

These measurable vital responses to measurable ex-
ternal agencies are very convincing, and from them it
would appear that behavior, or conduct, even in the
most highly organized animals, is the resultant of many
mingled external influences each acting in definite
ways, on definite organic structures. And that is
doubtless true. But we may not assume that conduct
is merely the algebraic sum of certain constituent acts.
We cannot measure conduct wholly in that way, any
more than we can measure the action, or quality, or
behavior, of water, as a world agent, by the acts of its
separate chemical constituents.

There is a creative attribute in the cooperative op-
eration of organic acts, as there is in the cooperative
action of chemical elements. For that reason the ex-
perienced biologist, while he always welcomes the in-
formation which may come from the experimental dis-
section and analysis of animal behavior, does not cease
to look on the living animal, on the one hand, as an or-
ganic unit having a special value of its own in its unity,

248 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

and on the other, as a unit which is inseparable from
the environment which created it and which it helps
to create.

For every animal, like a bank, a college, or an au-
tomobile, is both a product and a producer of its time.
As a created and creative agent, the constructive value,
or quality, of each one of them is manifest only when
all its parts are in cooperative action and when it is
itself in action as a creative agent within the social en-
vironment which created it.

4. Triaxial Architecture as a Tropic Reaction
System, and as a Product of Tropic Action. The
most striking attribute of the triaxial system of growth,
in contrast with all other organic systems, is its su-
preme structural fitness for the discriminating receipt
of influences from the outer world, and for moving
from place to place in profitable response to them.

Among the imperative requirements for this free-
dom of movement are: head-first locomotion, parallel
both with the main axis of growth and with the three
longitudinal systems of internal gradient treatment and
distributions; a stable neuro-haemal balance in respect
to gravity; and a bilateral symmetry in reference to a
changing asymmetry in its chief plane of action.

From a historic standpoint, the gradual evolution
of this architectural system, which attains its logical
culmination in man's bodily structure, may be regarded
as a special form of tropic growth, or as a progres-
sively adaptive response to the more insistent actors of
the outer world. The constructive process includes
both the agencies to that end and the products, for it
derives its accumulating constructive profits from

HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION 249

greater freedom of action, and greater freedom from
more profitably responsive structures.

VI. Other Registers of Constructive Action; In-
stincts, Intelligence, Cultural Implements

In addition to the triaxial organization essential to
this basic orientation and guidance, there must be some
internal means of modifying, or reversing tropic ac-
tion from positive to negative, and negative to posi-
tive, when a constructive stimulus is intensified to a
point where it becomes painful, or injurious, or de-
structive, or where it has fulfilled its purpose, and
thereby ceases, for the moment, to be constructive.
That is, conduct, like growth, must be constantly read-
justed to itself, and to that good and evil which changes
the more, the more active the organism is ; and it must
be rightly readjusted, otherwise freedom of movement
would not be more constructive than sitting still and
waiting for something to happen.

We do not know how this is done, but we cannot
doubt it is done, as may be easily demonstrated in the
laboratory; and besides, all about us are the living wit-
nesses to its accomplishment. All, the more highly
organized animals, for example, invariably react con-
structively, or rightly, to gravity, and on the average
they react rightly to many of the countless minor in-
fluences to which they are subject. The register of
one is in the architectural plan of the whole organism
and in its constant orientation to gravity.1

1 See also the remarkable orientation of nerve fibres within the visual
rods of arthropod ocelli, in reference to the direction of the incoming rays
of light, and also in reference to three perpendicular planes. "A Basis for
a Theory of Color Vision." W. Patten, Am. Nat. Vol. 32, 1918.

GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

The register of the other is in supplementary
structural details, chiefly, no doubt, in the nervous sys-
tem. These structural details are not so easily meas-
urable; many of them are wholly inaccessible. They
may be manifest only in supplementary reflex actions,
in instincts, or in the more immediately purposeful acts
called intelligent actions.

In all these cases, the jightly moulded organic
structures and the Tightness of their responses to the
outer world are the product of what we call experience.

Cultural Registers. But to go beyond mere in-
stinct and animal intelligence, and rightly to respond,
in a comprehensive way, to the less insistent warnings,
and to the less frequent invitations of the outer world,
demands something more than the fleeting memory,
and the limited experience of the individual organism.

It demands some means of gaining an approximate
equivalent of personal experience though communica-
tion with other individuals. These equivalents of ex-
perience must then themselves be recorded, or sym-
bolized in some enduring architectural form; averaged
and expressed in what we call natural laws, or customs,
and made, so far as possible, immediately available for
the usage of every individual.

But no one individual, or one generation, can do
that. That is a social function of mankind ; one which
demands for its accomplishment the cooperation of
countless individuals, for many successive generations,
and the usage of more enduring and more powerful
physical agencies than naked protoplasm. And so far
as that is accomplished, animal life passes over into
the more distinctive phases of human life and social

HIGHWAY OF ANIMAL EVOLUTION 251

organization. Man's creative action, his constructive
response to his outer world, is then registered and pre-
served in rituals and social pageantry; in the material
agencies of commerce, art, literature, and science. His
constructive egoism matures in cultural benevolence;
the profits of his labor and of his experience become a
social heritage, and the constructive Tightness in nature
action is reembodied in the works of man.

CHAPTER X

THE ARCHITECTURE AND COHESIVE
POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE

Limitations to the Growth of Man as an Individual, and the Phy-
sical Limitations to his Organic Instruments — The Distinctive
Organs of Social Life, Manual, Visual, Focal, Auditory, a
Mental, and their cooperative Unification — The Merging of Man's
Sense of Self with his Physical Instruments and Material Properties
— The World-wide Unification, Physical, Organic, and Mental, of
the Nineteenth Century: the Completion of the Social Blastoderm;
the Increment of Power; the New Receptors and Perceptors; the
New Ways and Means of Conveyance; the Orientation to a New
World and the New Mental Freedom — The Compulsion to Social
Cooperation — The Consciousness of Social Possessions as the Compel-
ling Creative Power in Social Construction and Social Preservation
— Summary of Chapters VII-X.

I. Limitations to the Growth of Man as an Individ-
ual, and the Physical Limitations to His
Organic Instruments

WE have seen that there are very definite limita-
tions to every system of growth, physical or organic.
When those limits are reached, further growth is pos-
sible only by the production of more individuals of
the same kind (either by repetition, de novo, or by di-
vision, or by self-reproduction) and by their coopera-
tive union to form new systems on a higher level. In
this respect, human beings are not different from celes-
tial bodies, or from atoms, molecules, cells, plants, or
animals. In man, these distinct but overlapping

252

COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 253

phases of growth are: growth, or development, of the
individual man; increase in population by his multi-
plication, or reproduction; and growth, or develop-
ment, of social units ; their division, or multiplication,
growth, cooperative union, etc.

There is reasonable assurance that the triaxial sys-
tem of growth has practically reached its limits in
man. No notable modification in man's architectural
plan, in his physical dimensions, organic structure, or
vital power, is likely to take place, even in the very
remote future. It seems probable, however, that the
general average of attainment in the most characteris-
tic human traits will be much improved, and the dura-
tion of human life greatly increased, and with relative
rapidity. It is also quite possible that the impending
functional segregations of social life, with their spe-
cial trainings, common interests and mutual under-
standings, will tend more and more to minimize racial
and mental distinctions, and accentuate functional
types.

The inherent limitations to man's further evolution,
as an individual organism, lie in the fact that no fur-
ther readjustments, or increments, of his chief vital
organs, such as have taken place in his more remote an-
cestors, are possible. Those changes have clearly
reached their logical conclusion. And as for his
purely muscular and nervous powers, so essential for
locomotion, internal circulation, and discriminating re-
sponse to external agents, further increase of power in
these directions is definitely prohibited by the limited
conductivity and tensile strength of living protoplasm
and its products; by its limited powers of assimilation
and response to physical agents; its limited ability to

254 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

i

transmit these influences, and to distribute its commodi-
ties to the various parts of the body.

These basic limitations of life, well known to the
biologists, but often wholly ignored by the layman,
are not peculiar to man alone, but to all animals, and
to all protoplasmic structures.

Man's freedom of action, as a naked animal organ-
ism, and his profitable response to his environment, is
therefore strictly limited by the purely physical limi-
tations of his organic instruments. They limit his ex-
perience to those world influences which can reach
him through his naked senses; confine him to what-
ever territory he may be able to reach with his unaided
hands and feet; and limit his sources of power to those
foods his unaided digestive organs can assimilate.

Man might multiply indefinitely and his progeny
gradually spread over all the habitable portions of the
globe, but without something more than mere increase
in numbers the individual man would remain prac-
tically as before. He could not greatly increase his
native powers without increasing the physical power of
his organic instruments, and without the aid of his fel-
low-man; it was in these cultural increments to the
power of his vital organs, and in the mutual aid and
cooperative fellowship of unarmed, ape-like men that
human society had its origin.

II. The Distinctive Organs of Social Life; Manual,

Visual, Vocal, Auditory, and Mental, and

Their Cooperative Unification

Man's peculiar fitness for social life was already
established by (i) a considerable measure of intelli-

COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 255

gence, greater probably than in any of his animal pred-
ecessors; (2) an extremely elaborate visual, vocal, and
auditory equipment, readily adaptable to communica-
tion and cooperative social action; and (3) a pair of
appendages (arms and hands) relatively free from lo-
comotor demands, and themselves rightly constructed
for constructive purposes. How, or why, all these or-
ganically distinct sets of structures and functions, so
essential to social life, happened to exist in primitive
man, and which one of them, if any, preceded or ex-
ceeded the other, we do not know; nor is it pertinent
to our present discussion. There they undoubtedly
were, and they, with practically all their subsidiary
parts, were initiated very far back in the arthropod-ver-
tebrate stock, millions of years before the mammals, to
say nothing of man himself, existed; and long before
they could be utilized in social life as they are today.
Thus each of these important organic systems, after
an immeasurably long constructive period, came to
man essentially as they are today, rightly modeled be-
forehand, and with all their great social potentialities
ready for exploitation, and so they are likely to re-
main. What these potentialities are we may better
realize, perhaps, if we try to imagine what the result
would have been if some one of these conditions had
been otherwise. Suppose, for example, that primitive
man, though endowed with the intelligence of a Greek
or Hindoo philosopher, had inherited a hand like a
horse's foot, or an eye like an ant's, or vocal and audi-
tory organs like those of a grasshopper. Intelligence
of that order, even if it could under those conditions
have come into being, with such instruments to work
with would have little or no constructive social value.

256 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

Even with mutual aid and dawning intelligence,
man could not greatly increase his native power, or
raise his social organization much above that of ani-
mal life, until his hand, eye, ear, vocal organs, and
intelligence were brought into better organic coopera-
tion, and their potential constructive power made a
reality. These great constructive functions, visual,
manual, linguistic, auditory, and mental, must march
abreast on approximately the same front; neither one,
without inviting disaster, can greatly surpass, or greatly
fall behind, the other; for they must all act together,
and act cooperatively, to act constructively. Their
constructive power is in their unity of action and pur-
pose, and the progress of man, as an individual and as
a social animal, was, and still is, dependent on the
equitable development of each function.

What we may call the preliminary period of man's
social evolution was devoted largely to the improve-
ment and unification of these organic instruments. For
it was only after that was in some measure achieved
that his hand, guided by his senses and by his intelli-
gence, could put material things to rights, and his ar-
ticulated words — expressing inward emotions in the ar-
chitecture of outwardly propagated sounds — could join
anarchistic wills in one, and direct the conduct of
widely separated human bodies into cooperative social
action.

III. The Merging of Man's Sense of Self with His
Physical Instruments and Material Properties

Meantime man was gradually learning that the ma-
terial things in nature have a constructive power of

COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 257

their own, and that when rightly combined with his
own native powers they become virtually a part of
himself, supplementing the power of his own vital
organs, and extending his sense of self, and of personal
ownership, farther and farther beyond himself, into
the outer world of usable things.

This merging of his living, organic self with ex-
ternal properties, inevitably extended to whatever
things in nature man could lay his hands upon and bend
to his self-constructive ends, including his fellow-man.
And there was the source of his mental confusion as
to the limitations of his personal rights, initiating end-
less conflicts to define and stabilize them. Man could
not sharply distinguish between the constructive and
saving power of his usable personal properties, such
as material objects, domestic, or wild animals or plants,
and human beings, and those of his own vital organs,
because in reality there is no such distinction. Hence
there could be no final solution to his problems of
ownership, personal rights, and the delimitation of
domains, or spheres of constructive action, except the
recognition that the right to use nature's properties
constructively, even man's right of self-usage, is not
restricted to any individual thing. That right is uni-
versal.

The evolution of cultural architecture was a very
slow process, covering a period of something like fifty
thousand, or it may be five hundred thousand years.
It comprised the invention, discovery, and utilization
of many distinct and separate things, beginning with
the rudest implements of wood, or stone, or bone. They
were constructed, or invented, either de novo by differ-
ent primitive races at different times and places, or

258 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

conserved, increased, and transmitted by them in a
process of social inheritance, from one race, or genera-
tion, to another.

There was, of course, no formal continuity, or ar-
chitectural unity, in all these material things, or in
their constructive usage, like, that for example in the
organs of a living body; but their basic elements, or
properties, such as fire, heat, and light; the elasticity
of the bow, vibrating strings and membranes; the prin-
ciples involved in the hammer, the wheel, and the axle,
lever, arch, and sail; and the application of power in
pull and thrust, the automatic adjustment, or response,
of material things to gravity, atmospheric pressure, and
to other physical agencies, were everywhere the same.
The more complex mechanisms, that were evolved at
a later period, such as a watch, engine, or microscope,
were merely more complex cooperative combinations
of them "organized" for some particular end, or pur-
pose.

In all this cultural evolution, the real gain, as in
all other phases of evolution, was in constructive right-
ness. The evidence of that Tightness was both in the
things so constructed, and in their constructors, human
and otherwise. Somehow, or in some way, there has
been registered and conserved in the architecture of
the individual man, as the regenerative power of the
race is registered and conserved in the architecture of
the egg, the power to reconstruct in a few hours what
had taken his ancestors many thousand of years to con-
struct. The most essential element of that new cultural
power was Tightness, or the "knowledge" of the right
way to do things.

COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 259

Thus a most significant factor in cultural evolution
is the enlarged sense of personality that goes with every
increase of man's personal properties, or possessions.
When man made a club to reinforce his fist, or teeth,
shaped a log to improve his locomotion, or cleared a
place to plant a root, or seed, helping it to grow in or-
der to insure the continuity of his own food supply, it
was in effect a larger process of self-construction, in
which the growth of his own individuality was ex-
tended beyond his organic self, into those properties
which he appropriated from nature, or which with his
own hands, instead of his digestive organs, he con-
structed out of nature's own constructive materials.

His instinct of self-preservation then widened to
embrace his larger self, compelling him to preserve
and protect his possessions, as he would a part of his
own body, or his own offspring.

That is, the conscious possession of these self-con-
structing cultural properties carried with it the mental
compulsion to protect and save them. This is merely
another instance of the compulsion of possessions that
we have seen in operation in the organic and physical
world.

Another significant factor is that these cultural
properties can be detached, or alienated, from their
producer, or creator, without destroying their con-
structive power, or usefulness. For a well-constructed
club is as impartial in its impact, a plot of ground, in
its returns, and a canoe, in its buoyancy, for the man
who buys them, or steals them, or in any other way gets
possession of them, as they were for the man who put
his labor into them. But the head, or hand, cannot
be so separated from the body and still preserve its con-

26o GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

structive power, either for the producer, or for any
one else.

This more obvious and more permanent usefulness
of detachable possessions is an essential condition for
barter, or commerce, or for that mutually profitable ex-
change of constructive properties across the larger
reaches of time and space, which separate one individ-
ual from the other. The viability, or conveyability,
of these constructive properties is an essential condition
to the functional unity of separate human beings, or,
in other words, to social metabolism.

While the growth of these cultural properties led
to endless conflicts for their possession, they were not
wholly destroyed by the change of ownership, but ac-
cumulated to form the foundation of future social life
on a still larger scale.

For as slaves, retainers, domesticated animals and
plants, cultivated lands, dwelling places, weapons and
utensils of all kinds grew in constructive power and
durability; as man's knowledge of the right way to use
them increased; and as their saving and constructive
value extended beyond the nominal owner, to the
many, the initial limitations of the more primitive in-
dividual man were widened, his sense of personality en-
larged, blending with that of his more helpful fellows,
and so into that of the social group and its common store
of cultural possessions. The social unit then virtually
became the property of every individual in it. For
each one could then rightly refer to it as my clan, or
my village, or in later stages of social evolution, as my
city, my college, or my country.

From time to time, the hearthstone, the totem, the
college color, the cross, the crescent, or the flag, became

COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 261

the symbol of this social unity; something that signi-
fied, in a simple, tangible form the history and tradi-
tions, or the common body of constructive agencies,
which produced that unity, and its common purpose.

Such symbols are the material agencies of mental
compulsion in these various social groups. As occa-
sion may demand, they are effectively utilized to mobi-
lize the vital resources of all their individual mem-
bers, to summons them to augment and preserve their
possessions.

But with better understanding, the sense of owner-
ship extends far beyond even these broader limits,
for it then becomes sufficiently obvious, at least to the
so-called idealist, that the scientific and political
achievements of the French, German and English peo-
ples, the art, literature, and philosophy of Greek and
Roman, of Hebrew, Hindoo, and Mongolian, and the
cultural inventions of the American, are practically im-
mortal human possessions, a common social heritage
open to the usage of all mankind, and having essen-
tially the same constructive value for one race or nation
as for the other. It is also obvious that the charac-
teristic quality in each local cultural product, and the
most valuable one to other peoples, is something which
can have its origin only in some particular social group,
with its own peculiar antecedents and surroundings.

The consciousness in one people of this ownership
in the constructive attributes of all the others, and the
recognition of the common source of these attributes,
is the only power which can hold mankind together in
social unity, and compel man to mobolize his resources
in order to augment and preserve his common pos-
sessions.

262 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

We may see in all this cultural growth the same
constructive strategy and cumulative benevolence we
have seen in other phases of evolution. For man's
mere bodily growth, supplemented by his external, or
cultural, constructiveness, while enlarging his egoism,
also enlarges his altruism. It thereby enables the in-
dividual man to give the body social something of more
permanent constructive value; and it is these personal
profits, to him no longer usable, which are ultimately
redirected to his future self, or offspring, as a germinal,
cultural heritage.

We need not review the evolution of man's extra-
bodily constructions, such as tools, clothing, utensils,
material instruments, etc., whose architecture is al-
ways the expression, in some one or more particulars,
of the peculiar constructive power of his bodily or-
gans. All that is sufficiently familiar, or easily acces-
sible. What we wish to emphasize is that every new
cultural invention, or construction, every new discov-
ery in constructive Tightness, was virtually an exten-
sion of the powers of some one or more of his vital
organs, and yielded its returns in social growth, ac-
cording to the constructive value of the invention to
the individual man. And, to some extent, these inor-
ganic cultural instruments reacted constructively on
man's vital organization, as though they actually were
new vital organs.

The rate of cultural evolution was, therefore, no
more uniform than organic evolution. It was spas-
modic and divergent; now rapid, now slow; now in
one direction, now in another, until the full creative

COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 263

power of each construction was realized; and checked
when a new level of stability was attained.

Nevertheless, when we compare the new things
constructed by man during this long proto-cultural pe-
riod, with the progress of his own bodily organization,
it is evident that cultural growth was very rapid in-
deed.

Man's cultural constructiveness was first exercised
to increase his own individual possessions, for his own
personal usage, or at most for that of a comparatively
small group of individuals, such as the family, band, or
class. But whatever man himself may have thought,
or believed, or intended, all of his cultural achieve-
ments, such as utensils, weapons, and housings, and the
territories delimited and preempted by cultivation,
roadways, and defenses were in reality possessions in
common, for immediate or future usage of all mankind.

This early cultural period may be regarded as a
sort of protozoan cultural age; that is, an age of more
or less isolated, or independent, elemental cultural in-
struments. It was a necessary preliminary stage to
their cooperative union, or combination, to form the
more complex machinery of modern life, and through
its instrumentality, to tie the larger social groups into
organic unity.

IV. The World-wide Unification, Physical, Organic
and Mental of the Nineteenth Century

But when this proto-cultural age, which we shall
not attempt to review, attained its maturity, and the ele-
ments, or principles, of many separate inventions were

264 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

variously combined, making them more comprehensive
in their utility, serving not only one man, or one vil-
lage, but many millions of human beings, for all time
and all places, as the printing press, telegraph, and
engine, man was unwittingly compelled, in spite of
himself, to think and act constructively for all mankind.

Many factors contributed to this result, but all of
them seem to have been slowly marshalled in secret,
like the different organs of a growing embryo. In the
nineteenth century, to use roundly a convenient unit of
time, they seem to come into cooperative action all at
once, making that century the most creative period in
the history of organic evolution; setting it distinctly
apart as the quickening period of a world-wide, social
entity; and making, at least in a physically united hu-
manity, the philosopher's dream a reality.

We can do no more than barely outline the cultural
movements of the nineteenth century, and in so doing
we shall not rigidly restrict ourselves to the literal
meaning of the term, for many of these movements may
be traced back, historically, hundreds, or thousands,
of years. But in the cases specified the movements at-
tained well within that period a quickening momentum
and a unity of action befitting the birth of a living body
of world-wide dimensions.

It will best serve our present purpose, if we project
these events in bold relief against the general back-
ground of organic evolution. We may then more
clearly see what it was that so quickly widened man's
mental horizon, increased his freedom of action, and
made his organic unity a reality. The events we have
in mind may be grouped as follows :

COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 265

I. The Completion of the Social Blastoderm.
With increase in population, migrations, and coloniza-
tions, man had at last, within the nineteenth century,
covered all the habitable surface of the globe with a
virtually continuous blastoderm, to use an embryolog-
ical term, or at least with an anastomosing network of
human beings, which were everywhere within reach
of one another; all of them moving more or less freely
to and fro, and mingling with one another in social
and reproductive intercourse.

It is true that the discrete elements in this stream-
ing human plasmodium, its individuals, families,
tribes, and races, are separated by countless cleavage
planes of habits, prejudices, and long established cus-
toms; by arbitrary territorial boundaries rupturing, or
bending in and out, under the varying osmotic pressure
of rising and declining populations; by semi-perme-
able rivers, plains, and forests; or by impassable na-
ture-barriers, oceans and mountain ranges, ancient and
forbidding. But on the other hand, between the larger
blood-islands of social life, lie the open gateways of
terrestrial architecture, permanent channels, and stand-
ing invitations to social and commercial circulation.
No animal in the history of organic evolution, nor man
himself, has ever before attained this world-wide dis-
tribution and this degree of freedom in social inter-
course.

2. The Increment of Power. The increase in the
amount of energy at man's command, or that he was
able to utilize for moving, or conveying himself and
his properties from place to place, was chiefly due (i)
To greater food supplies derived from domesticated

266 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

animals and plants, drawn from all quarters of the
globe; and from better agricultural returns. (2) To the
use of mineral fuels and water power. (3) To the
use of machinery. During the brief period of the nine-
teenth century, the resulting increase in man's construc-
tive power, and in his power of transportation, was far
greater than in all the preceding cultural eras, and is
without a parallel in any animal, for any length of time
whatsoever, in the whole history of evolution. The
chief creative value of this accomplishment lies in the
fact that, for the first time in evolution, it provided a
living organism with sufficient power for a continuous,
world-wide, vital circulation, comparable in its func-
tional and social significance with the initial circula-
tion of the blood in a growing embryo.

3. The New Receptors and Perceptors. Sense
organs are living resonators, or receptors tuned to par-
ticular kinds of physical action. The range of action
to which they respond, that is, wave-length, energy,
and frequency, is in each organ very limited ; they are
either mute to actions outside that range, or destroyed
by them.

In their respective functions and limitations, the
sense organs of man are much like those of other ani-
mals. In both cases, there is a vast world of nature-
action all about them, to which they do not, and cannot,
make an adaptive response. To them, this other and
greater world does not exist.

Man alone is able to construct supplementary
sense organs, or perceptors, or measurers, of external
events; that is, he alone is able to select certain objects
which are highly sensitive to particular external acts,
or conditions, shield them from other influences, and

COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 267

then, by observing their reactions, to obtain from them
more trustworthy testimony to nature-action, unpreju-
diced by previous opinion, conflicting vital influences,
or human emotions.

This mental humility, or the willingness to appeal
to the democracy of nature and to submit to the un-
biassed testimony of her humblest constituents, defi-
nitely initiated the delivery of man from the dominion
of his own senses. During the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, probably for the first time in history,
this mental attitude became the chief characteristic of
intellectual leaders, and the means by which they made
their most important discoveries. It was the chief fac-
tor in the rapid evolution of modern science, and at
once revealed to man a new world of architectural
realities, to which he was compelled mentally to orient
himself, whether he would or no.

By means of these new physical instruments, prac-
tically all of them constructed, or greatly improved,
during the nineteenth century, the precision, range, and
capacity of human sense organs was magnified many
hundred, thousand, or even million fold. The micro-
scope, telescope, and camera became a new eye; the
stethoscope, seismograph, and phonograph, a new
ear; and physical, astronomical, chemical, and biologi-
cal laboratories, with all their machinery for measur-
ing, analyzing, and recording nature-action, became
new balancing, temperature, olfactory, and gustatory
organs. But even more than that, they were building
a more stable and more comprehensive register of
human experience, in fact, a new social memory, and
a cloud of ready witnesses that were partisans of no
theory, no race, no government, and no religion.

268 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

We can grasp the magnitude and the significance of
this almost instant achievement of man only when we
realize that there had been no notable inventions or
consistent improvements in animal sense organs in many
millions of preceding years.

4. The . New Ways and Means of Conveyance.
Broadly speaking, vital response is expressed in the
ways and means of conveyance: (i ) In organic acts, or
motion, such as movements of appendages, heart-beat,
peristaltic action, etc. ; in locomotion, or bodily trans-
portation in air, land, or water, or along definite roads,
or pathways in such media; and in circulation, or the
internal movements of vital commodities and waste
materials through definite channels, blood vessels, ca-
nals, and tubules. (2) In communication, or the trans-
mission of impulses through amorphous media, such as
air, or water, or soil; or through specially constructed
conductors, such as nerve fibres. (3) In the impulses
and commodities themselves, and in their conductors,
receptacles, records, and other architectural contain-
ers. (4) In the regulation of conveyance in response to
variations in supply and demand.

Commerce, science, literature, and art, in a word,
culture, is merely an extension, or enlargement, of these
organic systems of conveyance, utilizing more power
and other instruments, and which at one and the same
time serve the same functions for many, that the vital
organs do for one.

Man was the first animal to construct a cultural
system of this character. In the nineteenth century, its
great trunk lines of conveyance extended completely
round the earth, for the first time in evolution, defi-

COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 269

nitely uniting and regulating the supplies and demands
of a world-wide social life.

Within that period, its roads and pathways grew
from provincial, or national ones, to oceanic and con-
tinental highways, rightly oriented to terrestrial archi-
tecture and human service. The stored-up energy of a
nature-life, long since extinct, became its chief source
of power. Primeval vehicles of vital commodities
grew to steel-clad ships and cars, swift couriers of age-
long hostile peoples and their products. The feeble
signals of cell to cell and man to man, calling for aid
and offering aid, grew to the call of empires and con-
tinents flashed around the world in advertisement of
their surplus and their necessities; and accepting these
invitations to exchange, protoplasmic, cultural, and in-
ternational metabolism were joined in one.

In approximately this brief period, many house-
hold functions grew into municipal and state functions;
and domestic architecture into municipal and state ar-
chitecture; into reservoirs, parks, conservatories, gran-
aries, and warehouses, and into communal heating,
lighting, cooking, cold storage, and sewerage systems.
The unstable mental records of countless individuals
were fixed, summed up, tabulated and recorded in ma-
terial symbols; memorialized in ledgers of metal and
stone; in libraries and museums; in science, literature,
and art, the great communal banks for the conservation
of human profits, world reservoirs of spiritual power,
subject to draught at all times, by all peoples.

All these great cultural systems, which came to
life with such extraordinary rapidity in the nineteenth
century, are for social life precisely what the living, or-

270 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

ganic systems of the body are for the living individual,
receivers, conveyors, containers, metabulators, and reg-
ulators of constructive supplies; sustaining and quick-
ening social life, the world over, by their mutually
serviceable action.

5. The Orientation to a New World and the New
Mental Freedom. The world in which an animal lives
is limited to those things to which it is rightly oriented,
and to which, for that reason, it makes a profitable re-
sponse. To react unprofitably is to die. The profit is
in avoiding those things which are evil and in taking
possession of those which are good. In its ultimate
analysis, this vital response is a process of exploration
and experiment, conscious or unconscious, measurable
in the power used for conveyance in exploration, and
in the constructive Tightness of the response, mental or
physical, to the good and evil discovered.

So it is with men. We have witnessed the enormous
increment of man's physical power and constructive
Tightness in the nineteenth century, and how his world,
and his freedom of action in it, was enlarged with every
increment in his usable power, and with every new in-
vention of physical instruments for better exploration
and discovery, and for the better measurement of what
was really going on in the world of action all about
him.

If we try to picture the typical man of two hundred,
or ten thousand, or even fifty thousand years ago, and
compare him, merely as a human being, without his
cultural implements and social atmosphere, with the
man of today, we shall find little or no reason to
suspect that in naked physical and mental capacity he
would be the one to suffer from the comparison. But

COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 271

how great the difference when their respective cultural
instruments and social atmospheres are thrown into the
balance!

Consider for a moment the man of today in his
altered mental relations to natural phenomena. How his
knowledge of the physical and organic, large and small,
has grown! How his mental attitude, or his mental
orientation in reference to them, has been readjusted
and progressively stabilized with that growth! Con-
sider geography, and celestial architecture; spiral
nebulae and radio-activity; spontaneous generation, con-
tagious diseases, surgery, sanitation, bacteria, heredity,
and the architecture and functions of cells, plants, and
animals; slavery, and the social relations of man to
man. How this world of his has been enlarged in the
nineteenth century! How he has been compelled to
reorient himself to it in mental tropic response. How
his vision has been clarified, his wild guesses and super-
stitions rectified. How his resources have been in-
creased, and his ability to distinguish between reality
and phantasy, good and evil, right ways of thinking
and acting, and wrong ways. Then consider his profits
therefrom in terms of mental and physical growth,
mental and physical freedom. His old world of
thought and action appears small, indeed, and tra-
gically confused, but only because a larger, more law-
ful world of thought and action has been revealed to
us, and our life has been brought into cooperative action
with it.

But this new heritage of man was not merely an
endowment of physical power and material instru-
ments; it was also a spiritual endowment, and the
greatest of all was the new concept of world growth.

272 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

Evolution was, in effect, a mental emancipation from
an imaginary immutable world order. It released man
from the dominion of a fixed idea, and revealed him to
himself, not as the degenerate paralytic offspring of a
fallen angel, the imprisoned scourge of an implacable
and incompetent experimenter like himself, but as a
living growing part of a living growing universe ; prod-
uct of the sun and soil, blood relative and next of kin
to his meanest servants. This revelation, at first so stag-
gering and repulsive to his childish imagination, ulti-
mately inspired him with its real significance, and gave
to his newly-won manhood, and to his new concept of
animism, a new dignity. It was a rousing challenge to
the dawning consciousness of his physical and intellec-
tual powers; and under its influence the dominion of
age-old myths, and fables, and superstition, passed rap-
idly away. The long night of baseless terror and gro-
tesque imaginings was past and a new day was dawn-
ing. His multitudinous enemies vanished with the
dark, and in the new light appeared as friends and co-
workers. Man was at last conscious of his real self;
conscious of his unity with his fellow creatures, and
conscious of his creative mission. He heard nature
speaking to him in friendly tones, and at last realized
-that her gestures were not threats, but invitations to
creative acts. The students and lovers of nature, walk-
ing with nature in the field, the hospital, workshop, and
laboratory, were no longer, in their own estimation, or
in that of their fellows, social outcasts, or harmless
lunatics, or sacrilegious sorcerers and workers of witch-
craft, or magic, in dens of secret iniquity, but self-re-
specting and respected ministers of a new order; new
instruments of nature, seeking, not indeed to conquer

COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 273

nature, but to discover the will of nature, the better to
obey it.

This growth period, then, that we have had in mind
was doubtless the most remarkable constructive period
in the history or organic evolution. No known geo-
logical era, representing many millions of years, shows
anything comparable, either in actual accomplishment,
or in potential significance, with this world-wide func-
tional unification of physical, organic, and spiritual
powers.

V. The Compulsion to Social Cooperation

It is evident that the source of man's motor power
is not in man himself. The real source of the great
wealth of life and treasure, which not only provides
him with the means to action, but the motive for action,
is in the past; in the sunlight and in the soil; in moving
and standing waters; in the forests, mountains, and
plains; in their products, and in their inhabitants. It
is from this accumulated capital of nature's construc-
tive labor that man derives his vital power. It is the
common heritage of life from nature, held in trust by
life, for life and its posterity.

But the dawning consciousness that he, Aladdin-
like, could command these vast sources of power; that
at the touch of his hand and the impulse of his will
these monstrous genii of good and evil could be sum-
monsed to his aid, spurred him on to gain possession
of them. They became indeed the common objectives
of national and imperial endeavor. But the questions,
what shall be done with them, or how shall we use

274 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

them, brought the old militant, selfish doctrines of
church and state into conflict with the new doctrines of
democracy; not merely with the democracy of man-
kind, but with nature's kind; with that universal
equality of right to be served, the obligation to serve,
and the equitable sharing of profits and losses, upon
which all constructive, or creative action depends.

This conflict cannot be confined to any time, or
place, or people; it cuts across every phase of life, high
and low, young and old, domestic and foreign. It is, in
fact, not merely a question of national, or racial, or
class growth, it is a basic question of organic evolution,
or the right constructive usage of all nature's resources.

There was, and there is today, little or no conscious-
ness of the real social significance of evolution among
the most cultured peoples, or even among scientists
themselves, to say nothing of the outspoken political
and theological champions of the old regime. Too
late for the rack and the stake, evolution was tolerated
with a grimace and a joke, and became an impalpable
atmosphere and an agency of intellectual compulsion.
The monkey saved it from academic oblivion. All un-
consciously, the basic idea in evolution took root in the
popular mind, and through the agency of science and
the press penetrated all social and mental strata, in
countless subtle disguises; widening the general per-
spective, clarifying social vision, undermining ancient
shams and privileges, weakening the old bonds of au-
thority, and equalizing the power of individual men
for good and evil.

• • • • •

Dominion and equality, over lordship and democ-
racy, are irreconcilable ideals. In a universal egoistic

COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 275

struggle for power, where everything must get what it
can, and defend what it has, there is no escape but to
rob, or be robbed, or to remain stationary. In a world
that is not, and cannot be stationary, there are but two
alternative vital policies, or goals of vital endeavor,
and in reality but one of these goals is attainable; either
a perpetual life and death struggle of the stronger
against the weaker, making dominion and slavery the
ideal, or progressive cooperation, making equality of
rights and mutual service the ideal. At the beginning
of the twentieth century, the time had come in the social
evolution of man when a decisive conflict between these
two ideals was inevitable. For the first time in human
history, this alternative, openly expressed, and so clearly
formulated that the meanest intelligence could not fail
to grasp its import, became for every race, and class,
and nation, and individual, not merely an academic
question, but the practical question of the moment, de-
manding immediate action.

The rapid growth of the preceding century, the
complete preemption of the world's habitable territory,
the contiguity of alert, hostile entities, gigantic reser-
voirs of power surcharged with pent-up energy and
cris-crossed with wires hot with inflammable lies, and
the deep-rooted conviction on all sides that the im-
pending struggle was to be one of life and death, made
the war that followed a fitting expression of the magni-
tude of the forces set in motion, the issues at stake, and
the unity of world interests.

But it was also a most significant testimonial to the
uncompromising bitterness and heroism with which
man will fight for his convictions, right or wrong; the
willingness with which he gives up his life in the de-

276 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

fense of his ideal of justice, and of what he believes to
be right. That testimonial is not an assurance. It is
a warning.

• • • • *

The social turmoil of today is in part the result of
the destruction of life and property, and the loss of
constructive momentum due to the war itself; but in
the main it is the expression of the very same causes
that brought on the war — that is (i) The attainment
of a world-wide physical unity, expressing itself in
social vitality, in national and in class consciousness, and
in vigorous self-constructive purposes. (2) The uni-
versal struggle, individually and collectively, for the
possession of territory, of land and yet more land, with
all its sources of power, as a means of self-preservation
and growth. (3) The conscious command of vast
sources of power by organized social groups, consti-
tuting both a threat of mutual destruction, and an in-
vitation to mutual service. (4) The conflict of ideals
within these groups as to the right ways and means of
using their power.

Reduced to its lowest terms, the problem in every
national, as well in every individual, life is how to get
power and how to use it. It is the problem of egoism
and altruism applied to cultural constructiveness or
cultural growth.

All problems concerning the use of power, in nature
or in any phase of human life, are the same; they are
architectural problems; problems in self-construction,
or growth, old as life and nature itself, yet always ap-
pearing in new forms. They can never be permanently
solved as long as life and growth endure. The inev-
itable new conditions produced by growth, create new

COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 277

supplies, new reactions, and new demands, and these
demands must be supplied if growth is to continue.

But there is obviously only one way in which that
can be done, and that way is always the same ; better
cooperation, better egoism and altruism, better mutual
services, and better fulfilment of mutual obligations.
Therein lies the compulsion to social cooperation.

Standing on this basic axiom, all constructive prob-
lems in social life may be resolved into secondary prob-
lems of ways and means of extending the principles of
cooperative action to larger and larger groups, or con-
ditions, for longer and longer periods. To that end,
correspondingly larger experience, more comprehen-
sive vision, and greater tenacity of purpose are essen-
tial. But the constructive method will always remain
the same.

VI. The Consciousness of Social Possession as the
Compelling Creative Power in Social Construc-
tion and Social Preservation

In cultural constructiveness, the new agent used to
direct, or to control power is the human will, which is
itself an expression of intelligence. Intelligence is a
highly discriminating constructive response of the in-
dividual man to his outer world. But the very at-
tribute which makes intelligence one of the most con-
structive agents in social evolution, at the same time
constitutes its inherent weakness. As a form of energy,
its power is immeasurably small. Its discriminating
irritability and instability are defects as deadly as these
qualities are vital, or essential.

In physical and organic evolution, progress is made

278 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

by stabilizing and conserving, in some architectural
form, the gains in constructive Tightness and coherent
power. In cultural evolution, the problem is to stab-
ilize and conserve the gains of constructive intelligence ;
that is, to reinforce the will to create and to preserve
social institutions. That is the function of education.

But that education must be fundamentally right,
and consistent with itself. If the educators themselves
are not rightly educated, or if they are teachers of con-
flicting social ideals, fundamentally incompatible, the
more elaborate and extensive the education, the greater
the disaster when the social structures built upon these
ideals collapse.

There is no hope in an education, however, technical
or elaborate, which does not stabilize a basic sense of
social righteousness; nor in one which serves more
deeply to entrench antagonistic wills in opposition on
fundamental principles, strengthening their respective
convictions, increasing their respective 'powers, and
perpetuating a conflict which becomes more and more
bitter and mutually destructive.

Human society, large or small, national or inter-
national, is a living, growing organism with attributes
peculiar to itself. Its unity and vitality is expressed in
the cooperative actions of all its constituent parts.

There is no physical power that can hold these
heterogeneous social structures together save the human
will, acting in self-preservation under the guidance and
compulsion of intelligence. That will to preserve
social life, that common compulsion to defend it and
contribute to it, can exist only in the conviction that
social life is a vital part of every individual life, and
that the whole architecture of society, physical and or-

COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 279'

ganic, national and international, is a personal posses-
sion of every one of its constituents. With this convic-
tion, which is broadened and stabilized with broaden-
ing intelligence, self and society are automatically
merged in one organism, and the compulsion of these
cultural possessions provides the motive to social self-
preservation and further social growth.

Summary to Chapters VII, X

We may summarize our conclusions as to construc-
tive action and world architecture as follows:

Every individual thing in nature is a resultant prod-
uct of cooperative action between itself and its outer
world. The influence of these cooperative agencies,
great and small, on one another is mutual, but not
equivalent. The effect is profitable, or cumulative, and
tends mutually to direct, or mould, the world's content
into more and more diversified architectural forms,
which are themselves more and more unified by the
cooperative action of their constituent parts, subject to
directive external control. Therein lies the source of
their increment in power. The resultant constructive
and conserving action is what we call growth, or pro-
gress, or evolution, or creation, or constructive Tight-
ness.

Man's bodily structure is the final product of indi-
vidualized cell growth, cell multiplication, and cellu-
lar socialization, in which the cooperating cells and
their products are either definitely localized or con-
veyed, so as to form a symmetrical, triaxial system of

28o GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

gradient action, in which the actors have the most
profitable functional relations, both to one another and
to the asymmetrical system of gradient action in the
outer world.

The consistent architectural growth of this particu-
lar action system throughout the whole range of geo-
logic and embryologic history is what we call The
Great Highway of Animal Evolution.

The evolution of this system is the resultant of a
cumulative directive restriction and compulsion, which
is expressed architecturally in a progressive upbuild-
ing, or growth tropism, wherein the organic architec-
tural elements react to nature's content in a more and
more self-constructive, or profitable, way.

The basic difference between the life of a single cell
leading an independent existence, and the life of a hu-
man being, lies in the fact that in man there are many
millions of cells united in a common constructive serv-
ice; each cell leading its own individual life, yet serv-
ing all the others, and in turn served by them; all con-
tributing something to the sum total of what we call the
individual man, and all cooperating to make him a more
effective servant to other individuals, human and other-
wise.

No one cell in the human body, so far as we know,
does anything essentially better, or more difficult, than
the others, or than the things a single vagabond cell
may do. But when millions of cells are united to form
one organic body, with common interests and common
dangers; a common origin and a common destiny; with
justly divided labors duly performed and welfare mu-

COHESIVE POWER OF SOCIAL LIFE 281

tually assured, how different are the powers so created!
How great the possibilities !

In man, as an individual organism, an absolute, or
natural, constructive limitation to the power of terres-
trial organic growth, has been attained, which neither
man, nor any other form of animal life, is at all likely
to surpass, unless it may be in better mental adapta-
bility to a cooperative social life. In the arthropod-
vertebrate stock, the great trunk line of animal evolu-
tion which runs through the whole gamut of geologic
eras and finally culminates in man, the consistent
progress of organic growth, with its concomitant adap-
tive readjustment to itself and to the outer world of
action, reaches its logical conclusion. Moreover man's
chief vital organs, sensory, digestive, circulatory, and
motor, have practically reached a natural limitation to
the physical powers of protoplasmic response.

Man's further evolution is possible, up to the limit
of nature's available constructive capital, only by mul-
tiplication, or increase in population; by raising the
general average of man's physical and mental power;
by further individualization, or specialization; and by
better social cooperation, aided by the evolution of
those cultural agencies which extend, reenforce, and
communize man's purely bodily functions.

During the last century, these wholly involuntary
phases of social growth, radiating from many inde-
pendent social foci, have met and joined forces around
the world, producing a new, critical stage in organic
evolution, where social cooperation, or cultural organ-
ization, irrespective of race, class, or nation, has be-

282 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

come compulsory, and now awaits only a more "volun-
tary" human guidance, before further social evolution
can be realized.

The cohesive power of social life is the will to create
social institutions. Acting under the compulsion of
self-preservation, man is compelled to provide that
power out of his own resources as soon as elemental in-
telligence dictates to him that social institutions are
his personal possessions usable in self-construction and
self-preservation.

PART IV

THE ARCHITECTONICS OF MENTAL
EVOLUTION

CHAPTER XI

THE ORIENTATION OF MENTAL IMAGERY

TO NATURE-ACTION AS A MEANS TO

CONSTRUCTIVE CONDUCT

The Cooperation between Conduct, Cosmic, Organic, and Mental
Action — The Egoism and Altruism of Mental Life, Learning, and
Teaching — The Parallelism between Mental and Physical Evolu-
tion— Mental Imagery as a Self-Constructive Function — The Evo-
lution of Mental Imagery — The Imagination as an Instrument of
Conveyance — The New Freedom and the New World — Basic Con-
cepts: Creation, Growth, Obedience, Service, Profit — The Tests of
Veracity.

I. The Cooperation Between Conduct, Cosmic,
Organic, and Mental Action

CONFIRMED evolutionists, unlike introspective phil-
osophers, prefer to approach their problems from with-
out, and, so far as possible, to treat them in a purely
objective way. At the very outset, therefore, of any
comprehensive treatment of social life, we must
clearly recognize that man is one of the more recent
products of a unified system of cosmic growth, in which
physical, organic, and mental evolution have played
and still play their respective roles. We must also
recognize that all the agencies of this system, including
man, can endure and grow only so far as they rightly
conform to one 'another and act in a mutually profitable
way.

Starting with these basic assumptions, analysis of

285

286 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

social growth at once reveals four main categories of
phenomena whose constructive relations to one another
must be considered, (i) Nature-action, or the cosmic
action system itself, as expressed in the growth, or crea-
tion, of physical and organic bodies. (2) Man's reac-
tions, as a purely animal organism, to the cosmic sys-
tem. (3) His mental imagery of nature action. (4)
His conduct in reference to his outer world, as influ
enced by his imagery, or by his so-called intelligence.
The first two categories we have considered in the
preceding chapters.

As man's mental imagery is a prime creative factor
in the newer phases of cosmic evolution that we call so-
cial life, giving man a new footing in the world differ-
ent from all the other products of nature, it is necessary
for us to consider how this mental imagery has grown
up in man, and how it has influenced his conduct. In
this way we may, perhaps, better understand the ar-
chitectural relations between these great action sys-
tems, for it is evident that, at least in some measure and
in some way, they must become more rightly fitted to
one another before they can act more cooperatively, or
profitably, or before they can become progressively
creative and saving agencies. As an intelligent animal,
man's life and growth is contingent on the Tightness
both of his mental imagery and his conduct, or upon the
maintenance of profitable relations between his mental
imagery, his conduct, and his outer world.

Sometime, perhaps, the evolutionist may be able to
trace in broad perspective, the growth of man's mental
life into those more specific systems of mental imagery
called religious, scientific, and philosophic thought,
and to trace their concomitant morphological expres-

ORIENTATION OF MENTAL IMAGERY 287

sion in bodily acts and bodily structures, or in conduct,
art, and social procedure. That, needless to say, can-
not now be done. However, some tentative generaliza-
tions, indicative of the cooperative relations between
these different systems, may be permissible. Broadly
stated, they seem to be somewhat as follows : ( i ) Man's
mental imagery, reflecting directly or indirectly nature-
action, tends to become unbuilt and organized into logi-
cally coherent sequences by the same self-saving and
creative methods that have produced nature's evolution-
ary streams of form and structure. (2) Hence, no
matter what their racial sources may be, or their instru-
mentalities, science, religion, and philosophy are driven
by the same logical compulsion toward the same ele-
mental conclusions. (3) Hence these psychic-action
systems, when outwardly expressed in material con-
structions, in organic action, conduct, art, or cultural
constructions, must be expressed in similar architec-
tural forms, and in similar modes of social procedure.
In this indirect way, man's mental imagery, bodily
actions, and social procedures are individually unbuilt
by mutual adaptation, and in functional unison, as
members of a common growth system, and in accord-
ance with the same saving and constructive methods
universally used in nature architecture.

II. The Egoism and Altruism of Mental Life,
Learning and Teaching

In the evolution of these three great currents of
constructive thought, we see the same basic imagery,
the same attempts to discover corresponding realities in
nature, and the same attempts to test, or interpret, trie'

a88 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

validity of their imagery in terms of conduct. There
is the same trial groping after truth, wherein saving
Tightness and eliminating error ultimately yield some
abiding sense of mental well-being, self-saving satisfac-
tion, and new creative power in a cooperative or logical
explanation, and in profitable conduct.

All of them have had their martyrs to truth, and in
all their leaders there is manifest the same constructive
egoism, the same insatiable acquisitiveness of the stu-
dent, or investigator, which overflows into idealism,
whose receptive goal lies somewhere outside of self,
beyond the constructive limitations of individual life.
This missionary spirit of idealism, this mental benevo-
lence, or mental altruism, is the characteristic teacher
instinct of mankind. It is, in effect, the germinal, or re-
productive, attribute of the mind, constituting the basic
factor in a system of mental heritage, by which the ac-
cumulating profits of mental Tightness are given vital
continuity. What man learns today and teaches to-
morrow is the chief, if not the only source of man's
mental capital. This mental overflow, through what-
ever channels it may find its way, is in fact, a dower of
mental mother-yolk for future generations to utilize
and build upon, but unhampered by parental, or racial
restrictions. This dower of mental loaves and fishes,
multiplied in the giving, is a mental possession, over
and above that essential, or usable, for the welfare of
the parent, giver or teacher, and which by right of
dower becomes a common germinal property, held in
trust by mankind for mankind.

The ripening of mental leadership to its reproduc-
tive act is ever expressed in the exuberant mental power

ORIENTATION OF MENTAL IMAGERY 289

that drives the virile intellectual leader to day-dreams,
to playful explorations and mental foragings which ul-
timately blossom into self-assertion, but bringing no
other profit to the forager save the joy of discovery and
the pleasure of mental procreation in mental giving.
Indeed his best gifts may be most unwelcome, and their
sowing the cause of his undoing; but they will be very
precious to those he can never know and from whom he
can receive no returns.

III. The Parallelism Between Mental and Physical

Evolution

The self-saving and self-constructive methods of the
mind are therefore truly comparable with those of the
physical world, and the results are measured in similar
terms. We may say, for example, that an hypothesis,
theory, or explanation, is right, or true, or good, or
workable, or creative, if its component elements are
mutually confirmatory, cooperative, self-preservative,
or self -constructive; that it is wrong, or false, or evil,
if they are mutually conflicting, non-cooperative, or
destructive. And we may say that mental processes are
benevolent, or altruistic in effect when the mental
profits, or possessions, of the individual are transmitted
to other individuals through the instrumentalities of
education.

That is to say, every mental image, every thought,
theory, or system of thought, to exist, must in some
measure sustain, or confirm, some other image, or
images, thought, or theory, and be sustained, or con-
firmed by them, just as every physical thing, or system

290 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

of things, and all their parts, to exist, must move, hold,
or sustain, something else, and be moved, or sustained,
by them.

The serviceability of any system, mental or physi-
cal, is its power to save itself, and give itself, as an al-
truistic agent, to the construction of something else.
To grow in stability and serviceability, it must increase
the number, variety, continuity, and Tightness of its
self-sustaining services, draw to itself new servants,
and perform for them more and better services.

IV. Mental Imagery as a Self -Constructive Function

Intelligence may be regarded as a constructive re-
sponse, not of any one organ, but of the whole organism,
to its outer world.

As this functional response expresses the coopera-
tive action of discrete physical and organic systems, it
must await the creation of the various parts and instru-
ments of those systems before it can itself be manifest.
Intelligence becomes more and more manifest with the
growth of these physical instruments and the increase
of their creative returns.

The purpose of intelligence, like that of every other
function, is manifest in what it does, or accomplishes.
In this case, it is to discover the right ways to do
things in order that the body may do them rightly, or
self-constructively; in other words, in order to find,
appropriate, and rightly use what is good, or self-
creative and self-saving, and to avoid what is evil, or
destructive.

Those things, therefore, which do possess a measure
of intelligence, in some way must have conserved in

ORIENTATION OF MENTAL IMAGERY 291

their architecture the summed-up profits of righteous
action. Their basic purposes, to that extent, have been
achieved, and from that level new constructive ends
may be attained by more direct, or economic, methods.

V. The Evolution of Mental Imagery

Animal life, as we have already seen, is a coopera-
tive and adaptive response to the outer world. But no
living thing responds to all its environments, nor can
it adapt its life to all the things to which it responds.
In this adaptive response to its environment, an animal
may move from place to place wherever protoplasm
may endure, or wherever it finds the physical condi-
tions essential to its activities. No animal can live, in
the past or in the future, or for one instant outside the
established sanctuary of physico-chemical conditions
essential to its being; nor, so far as we know, can it
consciously utilize the past to establish more profitable
relations with the future.

Animal life, therefore, in the final analysis is a serial
response, or a moving picture if you will, of a particu-
lar part of the present external world of reality ex-
pressed in terms of protoplasmic activity. This animal
life, even though it be a reflection, or reaction, to some-
thing else, is itself a reality just as much as the world
external to it is a reality. It is, however, not the same
reality any more than the vibrating string is the same
thing as the moving bow, air waves, or the nervous
reactions they produce in man. Nevertheless each
reality may be interpreted in terms of the other.

In man, a new vital factor has been introduced. In
addition to this older animal machinery of direct neu-

292 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

romuscular response to the outer world of the present,
man has acquired a mental or spiritual power that
enables him indirectly to picture and interpret the past
by means of the present, and thus to explore those
regions of the outer world which lie outside and beyond
the physical sanctuary within which his body is con-
fined. This "retroactive cognition" lies largely in
memorizing, or in approximately repeating a part of
the nervous reactions produced by previous experience,
as though the events that first produced them were
themselves present, or repeated. This new power is
apparently resident in an over-nervous tension, released
and expended in the repetition of the older sequence
of nervous acts, without the presence of the original
outer stimuli, and without the other bodily acts that
normally accompany them.

This supplementary nervous activity initiates a
new kind of vital action that may be largely indepen-
dent of the external world it tends to portray. With its
aid, it is possible for man to construct image chains
which tend to follow the same order as those produced
by experience, and which thus tend to correspond with
the actual order of external events. These retrospec-
tive images are tested, readjusted, and approved or dis-
approved by supplementary experience to form a
broader and more secure basis for prospective action.

These mental pseudopodia, this halo of mental out-
reachings into the past and future, into history and
prophecy, enable man to project himself as it were into
the limitless expanse of universal time and universal
space in search of those more comprehensive truths, or
realities, which he calls natural laws.

This constructive usage of the imagination, ever

ORIENTATION OF MENTAL IMAGERY 293

checked and reoriented by observation and experiment;
this matching of the inevitable logic of growth and evo-
lution in the outer world with a logical sequence of self-
sustaining mental processes, is the very essence of
science and of spiritual freedom. It is the only means
we have of reconstructing the unwritten past, and anti-
cipating or prophesying the future. It is our only
escape from the narrow prison in which the physical
body is confined, to universal freedom and to larger
fields of profit.

The chief purpose, therefore, of the imagination is
rightly to orient mental and bodily growth to world
growth ; rightly to picture the world as it was, and shall
be, in order to fit life more profitably to the world as
it is.

Fantasy may create its own pictures, real enough
it is true, and true they may well be. But if these
mental creations have no corresponding realities in the
outer world, they cannot be used for constructive pur-
poses. Organic life cannot build itself up and preserve
itself by acting in accordance with them, because in that
way life cannot receive cooperative support, or service,
from the outer world.

The free usage of both fantasy and the imagination
may be regarded as mental play, serving the same pur-
pose as physical play, in that it exercises important vital
functions, and leads to the discovery of the ways things
may or may not be done.

VI. The Imagination as an Instrument of Conveyance
The New Freedom and The New World

The lives of plants, animals, and man, are depen-
dent on three different orders of conveyance, each

294 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

order, in its own way, providing the means to profitable
exchange, or growth.

The plant in the main lives in, and on the larger cir-
culation of inanimate nature, and the chief materials
and forces essential to its being are carried to its very
doors by a benevolent, cosmic circulation of light, and
air, and water, and soil. The continuity of the rela-
tively simple life of the plant is assured by the wide
distribution and inexhaustible abundance of these sup-
plies and by the stability of their sources.

In the animal, these larger, more fundamental
methods of the plant are supplemented by individual
freedom of movement. By means of its adaptive neuro-
muscular responses, and by means of its complex in-
ternal system of transmission and exchange, the animal
may move bodily toward more specialized sources of
supplies and thread its way between more particu-
larized sources of danger. With ever increasing profit,
it is conveyed along the more localized food lines to
their source and along the more localized danger lines,
away from their source, uniting with what is good for
it and avoiding what is evil. The progress and con-
tinuity of this more subtle life is automatically insured!
by a more and more elaborate organic cooperation
within, and by better bodily conduct in reference to the
outer world, which constantly tend to reduce the per-
centage of errors, to substitute certainties for probabili-
ties, to increase the rate and the volume of cooperation
and exchange.

In man, the chief mechanisms of plant and animal
life are still utilized, but they are heavily reinforced
by his new instrument, the imagination, the eyes and
legs of his spiritual body, the real seven-league boots

ORIENTATION OF MENTAL IMAGERY 295

and the helmet of invisibility with which he anni-
hilates time, and space, and matter, and with which, in
effect, he may project himself far beyond the narrow
confines of his physical sanctuary into realms his
physical body may not enter.

Imagination opens the gates of the universe. It is
life's open sesame to world freedom and to the accu-
mulated treasures of the world's experience. In his
search for wisdom, it gives man the instant power to
look over the edge of yesterday and the top of tomor-
row into the abyss of universal time ; to fly through and
beyond all physical barriers into the infinite expanse of
universal space ; to explore the dead past and invade the
germinating future.

Ever checked and corrected, ever stimulated by its
increment in power, it is the common agency by which
man is perpetually upbuilding, renovating, and sys-
tematizing his science, his philosophy, and his religion;
short circuiting the roundabout methods of chance, and
hastening the discovery of the constructive way.

VII. Basic Concepts: Creation, Growth, Obedience,
Service, Profit

As man grew in bodily organization, his world
enlarged, that is, he was influenced by a larger number
and greater variety of things ; and as he grew in power
rightly to form mental images of this larger world, he
grew in knowledge and in wisdom. His wisdom con-
sisted not merely in the more profitable regulation of
his own conduct in reference to that of other men, but
also in reference to the conduct of plants and animals
and to that of the great world of inorganic things.

296 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

Apparently man's earliest and most fundamental
concept was that of profit, or progress, or growth; the
vague notion that all things had some kind of a begin-
ning, and moved toward some end, for some purpose.
The dawning consciousness of progress was doubtless
due to its insistent influence on the whole gamut of or-
ganic life. It was but another expression of the com-
pulsory adaptation of life to universal progress; for
life could preserve its own constructive relations to the
outer world only so far as its own acts fitted coopera-
tively into these larger movements of the outer world.
Hence this idea of progress has been the chief motive-
thought of man, persistently expressed in a more or
less crude way, in his science, in his religion, and in
his conduct, at every stage of his mental evolution.

Man's earliest questioning, the underlying motive
of all his seeking, has ever been to discover: — How the
familiar things of the world begin, where they come
from, how they "carry on," and how man may keep on
the right side of things as they are. Or to put these
questions in a more modern form: What creates, what
preserves, and what destroys the products of nature
and how man may profit thereby? Or still more com-
prehensively: How does nature act and how must
man act in order to live and to grow?

The asking of these questions and the attempts to
answer them marked man's dawning recognition of
Tightness and his obligation to obedience ; the germina-
tion of his ethics and morality, as a counter expression
of the ethics and morality of nature action. Out of
these very practical, every day problems, with no sys-
tem of formulating questions and answers; no dis-
tinction between fantasy and reality, and no separa-

ORIENTATION OF MENTAL IMAGERY 297

tion of nature into the great domains of the organic
and inorganic, the living and the dead; always con-
scious of his own weakness, and of the larger world
forces which must be avoided, or enlisted in his own
services, or in some way bribed or propitiated; always
moved by fear of destruction and by the greedy appe-
tites that ministered to his own growth and preserva-
tion, grew the first vague outlines of man's organized
knowledge that we call science, religion, and philoso-
phy, and the attempts to regulate his acts in harmony
therewith, that we call social conduct, social laws, and
social discipline.

These more or less independently organized sys-
tems of thought and action have a common origin in
vital experience. Their roots penetrate every phase
of organic life, extending even beyond instincts and
purely organic reactions, into the domain of the inor-
ganic world, where life itself has its origin, and from
which it still draws its working materials and powers.

The more immediate basis of these great physico-
psychic systems was an elemental, but a very practical
nature-science; the ethics and morality of plant and
animal life, the self -constructive action of the cat, the
mouse, and the nut, of the ape, the fruit, and the tiger,
whereby, in varying degrees, the duration and well be-
ing of each life was insured by its conformity to the
exigencies of the other, and to the chemical and physi-
cal properties of a multitude of other agencies. The
cat is of necessity a practical student of the physics,
chemistry, and biology of the mouse, just as the mouse,
of necessity, is a practical student of the dangerous
ways of the cat, the attributes of moving bodies, the
physical properties of nut-shells, and the chemical

298 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

properties of their contents. Its life is ordered in such
a way, whatever the means of ordering it may be, that
on the whole the mouse avoids the cat, discovers the
nut, circumvents the nut-shell, gets to the meat it con-
tains, and rightly uses it in self-construction.. On the
whole, the mouse successfully avoids what is evil, and
gets what is good by rightly conforming its acts, or
behavior, to its own inner and outer world. To that
extent it is obedient to itself and to its outer world:
its science is true, its art constructive, and its morality
right or profitable, for they rest on the saving and cre-
ating basis of cooperative realities; otherwise the mouse
could not exist. So also with the cat, the ape, the fruit,
and the tiger. And also so with man.

But this primordial science and art, ethics and
morality, of organic life was either so familiar, or so
fundamental to man's very existence that he did not,
or could not, recognize it as such till after the methods
and instruments of science had taken on newer and
less familiar shapes.

When broader concepts were formed, and more
generalized rules of conduct formulated, this primor-
dial nature-science passed over into what we may more
properly call the common basis of man's science, re-
ligion, philosophy and art.

Religion was the first of the great physico-psychic
systems to emerge from this common basis and to as-
sume a form peculiar to itself, partly because of the
growing remoteness of its subject matter from the in-
numerable practical problems of every day life; and
partly because imagination and fantasy, speculation
and theory, always outrun experience, and extend far
beyond the realms where the more immediate tests of

ORIENTATION OF MENTAL IMAGERY 299

veracity can be made and answered in terms of life
and death, into realms where the more deliberate meth-
ods, peculiar to science are not available, or cannot be
applied.

But perhaps the chief reason was the crystallization
of its imagery into simple formulas, and because of
the urgency and the democracy of its message. Re-
ligion could preserve its form and continuity through
the simplicity of its fundamental concepts, as well as
through the intelligibility and durability of its sym-
bols, such as amulets, material images, monuments and
temples, and its fixed ceremonials, dancing, incanta-
tions and rituals. Man's intangible mental concepts
were thereby preserved in wood, clay, bone, and stone,
in pigments, and in music, through the pleasurable ex-
ercise of his highest artistic faculties. Above all his
religious messages, and their accompanying regulations
of conduct, were essentially unselfish, democratic, and
universal, for the obligations of service and obedience
were laid on all alike.

This was not, and could not be the case with sci-
ence. Science, so far as it was distinct from religion,
had no temples of its own save the great temple of
nature itself; no processionals, save the moving pa-
geantry of world-life; no simple message intelligible to
the great masses of humanity, and no immediate com-
pulsion to action in prospective profits, or in fear. It
had no means of preserving the form, or continuity, of
its imagery till a more exact verbal language had de-
veloped, more enduring verbal symbols were created,
and the physical instruments and materials for more
numerous tests and records invented.

When its messages did come, they came as mists

300 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

of the morning, or in intermittent clouds and torrents,
which slowly raised the general level of human knowl-
edge unnoticed by mankind. The great majority were
unconscious of the storms of scientific controversy, or
the continuous patter of discovery, but they utilized
their accumulating power, nevertheless. Always eager
passengers of science, they sailed its rising tides to
ever more distant realms, viewing in wonder the other-
wise inaccessible works of nature, but as unconscious
as were their ancestral apes of the means by which
their vision had been enlarged.

These discoveries of science were too intricate and
numerous to be apprehended by any one individual.
They had continually to be unified and summarized,
expressed in ever simpler and more comprehensive
terms, called "natural laws," to carry any message
whatever. That was necessarily a slow process.

VIII. The Tests of Veracity

The basic, or initial test of veracity, in religion
as in every other domain of mental life, is human au-
thority, or the concrete evidence afforded by the bod-
ily presence and well being of him who claimed to
have profited by his own experience. The older,
stronger, and more successful men being the larger,
more enduring vessels of experience, were therefore
rightly regarded as the chief sources of evidence.

Science separated from religion and philosophy as
soon as it began to seek out and to utilize new and
larger sources of evidence than human authority in
order to test the veracity of its mental imagery. The
mutation in human thought and action out of which

ORIENTATION OF MENTAL IMAGERY 301

modern science evolved, was man's purposeful usage of
more stable objects, and of more measurably responsive
physical instruments to supplement or enlarge the lim-
ited powers of his senses, and to check, or control, his
estimates of sensory response. These objects and in-
struments enabled man to broaden his experience by
observations and experiments in new fields; to increase
the accuracy and capacity of his memory by the use
of records and statistics from countless sources other
than himself. Human authority then lost its suprem-
acy and surrendered to the democracy of common
things.

To distinguish the true from the false, science sub-
mitted man's imagery to the supreme court of na-
ture, resting its cases on the evidence of the yardstick,
the balance, and the clock, and upon the total testimo-
nies of the multitudes. On these multiplied verdicts
of nature, confirmed and reconfirmed by nature her-
self, is based man's supreme contribution to his own
salvation and welfare. Man was thereby able to ver-
ify his trial guesses. And it was but yesterday that
man, for the first time, could confidently affirm that his
imagery of progress was indeed a reflection of reality.

The reality of this world progress, this lawful ac-
tion of nature, under whose directive discipline man
upbuilds all his edifices, is called Evolution. It is but
another way of saying that nature grows, and grows in
a self-regulated, profitable way.

CHAPTER XII

THE COMPULSION OF NATURE-ACTION IN

SCIENCE, RELIGION, ART, AND

GOVERNMENT

The Compulsion of Intelligence — The Expression of Nature's
Self-Constructive Ways in Man's Self-Constructive Social Laws —
Mental Reorientation — The Militant Phase of Intelligent Action —
Fear as a Counter Evil — The Conservation of Mental Rightness
through Education — The Creative Value of Truth as the Expression
of a Natural Creative Law — The Cooperative Factor, Mental and
Moral, in Animism — The Tendency to Unify and Simplify Natural
Phenomena — Rightness as a Saving and Directing Agency in Mental
and Physical Action — The Community of Purpose in Science and
Religion.

WE have seen that science, religion, and philoso-
phy are more or less coherent systems of thought and
conduct, growing out of man's conscious attempts to
utilize nature-action in self-construction.

Man's first glimmer of "truth" was the discovery
that some ways were good and others bad ; some things
helped, others hindered; that in order to prosper he
must appropriate to himself the helpers and avoid the
hinderers, or else subordinate his ways to their ways.

In spite of all his longing for freedom of action,
mysterious forces constantly hedged him about, lim-
iting the scope of his enterprises, and determining
the outlets to his purposes.

These limitations and compulsions made his errors
manifest; they were the chief sources of his terrors,
and the compelling instruments to his persuasion; for

502

COMPULSION OF NATURE-ACTION 303

man has ever feared the actual tiger and the storm less
than the unknown menace behind them.

Man's impulse was primarily to avoid; then to con-
quer or to destroy either by the display of force or by
the application of force; that unavailing, he endeav-
ored by gifts, supplications, or education to modify or
reform these obstacles to his purpose. Failing in that,
and his failures were ever competent to make him pli-
able, his last resort was to reform himself; to learn
the will, the ways or the purpose, of these mysterious
forces, the better to obey them.

I. The Compulsion of Intelligence

This desire to understand, the better to obey, is a
self-saving impulse common to all phases of science,
religion, and philosophy. When man does under-
stand, the truth thus revealed to him then becomes a
new leader and a new instrument to his compulsion.
He may resist an unwelcome truth, or he may not im-
mediately honor it by responsive action; but he can-
not evade his own convictions. He cannot escape the
compulsion of the truth he has discovered, whether he
would or no. Its ultimate triumph over him is cer-
tain.

With the recognition of acquisition and obedience
as primal necessities, came man's recognition of free-
dom and compulsion; of impulse from within and re-
straint from without, and of right and wrong. With
them developed his power of self-control, or his power
of adaptive self-inhibition and self-acceleration, which
in turn was expressed in his conduct, his social laws
and customs. These laws and customs, written or

304 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

otherwise, formulate more or less accurately and fully
what he believes he ought to do, and what he ought not
to do, to insure his self preservation and profit, indi-
vidually and collectively. Just as man's mental imag-
ery was gradually fitted to outward realities by the
profits of Tightness and the disasters of error, so his con-
duct, by the same process of addition and subtraction
was gradually fitted to his imagery. Hence man's so-
cial procedures are the legal symbols of his intelli-
gence. His prosperity and happiness are the proofs,
as well as the profits, of his mental and moral right-
ness ; they measure the truthfulness of his imagery and
the extent to which he has rightly, or constructively,
conformed his conduct to realities.

Intelligence, therefore, is the recognition of these
demands of nature-action, and voluntary submission
to them. To act intelligently and profitably, man must
be disciplined in mind and body into conformity with
these realities of the outer world. He must distin-
guish between his limitations and his opportunities,
and recognizing them, deny himself the one, and
mould his thoughts and acts to the other. The disci-
pline to which he then voluntarily subjects himself is
the same discipline to which nature herself is subject
in the possible and the impossible.

Here we may see nature's directive strategy in op-
eration on the field of mental life. For her warn-
ings of disaster and her invitations to profit bend man's
anarchistic will to constructive Tightness for his own
self-preserving and self-creating ends. And the
clearer, more comprehensive his vision is, the more
imperative are its demands; the more willing he is to
obey them, and the more he thrives in his obedience.

COMPULSION OF NATURE-ACTION 305

Thus the compulsion of nature-action has its ultimate
organic outlet in the compulsion of intelligence.
Here, as elsewhere, the directive saving and creative
agency is Tightness.

II. The Expression of Nature's Self -constructive
Ways in Man's Self-constructive Social Laws

If every individual thing in nature were made of
materials wholly peculiar to itself, and each thing
acted wholly in its own way, there would be no nat-
ural laws, and there could be no science; there could
be no ethics or morality, right or wrong, or intelligent
action. Man, even if he, or anything else, could exist,
would bump his way through the world with less" regu-
larity and less chance of profit than an amoeba, or an
atom of hydrogen.

But since man has discovered a very large degree
of material uniformity and of mutual regulation in
nature, foresight and intelligent conduct on his part,
or the preparation for coming events in accordance
with past experience, is possible. His ways of act-
ing, especially when they are self-creating and self-
preserving, or when they are more general in their
application rather than particular, then become in
some measure a replica of nature's self-constructive
ways ; we then call them social laws, or customs, rather
than natural laws.

When man became conscious that his ways were
good, he appropriated them to himself; called them
his own laws, and in self-preservation demanded their
observance. The evil, or bad ways, in self-defense, he
rejected, or forbade, or tabooed. As his vision of good
and evil became clearer, and his ways and means of

3o6 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

self expression increased, he attempted to formulate
more exactly and permanently these constructive and
destructive ways into both more general and more spe-
cific rules, or laws, of social conduct. Obedience to
his laws he then counted a virtue, called it morality,
and guarded and cherished it in others as a useful prop-
erty to himself.

Written social laws are therefore but verbal formu-
las to express man's mental imagery of right and wrong
within a limited field o£ nature-action. Because they
are so limited, they are not immutable. In fact they
must be perpetually remodelled the better to adapt
them to the new conditions created by social growth,
to the growth of man's intelligence, to the increase of
his properties, to larger numbers, and to the ability
of the masses to understand more elemental, more com-
prehensive truths.

We have seen that creative power in the purely
physical and organic worlds depends on the coopera-
tive action of various architectural agents,, on their en-
during physical or chemical attributes, on their distri-
bution in time and space, and on the way in which
each one moulds and directs the other into constructive
Tightness.

In human social life these same factors still play
their necessary parts in the creation and preservation
of the individual man and his properties. But beyond
and above this substratum of unconscious physical and
organic cooperation, intelligence enters as a new se-
lective and directive agent, moulding human beings,
as intelligent individuals endowed with a new con-
structive attribute, or a will of their own, into coopera-
tive action.

COMPULSION OF NATURE-ACTION 307

Individual acts, or social procedures, are then sub-
ject to the inspection of intelligence, repeatedly made
to determine their saving and constructive value. Ac-
cording as they withstand or dissolve under these cor-
rosive tests they constitute a crumbling or an enduring
foundation for further social growth. And these tests
are not merely the occasional tests of the ultra wise
ones, but the every day tests of the common tissues of
mankind.

The elemental virtues of social life, such as the
cooperative safeguarding of life and property, and the
recognition of mutual rights and obligations within the
circle of the family, tribe, and nation, have withstood
these tests so long and so often, that these virtues are
everywhere recognized, even by peoples of very limited
intelligence, as self-saving necessities.

III. Mental Reorientation

It is evident that this mental Tightness must be a
more or less stable attribute of the controlling major-
ity if cooperative social conduct is to endure, or extend
to larger groups, or a higher kind of social life be built
upon it within the limits of any group whatsoever.

Nevertheless intelligent action may quickly reverse
itself, like an unconscious tropism under changing
temperature, whenever man clearly recognizes that the
further application of his methods would ultimately
defeat his self-constructive purposes. The reversal of
man's mental attitude and conduct toward slavery is
a case in point.

Slavery was once an approved social institution.
It was as old, perhaps, as human society, and was uni-

308 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

versally honored as a necessary part of social life, as
much so as marriage and loyalty to the state. But
well within a century, it has been stricken from the
statutes of every civilized nation, not so much because
it had failed to work in the past, or had failed to serve
its initial purpose, but because it could not, in prac-
tice, stand the stress of further development, and be-
cause it could not be intellectually justified as a means
to further social progress. Slavery, indeed, primarily
had its creative and cooperative values in the mutual
services of master and slave; in that respect it was
less slavery in reality than in name. It was only when
actually carried by its own growth to its logical and
inevitable conclusion, and the repeated attempts to
build upon it a larger and more elaborate social sys-
tem failed, that its mutually destructive character was
clearly recognized.

The gain in constructive mental Tightness thereby
achieved was absolute and permanent. But this gain
was not so much in the destruction of formal slavery
— for social slavery still exists, no less pernicious for
its lack of recognition — as in the fact that the philoso-
phy of slavery had lost its intellectual defense.

In recognizing the self-destructive character of
slavery, mankind made a discovery in constructive
Tightness of elemental magnitude. As one of the pos-
sible methods of social construction and social growth,
slavery was thereby stricken from the mind of man.
As a creative social factor, it was as dead as cannibal-
ism. A better way to social growth was opene^d, the
old one closed forever, and an old virtue had become
a crime.

COMPULSION OF NATURE-ACTION 309

IV. The Militant Phase of Intelligent Action

The recognition that elemental social truths are
saving virtues provides not merely a new means to so-
cial life, it also creates the will to cherish and protect
these virtues as social properties and guarantees of
personal safety.

Thus the abolition of slavery does not in itself rep-
resent the whole gain to humanity. This discovery of
the way in which things could not be done produced
a veritable intellectual mutation, or mental reorienta-
tion, of permanent value, whereof the fruits as yet are
in the bud.

The sharper, clearer vision of personal peril in
slavery created a haunting, ever present fear of it; and
out of that fear the purpose grew and the will power
was born to seek out the spirit of slavery wherever it
lurked, in order to destroy it. When that militant
phase was reached, slavery needed but show itself to
be attacked as though it were an assassin, or a common
enemy of mankind. Here man was evidently acting
under the compulsion of a truth, clearly visualized;
while acting intelligently and consciously, he was
nevertheless unconscious of the compulsion under
which he was voluntarily acting.

This is a good illustration of the growth of men-
tal imagery into truth and constructive vital action,
showing the usual way in which a mental concept passes
through its earlier embryonic phases to the altruistic
phase of its maturity. In this case, as in prohibition,
woman's suffrage, militarism, and so many others of
a similar character, we may see how slavery, as a

3io GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

problem in social philosophy, passed from an inchoate,
sporadic phase to a purely academic question, then
into an urgent practical problem, and thence into mili-
tant constructive action.

Just such an intelligently aggressive attitude must
be created in respect to the philosophy of dominion,
the elder brother of slavery, before more enduring
foundations for social cooperation can be laid and a
broader, more profitable system of social life securely
built upon them. The compelling vision of a per-
sonal peril must be created within man by every form
of social tyranny; a mental vision, clear and sharp as
the image of a physical weapon aimed at him and his
children, before the will to combat that particular evil
can exist, and before the obligation to destroy it can
be fulfilled.

V. Fear as a Counter Evil

But the vision of truth must still further grow in
breadth and clearness, for in every birth of truth is resi-
dent a new born evil to test the youthful vision. For
once created, fear begets fear, distorts and multiplies
its images ; sees friends in foes, and danger where dan-
ger long since has passed away.

If slavery and dominion are self-destructive, and
permanent barriers to social growth, so are the coun-
ter evils, freedom, independence, and anarchy. Soci-
ety cannot exist without mutual services. No one can
be free, or independent, and at the same time be an
organic part of any society. One must be either a serv-
iceable, or striving to be a serviceable part of the so-
ciety wherein one is placed, using one's social priv-

COMPULSION OF NATURE-ACTION 31 r

ileges, and performing one's social obligations as best
one may to a common end, or be a dead-head passen-
ger, a parasite, or a wilful enemy of society, with no
right to exist there, save social negligence.

Social freedom is merely the right to select, or be
selected, for the service one is best able to perform.
In return for, or in anticipation of that service, society
must provide ways and means whereby that service may
be effectively and happily performed, or itself suffer
self-destructive penalties. Here, as elsewhere, the ob-
ligation to serve, and the right to be served, is the
categorical imperative to existence.

VI. The Conservation of Menial Rightness Through

Education

Social life derives its power largely from voluntary
services intelligently performed. In self-protection, so-
ciety may justly use its power to eject from, or refuse
admission to itself; but the human will, acting under
the compulsion of egoistic intelligence is the only
agency that can bring social power into action, or pre-
serve the organic cohesion of social life. As society
grows in volume and diversity, a more and more elab-
orate cooperation is necessary, and more intelligence in
both leaders and followers is required to direct it and
keep it in self-sustaining motion.

This new kind of mental Tightness, and the under-
standing of these larger social purposes, so essential
to intelligent action, is not inborn or transmitted
through the usual channels of germinal inheritance. It
must be reacquired by each leader and follower, either
by the slow and costly method of trial and experiment,

312 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

or by personal intercourse, imitation, or communica-
tion.

This mental egoism and altruism of teacher and
learner, that we call education, is the system of mental
inheritance, and the only one, by which society con-
serves its mental profits, augments its capital in mental
Tightness, and stabilizes its purposes. It is the great
saving and creating factor in social evolution; the most
vital spot in social life, and the one most difficult to
fortify. A nation, stumbling into ignorance, must be
bandaged with restrictions, and propped up with the
crutches of force. Pricked by the poisoned shafts of
propaganda, it may dissolve in anarchy though the ar-
mies and navies of the world have failed to break it.
Its vital powers can be mobilized only in a common
self-saving purpose, clearly recognized as such, and
approved by a common fund of intelligence.

VII. The Creative Value of Truth as the Expression
of a Natural Creative Law

The creative value of truth is measured by its men-
tal candle power, or its power to reveal creative ways.
The harvest of constructive returns which flow from
every great discovery, springs from the revelation of
a fundamental unity and similarity in phenomena that
appeared to be different in method, or in domain.
That all celestial bodies are moved and regulated by
a common force; that physics, chemistry and biology
have a common basis in atomic and ionic mechanism;
that all organic life is upraised on common structural
units, or cells, which are activated by common vital
processes; and that all social life is based on mutual

COMPULSION OF NATURE-ACTION 313

rights and obligations, common to all its constituents,
are discoveries of this character.

If man could go further than this and discover that
there is one essential, underlying method common to
all the creative processes of nature, that discovery
would at once give him the creative power of a great
fundamental truth. It would give him a more trust-
worthy historic and prophetic vision than he had be-
fore; a more compelling reason for modifying his own
acts, and a more certain means of directing the crea-
tive acts of nature to his own profit. In all his own
creative acts, it would be this creative way of nature
that he was actually following, even though he knew
not what the forces and materials were with which he
was dealing. This truth would be to him the "law"
which he must obey, willingly or unwillingly, if he is
to succeed in his efforts further to upbuild his own life
individually and socially.

Progressive creation through better mutual service,
is such a truth and such a law. It is a still broader
expression of the basic unity and similarity which
pervades all natural phenomena. It is the most com-
prehensive truth man has discovered for it is applica-
ble to all the serially constructive processes of physics,
chemistry, and astronomy, as well as to those of or-
ganic and social life. It is more comprehensive than
evolution itself, for progressive cooperation is the
agency that everywhere produces evolution. Or, stated
in another way, evolution is the architectural mani-
festation of the cooperative law, expressed in graded
products serially created. While the progress of evo-
lution within the various realms of nature may be
temporarily checked, or accelerated, or its direction

3 14 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

diverted by local events into minor currents and eddies,
neither its underlying power, nor its methods, nor its
forward drift, as a whole, are thereby sensibly changed,
or evaded.

The dawning consciousness that all these minor
constructive processes of nature are but different
phases of one universal creative process is pregnant
with all that man may hope to realize; for the revela-
tion of nature's basic strategy, of the enduring unity
and similarity of her creative methods is what gives
man his peculiar powers of retrospection and proph-
ecy, his constructive influence over nature, and over
himself.

His discovery of nature's way of destroying, cre-
ating, and preserving her products, thereby, in some
degree endows him with her own constructive right-
ness, and to some extent with her own creative power.
For an intelligent act is one wherein, for his own profit,
man seeks merely to guide nature's existing agents into
their own ways of cooperation. There is no measure
of its increase in value save the increase of constructive
returns.

Man has no creative power of his own save right-
ness; none save the will to direct and short-circuit na-
ture-processes, till a more constructive way is found.
When that is rightly done, things make and preserve
themselves. But man, more than any other animal,
knows how things may, and may not, be done. Therein
lies his distinguishing attribute; in the use of it, his
happiness. Therein is he dedicated to a service be-
yond himself, moved by that missionary instinct of
super-service which animates all discoverers and giv-
ers of profits.

COMPULSION OF NATURE-ACTION 315

When man became conscious of this power in him-
self, he became an organic, creative will; a new in-
strument of nature to constructive Tightness, and a
new means to a new era in evolution. The moving
power behind this will to create is the compulsion of
his possessions in mental Tightness.

VIII. The Cooperative Factor, Mental and Moral,

in Animism

In man's earlier attempts to interpret nature, no
fundamental distinction was drawn between animate
and inanimate things, and he rarely recognized a con-
stant relation between cause and effect.

Having no written language to symbolize his men-
tal imagery, he had no stable means of mental convey-
ance from man to man; no reservoir of memory-sym-
bols in which to store up the fruits of his experiences
neither for his own future use, nor for that of succeed-
ing generations. He therefore had little or no means,
beyond his own personal experience, of correlating
one event with another, especially the ones of less fre-
quent, or more irregular occurrence. Being without
these means, he was compelled to invent them the easi-
est way on the spur of the moment. It is not so sur-
prising that his first inventions were so varied or that
his trial explanations of natural phenomena were so
wide of the mark, as that he should have felt compelled
to make any at all.

The Papuans, a primitive race of New Guinea sav-
ages, it is said, do not recognize that there is such a
thing as natural death, or death by inevitable internal
causes. However that may be, the Papuan is always

3i6 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

ready with some self-satisfying explanation for any-
thing that may happen to himself, or to others. If he
sickens, or is about to die, it is due to the superior
power, or witchcraft, or absent-treatment, of some in-
visible human enemy, or of some offended plant or
animal totem, or of some other nature-personality, who
to him may be very present and very real. If he stubs
his toe in the forest, he is little likely to count it his
own fault; rather will he attribute his disaster to some
stick or stone lying in ambush for him, which with dev-
ilish malignity rose up in the nick of time to accom-
plish its purpose.

Like many other primitive people, and indeed like
many educated persons in our most civilized communi-
ties, he attributes miraculous powers to curiously
shaped sticks and stones and other oddities, which are
carefully sought for, treasured, and reverently worn
as protective charms, or amulets. Even the more cul-
tured races have pictured the great forces of nature,
such as the sun, moon, and stars, thunder, wind, etc., as
living things, or as man-like beings, but on a larger
scale, and have persistently interpreted their acts and
motives in terms of human life.

The Greeks and Romans, in certain periods of their
evolution, endowed practically every familiar object,
or event, even the more trivial ones, with a presiding,
or controlling, spirit.

All these amulets, totems, and personified physical
forces, are supposed to have peculiar powers of their
own, and to be animated with some good or evil pur-
pose. In effect, it is believed that by due respect, by
submission to their "will," or ways, or by appropriate
gifts and ceremonials, or even by threats to withdraw

COMPULSION OF NATURE- ACTION 317

allegiance, their purposes may be, so to speak, adap-
tively modified, or they may be in some way induced
to preserve or augment the petitioner, and to nullify,
weaken, or destroy his enemies.

This primitive attempt to obtain desired results by
obeying, yielding, or giving up something of one's self
to an unwilling power, and thus by means of these gifts,
or additions to it, helping, inducing, or compelling
that power to modify itself, or to make up its own mind
how to act, is an important step toward bringing about
that mutual adaptation which is so essential to all co-
operative action. The creative principle utilized is
right, for it is the only method that can give creative
returns. The specific application may be largely, or
wholly, wrong.

IX. The Tendency to Unify and Simplify Natural

Phenomena

But we need not further recall the familiar facts
of animism and anthropomorphism. They are easily
accessible. What I wish more particularly to empha-
size is that as man, consciously, or unconsciously, tried
to find cooperative explanations of natural phenomena,
explanations that would work together to strengthen
one another and at the same time strengthen and pre-
serve himself, or serve as guiding principles in the bet-
ter conduct of his own life, he gradually reduced his
legions of warring gods and devils to a smaller num-
ber; that is> he unconsciously classified natural phe-
nomena into larger and larger groups presided over
by more powerful "spirits," or more comprehensive
agencies.

318 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

In Persia, in India, and on the shores of the Medi-
terranean, we may see these preeminent agencies
slowly emerging from the mists of ancient thought,
each taking a form and sovereignty somewhat apart,
and each reigning over all the minor agencies of a sim-
ilar kind under a broadly significant term, or title.

Thus in Persia, in the religion of Zoroaster, the
dominant thought is the universal conflict of construc-
tive and destructive forces, of good and evil, of Ahri-
met and Ormazd. In Hinduism, the great mother re-
ligion of the East, there is Brahma the creator,
Vishnu the Preserver, and Siva the destroyer. And in
the Christian religion, the thought is focussed more
and more clearly on Jehovah, the one God, who is the
creator of all things and the source of all that is good;
on one supreme devil, or Satan, the destroyer and the
source of all that is evil; and on Christ, the saviour
of the world.

This reducing and embracing tendency in the
cleavage of religious thought is the same phenomenon
we see so clearly in the development of science and
philosophy, where, under the increasing compulsion
of larger experience and broader intelligence, man
sees more and more clearly the fundamental unity of
the universe, and absolutely refuses to subdivide his
concepts of nature, where no division in nature exists.

But religion could reach this more advanced stage
more quickly than science, because she was primarily
concerned with the larger, more comprehensive neces-
sities of life. She was temperamentally incapable of
seeing the multitudes of confusing details in the physi-
cal and organic world immediately about her; with
them she was not concerned, and by them the course

COMPULSION OF NATURE-ACTION 319

of her conscious life was little perturbed. On a free
and easy logic, and without mental compunctions, she
rode rough-shod over minor obstructions straight for
her goal.

Science, although not necessarily more cautious,
took the longer and safer way to reach her conclusions.
She had from the outset the stolid, neuro-muscular
temperament of the artisan, rather than that of the
master, the singer, or the spinner of alluring verbal
webs. She was intensely interested, and wholly ab-
sorbed, in the beauty and perfection of the mechanical
details of nature; perpetually losing herself in the end-
less mazes of purposeful adaptation of form and move-
ment to definite constructive ends; watching in dumb
and lingering amazement the big and little elements of
the living and non-living world lose themselves in one
another and free themselves again; or turn and halt,
rise and march, and fall and separate, in an endless
swirl of music, color, and pattern, apparently with no
other cause or reason than their own good will, or in-
herent impulse.

Science could not logically unite the elements of
nature into distinct mechanisms, and these mechan-
isms into one living, self-sustaining system, until she
was better able to estimate the capacity of nature's
resources, and to visualize the connecting links, the
reservoirs, and the pathways through space and time,
over which the driving power of nature was received
and delivered, or held in reserve.

She was unable convincingly to summarize in gen-
eral terms her multitudinous impressions, or to visual-
ize the physical and organic universe as a unit until
her discoveries of more comprehensive laws, such as

320 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

theilaw of gravity, the corpuscular structure of matter,
the unity of heat, light, and electricity, evolution, the
cellular structure of living bodies and the mechanism
of heredity, broadened, and clarified, and steadied her
vision, and forced her to reduce her own gods and
devils to a smaller number.

Thus science, like religion, under the compulsion
of a growing intelligence, has been forced to abandon,
one after another, her older deities, or to unite them
into larger, and again into still larger categorical frac-
tions with smaller denominators. She now calls them
matter and energy, or merely an infinite "something"
acting lawfully and serviceably in time and space,
which without that "something" could not exist.

These magnified and unified gods of modern sci-
ence are as impalpable, as indefinable and all embrac-
ing as those of modern religion. They are indistin-
guishable from one another. In their saving and crea-
tive attributes they are identical.

It was, therefore, inevitable that in the blindness
of their youthful ardor, science and religion should
come into conflict, for each saw in the other a deadly
enemy intent on destroying all the other held most true
and precious. Today, with clarified vision, and with
the relics of a barbarous youth eliminated, each will
see in the other only a collaborator.

Philosophy, in so far as she was able to stand on
her own feet in a province of her own, has generally
had more intimate, perhaps more friendly relations
with religion than with science.

Philosophy occupies an intermediate position, and
as a medium of intellectual assimilation and exchange
has served to unite and adaptively modify the two ex-

COMPULSION OF NATURE-ACTION 321

tremes. She is chiefly concerned with the larger prob-
lems common to the whole domain of constructive
thought, rather than with the formal, dynamic, or ar-
chitectural processes of nature, and as an ostensible
neutral has often served as a court of appeal in religious
and scientific controversies. But philosophy could not
rightly perform her functions till the natural sciences
brought her to earth, and in the architectural realities
of a physical world provided a substantial footing for
her metaphysical abstractions.

X. Rightness, as a Saving and Directing Agency in
Mental and Physical Action

Thus the upbuilding of all constructive mental
processes, like the upbuilding of cooperative organic
structures, necessarily develops along definite phylo-
genetic lines. Like living things, they expend their
resources in protozoan mental wanderings, or in hap-
hazard trial explanations, in pursuit of profit. Find-
ing profit in Tightness only, they are gradually sta-
bilized in Tightness and oriented by directive realities,
as zigzaging swarm-spores are stabilized and oriented
to rectilinear light. Because they are saved by truth
and grow by the acquisition of truth, they progress on
converging lines toward a universal truth, with the
same purposes, the same increment of illuminating
thought, and with the same creative results.

Thus, whatever his ethnic, or geographic origin
may be, or along whatever lines his mental activities
may specialize, man is always drawn in the same di-
rection, and compelled to face the same basic problems.
What is good and evil, right and wrong? How may

322 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

the one be found, the other avoided? How may man
live profitably?

Has not that been the history of science, that
breaker of false images and unwelcome intruder on
the domains of religion and philosophy? Are not
those also her ultimate thoughts and purposes? Does
not science aim to follow, step by step, link by link,
the chain of cause and effect, backward into history
and forward into prophecy, in order to discover, as
nearly as may be, how things are created, or "happen,"
or come into being; how they endure, or survive, or
are saved ; how they are constructed, or organized ; how
they grow, or profit; how their growth is checked and
accelerated; how they are disorganized, or destroyed;
and how man himself may profit thereby? Or, in still
simpler terms, how can science help man to attain
that which is good and avoid that which is evil?

To these basic questions the same answer always
comes back, clothed in similar meaning, if not in sim-
ilar terms: Mutual service creates and preserves. The
profit is in Tightness.

Fitness and adaptation, those conjuring words with
which the biologist so blandly performs his tricks, and
conceals the way he does them, are but other names for
Tightness. In any particular case, adaptation, in ac-
tion, is the finding of the right way of doing that par-
ticular thing, and avoiding the wrong way. Fitness,
or adaptation, as an accomplished fact, is the mani-
fest evidence that in that case, and to that extent, the
right constructive way has been successfully found.
Science first points out these facts and then seeks to
discover how these ways are found.

And science finally reveals to us that nature's way

COMPULSION OF NATURE-ACTION 323

of self-construction and self-conservation, although ex-
ceedingly intricate and variable in detail, is very sim-
ple and invariable in principle. It is a universal co-
operative system of mutually profitable give and take;
a system of reciprocating egoism and altruism, whereby
more serviceable agents are created for use in larger
creative enterprises.

When once a right way is found, a more secure
foundation is laid for further construction. That is
the reason why there are such things as great lines of
evolution, or progress. That is the reason they are
so continuous, direct, and cumulative in some one or
more particulars, or as the biologist would call them,
orthogenic. These lines of progress may be called,
with equal propriety, the pathways of constructive
Tightness, in so far as that particular way, or condition,
is concerned. The limitations to progress in that par-
ticular individual thing are reached, sooner or later,
according to its own degree of constructive Tightness

and that of its environments.

• ••••••

Thus in their broader aspects, the evolution of hu-
man thought and the evolution of the world's physical
architecture follow comparable, or corresponding
courses, making it possible to establish profitable co-
operative relations between psychic action and organic
action, conduct and environment.

The subtle compulsion which moves and guides
psychic evolution, leading it persistently toward the
recognition of a threefold directorate: creator, pre-
server, and destroyer, is due to the fact that these three
terms symbolize three fundamental attributes, or actual
processes, or realities, of nature. These three attri-

324 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

butes are rightly the chief subjects of all man's re-
ligious, scientific, and philosophic thought. Rightly
to know and to utilize the saving and creative ways
and to avoid the destructive ones is the goal of all his
endeavors.

XI. The Community of Purpose in Science and Re-
ligion

Thus when we analyze the intellectual .life of man,
we find that its motive is everywhere the same. Man's
motive is profit, or growth. Science, which is the or-
ganized intellectual life of mankind, has three chief
functions, all serving the same purpose, — profit.
First, to explore and to chronicle. To that end science
aims to discover what things are contained in nature,
where they are, what they do, and what the order is,
step by step, of their coming in, their growing up, and
their going out. Second, to compare, to explain, and
to distinguish right from wrong, or how things may,
or may not be done. To that end, science aims to dis-
cover why things are as they are, in what respects they
differ, what they have in common, how one thing in-
fluences another, for good or evil, constructively or de-
structively. Her third function is to act construc-
tively, or to create. To that end her purpose is to
regulate man's conduct in profitable accordance with
nature's way of doing things. In the execution of this
purpose, Science completes its functioning by passing,
over into Art, as thought passes over into constructive
action.

Thus three qualifying motives pervade science: the
acquisitive, the ethical, and the moral. She seeks

COMPULSION OF NATURE-ACTION 325

knowledge through experience, wisdom through un-
derstanding, and profit through obedience.

But that profit is small indeed that cannot be com-
pounded, added up, rightly placed, conserved, and
handed on from life to life, for life again to supple-
ment. The vital power of science is so compounded.
Science lives and grows only so far as her profits are
conserved, and transmitted through her own peculiar
instruments of conveyance to fertile soil, from genera-
tion to generation. She shelters no self-corrupting se-
crets. In the very catholicity of her altruistic give
and her egoistic take, in her incoming endowments of
truth, and in her educational outgivings of truth, is the
warm vital power of an unsatiable appetite and an
unstinting benevolence. Science, like life itself, freely
gives to fructify, and herself is fructified through her
receiving.

In the same way, religion and philosophy blossom
into art and constructive action wherever there is this
vital reciprocity of egoism and altruism. In the subtle
religion and philosophy of the ancient East, and in
the religion and philosophy of the modern West, the
underlying motives and questions were and are the
same as those of science: How was the world created?
Why do things live and grow? What is good and evil,
right and wrong? What creates, what preserves, and
what destroys? What must man obey? How may
man profit by his obedience, and what shall the profit
be?

While science answers in terms of exact measure-
ments and natural laws, rather than in terms of an
anthropomorphic will to create and a will to destroy,
she contributes nothing more to the answers, nor can

326 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

she do so, than a greater volume of precise and organ-
ized knowledge, based on experience in her chosen
fields.

The chief distinction, then, between science, re-
ligion, and philosophy, is in the domains of their men-
tal activities, and in their methods of testing the verac-
ity of their imagery. Their basic purpose is the same.
And now their methods are losing their distinctive
characters; the boundaries of their old domains are
mutually over-run, binding the three more closely to-
gether in cooperative action. Religion has become
more cognizant of present physical realities, more tol-
erant, and receptive; science more spiritual, humani-
tarian, and social in its benevolence; and philosophy,
like the middle man it really is, gives and receives
from both. There is no conflict between the basic
teachings of science and the instinctive dictates of hu-
manity expressed in broad religious terms.

Science seeks truth and discovers Tightness. Re-
ligion seeks righteousness and discovers truth. Both
have acquired knowledge of creative and destructive
ways, of right and wrong, and both point the same
way to right living.

In religion, there is an instinctive desire for truth,
benevolence, and righteousness. Nature's way is the
truth man seeks to discover, and her way is benevolent
and righteous. Science takes cognizance of it in meas-
ured terms.

In religion, there is a formal expression of wonder,
adoration, gratitude, and humility. It is justified and
satisfied by the contemplation of nature through
science.

Religion demands service. Nature is a growing

COMPULSION OF NATURE-ACTION 327

fabric of cooperating services. Science surveys the
process, shows man the way to service, and provides the
ways and means to perform the service.

In religion, there is a formal recognition of our
imperfections and a desire for perfection. Nature-
action is a conflict of imperfections. Science shows
that the conflict is aimed at, and moves toward, per-
fection. Both serve that end the more the better their
own services are organized. Each, in its own way,
through progressive adaptation of thought and act to
creative ends, reflects the universal ways of nature-
growth and evolution, the way nature herself moves
toward perfection.

Science and religion, therefore, always have asked,
and doubtless always will ask the same fundamental
questions, and they must ever seek the answers to them
in constructive action. The answers, whatever they
may be, will come to them from the same source, in
the same way, and ultimately must be expressed by
them in essentially equivalent terms. And their pur-
pose in seeking these answers is to enable man, the
man in the streets of commerce, in the study, and in
the wilderness, the leader and the follower, rightly to
use the lessons of human experience in self-construc-
tive acts to ulterior creative ends ; and to mitigate the
inevitable tragedies of a life which has become con-
scious of its aspirations and its compulsions, and which
is valiantly seeking to satisfy their demands.

But creative art is never wholly subject to es-
tablished laws and precedents. Nature's inexhaust-
ible secrecy, that defies all prophecy and rewards all
trials, is the source of man's undying hope and faith,
his abiding impulse to endeavor.

PARTY

CHAPTER XIII

MENTAL IMAGERY AS A FACTOR IN
SOCIAL GROWTH

Conflicting Social Philosophies, Old and New — The Distorted
Philosophy of the Biologists — Business Philosophy — Germany's Mili-
tant Kultur — The Permanent Mental Incentive in Social Regenera-
tion— Mental Limitations and Unadaptive Social Growths: Primi-
tive Social Life of the Australians; Christianity, Buddhism, and
Hinduism; the Cultural Inequalities of the Greeks — Science and the
New Democracy — The New Demands of the New Freedom.

I. Conflicting Social Philosophies, Old and New

IT is not surprising that the subjective and objec-
tive interpretations of nature were at first so generally
regarded as mutually exclusive. The problem was
complicated by a general lack of sympathy with na-
ture-action, a narrow interpretation of evolution by
all the disputants, and above all by a bitter struggle
for mental supremacy between the leaders of the new
science and the old religion.

For countless ages man had pictured natural phe-
nomena as vital processes, or as living processes domi-
nated by living agents endowed with human powers
and animated by capricious human motives. Science
and evolution dealt a mortal blow to this fictitious uni-
verse and set up in its place a dead and empty mechan-
ism. But scientists, theologians, and laymen alike
quite generally overlooked the fact that the vital crea-
tive power of nature was not destroyed by evolution.
On the contrary in all the domains of the physical and
organic world, so far as they were accessible to scien-

331

332 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

tific inquiry, evolution made that creative power more
clearly manifest; and made it more intelligible for it
was seen to be more lawful in action. It was also quite
generally overlooked that man derives his creative
power from some kind of benevolent action, from mu-
tual service and Tightness; and that the methods by
which he attains his ends are the same as those by which
he himself was created.

II. The Distorted Philosophy of the Biologists

One of the chief causes of his misunderstanding
was the common error of failing to distinguish between
evolution, as a universal phenomenon, and the vari-
ous attempts to explain some particular phase of evo-
lution.

A period of calm was necessary after the more vio-
lent discussions, before even the more sagacious evo-
lutionists could clearly perceive that natural selection,
the most generally accepted explanation, was not in
itself a true creative process, but merely a name for a
multitude of interacting agencies by which things al-
ready created were selected for preservation. But
long after this period of mental reaction, for some un-
accountable reason, biologists persistently magnified the
goddess of chance and exalted the reign of force. They
persistently exaggerated the selfishness and failures,
the "wanton destruction" and the tragedies of life, and
minimized the gains that were so manifest in a benevo-
lent order. The shallow philosophers, statesmen, and
sentimentalists were not slow to catch the dominant
note, and to join in a noisy chorus, wherein the reiter-
ated thought of a warring, hostile nature, "red in tooth

IMAGERY IN SOCIAL GROWTH 333

and claw with ravin," was the recurrent lash in their
poetic frenzy. Many good souls joined in the chorus
out of pure imitativeness, others because it helped to
soothe an uneasy sense of social unrightness, or ap-
peared to justify whatever special privileges and im-
munities they possessed, or eagerly sought to acquire.

It is evident to every thoughtful biologist, I be-
lieve, that this cynical view of nature-action is super-
ficial, morbid, and absurdly tragic. Much of it, very
much indeed, is wholly fictitious and imaginary, and
has done incalculable harm. It has produced an in-
sidious pseudo-scientific philosophy of life, based on
a wholly false biological foundation. It has fortified
a false social philosophy which sees in social para-
sitism, in self-aggrandizement, in measureless acquisi-
tion of arbitrary power, the goal of a successful life,
and one which seeks to justify itself by an appeal to
the struggle for existence, the elimination of the unfit,
and the survival of the fittest.

The philosophy of robbery is difficult to combat be-
cause it is always easier to point to a successful thief
than to prove that honesty is the best policy. In the
great world of nature-life, it is all the more difficult to
combat this half-witted philosophy of unadulterated
egoism because animal robbers and animal parasites
flaunt their ephemeral successes even more conspicu-
ously and shamelessly than man, while nature's more
basic system of cooperation and mutual service, inter-
woven as it is in the most intricate manner through
age-long periods, is not so easily understood, and its
results are so commonplace they fail to attract at-
tention.

Thus in this new world of intellectual freedom

334 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

which man was invading guided by his first visions of
evolution, his age-old standards of ethics and morality
were rapidly destroyed. The more remote sources of
creative power were forgotten, or concealed in the ruins
of his anthropmorphic religions, or overgrown with
the poisonous thickets of his new doctrine of selfish-
ness. His belief in the supremacy of force, and the
necessity for complete freedom of action, grew apace;
his sense of obligation and restraint, his recognition
that it was necessary for others to have the same free-
dom of action, and that he was under obligations to
insure it to them through his own services, slowly
atrophied.

III. Business Philosophy

It was this one-sided, or half-witted philosophy of
egoism, fortunately now in disrepute since its patho-
logical nature has been so clearly recognized, which
characterized the business ethics and morality of the
past generation, or more. "Business was business,"
for no other than purely selfish ends, and any ways or
means within, or beyond, the written law was justi-
fied so long as it brought immediate returns that could
be measured in money and social power. That busi-
ness is also an altruistic, public service, and commerce,
a system of cooperative social conveyance, was but
dimly recognized, if at all.

But this philosophy was not more characteristic of
Americans than of other peoples, many critics to the
contrary notwithstanding. At any rate, if the accusa-
tion is justified, the lavish gifts of American business
men to education, to medicine, and to other social in-
stitutions, has amply demonstrated that their business

IMAGERY IN SOCIAL GROWTH 335

philosophy and their social philosophy were not the
same. They evidently recognized, more clearly, per-
haps, than their critics, that a cumulative system of
social benevolence is an essential factor in all social
growth and social preservation.

IV. Germany's Militant Kultur

It was this false, shortsighted philosophy of the bi-
ologists which was so largely responsible for the world
war. German scientists were among the very first
freely to accept the Darwinian theory of evolution;
and German leaders were the first frankly to incorpor-
ate into their politics, their business, their philosophy,
and their religion, the most pernicious teachings of the
struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest.

Germany's concept of world politics was the result
of her deliberate application of scientific principles,
particularly of biological science, to international life.
Her international policy was a purely scholastic effort
to profit by a clearer understanding, and better imita-
tion of animal life and natural laws. In that respect
her purpose was wholly justifiable, and her efforts com-
mendable. That her concepts of nature-action were
false is pardonable; in that she did not, and does not,
stand alone. But the practical application of her the-
ory of social life, with all its sordid, heartless, and
criminal details, could have been possible only by an
unimaginative people, whose moral instincts and so-
cial idealism were too immature, or too firmly sup-
pressed, to rebel against the logic of its demands.

Germany is the unfortunate victim of her own pol
icy, faultlessly executed. She has proved the falsity

336 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

of her own concept of world life by the elaborate way
in which she has dissected and exposed her own
mental attitude toward life, and by the unflinching
manner in which she has executed the preposterous de-
mands of her own logic.

She would not be convinced by the mere "reductio
ad absurdum" which was the manifest outcome of her
moral system. She must have it actually demon-
strated on her own person, by her own disasters. This
moral corruption, like a running sore, poisoned her
whole intellectual system, nullified her physical pow-
ers, and led them to inevitable disaster. The fetor
of her dissolution already pervades the house of man,
and moves man, as death always does, to fear and fore-
boding.

But the world will be the better for this practical
lesson, for it can now more clearly see the inevitable
results of this policy. For Germany, with scientific
precision, has demonstrated to the world, using in the
experiment all her incomparable resources of power,
physical, intellectual, and administrative, that selfish-
ness, for nations as for individuals, is self-destructive.

It must be conceded that in her internal adminis-
tration, Germany made good use of cooperative prin-
ciples and succeeded in creating a powerful empire.
But she lamentably failed in her larger purpose, be-
cause the scope of her cooperation was narrow and
self-limited. She lacked the missionary spirit which
must animate all social units, if they are to live and
grow; a spirit which aims to create social power in or-
der to use it in cooperation with other people and
other nations for mutual welfare and world-service

It is commendable to put one's house in order for

IMAGERY IN SOCIAL GROWTH 337

its own sake, but it is all the more detestable if the
real purpose is deliberately to create power in order
to insure efficiency in the robbery and destruction of
some other household. This larger criminal purpose
of Germany has been revealed. It was doomed to
failure because it was sure to destroy the very qualities
upon which its whole life depended.

Militant kultur is a very simple and a very old
philosophy. It is the philosophy generally defended
and practised by those people who have achieved some
measure of so called success. It runs somewhat to
this effect. Progress is the creation of more intelligent
and powerful people. It is accomplished by provid-
ing for them better servants and helpers to do the nec-
essary, but less important things in life. The servants
are the weak and the stupid, the unfortunate, barbar-
ous, or undeveloped members of the human race, whom
nature benevolently provides for the born master and
leader of men. His function is to herd and house-
break these helpless ones, force them to feed out of his
hand, man his machines, and drive his chariots.

Germany's militant kultur was the application of
this type of philosophy, on a magnificent, international
scale. It aimed to make German citizens more docile
and capable servants for a dominant ruling class; and
to make the world at large a fatter and easier prey for
Germany. It was an automatically self-destructive
process, because it tended to destroy the very instru-
ments and sources of her own social power. Like all
forms of parasitism and slavery, and "militant kultur"
is nothing more than that in principle, it inevitably
results in a disastrous unbalancing of the giving and
receiving processes, leading to the undue weakening

338 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

of the citizen host and to the degeneration of the para-
sitic ruler. The more efficient the system, the more
deadly its effects, and the greater the catastrophe when
it breaks down under the final test.

One of the chief sources of Germany's growth in
power was the development of her science; her delib-
erate prostitution of science was one of the many causes
of her destruction.

The egoistic and altruistic spirit of science, the
craving for truth for truth's own sake, and the impulse,
when once it is found, freely to convey truth to those
who have it not, is man's most precious possession;
for truth is the only creative attribute which by right of
conquest he may justly call his own.

But when the trained scientist, the dedicated disci-
ple of truth, is deliberately perverted into an artful
propagandist, or a scientific instrument of intrigue,
whose chief purpose is to scatter lies and create con-
fusion and anarchy abroad, the better to fish in troubled
waters, the very spirit that created him is poisoned at
its source, and science itself is destroyed. The spirit
of science and the spirit of intrigue are mutually ex-
clusive and mutually destructive. They cannot flour-
ish in the same soil. For no man, or nation, can be
an effective conveyor of lies and truth at the same time ;
success in the one attempt automatically excludes suc-
cess in the other.

Or consider the egoistic philosophy itself. A
purely predatory system must live and grow on the
exploited, hence it is limited in its growth to their re-
sources. When those admittedly inferior resources are
exhausted, but two alternatives are available, each end-
ing in self-destruction; that is, either the system must

IMAGERY IN SOCIAL GROWTH 339

radically change its character, or turn inwards on it-
self, and consume itself.

When, for example, the exploited race, or class, or
nation, is weakened, or threatened with destruction, it
cannot be restored by any effort on the part of the ex-
ploiter, except through some form of assistance which,
to serve its purpose must end in the transformation of
the predatory system into a benevolent, or cooperative
one.

On the other hand, in times of stress, external
sources failing, the true disciple of a predatory sys-
tem cannot logically deny the right of each member of
that system to attack and consume the other, since all
the reasons for friendly cooperation in the robbery of
the common enemy have disappeared. That way also,
madness lies. His system, therefore, contains no ulti-
mate refuge in an enduring, self-saving principle. It
must either dissolve in internal anarchy, robbery, or
social cannibalism, or change itself into a cooperative
system.

A house divided against itself cannot stand ; a gov-
ernment cannot endure, half slave, and half free; a
system, of any kind whatsoever, cannot be upbuilt on
antagonistic principles, part militant, part cooperative.
It will ultimately break down into separate antagonis-
tic systems ; or one part will destroy, or neutralize the
other, or be to the other a non-contributory burden, a
foreign element in the system, not an organic part of
the system.

A cooperative system may be destroyed by a mili-
tant one, but there is no power that can destroy the
creative principle in cooperation, for that is indestruc-
tible ; or that can make a militant system creative, save

340 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

only so far as it is not militant, but mutually service-
able within itself, like a gang of thieves living on the
profits of other people.

A social system, mutually serviceable to its con-
stituents and to its foreign colleagues, embodies within
itself the principle of perpetual growth and immor-
tality.

But that saving principle will not become a com-
pelling incentive to cooperative, self-saving action till
that fact is clearly recognized, or becomes intelligible,
or becomes for man what we call truth, or reality.

In balancing the constructive value of contingent
profits and losses, the more immediate demands must
necessarily take precedence over the more remote,
otherwise there would be no saving basis to build upon.

V. The Permanent Mental Incentive in Social Re-
generation

A fundamental attribute of man, underlying all his
variability as an individual, is his sociability, or his
tendency when in contiguity like atoms to combine in
social molecules. For each human atom, according to
his personal peculiarities, finds thereby a larger sav-
ing usage for his strength and a better servant to his
weakness.

The immediate result of association is a self-rein-
forcement, that may, or may not, be recognized. But as
this result is one of man's most frequent and impres-
sive experiences, it is one of the first truths to be im-
pressed upon his conscious life.

Hence when this fact, or truth, or certainty, is

IMAGERY IN SOCIAL GROWTH 341

recognized, the prospective gain in this elemental co-
operation then becomes the incentive, or the compelling
motive to social cooperation, a motive as immortal, or
enduring, as elemental human intelligence. All the ex-
isting social systems of man have been upbuilt, con-
sciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly, by
the use of these cooperative methods.

They fail, as every other growing system fails, when
the limits of cooperative coherency are reached ; when
the mutual give and take become unbalanced or un-
just; when the currents of profit, duly earned, persist-
ently set in one direction and there are no compensat-
ing returns from obligations elsewhere duly performed ;
when the will to service is fattened by parasitism to
inaction, and poisoned by privilege to insensibility;
when the channels of service are hardened by con-
servatism and clogged by formalities which destroy the
power of adaptive response; and when the instru-
ments of conveyance, to and from the outlying and
submerged, are, unable to fulfil their elemental func-
tions. When any one or more of these social condi-
tions arise and are not adaptively rectified, a patho-
logical condition is produced comparable with or-
ganic disease, or senility, in animal life. Something
then breaks, or fails duly to perform its functions. So-
cial atrophy, hypertrophy, or paralysis, may then en-
sue; or some vital social organ falls, or rises in re-
bellion. Death then mercifully enters, followed by
dissolution, and clears the ground for a new attempt.

Dissolution may be gradual or catastrophic, but
in any case the surviving fragments, like swarm spores,
or ovum and sperm, then reunite to form new struc-

342 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

tural patterns, or redissolve in one another to form
new social mixtures which grow again and reproduce
new social generations in new environments.

This indestructible social attribute of man is the
hereditary germinal factor in society which endows
society with its immortality. The repeated attempts
to find a better way cooperatively to unite diverse hu-
man individuals supplies the diversifying factor in
social development analagous to sexual reproduction.
Ultimately these fertilizing unions provide new means
of social salvation, and direct the subsequent social
cleavage and the upbuilding of social institutions
throughout the embryonic and youthful stages of soci-
iety to a new maturity.

This repeated dissolution and regeneration of social
life does not differ in any essential respect from the
death and reproductive regeneration of individual life.

But no living organism in death normally disinte-
grates into its ultimate elements. Some of its gains are
permanent. Besides the more specific germinal ele-
ments of life, other parts survive after the parent organ-
ism dies, or has severed its connection with its offspring,
such as egg-yolk, foods, and various administrative
provisions supplementary to the living germ. They
enable the new life safely to bridge over the more
precarious initial stages of growth, insure its welfare
in youth, and its guidance into right developmental
channels. The longer these renewed developmental
journeys are, the more bounteous and righteous these
ancestral provisions must be. And so they are.

So also it is with social death and regeneration.
The culture of social life is seldom, if ever, wholly
extinguished. Through many winters of discontent it

IMAGERY IN SOCIAL GROWTH 343

may dormant lie, and come to life again long after its
social parents have passed away. New civilizations
incorporate the more stable elements of its construc-
tive Tightness into themselves, revitalize them and uti-
lize the accumulated profits contained in its literature,
arts, and sciences, for the upbuilding of a new social
life.

A new race, or a new social system may then feed,
vulture-like, on the carcass of a dead, or moribund,
civilization, but it cannot rise to the former level by
those means alone. It will itself die when its resources
in the dead are exhausted, unless it holds within itself
the elements of a self-sustaining, creative power.

Or the life of a social system may be prolonged by
sacrifices, by self-control, and by the corrective medi-
cine of equal justice. But good will is not enough,
nor equal justice, to enlarge the scope of life and insure
its further growth and continuity. For a social system
cannot grow beyond its powers of conveyance to and
from the sacrificial altars of individual life. To ex-
tend that power, the vision of the truth must be more
exact and comprehensive; the instrumentalities of the
physical world must be enlisted in its service. Social
inheritance can have no constructive value if the her-
itage makes no effective appeal to the intelligence, for
unless that appeal is heard there can be no compulsion
to save its heritage and utilize it in self-construction.

VI. Mental Limitations and Unadaptive Social

Growths

In small social groups, cooperative aims are easily
attained. In larger groups, where social undertakings

344 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

involve larger factors in time, space, and numbers,
broader vision and more intelligence are demanded.
But the cooperative instinct then becomes confused, or
divided into opposing motive currents which neutral-
ize, or ultimately defeat one another. Man becomes
wholly impotent to accomplish these larger purposes
when he reaches the limits of his ability to utilize na-
ture's resources, or when he becomes unable rightly to
interpret and adapt himself to the internal social con-
ditions created by his own social growth. In these re-
spects society is subject to the same constructive limita-
tions as a growing multicellular organism.

Man's moral instincts, his desire to do the right
things, his willingness to make sacrificial offerings, may
be ever so strong, but if through sheer stupidity, igno-
rance, or intellectual cdnfusion in the handling of his
larger problems, he does not know what is right, what
really is helpful and constructive, his acts are more
likely to be suicidal than self-saving, because there are
always more wrong ways of doing things than right
ones.

We have seen that in organic evolution every for-
ward step in the structural upbuilding of the living
animal body has been disc to the local enlargement
of some organ, or to some functional improvement, fol-
lowed by compensating adjustments elsewnere.

But these local increments, or improvements, may
become pathological and disastrous, if carried too far.
They may lead to some form of giantism, or acro-
megaly; to purely acrobatic specialization; to super-
fluous ornamentation; or to some form of organic
parasitism, all of them of a confiscatory nature. Such
monstrous overgrowths, or functional inequalities,

IMAGERY IN SOCIAL GROWTH 345

must be checked, or rectified by adaptive changes and
compensating services elsewhere, before the organism
as a whole can proceed on its evolutionary way. Sim-
ilar unadaptive growths are constantly arising in hu-
man societies, correlated with some mental limitation,

or mental peculiarity.

• • • • • • • •

No one, however, can accurately diagnose all the
contributory causes to the rise and decline of these un-
adaptable social growths; they are many and varied.
But from the biologist's viewpoint, it cannot be
doubted, I believe, that every great social upbuilding
has its impulse in some new birth of social vision, and
the finding of new ways and means of social coopera-
tion. We may call them religious, scientific, or artis-
tic revivals. In reality, they are ethical and moral
growths; enlarged visions of social Tightness, and en-
larged powers to act in a socially constructive way.
The real source of this impetus to growth, we can no
more discover than we can discover why a carbon
molecule builds itself up into complex structures, or
how a blade of grass grows. All we can do is to ob-
serve, as best we may, what conditions are right for
growth, help to make and keep them right, and draw
our dividends.

The germinal idea within the seed coats of every
religious regeneration has been some phase of mutual
service between man and man, or between man and
his gods, reiterated and reemphasized as a new way
of salvation better adapted to more complex social con-
ditions, or to a society wherein the impulse to mutual
service and self-sacrifice has become neutralized, con-
fused, or evaded, or wherein, for some reason, rights

346 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

were unequally recognized and obligations unequally
fulfilled.

These larger social obligations can not be recog-
nized without clearer vision, nor fulfilled without bet-
ter instruments. Hence, wherever they have been ful-
filled, it has been through some accession of ethical
insight and constructive power; some increase in the
knowledge of, and command over nature's constructive
resources. In other words, through some profitable
application of science, which enabled man to preserve
himself, and to add to his possessions by such means
as shelters, weapons, flocks, and agricultural products,
or by enlarged reservoirs of constructive profit, and
by better ways and means of conveyance, mental and
physical.

But every one of these great social functions, such
as science, art, religion, education, government, mili-
tarism, intellectualism, industrialism, and capitalism,
tends to become more and more self-centred and para-
sitic on social life. Cultivated for its own sake only,
each tends to overgrow and to ramify into countless
blind pockets of futility. Its basic, altruistic function
drops out of sight, and its organic usefulness as a so-
cial servant is gradually suppressed. The social or-
gan is then cut off from its bodily support, and the body
social is deprived of an essential function. Degenera-
tion and death follow in the wake of these changes.

i. Primitive Social Life of the Australians. The
naked, protozoan simplicity of the social life of the
aboriginal Australians, for example, is apparently not
due to a lack of sense perception and logic, for he is
marvellously acute as a tracker of man and beast, and
he can draw surprisingly unerring and most signifi-

IMAGERY IN SOCIAL GROWTH 347

cant conclusions from his observations; nor to his lack
of a practical knowledge of animal and plant life, for
his knowledge of them is extraordinarily full and ac-
curate, enabling him to live in safety and abundance,
where a very capable white man could not, unaided,
survive; nor to his lack of a spirit of mutual service
and self-sacrifice, for his education in numerous ex-
acting ceremonials, his attempts to augment natural
resources through his cooperative totem system, and
his elaborate sexual and property regulations, make
demands upon his mental powers and self-control
which few white men would be willing, or able, to
meet. On the other hand, in marked contrast to these
capacities, is his total lack of fixed dwelling places, of
cultivated crops, of other domestic animals than the
dog, and of all but a mere trace of constructive arts.
But above all, he has what, to us, is an appalling and
unfathomable stupidity and superstition in regard to
many of the most familiar and most elemental natural
phenomena, and a more than childish inability to fit his
life cooperatively to that of his fellow men.

This very primitive social life, like the primitive
organization of the jellyfish, was evidently not due to
the lack of time or opportunity for development, be-
cause, so far as we know, the Australians as a race are"
as old as any other human race; or to their physical
and bionomic environment, for while it is extremely
severe and exacting in some regions, in others it is as
favorable to human life as any the world affords.

The thing lacking was apparently some subtle men-
tal quality, mental Tightness is the only word to ex-
press it, which is essential to social growth and cul-
tural evolution.

348 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

2. Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism. No
religion has more clearly expressed the idea of uni-
versal unity, the equality of social rights and obliga-
tions, and the necessity for fraternal love and mutual
service, than Christianity; and few religions have been
le'ss insistent on the practical application of their ideals.
It grew up out of a decaying, pantheistic religion, in
a militant social system rich in material constructive-
ness. But Christianity was slow to eliminate the relics
of its primitive anthropmorphism and became over-
absorbed in theological disputations and ecclesiastical
formalities; it feared and vigorously opposed the
growth of the scientific spirit of inquiry and was un-
able to correct the growing menace of militarism, of
industrialism, and capitalism, when they made their
appearance in social life.

Hinduism and Buddhism* with similar precepts,
nobly clothed in poetic language, sprang from a more

1 "The great . . . complex of writings which bears the name of Veda,
that is '(theological) knowledge' . . . exceeds that of the Bible more than
six times over."

"The most ancient monument in this extensive circle of literature (and
perhaps also the most ancient literary monument of the human race) is
formed by the Hymns of the Rigveda, since, as regards the great bulk
of them, they go back to a time when their possessors were not yet in the
valley of the Ganges, but lived among the tributaries of the Indus, had
as yet no Castes, no privileged worship, no Brahmanical system of govern-
ment and life, but belonged to small tribes . . . enjoying a primitive life.
The Hymns of the Rigveda unfold a graphic picture of all these relations,
but especially we can follow in them the genesis of the primitive nature
religion of India, through its different phases, in part even from the moment
when the gods are crystallizing under the hand of the poet out of the
phenomena of nature, to the point at which belief in them for the thinking
part of the nation begins to grow dim, and is being replaced by the first
stirrings of philosophical speculation."

"Parallel with this development of the Vedic theories, there early arose
side by side in India, from the germs contained in the Brahamana's and
older Upanishad's, a whole series of philosophic systems ... in which we
can trace every shade of philosophical concept of the world, from the crass
and cynical materialism of the Carvaka's up to the orthodox faith in the
letter of the Vedas. Six among them were able to obtain the reputation of
orthodoxy; .... the others, and among them Buddhism, were held to be
heterodox and heretical." — Deussen. The System of the Vedanta, 1912.

IMAGERY IN SOCIAL GROWTH 349

comprehensive religious philosophy, cosmic in its cre-
ative concepts, rather than theistic. But they ulti-
mately lost contact with the constructive material
world and grew into empty mysticism and inaction.

Christianity needed the infusion of the scientific
spirit, which it is now receiving, in order to increase
its sympathy with nature-action, and to broaden its cos-
mic concepts. Buddhism and Hinduism need it to
draw their thought to present terrestrial realities, and
to arm their self-constructive purposes with material
instruments.

• • ,• • • • • •

3. The Cultural Inequalities of the Greeks.
Greek culture, rooted in a primitive social soil, nar-
rowly circumscribed geographically and minutely sub-
divided by political barriers of mutual distrust and
rivalry, nevertheless blossomed into social life with a
splendor unsurpassed. But her towering art and in-
tellectualism were ultimately sterilized by the limited
scope of her social instincts. Greek art lost its regen-
erative motive with the decline of her religion, which
her growing intellectualism devitalized and destroyed,
but could not replace. Her intellectualism was self-
centred and top-heavy; its inlets and outlets unduly
constricted. It lacked catholicity of receipts and the
altruistic spirit of out-going social services. Cut off
at the roots from the lower strata of society, and from
real communion with the great world of nature-life,
it became over-humanistic, aristocratic, acrobatic, and
ornamental. Her semi-parasitic philosophers, not
more familiar with the intimate life of plants and ani-
mals than an Australian black-fellow, rarely sharp-
ened their wits on the whetstone of hard realities, or

350 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

utilized them constructively for compensating plebian
betterments. Her intellectualism could not, or did
not, test the veracity of its imagery by an experimen-
tal appeal to the democracy of nature, and would not
submit to the correction of its conduct by humiliating
experience with little things and homely.

When her creative resources were exhausted, there
was no sufficient motive for mere repetition. She
could not, in self-sustaining labor, pay the price of
freedom with the unproductive freedom she de-
manded.

The Greeks, in other words, were unscientific in
the constructive usage of their thought and action.
Their culture lacked the creative metabolism of a uni-
versal give and take, the vital catholicity which gladly
receives from all and freely gives to all. It was not
impregnated with the regenerative lure of the scien-
tific spirit, which ever leads to new exploits and creates
new means to new delights; which ever satisfies and
never satiates; which ever calls to new adventures in
fields unhorizoned and unexplored, where achievement
flows through its countless outlets of employment to the
ocean of created things and back again to the sunlight
and the soil.

New social systems sprang from the prostrate rem-
nants of Greek and Roman culture, not from quickened
parent seeds, but from storm-swept foreign spores that
like fungous growths on fallen tree-trunks could never
blossom into fruit like theirs.

The remnants of these moribund civilizations grad-
ually broke down into their less perishable elements of
Tightness. But for centuries their decomposing remains
provided an easy living for pale mental parasites and

IMAGERY IN SOCIAL GROWTH 351

patched-up pensioners of progress — grotesquely fash-
ioned in protective patterns of the dead — that flour-
ished on the lifeless body of this red-blooded past.
When at last they crawled away into the obscurity of
ineffective action, the ground was cleared for a new
life, more independent and self-sustaining.

VII. Science and the New Democracy

After twenty centuries or more, this new life ma-
tured, not as a mere renaissance of the old, but as a
veritable social mutation; it was a new physical growth
in a new environment, using different material agencies
under the guidance of a new mental imagery.

The great impetus came with the new concept of
nature-growth contained in the doctrine of evolution.
When this concept finally ripened into conviction, as it
were overnight, the old garment of thought which, like
a larval envelop had encased the mind, was ruptured
and cast aside. It had served its purpose. Man was no
longer a mere imitator of a past that was dead and gone
forever; or the slave of a fickle imagination, but the
master of it. He forfeited, indeed, his claim to a ficti-
tious kingdom, but gained his rightful place as master
builder in the great kingdom of terrestrial life. In the
revelation of evolution, man had a new birth of physi-
cal and mental freedom. He entered a new world of
boundless possibilities, free from baseless terrors and
self-imposed restrictions; free to experiment with his
treasures, and to appropriate therefrom to his own
pleasure and profit; free to taste what is evil and to
avoid it; free to seek out the good and to make it a part
of himself.

352 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

The incubus of uncorroborative authority, which
like a nightmare had pressed so heavily on his mind,
was thrown off, and all his vital activities were impreg-
nated with the quickening spirit of experimental in-
quiry. The liberated agencies of mind and body at once
found access to new sources of creative power, and new
physical and spiritual growths followed with extraor-
dinary rapidity.

With this broadened vision came a clearer recogni-
tion of mutual rights and obligations, penetrating far
deeper into the lower strata of life than ever before, re-
vitalizing social life from below, under the far reach-
ing compulsion of this new increment of intelligence.

The emancipation of his mental imagery from su-
perstitions, from classical and theological dogma-
tism, for the first time in evolution gave free play
to his motor impulses, and ripened his thought for its
reproductive act. It delivered him from all paralyz-
ing fears, save the fear of a futile life; kindled within
him the lust for truth, and set him afoot with his
vision.

Armored and armed with the courage of righteous-
ness, he bravely courted nature and won the lovers'
sanction to explore the forbidden mysteries of creation.
He broke down the phantom barriers of the flesh be-
tween man, and beast, and flower; bridged the canyons
of the living and the non-living worlds; beheld their
protean shapes merge with one another and emerge
again, and saw that they were one. All the social
institutions of man, however hallowed by custom and
antiquity, were subject to his questioning and his reno-
vation. The silent sanctuaries of the dead were robbed
of their ghostly terrors ; the hiding places of the gods

IMAGERY IN SOCIAL GROWTH 353

ransacked and despoiled; and the whole household of
nature, sweetened and illumined by his love, was
thrown open to public pleasures and profitable usages.

At last the dreadful fictions of the waning mental
night vanished in the white light of realities, and the
narrow womb of time and space, which hemmed in
man's endeavors, opened wide delivering him into a
world of unlimited opportunities.

The new-born man was deeply humiliated by his
self-revealed nakedness; by his poverty in godliness,
and by his infinitesimal insignificance as part and par-
cel of the material universe. He was deeply chagrined
by the discovery that he was but one of nature's count-
less products, privileged solely by his flickering vision
of right and wrong, and wholly dependent on his
knowledge of nature and himself for his support.
Henceforth his burnt offerings and propitiatory divi-
dends to the gods were to be the sacrifices of a self-
consuming labor on the altar of his fellow-creatures.
On him fell the heavy obligation to deliver himself
from evil, and to quench his thirst for constructive
Tightness from the well springs of Tightness all about
him.

All unconsciously the methods of science demon-
strated to man's unwilling mind the universality of his
democracy, and his kinship to nature. Neither arro-
gance, nor pride of place, the humility of misfortune,
nor the bitterness of defeat, could long survive the
knowledge that man, and beast, and flower, and sun,
and soil, are made of the same universal stuff and
moved by the same universal forces. That kings and
paupers, black, and yellow, and white, are born in
the same way, fed with the same foods, respond phys-

354 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

ically to the same stimuli, have the same hopes and
fears, pride and prejudice, joys and sorrows; the same
rights, the same obligations, and the same end.

When man turned his thoughts away from human
life to nature-life, the old values vanished, never to
return, and new ones took their places. For science
knows no barriers, and fosters no spirit of propagand-
ism. She permits no proprietorship in sun, or moon,
or stars; instills no prejudice in poison, and forbids
all privilege with death. There is no racial bigotry
in heat, or cold, or gravity. The microscope, the bal-
ance, and the test-tube speak the same language to all
mankind; they tell the same story to England, Ger-
many, and Japan, they tell to me, to you, and to yours.

VIII. The New Demands of the New Freedom

With man's new mental and bodily freedom, and
his new discoveries of constructive Tightness, all the
physical and organic fibres of society surged with ex-
panding life, and with a more profitable social meta-
bolism. The new returns created new demands, and
the new demands impelled man to seek, and to find,
new ways and means to satisfy them. Mankind inter-
mingled, bred, and multiplied, and with the same
basic motives spread their racial rootlets and commer-
cial tendrils into every nutrient nook and corner of
the earth, distilling their peculiar qualities into one
another, and exercising their mutually adaptive influ-
ences on one another, wherever they came in contact.
The physical machinery and the mental vision neces-
sary to sustain this world-wide social organization, put
into the hands of social children the most terrible de-

IMAGERY IN SOCIAL GROWTH 355

structive instruments the world has ever seen, and
gave them unlimited opportunities to use them for
good or evil, as they saw fit. It was not merely that
the ancient implements of social conveyance had grown
into steel-clad cars, battle-ships, submarines, and air-
ships; into newspaper, cinema, and international postal
service. Far more significant than these events, great
as they were, was the fact that the vital spots of the
whole social system were left open to mental and phys-
ical attacks capable of at once destroying countless
human beings, and of reducing the survivors to the
old levels of barbarism. For the cohesion of this new
system was no longer resident in a rigid mental con-
servatism, or in stable chemical affinities, or in long
established social relations of man to man, or to his
physical environment; but to good will, to mutual con-
fidence, and to a clear understanding of the new con-
ditions that had brought this new social life into exis-
tence and which were essential to its endurance.

And meantime social officers virtually, if not in
reality, had been degraded to the ranks because they
had lost that distinctive saving power which sanctions
authority. The divinity that hedged about the king
and priest had disappeared; the gaudy covering of
paint and feathers, and the coating of tinselled tradi-
tion that served to conceal and protect the social para-
site and profiteer, became as transparent and penetrable
as air to the newly armed and bespectacled masses.
The modern political and business barons, and the law-
clad knights of militarism and diplomacy, for their
own selfish purposes, had put the all powerful instru-
ments of science into the hands of their retainers in
place of the flail, the hammer, and the scythe ; and had

356 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

given to them understanding in place of the bludgeons
of ignorance. The disciples of physical and intellec-
tual dominion thereby unconsciously fashioned the
means to their own destruction, and raised mankind
to a higher level of equality in social opportunity, in
offensive and defensive power.

The ability to move the masses to united purposeful
action vanished when these time-honored leaders lost
their authority. They fell from their physical and
mental supremacy to the levels of the rank and file,
because they no longer inspired a compelling fear of
their power to destroy, nor an abiding faith in their
power to save.

To construct and control the exacting machinery of
modern social life, and of modern warfare, demands
long and careful training, and the exercise of the high-
est intellectual faculties by a large number of individ-
uals. But these mental attributes are the very ones
which enable men to visualize with greater clearness
the horrors and futility of war, thus compelling them
to cooperate with one another in their common inter-
ests, rather than fight one another to their common
disadvantage.

The growth of these mutually nullifying factors
automatically inhibits the development of any compre-
hensive system of mental and physical dominion, and
will ultimately reduce the danger from great interna-
tional wars to the vanishing point. For you cannot
educate men to the command of physical forces, and
at the same time make them insensible to moral forces.
A time must inevitably come when there will be no
motive sufficiently strong to mobilize these growing
intellectual powers for purposes of destruction. Either

IMAGERY IN SOCIAL GROWTH 357

a moving fear will not be there, or the possible profits
will manifestly not be worth the sacrifice.

It is only the sharp compelling vision of an impend-
ing common disaster, or the vision of common salvation
and immediate profit, that can produce in all the mem-
bers of any social group the same motive for action;
and that motive alone can compel cooperative action
to a common end. Such a motive for international
wars does not and cannot, exist. The clearer man's
constructive vision becomes, the more evident it is that
the salvation and growth of nations, as well as of indi-
viduals, lies in peace, not in war; in mutual service,
not in mutual destruction.

CHAPTER XIV

CLASS FUNCTIONS AND VOLUNTARY SUB-
MISSION TO LEADERSHIP

Class Differences a Necessary Condition to Social Cooperation —
Social Metabolism and the Conveyance of Social Power — Social
Cleavage and the Delimitation of Social Units — Social Motives and
the Compulsion of Achievement — The Constructive Usage of Intel-
ligence in Social Growth: Mental Dominion; Mental Democracy,
or Equality of Authority — The Delegation of Functional Authority
and Voluntary Submission to Leadership.

THE inhibitory mental factor in social evolution
which automatically tends to suppress great interna-
tional wars, is less potent to suppress minor, or internal,
conflicts. Here the divergence of interests is more
fluctuating, the relative difference in individual profits
greater, and apparently more easily accessible to cor-
rection. It is therefore easier to mobilize antagonistic
purposes for prospective gains; and the prospective
losses in the struggle for Tightness, being less appalling,
are not so deterrent to action.

I. Class Differences a Necessary Condition to Social

Cooperation

Without the structural and functional differences
in human beings on which class distinctions are mainly
based, no social organization would be possible. For
cooperation is contingent on differences not likenesses.
Like the various tissues and organs which make up a

358

SUBMISSION TO LEADERSHIP 359

living animal, these differences in human individuals
indicate not only the manner in which society actually
has grown up and acquired its organization but, in a
general way, the direction in which further growth
and organization must take place, if at all. Class dif-
ferences are primarily due to inevitable differences in
the time and place of birth of different individuals,
and to personal differences in their physical structure
and mental powers. They inevitably increase with
every stage of social growth. Further social growth,
or progress, is possible only by increasing these differ-
ences and by rinding new and better ways to utilize
them cooperatively.

Class interests are those things which are concerned
with the growth and preservation of these functional,
or class, differences. They are therefore of paramount
importance, secondary only to those of individual life.
They are essentially the same in every social group in
corresponding stages of social evolution.

To understand and to react intelligently to these
internal conditions is of more immediate importance
than the solution of the larger and more remote prob-
lems of internationalism; for when they are under-
stood, and not till then, internationalism will take care
of itself in due time and sequence, through the out-
ward extension of the same methods of cooperation to
larger groups.

For social growth and organization proceed from
the small to the large, not from the large to the small.
If man is not at heart truly democratic; if he still pre-
serves the spirit of uncompromising arrogance and the
ultimate hope of any kind of dominion over others;
if he is not willing to pay the price of social coopera-

360 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

tino in personal sacrifices and self-subordination to the
whole, no enduring social or national structure can be
upbuilt by him that can sustain the more comprehen-
sive sacrifices of internationalism.

II. Social Metabolism and the Conveyance of Power

The really vital problems of state, of empires, or
of humanity, are precisely the same kind of problems
as those of a family of human beings under one roof,
except that in the former instances the households are
larger, more enduring, and contain more children.

The only way in which any social group can in-
crease in numbers, in security, and welfare, is through
the improvement or extension of the elementary co-
operative machinery of smaller social groups; that is
by increasing the range, or volume, or speed, of mu-
tual services. All these social services ultimately re-
solve themselves into problems of the conveyance of
power, mental and physical, to and from social con-
stituents, past, present, and future.

The more social life does grow in numbers, the
more complex these time, and space, and load, and
quality factors become; the more danger there is from
the rise of antagonistic, or of non-contributory groups;
from over-absorption in local, or class interests; from
the loss of social perspective and unity of purpose.

Thus in social life, as in a growing animal organ-
ism, all the problems of mutual service necessarily
become more intricate with the progress of growth;
more difficult to synchronize and readjust in order to
preserve that sequence and equality of give and take
essential to the maintenance of social metabolism.

SUBMISSION TO LEADERSHIP 361

III. Social Cleavage and the Delimitation of Social

Units

Whenever for any reason, geographic, racial, or
psychic, these problems become insoluble, and with
growth they always tend to approach that point, social
cleavage, or fission, or subdivision into smaller, more
centralized groups takes place. These new social
groups may then enter into cooperative relations with
one another on a different level. The process is similar
to that which takes place in living and non-living
things when they reach the limits to their power of
growth. For, as we have already seen, every sys-
tem, or individualized thing, such as an atom, nucleus,
cell, animal, or plant, has these definite limitations to
its size and coherency. They can become larger only
when their cooperative instruments have sufficient
power to cover those increased dimensions, or to act
constructively under those new conditions. The di-
mension of any system is the expression of the coop-
erative action of its constituent parts, as well as the
measure of their power to cooperate.

In any case, the greater the progress of social
growth, the more intelligence, the more toleration, the
more sense of obligation, confidence, and mutual serv-
ice is required to preserve that which has been gained
by mutual service. Not only a higher order of in-
telligence in the social leaders, to solve the more tech-
nical problems of life, but a better and more universal
understanding in the masses that will make it possible
to reach, and to keep some underlying agreement, how-
ever elemental it may be, as to the basic purposes of
life, and the basic ways and means of achieving them.

362 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

That community of understanding, that agreement
in acts and purposes, is the mental basis of social ethics
and morality. It is the power which holds individu-
als together in organic unity. The varying degrees
and extent of that agreement determines the cleavage
lines of social units, and the union of those units into
larger or smaller social bodies.

IV. Social Motives and the Compulsion of Achieve-
ment

Needless to say those social acts and purposes are
always two-fold, and reciprocal in their action: (i)
to increase the security, happiness, and creative power
of the individual through the constructive usage of all
the available social agencies; and (2) to increase the
security and creative power of the social group, or
state, by increasing the creative and cooperative power
of all its constituents. The state and the individual
citizen are alike involved in this reciprocating altru-
ism and egoism.

On this understanding, vague, narrow, or even semi-
conscious as it may be, social life has gone far on its
constructive way. To retreat now, to repudiate this
unwritten covenant, would be suicidal. Death would
be as certain for both state and its citizens, as it would
be for the body and all its organs, if the heart and brain
refused to act cooperatively.

Therein lies the directive agency of acquired pos-
sessions, and the mental compulsion of achievement;
the inevitable tragedy, as well as the challenge of so-
cial life and growth. In the consciousness of these

SUBMISSION TO LEADERSHIP 363

social possessions, lies the intellectual compulsion to
self-denial and self-saving cooperative action.

As the leaders in social life become more conscious
of what man has achieved, they feel more keenly the
sense of ownership in social institutions; recognize the
constructive value of their heritage, and the dangers
that threaten it. They are terrified by their new re-
sponsibilities and by the conviction that their own
welfare, their own lives, and those of their nearest and
dearest, depend not on themselves alone, but on count-
less scraps of good intentions; on countless vacillating
purposes, feeble intelligence, and physical incapacity
in other human beings in whom, of necessity, they must
place their trust. Therein lies the new and henceforth
ever present motive which, in self-defense and self-
preservation, will compel these leaders to serve and
strengthen their fellow men, physically, intellectually,
and morally.

The old terrors of the unknown, of superstition,
witchcraft, and of nature's countless evil doers, which
once served as directive agencies, rounding up mankind
with a common fear into terror-stricken flocks, com-
pelling him to seek the shelter of familiar haunts and
the encouragement of familiar faces, vanished under
the reassuring bounty of larger experience, only to be
replaced by the new terrors of modern social life.
That is, by the fear of overwhelming numbers whose
faces are seen but whose motives are unknown; fear
of drowning in a storm-tossed ocean of humanity, swept
from a sustaining purpose, or smothered into helpless
inaction ; fear of the instability of his own intentions,
and above all fear of the insincerity and incompetency

364 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

of his fellow-man, or that his co-workers will suddenly
let go, or change their purpose, and leave him helpless
on the brink of disaster. For he now knows that he
and his fellow-man have long since embarked on a com-
mon enterprise; mutiny and incompetency, no longer
mean mere disbandment and a return to the independ-
ent life of primitive man, but a terrible common dis-
aster.

The industrial life of to-day is in very truth a
perilous voyage of romantic adventurers; a motley
company of Ulysses, Jasons, and Sir Galahads, seeking
in untried worlds the golden fleece of some new experi-
ence, the fountains of perpetual youth, or the sources
of creative power. It has ventured far into unsus-
taining realms, trusting to a slender thread of relays
for its support. It can neither move forward, nor stay
where it is, nor yet retreat to its base of supplies, if any
one of the sustaining links of its support breaks down
through stupidity, or treachery, or physical incapacity.

No physical force, or dictator-ship, can preserve
the coherency of this social system. Its constituents
are held to their services solely by established habits;
by satisfaction in the right performance of social func-
tions; by a common understanding of social purposes;
and by that compelling sense of responsibility which
comes with the knowledge that failure on their part
means immeasurable disaster to one and all.

This social cohesion can be no greater than the
moral compulsion of intelligence, and the physical abil-
ity to obey its dictates.

It will not be denied, for example, that the force
of gravity compels more respect, more unqualified
obedience in one who is up a tree than in one whose

SUBMISSION TO LEADERSHIP 365

feet are firmly planted on the ground. But if obedi-
ence, however willing, is physically and organically
impossible, disaster is in no wise delayed. In that case,
one can live only on the ground; for such a one, to
climb is suicidal.

So it is with social life in respect to physical and
biological laws. They may be of little consequence to
barbarians drawing their sustenance directly from an
easily benevolent environment. But to the builders of
modern states, and to all those who today depend on
the due performance of great social functions, these
laws are of vital importance. The superstitions of
barbarism, the ignorance of elemental, natural phe-
nomena, are then manifestations of criminal negli-
gence; for in the present stage of social evolution,
obedience to an amazing multitude of natural laws is
absolutely essential to social life and growth; disobedi-
ence means death and social disintegration.

Or to change our simile, modern society is no longer
comparable with the traditional ship of state; nor is it
like an ocean liner, safely moving on a substantial
ocean, its familiar course prescribed from port to port.
Rather is it like a giant air-ship drifting in unstable
airs, and they who are in it know not where, or how,
or why, the ship is moving. Among them all there is
no unity of purpose, or desire; no agreement on the
course that must be followed, or the rate of progress.
Only this they know, and they that know are few in-
deed: the social ship is riding dangerously high, and
drifting farther and farther away from sustaining
earth and familiar shores. Supplies are rapidly di-
minishing, and unequally divided; the officers are in-
competent, the crew is mutinous, and there is perpetual

366 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

quarreling over the right ways and means of doing ob-
viously necessary things. Some believe in science,
some in religion; some in freedom, others in disci-
pline; some rely on humanity, others on brutality; some
follow Wilson, others Aristotle; some put their faith
in the things of today, others in the things of yester-
day. But no one is able to convince the other of his
error; and no one is quite sure whether it would be bet-
ter to go up, or down, or forwards, or backwards;
whether the social ballast is in the gasoline tanks, the
parachutes, or the refrigerators.

Who knows how far this bubble may yet expand
before it bursts? Who can say when, or how, or
where, the countless forces that have produced this
over-century industrial growth must be checked, or
stimulated, in order to preserve a righteous balance of
give and take and the requisite margin of safety?

But it is sufficiently clear that we cannot now re-
treat. We cannot now go "back to nature" and a prim-
itive life, except through cataclysmic death and dis-
solution. To live, we must hold fast to what we have,
and add more constructive Tightness to it. There is
no other option, and no opportunity to delay; for com-
placent death ever thrusts its insistent challenge in the
face of life, and defiant life promptly answers the chal-
lenge, stands alert to its guard and willingly throws
its whole self into the struggle.

There again lies the secret, compelling agency
which guides all steps to progress. There again is
the inevitable compulsion to still greater service and
larger sacrifice which achievement itself creates. So-
cial life has raised itself to what it is by its intelligence,
and now must use all its intelligence to save itself.

SUBMISSION TO LEADERSHIP 367

V. The Constructive Usage of Intelligence in Social

Growth

The existence of a physical object, or a living or-
ganism, is dependent on the compelling powers which
regulate the action of its constituent parts. In social
life, these powers are supplemented, or extended, by
the compulsion of intelligence.

There are apparently three alternative methods of
using that compulsion constructively: (i) By mental
dominion, or the compulsion to constructive action of
the mentally weak and stupid by the mentally strong;
(2) By mental democracy, or the compulsion to con-
structive action by an equal degree of intelligence in
all the social constituents; and (3) By a combination
of the first two methods, or by the delegation of au-
thority.

In any case, the underlying intellectual compulsion
that drives the individual man to purposeful action
is always essentially the same; fear of destruction, loss,
or injury; the desire to save himself* and the desire to
profit, to increase, or to grow.

i. Mental Dominion. Of these three alternative
methods, the first one is definitely excluded as a per-
manent means of progress, because no class, or group,
or nation, can go on growing in intellectual power and
in dominion over others, and at the same time deprive
its own constituents of the intellectual instruments by
which that dominion is created and maintained. The
command of these constructive agencies must be gen-
eral, or diffused throughout the dominant group, else
no enduring system of social power can be created.
If this command is general, dominion within the group,

368 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

however large, vanishes with the equalization of men-
tal power, and any individual, or minor group of in-
dividuals, can then use these agencies as their interests
may demand.

There is no way to compel anyone knowingly to
act to his own disadvantage when he has the physical
power to prevent it; no way to hold back the rising
tide of intelligence which, as it sees the way to its own
salvation, beats down all artificial barriers to the at-
tainment of its desires.

Hence, if interests lie apart, the system falls apart
when that is recognized. If they lie in common, and
that is recognized, all the available constructive agen-
cies will be voluntarily utilized to that larger end. In
that case, the system automatically ceases to be founded
on dominion and becomes a voluntary cooperative sys-
tem.

2. Mental Democracy. The second method can-
not be the way to unlimited social progress because it
is impossible for all individuals, young and old, male
and female, to be equally intelligent, or to have equal
moral responsibiities and equal ability to fulfil them.
Moreover a period is soon reached in social growth
when no one individual can comprehend all the prob-
lems that arise in that social life, and who will have
more than an even chance of acting constructively
in reference to them. If it soon becomes impossible
for one, it will become impossible, at a much earlier,
or more primitive stage of social evolution, for a con-
trolling number of individuals to do so. When that
stage is reached, consistent progress will be automat-
ically checked at a fluctuating zone where chance alone
will be the controlling factor. Further progress can

SUBMISSION TO LEADERSHIP 369

be achieved, and consistently maintained at that higher
level, only through greater diversity of mental powers
among individuals, and a corresponding subdivision of
authority between them. In other words, through mu-
tual submission to the guidance of delegated experts.

If that is done, social organization and growth
passes over into the third alternative method, which
we will now consider in somewhat more detail.

VI. The Delegation of Functional Authority and
Voluntary Submission to Leadership

The third method is a combination of the first two.
That is, it is a method of growth based on coopera-
tive mental action, or mutual guidance and mutual sub-
mission to direction. It is, in fact, an extension into
the social group of the familiar principle of functional
acceleration and inhibition which governs the self-
constructive action of the living body. It is the only
method of social growth that is practically unlimited
in its creative possibilities.

Social growth is governed by the same creative law
that controls all other constructive processes in nature.
This law may be expressed somewhat as follows:
Growth always creates progressively diversified condi-
tions within the growing structure. These conditions
tend to create, or demand, corresponding diversity in
the constituent parts. Hence more diversified construc-
tive agents, and more elaborate cooperation between
them, are essential to every additional step in the con-
structive process. Growth will continue as long as these

demands are fulfilled; it stops when they are not ful-
filled.

In human society, therefore, an essential condition
for social evolution, or growth, is a progressive diver-
sity in the mental and physical qualities of human in-
dividuals, no matter how it is created, whether by so-
cial position, environment, education, or by heredity;
and the opportunity, or freedom, to exercise the di-
rective influence of those qualities on other individ-
uals.

In physical and organic things, the directive powers
of the elemental parts and organs, or of the whole sys-
tem created by them, we call physical attributes, or
functions. They are relatively fixed, or stable, quan-
tities dependent on the chemical and physical laws
which regulate their being. The mutual give and take
of these individual qualities and quantities is what, in
the broadest sense, we call cooperation.

In the intelligent human individual, acting as a liv-
ing social unit, this cooperative quality is not fixed, or
constant in quantity. It fluctuates widely and rap-
idly; or, as we say, it is "voluntary," changing with
experience, and as intelligence, in self interests, may
demand. Broadly speaking, its constancy can be pre-
served only so long as the intelligence of the individ-
ual, rightly or wrongly, wisely or foolishly, dictates
that it is self-saving, or profitable, so to act.

These impalpable forces of the will — as impalpa-
ble as those which hold atoms and molecules in coop-
eration together, but unlike them acting far and wide
across time and space — give to social life its sole co-
hesive power. On this labile basis, the cooperative
mental metabolism of social life is founded.

SUBMISSION TO LEADERSHIP 3711

This new factor in evolution, that we call "will" or
"intelligence" — new only in that it has now become
manifest to us in social architecture, even as atoms are
manifest in material bodies — is a terrible constructive
and destructive instrument, almost as potent for evil
as for good. It is a growing, benevolent factor, whose
gifts are augmented by the receiving, and whose de-
mands are ever more terrifying and exacting.

Education, in its broadest sense, is the construc-
tive influence one thing exercises over another. For so-
ciety to obtain these constructive results, or as we say
"to give them a chance," human social atoms must be
brought within the range of each other's influence and
be given every opportunity to find that environmental
stimulus which will give their peculiar powers the
best chance to grow. That is the purpose of the edu-
cational chemist.

Those powers, however, will be wasted, developed
to no purpose, unless they are themselves utilized; that
is unless they also are free to exercise their controlling
and guiding influence on others to a common creative
end. They cannot be so utilized unless other individ-
uals, in some one or more particulars voluntarily sub-
mit, eagerly and hopefully, to their leadership.

But to recognize that creative power in which lead-
ership is rightfully resident requires a high order of
intelligence in those who must choose their leaders and
submit to their guidance. Not necessarily expert
knowledge, but at least an elementary understanding
of the ways in which creative power is acquired by
others and the purposes for which it is utilized. In

372 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

other words, that intellectual cooperation, or mental
give and take, on which the preservation and improve-
ment of our social life depends cannot be assured with-
out a clear understanding on the part of the common
people of those agencies which have created the social
conditions in which they live.

For in mental, as well as physical phenomena, it
is an essential part of the grand strategy of evolution
that every new discovery of constructive Tightness cre-
ates new possessions which make new demands and im-
pose new obligations. These obligations must be ful-
filled if the beneficiary would preserve his gains.

We have already shown that the most creative
period in the history of evolution is the one in which
we are now living. To match this cataclysmic out-
burst of creative power, we search in vain the whole
gamut of geological records, where creative eras are
measured in millions of years, and where the construc-
tive gains are small indeed in comparison. These im-
measurable achievements and new possessions, create
our immeasurable obligations to science.

Nevertheless science is as yet in its glorious youth.
It is possible still further to increase its creative power;
but it can be done only by- extending more deeply and
widely into the social body the mental attitude toward
nature-action, and the mental methods which have cre-
ated science.

That means primarily the abdication of intellectual
dominion; the democratization of constructive thought
as well as constructive labor; putting, not merely the
physical machinery of social life and the instruments
of physical power into the hands of the common peo-
ple, but elemental truths and mental Tightness into their

SUBMISSION TO LEADERSHIP 373

heads, and the love of nature into their hearts. It
means that in education there shall be no diplomatic
evasions, no selfish secrecy, and no lying propagandism.
That the masses shall be entrusted with all the power
of knowledge they can receive and utilize to their own
salvation and welfare. That to fight the battles of
life they shall not be clad in superstition's rags, nor
decked with falsehood's paper caps and make-believe
arms of out-worn tradition; but clothed in wholesome
truth, and armed with stern realities.

The obligation to give the common people these of-
fensive and defensive weapons lies on the princes of
scholarship; on science, and on the church!

Intellectual cooperation and the submission to in-
tellectual leadership, can come only through this
larger measure of intellectual democracy and larger
measure of mutual confidence, whose source is the com-
mon understanding of a common purpose. This un-
derstanding must be based on a community of ideals;
on an intelligent sympathy with the aims and methods
of modern scholarship, using that term in its broad-
est sense. It must be based on a disciplined imagina-
tion growing out of a broader time and space perspec-
tive, and a stronger conviction of the benevolent neu-
trality and immutability of natural laws.

That kind of imagination can come only through
some elemental concept of world-progress, physical
and spiritual; some basic knowledge of cosmic, or-
ganic, and social evolution; of Astronomy, Geology,
Chemistry, Physics, and Biology, and the parts they
have played in the remote past, and are now playing in
the great creative movements of today.

No man without these basic concepts has today a

374

fair chance rightly to estimate his own value in the
general scheme of nature; to act constructively him-
self, or rightly to estimate the constructive value of
leadership in others. Nor will he, otherwise, volun-
tarily submit to the exactions which modern science, to
an ever increasing degree, must impose upon his con-
duct in commerce, agriculture, public health and other
phases of social life.

It is this kind of understanding our colleges must
give to their graduates if they are to fulfil their social
services. It is their chief social function to create an
intelligent middle class, as a cooperative mental link
between the specialists, created by the universities and
higher technical schools, and the great body of citizens
who cannot readily understand either the requirements
for, or the value of, expert knowledge; and who in-
stinctively fear the misuse of intellectual power.

The cooperative unity of social life is wholly de-
pendent on the sanity and good common sense of this
intellectual middle class. Without its approval, no
progressive social measures can be initiated, or if initi-
ated, cannot be effectively maintained. It regulates
and stabilizes public opinion and social conduct; pro-
tects one class against the narrowness, selfishness, and
over-zeal of the others ; and bends the conservative will
to new constructive purposes. Only through this volun-
tary service of one class for the other, and this volun-
tary submission to one another under the common com-
pulsion of obvious self-interest, can society preserve its
organization and continue its growth.

Such a mental social system is upbuilt, neither by
freedom nor by dominion, but by both; by the recip-
rocal mental egoism and mental altruism of pupil and

SUBMISSION TO LEADERSHIP 375

teacher. It is a self-regulating system, based on a com-
bination of intellectual compulsion and the dominion
of approved leadership. It is precisely the same kind
of a system that regulates the conduct of every highly
organized animal, or for that matter of every organ-
ized being. That is, it is a combination of free, or
spontaneous, or voluntary actions in response to invi-
tations to profit; and of self-inhibition in response to
warnings of danger, or of destruction. The middle
class is the clearing house where these social checks
and drafts are balanced against one another, and the
profits and losses, as nearly as may be, rightly dis-
tributed.

When it becomes perfectly clear that special
knowledge, skill, talent, or genius, are social proper-
ties held in common, and that they are saving and cre-
ative social agencies, freely open to common uses, they
then cease to be a source of disrupting envy, become
uniting bonds, and a source of pride in their posses-
sion. Heavy sacrifices will then be made, eagerly and
voluntarily, to preserve and augment these agencies.
For then the scholar, or the mental leader, is clearly
but an instrument of the other man. Each is then
guide and follower in one, and each a source of saving
power to the other.

Thus man, in his own selfish interests, will vol-
untarily submit to dictation and control so long as it
is manifest that his leaders are raised to leadership by
himself, as servants to himself. Both, then, are one,
in will and purpose; the identity of the people is then
merged with that of their officers and servants, and
theirs with that of their creators.

This community of will, which can spring only

376 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

from the consciousness of common possessions, common
interests, common responsibilities, and common con-
trol, is the one condition essential to social unity. It
is the sole element of compulsion in every intelligent,
"voluntary" cooperative system.

CHAPTER XV

THE NEW LEVIATHAN

Quickening World-Life — The Mosaic of World-Life, Functional
and Morphological — The Evidences of Organized World-Life — The
Ways and Means to a Purposeful World-Life — The State as Sphere
of Cooperative Action — The Evolution of Social Covenants — The
Government of the State: the Autocratice State; the Demo-
cratic State — Education as a Directive Agency to Social Egoism —
The State as a System of Cooperative Functions: Social Reproduc-
tion; Social Metabolism; Social Betterments — The Extension of
State Functions into International Functions.

I. Quickening World Life

MANKIND, together with the plant and animal col-
leagues that have been drawn into the circle of his in-
fluences, that thrive under his aegis and contribute to
his welfare, constitute a new thing in evolution, which
like a living organism is now assuming definite form
and action under our very eyes.

The evolution of this New Leviathan out of the
sordid, commonplace realities of today, dulls our sen-
sibility to what is actually going on all about us. But
we are both eye witnesses and active participants in
the miraculous birth of this giant organism which
now embraces the earth with its encircling arms. But
yesterday, unconscious as a new born child, today it
has come into conscious life; and you and I, the very
atoms of its flesh and blood, and the instruments of
its spiritual power, may calmly sit in contemplation
of its inmost anatomy, and measure the ebb and flow
of its vital impulses.

377

378 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

This infant monster is not merely the formless ag-
gregate we vaguely call humanity, although mankind
constitutes the denser warp and woof of its social pro-
toplasm. Intermingled with its substance are count-
less plants and animals, high and low, large and small,
living symbiotically with man, guided by his will, and
in turn, controlling him; pouring their nutrient and
transforming products into these human microsomes,
and exchanging their own vital commodities with those
of mankind, on precisely the same cooperative basis
that man makes his exchange with man.

But, it may be objected, man is a separate living
thing; he has a definite form of his own, is made of
coherent parts, and moves about at will from place to
place, while "society" is stationary, an amorphous, ses-
sile thing, tied to its native soil, and is made up of
different things, widely separated, such as human be-
ings, animals and plants, dead machines, books, and
material edifices.

These differences, and many others, are obvious
enough. But are they really significant, or vital dif-
ferences? It depends on our standards of measuring
time, space, and service values.

A human being starts life as a microscopic germ,
and grows to man's estate and power by profitable ex-
change with the materials and forces of his outer
world. His form is never constant, or his content; his
materials and directive forces stream in from the outer
world, and out again, in countless other ways than the
grosser, more familiar ones of feeding, respiration,
and excretion. And these same materials, forces, and
influences may be used by other living things in a
roundabout cannibalism, none the less real because it

THE NEW LEVIATHAN 379

is roundabout. And when we attempt to follow up
these vital processes within the body, they break up
into countless larger and smaller ones, mingling in-
extricably the living and the dead; into organs, cells,
and molecules, each a system in itself, and yet inter-
locking with all the others in a common give and
take, with merely nominal, or purely arbitrary bound-
aries between them, like different departments in one
department store. And when the chemist, or biolo-
gist turns his sharpest scrutiny on the most vital frag-
ments of life, the dead and the living appear not less
mingled than before. Precisely what parts are
"dead" and what "alive" does not appear. Only this
is sure: what once was dead is now a part of life; and
what was once a part of life, is now a part of things
called "dead."

And the separating spaces between all these living
bodily parts, down to their ultimate elements, appear
to be no less real, and no more, in one case than the
other, though the dimensions are smaller than those
which separate the physical and organic elements in,
for example, a great railroad system. But in both
cases the action flowing out from all these discon-
nected, heterogeneous elements is continuous and self-
sustaining, merging into larger common currents, and
into unified, purposeful action.

What then is essential among all these apparently
unessential, or equally essential, things? Evidently,
it is the self-sustaining unity of the various systems of
give and take; the measure of order, mutual service,
and right constructive action within each minor sys-
tem, and that which ties them all together into larger
and larger systems of cooperative systems, which in

380 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

their own peculiar ways are creative and self-sustain-
ing entities.

A red blood corpuscle, for example, itself an or-
ganism, but small beyond our unaided powers to esti-
mate, picks out in its own peculiar way its burden
of oxygen from the air, or water; and driven by other
bodily agents through a maze of capillary channels,
delivers its combustion cargo to muscle, and nerve, and
gland. And these, in terms of rightly administered
bodily actions, feed the corpuscle and pay its trans-
portation and deterioration charges to and from the
consumer and the source of its supplies. Which one
of all these separate and distinct agencies performs
the more vital, or essential service, the oxygen, blood
corpuscle, heart, arteries, veins, muscle, nerve, food, or
habitat? Where does any one of these services begin
or end? Which service could man best omit from
his bodily make-up, or which one of these bodily serv-
ants could best live and endure without the other?

Does the yeast plant, which ferments the grape, do
less for man than the laborer who extracts the wine
and stores it in his cellar against the time of need?
Does the lamb, which gives its wool to man, do less
for man than the tailor that fashions it into a coat?
Does the cow, which gives its milk to man, perform a
less vital and sustaining service for man than the
mother that nurses her own offspring? So also with
rice, wheat, potatoes, farmer, miller, baker, birds, flow-
ers, bees, ships, cars, iron, and coal. Do not all these
things, and countless more, cooperatively serve to ac-
complish the common result we call social life?

Evidently, therefore, the existence of this New Le-

THE NEW LEVIATHAN 381

viathan is not dependent on any fixed, morphological,
or architectural contours; or on their location in any
particular time or place : but on the persistency of their
action, and on the continuity of their reciprocal func-
tions. The fractions of time and space which isolate,
and which give freedom and individuality to the labile
units of social life, are indeed far larger, and perhaps
more variable, than those which isolate the atoms of
a chemical molecule, or the constituent parts of an
ocean liner, or of a social institution, like a college, or
university; but this same separating matrix is present
in all these individualities, and so far as we may know,
it is everywhere of precisely the same nature, imma-
terial and indefinable. Neither formal aggregation,
nor contiguity of substance, is the basic attribute of
unity and individuality, whether physical, organic, or
social. True unity is always based on cooperative ac-
tion across time and space, in variable measure; or on
the mutual conveyance of directive influences from
part to part, in a common creative act.

In this sense, then, the birth of humanity, of a great
coherent, immortal organism, is an accomplished fact.
In it are now securely embodied the unfailing prom-
ises of a vigorous youth. Although its utterances are
as yet incoherent and its acts uncoordinated, it is ani-
mated by common spiritual impulses and possessed of
the physical organs necessary to convey them to all its
constituents, and to utilize their powers in purposeful
action.

Justly to appreciate the significance of this period
in evolution, to grasp the magnitude of current events,
or to estimate even approximately their tremendous

382 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

power to transform and to create new social institu-
tions, one must view this critical period against the
whole background of organic evolution.

Seen in this universal setting, the past century, to
use a convenient unit of time, stands clearly apart as
a period of unsurpassed intellectual revelation, of vio-
lent social paroxysms, and flocculent political precipi-
tations.

Approximately within that period, an incredibly
short time for such world-moving events, the morpho-
logical features of many systems of physical and in-
tellectual conveyance, wholly new and world wide in
range, have been definitely established. Through
their instrumentality, utilizing agencies as intangible
as air and as unsubstantial as a dream, but agencies
which alone can hold free men together, as with hooks
of steel, this formless Leviathan has attained to individ-
uality, to structural unity, and to continuity of action.
In this individuality is now resident a stimulating self-
consciousness; a consciousness that mankind has a com-
mon origin with other living things, common blood,
and common purposes, and that he now possesses the
physical and spiritual instruments to translate his pur-
poses into self-preserving and self-constructive action.

It is, therefore, no mere trick of the imagination
which pictures this social Leviathan as a quickening
maelstrom of the most heterogeneous physical, organic,
and spiritual, agencies. An omniverous world-wide
plasmodium, greedily incorporating into itself the help-
ful instrumentalities of all nature life, from bacteria to
forests, and from protozoa to man; extending its dis-
criminating industrial pseudopodia into land and sea
and air, and extracting from them its sustaining forces

THE NEW LEVIATHAN 383

and constructive materials ; metabolizing iron and coal,
sunlight, and soil, and moving waters, into vital instru-
ments; sending out its products, its messengers, and its
demands to its far flung constituents, and receiving from
them, over the crumbling barriers of time and space,
and life and death, their reassuring answers.

The universe is its habitat, the earth its den, and the
earth, like an egg, is a well provisioned residence. In
the narrow cleft, between the more substantial earth
and the blanket of its enveloping atmosphere, it lives
and moves, and multiplies; riding free the currents of
terrestrial circulation; creeping into inviting valleys;
crossing nature's bridges as they emerge; and following
up the favoring shores of ancient causeways; spreading
out, where life is easier, in denser racial spots and larger
sprawling patches; linked over no-man's land by
thread-like filaments of interlacing traffic; or inter-
mingling hostile bloods, and merging spots and patches
into one, the living film at last grows around the world,
shutting in its cosmic heritage. East then meets west,
and north meets south on common territory.

Even so, in a growing embryo, the network of initial
blastodermic cells spreads from its initial point over all
the surface of its provisioning sphere, enclosing within
itself its parental heritage.

II. The Mosaic of World Life, Functional and
Morphological

But in spite of the basic uniformity of its human
elements, the blastoderm of social life appears to our
mind's eye as a labile mosaic pattern, an iridescent
social checker-board, the architectural product of

384 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

wavering social traits, physical and mental ; of shifting
geographic, climatic, and biologic conditions, where
heredity, political history, and education, play their
respective roles. These agencies, in their all-together
working, deflect the streams of social conveyance into
specific channels, restrict, or stimulate, the play of
social services, thereby outlining the areas of social co-
operation, and their intervening cleavage zones.

Thus this terrestrial social film is broken up into
specific functional blocks, called states, or nations, or
empires. But the intervening walls, like semi-per-
meable membranes, are never stationary, or impassable,
or wholly exclusive or inclusive. They waver from
place to place, under the varying osmotic pressure of
social metabolism; open or close from time to time,
checking the passage of certain influences and allowing
others to pass more freely through. The sum total of
all these influences is what gives individuality to a
given state, or province, marking it off from others as
a more or less self-determining sphere of cooperative
life, definitely qualified by one or more specific condi-
tions. If we choose to press our comparison, these
imperial, national, tribal and village spheres of cooper-
ative social life may be likened to the organic placodes
and unlike specific cell groups, or cleavage areas, of
embryonic life; civic capitals and local governments
are their representative and administrative nuclear
centres; and manufacturing districts, or other centres
of social metabolism, may be compared with plastids
and other bodily organs, where specific industries are
localized.

But we need not further press the parallel. Analo-
gies serve a double purpose ; for all analogies ultimately

THE NEW LEVIATHAN 385

break down, and in the end better serve to demonstrate
the existence of real differences rather than make the
resemblances more intelligible.

The main point is that in both cases the individuali-
ties that we call cells, or organs, and those that we call
social groups, or states, are merely localized spheres of
cooperative life of various dimensions. They are situ-
ated, it may be, side by side, or surrounded, and wholly
enclosed by many others, but in all cases separated and
shut off from one another by fluctuating barriers of
time and space that control and graduate the range,
volume, and character of the mutual exchange between
them.

III. The Evidences of Organized World Life

In the development of embryonic life, among the
first evidences of vital action, and perhaps the most
striking fact to the observer, is the unerring emergence
of definite bodily structures out of apparent emptiness.
For here life frankly displays before the critical, but
ever baffled gaze of science, the translation of its invis-
ible agencies into concrete forms.

Then other signs of vital action rise. Miniature
lakes and streams of nutrient fluids form ; and in them,
acquisitive cells are presently launched which ride on
swirling currents through guardian channels, traffick-
ing with every shore. Along widening crevices, be-
tween more substantial structures, sense organs and
nerves throw out their lines to myriad expectant ter-
minals, bringing subtle impulses from abroad, and
transmitting messages from cell to cell, in advertise-
ment of present supplies and urgent necessities.

386 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

And then the mystic embryo, apparently com-
pounded of countless discordant parts, expresses its or-
ganic unity in rhythmic heart-beats and convulsive
movements, and finally in more purposeful bodily
actions.

In the worlds developing social life, the same mys-
tery of embryonic phenomena is now being displayed
before our very eyes. We may see there the same
methods in action, utilized for the same purposes; and
in a similar manner its emerging physical structures
and coordinated vital actions reveal to us its growing
unity and cooperative organization.

The larger features of this embryo Leviathan are
seen in the checker-board of states and empires which
are now taking on more coherent and stable form in
response to their historic antecedents, their inherent
qualities, and their local environments. These national
units, once established, immediately express their indi-
viduality by the international exchange of their material
commodities and spiritual influences. The human will
cannot inhibit the flowing of these cross currents any
more than atoms can suppress their affinities, or the
ocean inhibit the flowing of its own waters. The mutual
influences of man on man, and state on state, operate
whether man wills it or not.

These vital influences are now taking on, in due
creative sequence, the more substantial form of vessels,
cars, and air-ships ; they are the larger blood corpuscles
of the growing international circulation, giving up and
receiving their life sustaining cargoes, regardless of
nominal boundaries, along the great channels and high-
ways of terrestrial conveyance.

And the press, the post, the phonograph, and the

THE NEW LEVIATHAN 387

"movies," the material receptors and transmitters of
the new life, with their printed films and chiseled metal
shields, their branching copper filaments, flash the
feeble calls of man to man, and state to state, through-
out the world; and black and brown respond to white,
and white to black and brown, in reassuring flashes.

At last, the myriad vacillating atoms of world-life
have emerged from the primordial chaos of futile isola-
tion and conflicting motives, joined in ever larger
groups to spiritual continuity, through steel clad cars
and tiny dots and dashes. At last the west stirs uneasily
to the call of the east, and the north to the call of the
south. The heart of the world-life has begun to beat
and her forces to act in unison.

The differences between all these quickening agen-
cies of world-life and those of the quickening embryo
are in dimensions^ materials and agents, not in methods,
purpose, or results. In both cases there is present the
same element of inevitable progress, the same basic
compulsion to growth and organization inherent in the
"make up" of their constituent parts. In both cases, as
in a Red Cross act, cosmic agencies, and the physical
machinery of life, must be rightly utilized to establish
cooperative continuity with the ultimate chemical and
organic forces of the living body before growth can
take place, and when that is accomplished growth takes
place automatically. In both cases, all the essential
processes involved are cooperative, mutually service-
able, saving and creative in their results if not in their
"purposes."x

We are now beginning to see more clearly some-
thing of the grand strategy of evolution, something of
the purpose, or end, toward which world-life is mov-

388 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

ing, and the agencies it is automatically creating within
itself for its own upbuilding.

Man, with feverish activity, is forever striving to
overtake his own purposes, like a cat chasing its own
tail; when the speed and power to gain his ends are
found, the ends are no longer there, but new ones are
seen still just out of reach. His perpetual invention of
better and more powerful instruments of conveyance
multiplies his desires, feeds them but does satisfy them,
and thus are means to a larger end than the mere
acquisition of more speed, or physical power, or wealth,
or comfort, or leisure, or knowledge, or art, or the do-
minion of man over nature's organic and physical
forces. All these gains are but instruments to an evolu-
tionary goal, not ends in themselves.

They but enable life to multiply the more, thereby
laying still heavier compulsion on man's intelligence,
and enforcing stricter moral discipline upon him, in
order to preserve his increase. The multiplication of
man is that growth in numbers necessary to give world-
life its bodily completion, its social unity and continu-
ity, its volume and variety of human resources. Man's
machinery of social conveyance, his commerce, science,
literature, and art, his acquisition of vast sources of
physical power, are but the necessary preliminaries to
the upbuilding of the physical anatomy, the circulatory
system, nerve centres, and sense organs, the sources and
reservoirs of physical supplies and spiritual stimuli,
essential to a world-wide cooperative life.

Man's intelligence, that new instrument in evolu-
tion, which primarily served, and rightly, his own sel-
fish, individual ends, having accomplished its initial

TH£ NEW LEVIATHAN 389

constructive purpose, became the unconscious, and now
the conscious, directive and constructive agency in a
new world-life. Intelligence, therefore, and her off-
spring, science, religion, philosophy, and art, like all
other cosmic agencies, is primarily egoistic, self-crea-
tive, and self-saving, and then turns its new-born powers
to super-service, to altruism, or to the still larger con-
structive ends of world-life.

The time is ripe for man to catch the spirit of this
mental obligation now laid upon him.

IV. The Ways and Means to a Purposeful World-Life

How can this embryonic world-life, now entering
its conscious stage, accomplish its creative purposes?
Solely by using present powers for future, altruistic
ends. As in the parental benevolence of animal life,
and as in all other phases of evolutionary strategy, pro-
visions must be made for future usage, consciously or
unconsciously, on a scale commensurate with the social
purposes to be accomplished. It should not surprise us
that all the pleasures and satisfactions in life, sensory
and mental, consist in doing these very things.

But the creative powers in mutual service, whether
expressed as reflex actions; or as sexual, or nutritive
instincts; or as religious, scientific, or philosophic mo-
tives; or as the highest ideals resident in the masters
only, are impotent as constructive social agencies with-
out the machinery for their accomplishment.

To turn these potential agencies into realities, a
larger, more controlling number must have these mo-
tives, or ideals, and themselves provide a permanent

390 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

vehicle for transmitting them from man to man, and
from generation to generation.

To act purposefully, with some measure of social
unison and common profit, as for example in the way
the bodily organs perform their purposeful actions for
the frog, the physical, organic, and mental machinery
of social conveyance must first be created, which will
make it possible for great social groups to preserve their
ideals; to advertise their supplies and demands; to store
up, or transport their commodities; and to check, or
stimulate, their activities as the common welfare may
demand. All that means national and international co-
operation, commercial and educational, resting on some
common understanding; on some basic community of
methods and motives.

The growth of such a system may be left to chance,
or till the slow action of natural laws establishes an
equitable balance in the flow of social give and take.
But in that case, the human quality in intelligent co-
operative action, and the fulfilment of man's moral
obligations, would be absent. The process can be
hastened, rectified, or regulated, given its human qua-
lity, only through the operation of the ordinary pro-
cesses of intelligent action in self-interests; that is by
foresight and self-denial, based on experience and on a
knowledge of natural laws and conditions. That means
what is commonly called "science" in its broader mean-
ing; or some knowledge of world movements, the nature
and volume of world resources, anticipation of the
world's supplies and demands, and a knowledge of the
right ways and means of utilizing one to satisfy the
other.

THE NEW LEVIATHAN 391

V. The State as a Sphere of Cooperative Action

We have seen that cooperative action is a universal
attribute of nature, rhythmic in the wave-like rise and
fall of its constructive impulses; and cumulative in
the tidal rise of world organization its petty gains en-
gender. It is the main spring to the growth and being
of every individual thing; the compelling creative
power which everywhere underlies the phenomena of
evolution and progress.

While it has not before been recognized that pro-
gressive cooperation is a universal creative law, man has
long been cognizant of the creative power in coopera-
tive action. Within the narrower circles of his more fa-
miliar affairs, he first instinctively, or unconsciously,
then deliberately, or intelligently, utilizes cooperative
methods to augment his own powers and resources.
Broadly speaking, his own profits and the dimensions
of all his social institutions, by whatever names they be
called, have been commensurate with the degree of
intelligence utilized in directing existing agencies into
cooperative channels.

But deliberately and rightly to utilize these creative
methods on a larger and more enduring scale, or in
projects that ripen in the more remote future, as in
agriculture, science, or education, or in kindred affairs
of state and nation, demands a far larger experience and
a broader vision than that requisite for the exploitation
of present opportunities. It demands at least a clear
enough vision of prospective profits to constitute an
abiding compulsory factor in the regulation of man's
conduct, and so regulating it in a sufficient number of

392 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

individuals as to produce concerted social action ade-
quate to attain these more remote, less tangible ends.

The success attendant upon these larger cooperative
enterprises, whatever the aims and agents may be,
depends on the fulfilment, to and by the constituents,
of definite rights and obligations in a definite sequence;
and this aid must be conveyed over wider areas and
longer periods, the larger and more comprehensive the
enterprises are. But these rights and obligations can
never be fulfilled in due time and equal measure, be-
cause social demands are never equally vocalized, nor
immediate necessities equally manifest, nor the ways
and means to execute them equally available to all.

Hence the cooperative egoism and altruism of social
life, like the metabolism of protoplasmic life, can never
attain to cooperative equilibrium, for the receipt of
rights by one constituent cannot precede the fulfilment
of obligations by the others; moreover the inevitable
handicaps of time, and place, and capacity may out-
weigh the necessity for one, or obviate the performance
of the other.

The rate at which cooperative social life actually
is evolved depends on the extent to which the under-
lying growth-pressure, or the increase in population
and the increasing exigencies of supply and demand,
forces these divergent tendencies through common
channels to their natural issues.

This growth pressure, which is itself evidence of an
underlying accumulation of profits whose only outlet
is through the discovery, or invention, of better ways
and means of conveyance, compels men to seek out and
utilize these better ways; preserves and strengthens
them with increased returns when these ways are

THE NEW LEVIATHAN 393

found ; and compels them to see that the fulfilment of
mutual rights and obligations in the attainment of these
ends is a self-preserving necessity.

The state is one of these larger spheres of coopera-
tive social action around which man has set up more or
less arbitrary boundaries.

VI. The Evolution of Social Covenants

It is evident, therefore, that men must come to some
sort of agreement in conduct, tacit or otherwise, before
they can live in association. These agreements are in
effect mutual stimulations and inhibitions for united
purposeful acts. They mean for each partner to the
agreement some measure of self-sacrifice and service
for a common gain; or a mutual surrender of indi-
vidual sovereignty in return for services rendered, or to
be rendered.

Whenever such agreements were mutually service-
able, the partners to them had a better chance to sur-
vive, the agreement a better chance to become a custom.
Agreements that were not mutually serviceable, or
profitable, ultimately ceased to be made; their author-
ity then died, and new agreements, that were stronger
and more enduring because they were more profitable,
were formed instead. The framework of social life is
upbuilt on countless agreements of this character that
may or may not be formally expressed, or even recog-
nized as an agreement. Municipal law derives its
basic authority from a long line of such agreements
whose origin vanishes in antiquity.

In any case, the agreement to be more constructive
socially must give freer play to egoistic and altruistic

394 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

action than independence, or complete freedom of
action could give; that is, it must result in increased
ability in each individual to render services to the other.
In this sense, then, municipal law is an extension into
social groups of the profitable system of organic inhibi-
tion and acceleration, so familiar to the student of ani-
mal life ; its really vital growth represents the accumu-
lating profits of socially constructive agreements, saved
by their Tightness, and saving those who use them
rightly.

The life of the state is wholly dependent on the actual
fulfilment of these mental agreements, however vaguely
they may be expressed, or formulated.

Contained in, or underlying all these agreements in
thought and act, is the principle of a cooperative cove-
nant, involving the partial surrender of sovereignty
and the assumption of obligations, for some ulterior
end, or result, or purpose.

The covenant may be religious, as wherein it is
understood that God is willing, or agrees, to save and
magnify His people, if they are willing to believe in
Him, or agree to obey and glorify Him. In effect,
science enters into a similar covenant with Nature. For
Nature virtually says to man: "Know me, obey me, and
serve me, and I will serve you and augment you." And
so she does. In the same way, the State virtually says
to her citizens : Serve me, or serve one another, and all
of us will serve you. And so on, down the whole cate-
gory of written, implied, or wholly unconscious cove-
nants of social life involved in law abiding citizenship,
in family relations, business integrity, credit, neigh-
borly conduct, and all that is implied in honor, and in
the conduct of a gentleman. The contract always im-

THE NEW LEVIATHAN 395

plies the expectation of profit, of self-betterment, aug-
mentation, or growth, on the part of the contractors;
and beyond that, a hope, less clearly defined, of attain-
ing some ulterior, larger result. The fulfilment of the
contract justifies that hope and keeps it alive.

We thus reach solid ground, on which to build a
biological interpretation of the state.

The state is clearly not to be identified with the
special privileges and immunities of a divinely
appointed ruler and his satellites; nor is it a being
whose interests stand apart, or on a different footing
than those "of its individual constituents. The state is
rather a more or less arbitrarily circumscribed sphere
of cooperative nature-action and human action; it is de-
pendent for its existence on the inventions and dis-
coveries, the mutual sacrifice and mutual services of
individual citizens, whereby other citizens have
attained greater freedom and greater power.

These servants constitute the state; their exchange
of mutual services, conscious or otherwise, is its vital-
ity; the conservation of their profits, its growth. In
this respect, the state is like any other living organism.
The thing, for example, we conveniently call a frog, is
in reality a complex action-system, whose various ma-
terial parts and organs constitute the physical body of
the frog; their cooperative action with one another and
with their outer world, is its vitality; the accumulating
profits of its exchange is its growth.

Thus in spite of the nominal boundaries laid down
by man, there can be no absolutely exclusive, or in-
clusive, boundaries to a state, any more than to any
other living being. Its inner life merges imperceptibly
into the life of its external environment.

396 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

That which gives it an outstanding unity is the dis-
tinctive character of its more immediate physical,
organic, and spiritual resources, and the degree of their
organization. Its physical topography and climate, the
history of its peoples, their education, and the funda-
mental unity of their thought and purpose, are decis-
ive factors.

With growth all these conditions change. The old
methods of internal and external conveyance must be
improved and extended in order to preserve these
gains; this, when accomplished, merely serves to unite
larger areas and larger groups of people into more
intimate cooperation.

VII. The Government of the State

One of the chief sources of social instability is the
diversity of opinion as to the right points and sequence
of attack in social betterment. These opinions reflect
the different desires of the social constituents, their
various degrees of experience and wisdom, and their
unequal incentives to action.

The ostensible purpose may be immediately to im-
prove the internal life of some individual citizen, or
class, or race, or nation; or their external life, or, ulti-
mately, both in all. But even though it may have been
clearly recognized, here and there, that the welfare of
each constituent individual is essential to the existence
of the state, and the welfare of the state essential to
each one of its constituents, at no time in human history
has there been any notable equality of desire, or of pur-
poseful action, to that end; or any consensus of opinion
as to the best ways and means of attaining it. These

THE NEW LEVIATHAN 397

social aims and measures are indicated by the ways in
which a state is governed.

The Autocratic State. In its internal organization,
the autocratic state seeks to increase its power by the
compulsory subordination of the weak to the strong.
Force, being the instrument of compulsion, thereby be-
comes the chief end and aim of the state, the ideal of all
its leaders, because it is the necessary means to all their
ends.

In its external life, or in its relations to other states,
autocracy seeks to utilize the same methods. In both
cases, wherever it is possible to do so, rights are seized
by force, and obligations sheltered by force, thus sacri-
ficing the weak to fortify the strong in a vain effort to
perpetuate the system.

The servant, whose will to endure is weakening, is
threatened by his master with greater ills to come;
bribed by the offset of prospective spoils, and stimulated
by the promise of increased power to rob the common
enemy.

The constructive principles frankly recognized in
this unequal exchange, however they may be disguised
by high sounding names, are those of the slave driver,
the pirate, and the parasite. But all such one-sided
systems, as we have seen, are ultimately self-destruc-
tive, because the more they are perfected, the worse it is
for both master and servant; and the sooner the one is
forced, in self-defense, to prey upon the other. He
that takes something from his servant, and gives some-
thing less in return, tends to destroy the source of his
own power, for the servant that is not rightly served

398 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

ceases to exist. Hence, with growth, the system inev-
itably disintegrates, broken down by its unbalanced
growths, the clearer consciousness of unequal justice,
and the lack of mutual benefit.

The Democratic State. Democracy is the inevi-
table reaction to autocracy. It seeks to protect the rights
of the individual, rather than force him to perform his
obligations. But the resultant over-emphasis of selfish-
ness and freedom, and the lack of a spirit of subordina-
tion and self-sacrifice, are incompatible with a coopera-
tive organization. Rights and obligations are theoreti-
cally equalized; in reality, they are not and can not be
equalized, because the demands for rights and the abil-
ity and the desire to serve, are never equally strong
in the same or in different individuals.

Moreover, the equality of social rights, and the
maximum power of the individual citizen, are not at-
tainable in an imperfectly organized state. And where
civic service is voluntary and sporadic, its necessity ob-
scure and unimperative, an efficiently organized state
is impossible.

In its external relations, the democratic state may be
tolerant of the rights of other states, but it is slow to
meet its international obligations because it lacks both
the vision essential to a sufficient motive, and the organ-
ized power essential to constructive action.

In democracy, great improvement is possible
through better education and organization. Improve-
ments in autocracy merely exaggerate its basic evils and
hasten its inevitable collapse.

THE NEW LEVIATHAN 399

In the recent war, the conflicting individualities
were intellectual groups, chiefly antagonized by dif-
ferences in education and ideals.

Prussia, the leading state of one group, was a politi-
cal monstrosity, a reversion to embryonic, ancestral con-
ditions, in that she still so largely retained, in her higher
intellectual life, the nullifying vestiges of criminal
purposes.

And Prussia preferred to capitalize her misfortune,
rather than to cauterize it. She sought to save herself
from an organic disease by combining the crudities of
barbarism with the idealism of modern science and the
spiritual forces of religion. She thereby destroyed the
very sources of her greatness. For the spirit of truth
and the spirit of service, the great creative forces of
science and religion, cannot live in the same soil with
barbarism.

For this insanity of purpose, the false interpreta-
tion of evolution by her biologists was very largely re-
sponsible. Her intellectual life had long been satur-
ated with their pernicious teachings, impelling her
leaders and laymen, in all walks of life, to justify their
immoral ambitions by an appeal to the ruthless bru-
tality of animal life, and to smother the instinctive out-
cries of outraged humanity by a pseudo-scientific inter-
pretation of the "struggle for existence" and "the sur-
vival of the fittest," where, forsooth, such sentimental-
ism as benevolence and altruism does not exist! Never
were science, religion, and philosophy, and the good
common sense of the layman, jointly committed to a
more palpable error.

This half-witted philosophy of dominion, that looks
only inwards to self, never outwards beyond self, as we

have seen, has no justification in the creative processes
of nature. It is this very attribute of super-service,
entering into all the constructive processes of nature,
which demands the intelligent use of altruistic methods
in international relations.

While this philosophy of international robbery was
not peculiar to Germany, no other nation so deliberately
made it the basis of all its policies, or in its name so
cunningly organized its educational system for destruc-
tive purposes; so knowingly prostituted the precious
heritage of its scientific fervor, its religion, and its love
of truth, to shameless propagandism; so cheaply sold
its honor to opportunity; or whose people have been so
intoxicated by the momentary success of its criminal
doctrines.

VIII. Education as a Directive Agency to Social

Egoism

Germany's power to accomplish her purpose was
destroyed, or temporarily nullified, by force. But there
is no force that can destroy her purpose. That purpose
will live, as well elsewhere, as in Germany. For "mili-
tarism" is a protean spirit, assuming many physical
disguises. It is the abiding egoistic attribute of prog-
ress; a recurrent organic disease, proclaiming in the
delirium of its excesses some increasing unbalancing of
the cooperative system, due either to environmental
changes, or to the rise or decline of internal resources.
It is as permanent as life, as incurable as death; a per-
petual menace to every social organism, which a better
education can better direct, but can never destroy. That
education must be ever in large excess of present needs.

THE NEW LEVIATHAN 401

The mental feelers of society, like the tentacles of a
crawling animal, must be fully extended to the outer
world, coming into intelligent contact with nature at
every possible point, in order that man may rightly find
his way through her mazes of constructive and destruc-
tive agencies. Like visceral nerves, the sympathetic
agencies of social life must extend their observant com-
municating lines into the very vitals of the social body,
in order to receive and distribute the reassuring mes-
sages of well being, and the warning pangs of social
maladies. In this way only can society acquire the
vision adequately to foresee impending evils, and the
saving motive rightly to readjust itself to new condi-
tions. For the insane spasm of pain, the red flag of
revolt, and the leaden pallor of inaction, are symptoms
of some local disturbance in the flow of cooperative
action ; the outcries of outraged constituents demanding
vital aid; the warning signals of approaching social
death and dissolution.

The motive behind all these demands for aid, and
the "right to exist," is the lure of service. The root of
the lure, expressing in vital terms the tendency of every
physical body to modify every other body, is the desire
to accomplish something; to exercise one's influence
creatively over other things and thereby gain self-
approval, merit in the eyes of others, and added influ-
ence. The growth-motive is always there, even though
the purpose may be narrowly limited or misdirected.
Only in the freedom of self-expression can that desire
be gratified. To capitalize this creative power, to
awaken the service-motive into consciousness, and to
give it wider opportunity for constructive action, is the
function of education.

402 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

Against this growing menace to freedom of action,
and in order to meet the larger demands for service
incident to a growing population and a narrowing
world, man must minister to himself by building his
offensive and defensive armaments of intelligence and
human sympathy on an ever deeper, broader, and more
enduring scale. For it is not against one another that
men are insanely struggling for existence, but against
ignorance and superstition and a diseased, or unbal-
anced, social condition, due to the fact that social life
has rapidly outgrown its power to correct its self-cre-
ated ills.

In this insane struggle for power, man is still led by
the same medicine-men, witch-doctors, and sorcerers of
old; the still older dog-ape chiefs of the pack, thinly
disguised as divinely appointed masters and heirs to
privilege ; who with malign whisperings of magic influ-
ences, with modern substitutes for tom-toms and blad-
der-rattles, still incite their witless brothers to fratri-
cidal frenzy, vainly hoping by sacrificial offerings to
tribal gods, by pageantry and a loud noise, to cure the
belly-ache of social indigestion, or the birth pangs of
social revolution, and still preserve their ancient privi-
leges.

To save himself, to live and grow in his new en-
vironment, man must shed these outgrown garments of
the past, and as one new born in a new world, face the
future with the youthful hope and naked courage of one
who knows his task is set and his happiness assured in
its performance. He must reconstruct his social life
on a far deeper and broader cooperative purpose than
ever before; a purpose simply and frankly expressed in
words and deeds which every normal individual can

THE NEW LEVIATHAN 403

see, and feel, and understand, and all work joyfully
together in its accomplishment.

Labor and capital, art and science, must be frankly
recognized as social increments, and as social proper-
ties. They are the social organs which create and pre-
serve the body social. They are to society as reserve
fats to the human body; as muscles and nerves, eyes and
ears, skeleton and gland, skill and intelligence; all of
which are both producers and products, the common
profits of bodily experience and bodily labor, held in
trust by man for present and future uses. Each belongs
to each and all to one. No one can survive without the
other. Each must receive its rights from the others, and
must fulfil its obligations to the others, or cease to exist.
That is the categorical imperative of social evolution.

Science and religion, the elder brothers of social
life, must draw closer together in cooperative social
action; science absorbing the more hopeful and spir-
itual qualities of religion, and religion the more pro-
gressive and frankly intellectual qualities of science.
Every phase of man's education must emphasize the
creative law of cooperative egoism and altruism, or the
universal obligation to self-aggrandizement for the pur-
pose of self-giving. This elemental creative law is the
fundamental lesson of social life. Unless it is well
learned, forming a basic part of man's personal char-
acter and of his social institutions, his intelligence will
be devoid of its most essential human quality, his learn-
ing vain, and his social life a failure.

IX. The State as a System of Cooperative Functions

We have shown that the state is an organic being,
territorially localized, and subject to the same basic

4o4 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

laws that govern animal life. Intelligence, the new
factor increasingly involved in its life and growth, does
not release man from the action of these laws, but
merely compels him to see them more clearly, and to
use them more rightly. What we call the govern-
ment of the state has been evolved out of many uncon-
scious, or semi-conscious, attempts to restrict and spe-
cialize individual conduct, the better to protect and
preserve the individual. So far as those attempts were
successful, they also created and preserved the system
of cooperative social functions we call the state.

But the individual can never solve all his social
problems. Under the new conditions which arise in
successive stages of social development, it is increas-
ingly difficult for him to find an adequate outlet to his
purposes. Under the compulsion of the ever new
demands of growth, he can find that outlet only through
a still more intelligent, or purposeful, organization of
state functions. These directive and disciplinary phe-
nomena of social embryology are precisely like those in
a developing animal embryo, except that the unit actors
belong to different dimensional orders.

The functions of the organic state are not less num-
erous and intricately interwoven than those of the hu-
man body. Nevertheless they may be conveniently
grouped into three great categories which will, at the
same time, serve to emphasize the three most important
groups of vital functions, namely: reproduction, meta-
bolism, and betterment.

Social Reproduction. In animal life the repro-
ductive functions embrace all those conservational

THE NEW LEVIATHAN 405

agencies which are included under the general terms
heredity and parental altruism. These reproductive
powers are wholly dependent on the endowment of the
next generation with approved germinal materials sup-
plemented by parental surplus in food materials, and
by parental administrative contributions which insure
the growth of their offspring and the production of an-
other life similar to that of the parent organism.

Society extends and further enlarges these organic
parental endowments, by means of all those educational
provisions which insure the conservation and continuity
of her mental and physical possessions. Among these
provisions are included the exemptions of youth from
productive labor; their shelter and nutrition out of
social reserves ; libraries, museums, and many other in-
stitutions, not restricted to the constructive usages of
youth, and which embody in themselves the accumu-
lated profits of human labor and experience and the
enduring principles of constructive Tightness.

Social Metabolism. In the animal organism
metabolism includes all those upbuilding (anabolic)
and consuming, or breaking down processes (katabolic)
which constitute the give and take, the altruism and
egoism, of protoplasmic life, and of internal organic
exchange. The extension of these vital exchanges, so
as to cover the larger reaches of time and space which
separate plant and animal organisms, constitutes the
social metabolism of nature-life. The more direct and
more closely interwoven give and take of commerce
and cultural life, providing power for its upbuilding,
for the wear and tear of exchange, and for the directive

406 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

agencies that keep it rightly moving, constitutes the
metabolism of human social life.

Social Betterments. But no vital process can grow,
or increase its possessions, without some provision other
than that necessary for mere conservation, or the main-
tainance of the previous conditions. To grow, or pro-
gress, the whole transaction must yield a profit. In
organic life, the provision for profit lies in a certain
measure of leisure, or of experimental freedom; a play-
time margin for adventure and exploration, which is
always available, in every phase of life, over and above
those compulsions necessary to machine-like main-
tenance.

From these opportunities, universally available for
variation, for improvisation, or play, arise the chief
betterments of life, or the discoveries of the right ways
to do the new things which the new conditions always
demand.

In social life, these provisions are supplied, al-
though often grudgingly allowed, in the margins of
life left open for wakeful rest, for contemplation, or
study, or play, after the labor necessary to sustain life
has been duly performed. Or more elaborate provi-
sions may be made by the establishment and support of
various institutions whose chief business is invention
and research, or the intelligent effort to discover the
right ways and means of meeting, or anticipating, the
new demands of the growing social organism.

• ••••• •

Whatever progress man may hope to attain can
come to him only through due response to these vital

THE NEW LEVIATHAN 407

demands of growth and to the discovery, or invention,
of more equitable and more economic methods of con-
veying physical and spiritual commodities to the
sources of these demands.

To give this new Leviathan of social life its neces-
sary spiritual cohesion and mental stability, man must
clearly recognize this basic growth purpose in social
life, and the constructive value of these social functions
to that end.

Formal agreements, or covenants, must therefore
be entered into, covering the principal functional
phases of world life, elementary in character they may
well be, yet nevertheless explicitly recognizing the
mutual rights and mutual obligations of the partners
to the agreement, and the common purpose to be
achieved by them. Chief and foremost among them,
should be formal covenants between the citizen and
the state ; between the state and its institutions, and be-
tween the state and its sister states.

This will be man's work for the immediate future.
It will demand something other than mere territorial,
or numerical representation; something more than the
shallow diplomacy of the "practical politician" or the
makeshift wits of the middle man in statesmanship. It
will call for the services of socially minded delegates
from all the great vital functions of social life ; dele-
gates who derive their authority from their functional
colleagues, .and who are appointed by them to define
their respective interests and purposes.

Such delegates can best foresee the requirements of
those they represent, and the creative possibilities of
their own social services. It should be their duty form-
ally to demand the social rights of their constituents,

4o8 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

and formally to express, and to assume, their social
obligations.

The anlage of an organic government of this char-
acter, independent of the more formal government,
exists within every modern state. It makes its appear-
ance no one knows exactly when or where, as more or
less informal, or supplementary methods of utilizing
latent resources in more purposeful social action. These
better methods tend to develop within every growing
social group, whatever its social formulas may be; in-
evitably creating more unity and saving order out of a
chaos of conflicting purposes.

The greater prevision and provision essential to the
existence of larger and more enduring organic units
make parental guidance, benevolence, and self-sacrifice
the most characteristic attributes of such units wherever
they exist. In the same way, social growth inevitably
raises man above the lower levels of petty selfishness to
higher levels of super-service and altruism. It auto-
matically creates devotion to larger purposes, thereby
creating the very agencies which are the instruments
to social salvation. Therein lies the assurance of future
progress.

In times of stress, and in great social emergencies,
like that of the recent war, the sheer power of social
service breaks down, or through all artificial barriers;
spending itself in the attainment of its goal, it welds
divergent wills together, shatters class distinctions, and
differentiates anew the democratic masses; vitalizing
with its energy all forms of society in a similar way,
and creating in them similar organic structures.

Leadership, and the right of way, opens to him who
best foresees demands, and to those who best supply

THE NEW LEVIATHAN 409

them. Society thereby automatically reorganizes itself
into more direct and more stable systems of coopera-
tive conveyance.

Under the pressure of the rising floods of necessity,
this shifting of social functions into broader and
straighter channels may rapidly assume revolutionary
dimensions, as recently demonstrated in our own coun-
try. But this threatened metamorphosis in our national
life created no destructive protest, because there was a
sufficient capital of social intelligence to recognize the
saving and creative way in that emergency. The mani-
fest logic of Tightness was the agent of compulsion.

Every successful revolution in the administration
of animal life, and there have been a great many of
them, is made in some such way as this. An essential
condition is the existence of different systems of or-
ganic conveyance, growing up side by side in the same
living organism, as, for example, the gills and lungs of
a fish, or tadpole. The one system of conveyance ulti-
mately supplants the other because it better serves the
demands of the growing organism. And that better ser-
vice then creates new growths, which make more de-
mands, leading the whole organism, as fishes and tad-
poles were led from water on to land, into a new
world of light and air, of food and sound, of space and
motion. The older system survives and serves, in
diminishing measure, till the new birth of freedom is
accomplished. It is then scrapped, or in part destroyed,
in part reserved for more general usage, and the rem-
nants incorporated into new instruments, such as male
vocal organs and resonant auditory chambers, which
then perform new and wholly different services. Thus
this organic metamorphosis and the transfer of impor-

4io GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION

tant bodily functions from one set of agents to another
is peacefully accomplished without interrupting the
flow of vital actions.

It may be that in our ultimate social metamorpho-
sis, the older system of democratic government, based
so largely on territorial and numerical representation,
will not be wholly destroyed, but will be in part pre-
served as mutually stimulating vocal organs for both
sexes, finding its chief usefulness in irritant oratory
and in resonant congressional chambers.

X. The Extension of State Functions into Inter-
national Functions

The functional agencies, which are so essential to the
upbuilding of the state, cannot be restricted in their
creative action to the internal life of the state. They
inevitably extend, consciously or unconsciously, far be-
yond all nominal boundaries, and become cooperative
international functions.

To give these international functions stability and
the directive quality of human intelligence consciously
acting in national self-preservation, international cov-
enants recognizing mutual rights and mutual obliga-
tions, .and thereby giving these international pledges
the authority of international law, are as imperative as
they are in smaller social groups.

But this more purposeful international cooperation
is not likely to be realized through the instrumentality
of existing political agencies, because the state is so
largely organized for narrower selfish ends, and be-
cause its political agents are not the ones best fitted in
spirit, training, or motives, adequately to recognize the

THE NEW LEVIATHAN 4111

extra-territorial interests and the creative potentialities
of their constituents. A more hopeful source of leader-
ship is in the great social functions of mankind, where
there is greater unity of purpose; where common inter-
ests are more easily recognized; where vital supplies
are more obviously drawn from world-wide domains,
or at least from domains wider than the state; where
the habit of thinking in terms of international coopera-
tion is more prevalent; and where a cooperative orga-
nization, on an idealistic international basis, is already
initiated.

Science, religion, art, education, commerce, and
manual labor are social functions of this character.
These great systems of vital exchange have long felt the
impulse to international cooperation, and their instinc-
tive response to it has already yielded results which
demonstrate that, physically and spiritually, they are
far better fitted to assume the judicial, legislative, and
executive functions of international life, than the old
political systems, with all their historic animosities.
Their ability to perform these services will greatly in-
crease with the fuller consciousness of their mission.
And to accomplish this mission, their delegates, through
the agency of international congresses, must endeavor to
define the conditions essential to the regulation and
control of constructive international relations, and sum-
mons their respective states to provide the necessary
ways and means to translate their demands into pur-
poseful action.

SUMMARY

IN the preceding chapters we have surveyed the
phenomena of nature from a purely objective point of
view in order to discover, so far as we may, what they
mean for us ; whether it is for us as intelligent beings to
"fight the cosmic process," or to use it according to our
light and strength in our owrn constructive enterprises,
and thereby become willing agents in its consummation.

We have seen that the one outstanding fact which
now dominates the thoughts and acts of intelligent men
is evolution, or nature-growth, embracing alike all
physical, organic, mental, and social phenomena in its
spontaneous constructive action, and using them all
alike in the consummation of its creative purpose.

That sovereign outward fact, in all its elemental
grandeur, is the immutable axial truth around which
man must orient his inward purposes and to it conform
his conduct rightly, or suffer self-destructive penalties.
It compels man to accept nature's constructive Tightness
as his ethical standard, and to adopt her constructive
methods as his moral code. It compels him to recog-
nize in nature-growth the expression of a creative will ;
it reveals to him in nature-action the way to augment
himself and the instrument to his salvation. His most
ardent desire is then to know that will the better to
obey it.

A limited perspective is always confusing, for the
very reason that the diversity of nature-action is always
unified. We instinctively resent the wanton destruction

412

SUMMARY 413

of creative values; we are appalled by nature's appar-
ent carelessness of individual life and, to us, the un-
meaning usage of her overwhelming power. But the
wider perspective of the evolutionist tends to correct
this mental confusion ; and his mental attitude to nature-
action, more rightly oriented, renews and fortifies his
faith in nature's creative purpose.

In mental life our little tragedies are mostly of our
own creation; they are mostly mental insurrections
against the growing consciousness of external compul-
sion and hostile limitation to our purposes. But when
the inevitable truth is clearly recognized, our mental
subjugation is completed in the appetite of desire, and
surrender to it becomes our pleasure and reward.

No accession of power can ever solve our problems,
or the accumulation of possessions satisfy our desires;
they are but new burdens which create new demands
and impose new restrictions on us.

The constructive usage of what we have for that
ulterior creative service we shall always crave is the
source of happiness.

Our resentment of the world's injustice vanishes
when we come to feel the sense of growth and owner-
ship in the world about us, and in its growth partici-
pate. The strictest discipline and greatest hardships
are no longer such, if we know that through them we
better play the game; if as parent, patriot, explorer,
artist, student, or as worker in any line whatsoevei of
human endeavor, our ideals are still preserved and we
truly seek and strive to satisfy our great desire.

APPENDIX

THE MESSAGE OF THE BIOLOGIST1

IT is eminently fitting that we biologists, like virile swarm spores, should
periodically come together in a holiday spirit of mutual exchange, and after
giving and receiving our messages, go back to our life work, reinvigorated
and reoriented, to prepare for another brief period of social conjugation.

The messages we send to one another will have little carrying power,
and little influence on the receiver, if they are not specific in content, limited
in scope, and securely wrapped up in the precise technical terms of our
own familiar code.

On the other hand, the biologist would be wholly lacking in social
instincts if he failed to recognize that he also has a more comprehensive
message for the layman, who is largely dependent on the biologist for his
working knowledge of the great domain of nature-life, and by whom the
biologist is provided with the necessary means of existence.

This larger message must have a different vehicle. It must first be
summarized, digested and metabolized into the vernacular, before it can
circulate through the body of social life, reach its terminals, and there
accomplish its strengthening and rectifying purpose.

We may well ask ourselves whether we have such a message to give,
and if so, what it is, and who, or what, is our authority. And by "we," I
now mean all of us, not merely the biologist, but the astronomer, geologist,
chemist, physicist and psychologist, for we are what we are to-day because
of the underlying community of our methods and purposes, and because, in
our concept of evolution, we acknowledge the same mental sovereignty.

This concept, of which we are the trustees, initiated in man a veritable
intellectual mutation, which is now rapidly expressing itself in new phases
of social action, and in the emergence, like the parts of a growing embryo,
of new types of social architecure. It is our duty to interpret this concept,
and to see to it that its real significance is understood, and rightly used
in social growth.

The social metamorphosis which historians call the renaissance was
largely due to organic improvements in the system of educational circula-
tion and the transmission of mental possessions from man to man. Learn-
ing was democratized by translating the bible and the classics into the
vernacular, and by this betterment in transmission across time and space,
the profits of a dead past were made to flow more freely into a living
future, making those profits in some measure the mental heritage of the

1 Address of the vice-president and chairman of Section F, Zoology,
American Association for the Advancement of Science, St. Louis, January
31, 1919. "Science," N. S., Vol. LI, January 30, 1920.

See also two other papers by the author, of earlier date, expressing simi-
lar views:

The Evolution of Service by Union, Cooperation, Conservation and
Exchange. Popular Science, Oct., 1914.

Cooperation as a Factor in Evolution: Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society, Vol. XV. 1916. Read April 15, 1916.

415

416

APPENDIX

common people, and their enduring germinal possessions for self-constructive
purposes.

In this accelerated social growth, the base line for the orientation of
human conduct, and for the measurement of right and wrong, good and
evil, was the bible, the classics, and the divine right of civic and religious
leadership. The power and stability of these external directive agencies
was universally acknowledged, the source of their authority unquestioned,
and like radiant beams, their tropic influence was formally expressed in
the prevailing architectonics of social procedure.

We are now witnessing, incident to a new birth of social vision, a new
social convulsion, much more significant than that of the middle ages, in
which science, and especially biological science, unconsciously played, and
is still playing, a very important part. For when we recognized a new
source of authority in lawful nature-action and in evolution, the old base
line for the measurements of human conduct vanished, and many of the
old bonds of social allegiance were destroyed; and now -we are asked:
What shall be the new compulsion to constructive social action, and on
what authority can we stay the march of anarchy?

And you, as biologists and American men of science, may not shirk the
grave responsibilities of social leadership now thrust upon you, for it re-
quires little gift of prophecy to foresee that America is destined quickly to
become the world's chief center of biological learning, as she is to-day the
center of the broadest sympathy with human life and nature.

Perhaps it may clarify our vision if we first ask, not what biology is,
but what science, as a whole, does, and what she tries to do. It will little
help us to enumerate all the sciences, or be told there is "pure" science and
applied science; science experimental, and descriptive. Behind and beyond
all these varied aspects of science there must be common motives, and com-
mon purposes in the scientists, if we are rightly to include them as in-
telligent beings in the same class.

Let us therefore precipitate and remove these adjective purities and
impurities, and you will then agree with me, I believe, that there still
remain in science several over-lapping functions and purposes. First to
explore and to chronicle. To that end, she aims to discover what things
are contained in nature, where they are, what they do, what the order is,
step by step, of their coming in, their growing up, their going out. And
then to memorize, to conserve her mental possessions, to register, in con-
venient and enduring symbols the result of her explorations, for future
usage. Second, to compare and explain. To that end, she aims to discover
why things are as they are, in what respects they differ, in what they agree,
how one thing influences another, constructively, or destructively, and to
distinguish the right ways of doing things from wrong ways. Her third
function is to do things rightly. In that respect, she is artistic, architectural.
To that end, by conforming her ways of doing things to nature's ways,
she aims to create, and to conserve, and to use her records and her knowl-
edge of right and wrong profitably.

Thus three qualifying motives pervade science: the acquisitive, the
ethical and the moral. She seeks knowledge through experience, wisdom
through understanding, and profit through obedience. One purpose is self-
constructive, or egotistic, the other, self-giving, or altruistic. Both are co-
operative functions; in action, continuous; in Tightness, cumulative; in
effect, creative.

The renaissance of to-day has its chief creative impulsive in the con-
sciousness of evolution. This revelation of modern science, which we all
acknowledge as our guiding star, has come to mean world-growth, or the
progressive organization and architectural upbuilding of nature. Nature

APPENDIX 417

is now the source of our authority, and creative nature-action, as expressed
in nature-growth, is the standard of all our values. Science is therefore
compelled to express all her measurements in positive and negative con-
structive terms, which ultimately must be oriented in reference to this
gradient base line of nature-progress, called evolution.

In this nature-growth, we fail to discover any gain or loss, either in
basic constructive matter, or in energy. But gain there must be, _if evolution
is a reality. That gain is, in reality, a moral and ethical gain, or a gain
in that creative action and constructive Tightness which we call organiza-
tion and -directive discipline. There are no better positive and negative
terms to express those gains, both relatively and absolutely, than the
familiar terms, right and wrong, good and evil.

On this point, therefore, there need be no equivocation in our message.
The profit in evolution is in better constructive action. By the conservation
of these profits, nature augments her capital in constructive Tightness.

But how is this profit made and conserved? That is the really vital
question. Until it is answered there can be no underlying intellectual
stability in human life, individually, or socially; no basic unity of purpose
in human conduct. Here our vision is not so clear. Many of us believe
that on this point we have no comprehensive message to give.

The most familiar attempts to explain how evolution takes place are
restricted to special aspects of evolution, and are often epitomized in per-
sonal names, such as Darwinism, Lamarkism, Weismannism, Mendelism.
Among us there are naturalists, morphologists, physiologists, and psychol-
ogists; breeders, experimentalists, and bio-chemists. And surrounding us
on all sides are the physicists, chemists, geologists, and astronomers, with
whom we must reckon, for their domains and their subject matter overlap
ours in countless ways.

But unfortunately between all these workers there is little common
understanding and much petty criticism.

Are we building out of aimless contributions to science a new Babel's
tower of disjointed, slippery words, with nothing to hold them to con-
structive lines, and preserve the unity of purpose in our social architecture?

Perhaps the most comprehensive terms, although they have little mean-
ing outside the organic world, are "natural selection," the "struggle for
existence," and the "survival of the fittest." But granting their validity
within the organic world, they have no definite moral significance. They
convey no implication as to how man, or anything else, must act in order
to exist, to say nothing of surviving. What is the fittest? Why is it fit?
Why does it survive? If right combinations happen primarily by chance,
why, or how, do they come to happen regularly? How can "right acci-
dents" become cumulative, or lawful, or determinate, unless there is a
saving, or more enduring, directive element in that something we call
Tightness ?

When the layman makes his holiday call on his biological menagerie
and points his umbrella at us, hoping to receive through that safety-first
device a brush discharge of information, we fail to "come across" with
illuminating answers to these very pertinent questions. But to conceal our
low potential, and preserve our self-respect, we all resort to certain un-
intelligible sounds, or warning signals, according to the particular pen in
which we have been bred and exercised, and which are guaranteed to
scare away, or charm into inaction, the most intrepid questioner. One
mumbles something about "environment" and "ecology," and crawls back
into the bushes. Another wheezes something about "enzymes" and "vitality"
and goes on with his experimenting. Another climbs to the top of his cage
and yells "eugenics," while his mate in the corner faintly lisps "euthenics."
Some particularly active youngsters jump into a revolving wheel, and

APPENDIX

every time it makes a complete revolution shout "chromosomes, chromosomes,
chromosomes." A few old moss-backs, a rare variety, mournfully harp on
"morphology." And one majestic megatherium comprising all in one,
coughs up an "energy complex," followed by a prolonged roar, in several
volumes, in which one can distinguish the words "action, reaction, and
interaction." The clergymen, senators, and Bolsheviki, with their retinues
of lady friends, exclaim "How wonderful, and so true." Life indeed is
complex, energetic, and full of actions, reactions, and interactions! And
all of them deeply impressed, go back to their deadly work, and act, and
believe, if at all, just as they did before.

After they are gone, all the animals agree that no one has any right
to bother real, simon-pure scientists with such fool questions. Let them go
to — well, Where? To Germany? To Nietsche, Bernhardi, and Treitschke?
To the militant philosophy of dominion; to a half-witted selfishness, in
politics, commerce, and kultur, frankly upbuilt on the doctrine of the survival
of the fittest; the fittest universally acknowledged, by themselves, to be the
Germans and their system?

Or to the spiritualists, anthropomorphists, and sentimentalists, who see
nothing clearly in the mirror of nature but a distorted image of themselves?

Or to Huxley and his "I don't know" followers, who can discover no
ethics or morality in nature-action; neither warning nor invitation, nor
directive discipline, but merely a drab, unoriented neutrality of "un-
morality," leaving man nothing but himself with which to orient himself;
leaving him to preate. his own system of ethics and morality out of his own
inner consciousness?

The biologist has found no evidence for the broad assumptions of these
philosophers. In nature, he sees no one-sided dominion of the strong over
the weak, or the weak over the strong; no special privileges; and no
freedom from obligations. Neither does he see any warrant for puling
sentimentality, nor any expectation of an unaggressive neutrality in nature-
action.

Nature, so far as we have been able to discover, is an enduring, self-
constructive system, gaining and preserving her gains in a definite way,
according to her own system of ethics and morality. In so far as nature-
growth is manifest in evolution, we can not deny that at least to that extent
her ethics are constructive and her morals saving.

Man's constructive and saving principles can not be otherwise, without
severing all his bonds with nature-action in a futile attempt, like that sug-
gested by Huxley, to set up an anarchistic ^imperium in imperio," or a
Bolshevistic "microcosm within the macrocosm."

I can not believe we have reached that parting of the ways, for man's
highest activities are all too clearly but extensions of nature's ways and
means of creating and preserving her products, in which man uses what-
ever intelligence he may have, and the cultural implements he has con-
structed, as special instruments to attain his ends.

The specific gravity of the western variety of biologists will not let him
float in a vacuum of cosmic mysteries with the Hindoo; and he does not
care to wallow in a quagmire of metaphysics with the Greek. He gladly
plants his substantial mental feet on the first firm substratum he can reach.
And even though that substratum be nothing more than the molecular quick-
sands of physics and chemistry, it safely leads him to the rising shores of
hard realities.

But now that we biologists, as evolutionists, feel reasonably safe in our
storm-proof shelters of established facts, the spirit of adventure again
leads us forth to wider excusions, and we ask ourselves whether it is possible
to reduce all the constructive processes of nature to a simple formula, which
can be expressed in familiar terms of universal human significance? This

APPENDIX 419

is a venture doomed apparently beforehand to defeat, for it takes us "back
again to the most ancient beaches of human controversy, strewn with the
wreckage of all man's early and late attempts to launch a religion, or a
philosophy, that will stand the test of experience.

And all these mournful wrecks are jealously guarded by marooned
mariners of hope, and their beach-combing followers, who show no mercy
to intruders. But modern science, which has wisely built on firmer, though
drier ground, must ultimately extend the foundations of all of her out-
housings down to the low water mark of this old shore, and while the at-
tempt is fraught with danger, it will ever be an inspiring task for those
engaged in the process of social reconstruction that now lies before us.
I know of no other engineers whose occupation should better fit them for
leadership in this task than the biologists, occupying, as they do, a central
strategic position in relation to chemistry and physics, geology and
astronomy, sociology and the humanities.

When to this end, we examine, as best we may, the attributes of these
basic, chemical elements of nature's substance, we find in them, as in
human social atoms, a potential constructive and creative power which be-
comes clearly manifest in the familiar processes of chemical action. In
that process we are compelled to assume, if we are willing to assume any-
thing, that some influence, or effect, we know not what, or how, is exercised
by one element on another, the result of which may be the formation of a
new unit, or compounded individuality, with a new style of architecture
of its own. Coincident with this construction, the former attributes of the
constituent parts vanish, and in the new unit a different attribute appears
which was not there before.

We may profitably translate this constructive process into the vernacular,
without, I trust, seriously offending the proprieties of the purest scientist,
even though the words may 'savor of morality.

We may say, for example, that when the right chemical elements are
in the right relations to one another, or if they are moved into them, or
placed there, or if these elements themselves find the right relations by
chance, or otherwise, cooperative action between them then takes place auto-
matically, or under a compulsion neither can resist, and something new is
created. In this cooperative action, each element evidently does something,
or give,s something to the other, and receives something from the other.
It is in fact apparently a clear case of creative action through mutual sub-
jection and mutual service — not necessarily service for each other, because
for all we know these elements may be the original anarchists and would
much prefer neither to give anything to anybody, nor receive anything from
anybody — but for the molecule so created.

In this creative process, the essential factors are, unity, mutual service,
mutual discipline, and some sort of constructive Tightness. When these
conditions are fulfilled, something new is created, and these anarchistic
elements then become, perforce, altruistic atgents, or accessories, to some
ulterior creative act, in which they may or may not be interested. In spite
of themselves, by their mere existence, they are compelled to act for some-
thing beyond self, and in doing so they cease to be anarchists and become
more or less orderly servants in a staid molecular society.

Mr. Molecule, therefore, is created by the mutual services and directive
discipline of his constituent atoms, or elements, and by his home surround-
ings, all acting cooperatively to give him birth. In his creation, he becomes
endowed with a sovereign quality of his own, subject to the sovereignty of
his outer world. He endures as long as those cooperative services are
rightly performed, and the discipline rightly maintained, and no longer.
His existence, therefore, is contingent on the performance of these services,
and on the existence of some degree of Tightness within himself, and out-
side himself; and that molecule which does survive has preserved within

420 APPENDIX

its makeup some measure of that Tightness. In that measure of cooperation
and Tightness lies the fitness of his constituents, and the selective agency
in the evolution of the molecule.

But the molecule thus peremptorily set up in business for itself, and
without being consulted in any way as to his own wishes in the matter,
has his own work in the world to do, subject to his own specific attributes
and external compulsions. This new anarchist, by force of circumstances,
may be compelled to help in the construction of proteids to be used by
some future plant or animal life, even if his anarchistic soul does rebel at
the performance of such useless altruistic labor, and at such unwarrantable
interference with his freedom of action.

If we now make a momentary excursion toward the other extreme of
nature^ction, into the domain of the astronomer, we apparently find the
same constructive, selective, and saving agencies at work that are manifest
in the upbuilding of the molecule, only the system and its component parts
are larger, the time and space factors greater, and the unknowable movers
have different names.

Here the cooperative agencies are the sovereign cosmos, and the sovereign
individualities it contains. These solar systems, with their constituent suns,
planets, and satellites, and their subordinate elements, are grouped in
partially visible architectural entities, suggesting the wholly invisible mole-
cular entities of physics and chemistry.

The gains in this cosmic action-system are formulated in sidereal archi-
tecture, and the continuity of its constructive services is manifest in the
stability of its organization. The morphology of the heavens, like that of
molecules and living organisms, is not only an index of past and present
physiologic action, but an assuring prophecy of future action. Without
this forward and backward aspect, along a gradient line of progressive
nature-action, science itself could not exist, for there would be no base line
for the profitable orientation of intelligent thought or action.

In each of these larger sidereal units, and systems of units, is embodied
the summed up profits of past cooperative actions. In this self-construction
lies the egoistic phase of these individualities. The ulterior altruistic serv-
ices to which they are accessories are in some measure apparent in the
terrestrial conditions under which, without our consent or approval, we now
exist. So let us get back to earth again, where these agencies have made
life and constructive thought a possibility, and have rigidly defined its
impossibilities, whether we like these invitations, restrictions, and com-
pulsion of nature's discipline, or not.

In the terrestrial world, the most convincing and familiar example of
creative unity through cooperative action, is the living organism. But plant
and animal life stand on, and in, the altruistic achievements of the physical
world. They are pensioners of the past, using both the oldest and newest
instruments of nature in their self-construction. The individual plant, or
animal, is the product of its cooperating elements, cells and organs, and its
environment, and is itself a cooperative agent in that environment. It is
subject to its own sovereign attributes, as well as to those of its constituents
and its habitat. The individual gain is everywhere contingent on the gen-
eral. The plant can not long endure without the animal, the male without
the female, and neither without their retinues of other servants. They exist,
as they do, because of these mutual services, within and without, past and
present. Their profit is in service betterments: their working capital, past
betterments conserved.

In this phase of nature-action, the cooperative system is formless, elastic,
and democratic. Plants and animals are the actor-units, widely separated

APPENDIX 421

it may be, in time and space, but everywhere intermingled regardless of
high or low degree. And the system now assumes the familiar give and
take of predatory life and reproduction, where consumer and consumed,
parent and offspring, egoism and altruism, perform reciprocal functions in
the universal metabolism of nature-life.

Consider, for example, the nut, the mouse and the cat.

If the mouse destroyed all the nuts, it would destroy itself. Its interests
are best served when nuts are encouraged. If it had intelligence, it would
cherish and preserve them. If it had the necessary cultural implements, it
might profitably spend its spare time and energy in producing more and
better nuts. Not even a "nut" could reasonably object to that. On the
other hand, the cat is an efficient educator. It teaches the mouse to confine
its attention to its own affairs, and both teacher and pupil are the better
for that.

And when the mouse is about to die, and is brought to earth, it does not
wholly go to waste. A percentage of him goes to make another nut, and a
percentage helps to make another cat, which without the one and the other
could not exist. And finally nature levies a tax upon the cat, and in due
season the cat pays his taxes.

By virtue of this rigorous nature discipline, which prescribes when,
and how, and where, the nut, the mouse, and the cat may act, and what
they must, and must not do, each in its own way makes a Hving, as many
others like them have done in similar ways before, a sufficient testimonial
to the constructive and saving virtue of the system.

But this is only one part of this system of give and take. The plant,
the mouse, or the cat, as an individual, not only gets, or receives enough
income from all sources to pay his personal running expenses, but on the
whole, each in his own way, makes a profit. Part goes into alterations,
repairs and additions, or into what we call growth. But there is always a
definite limit to individual holdings, or to the growth of every individual
system, which is peculiar to itself. When that limit of cohesion is reached,
or approached, the surplus overflows into other individualities and becomes
their possession.

Much of this surplus of the profiteer, which for him is unusable, is
scattered right and left with astounding prodigality, and this unwilling
altruism on his part becomes one of the chief sources of income to life at
large. But an adequate percentage becomes a special, entailed endowment
to a new individual, similar to the first, thus setting up a substitute, or a
direct lineal descendant in the business of life, giving him a fixed capital in
germinal materials, quick assets in germinal food-stuffs, with containers
and protective envelopes, all rightly constructed and arranged, and the
whole package so located in time and space by the administrators of these
estates as to insure for it, in the long run, a new life of adventure among
the hazards and inviting opportunities of the outer world.

Thus in this larger spongeoplasmic fabric of nature-life, visible only
to the more comprehensive instruments of the mind, kingdoms and classes,
races and species, young and old, the physical and organic entities of the
living and the dead, are unconscious partners in a common system of co-
operative action. In this social metabolism across the larger reaches of
time and space, each unit, in the reciprocal egoism and altruism of life
and death, plays its respective anabolic and catabolic functions, and thereby
gives the system, as a whole, its self-sustaining, vital power.

Through the shifting patterns of this growing fabric, we most clearly
see the converging threads of genetic lineage, the long, gradient lines of
alternating youthful egoism and parental altruism, on the one hand vanish-
ing in the primordial life that has its issue in the terrestrial loom, and on
the other, radiating into the abyss of future possibilities. Everywhere shot
through and across these more rigid hereditary lines are those which mark

422 APPENDIX

the sinuous course of predatory action, and other actions less discriminating.
Thus the whole system is woven into that variegated plexus of success and
failure, tragedy and comedy, joys and sorrows, good and evil, which makes
up the cooperation functions of life and give it creative unity.

And then man, a new nature-anarchist, the most modern pattern in this
moving-picture fabric, makes his appearance on the screen, and surrounded
by his satellites of cultural instruments, and with both positive and nega-
tive poles of his very material self flaming with the auroras of intelligence,
attempts to set this system which gave him birth to rights.

He is little conscious of the source of his own endowments, or that his
ethics and morality, as manifest in his sporadic outbursts of social philan-
thropy and benevolence, are not his own institutions, but the compulsory
application of world-old constructive principles to his own peculiar affairs.
Nor is he fully conscious that his boasted material inventions and discoveries,
his canoes and battleships, his ovens, highways and machinery, his micro-
scopes, telephones, and telescopes, his commerce, literature, science, and art,
are but improvements, or enlargements, outside himself, of his own internal
organs and functions, and that he must use these cultural instruments, if
he would use them constructively, in precisely the same ways his vital
organs are used in his bodily growth and preservation.

In their functioning, these cultural instruments extend, deeper into time
and farther across space, the power of his sense organs to discriminate be-
tween good and evil, and increase the range and velocity of the load his
muscles, blood vessels, nerves, and other bodily organs can move, or carry.
In other words they serve to increase the rate and diversity of the mutually
profitable exchange, mental and physical, between the human molecules of
social life, and between man and nature. They alone give man's social
life its cooperative unity and power, just as the cooperative action of mole-
cules, cells, and organs give unity and power to his body. Their saving
and constructive action is contingent on the growth and right usage of
intelligence, as the construction and preservation of his body is contingent
on the evolution of right reflex actions and instincts.

And now, in this twentieth century of the historian's calendar — when
the human blastoderm, for the first time in cosmic evolution, has practically
enclosed the terrestrial egg, filling in all the habitable surface of this cosmic
yolk-sphere, establishing its capillary network of highways, and its nerve
plexus of communication, joining its racial blood-islands and national
placodes into one organism — humanity has ceased to be a germinal po-
tentiality, or a mere vision of the prophets. It has become a present and
very obvious reality, and the academic flickerings of the philosophic auroras
are now sufficiently luminous to be visible, as practical questions, to the
politician. Indeed there is still hope that some rays may eventually pass
the threshold of senatorial sensibility.

But the man of normal social instincts and average intelligence, in spite
of himself, is now compelled to recognize this unity in human life and
nature, and the dependence of that unity on the fulfillment of mutual rights,
of mutual services, and mutual obligations. In this more humble state of
mind, he does not now ask "What will I do?" but "What must we do?" to
preserve social life and social structures. What is our protection against
the will to destroy? With destructive agencies everywhere now at hand
for those who have the will to use them, What shall be the compulsion to
constructive action?

The answers to these questions can not be found in precedents, for
there are no precedents in the whole history of evolution for man's present
social conditions. The solution must be found in the intelligent application

APPENDIX 423

of the elementary principles of ethics and morality, principles which have
their roots in the biological and physical sciences.

We must not accept Huxley's despairing assertions that "cosmic nature
is no school of virtue, but the headquarters of the enemy of ethical nature,"
and that "the cosmic process has no sort of relation to moral ends." To do
so we should have wholly to ignore the manifest creative power in cosmic
action. We may surmise, from internal evidence, the irritation that pro-
voked Huxley's brilliant but unconvincing dialectics; and it should be said
that his point of view then, and the chief target of his attack, is not
ours now.

And surely it is not for us "to fight the cosmic process" even under a
fighting Huxley; nor on the other hand need we accept the stoical philoso-
phy of protective mimicry and regard "living according to nature as the
whole duty of man"; nor need we be horrified at the thought of ethics
as "applied natural history."

Rather is it our duty to understand nature-action and to cooperate with
it; to distinguish between the minor tactics of evolution and the grand
strategy of evolution, and with our own peculiar instruments be willing
and happy agents in its consummation. Man has but his animal organs,
his cultural implements, and his intelligence, or his knowledge of right
and wrong constructive ways to work with. The more those instruments
are augmented, the better he can direct nature's constructive agencies
to his own egoistic ends, and in so doing, man himself then unwittingly
becomes a new and better altruistic agent in evolution.

We scientists, conscious of our purpose as constructive social agents,
have three broad fields of activity open to us, as already indicated in de-
fining the various functions and purposes of science. First, investigation,
or the discovery of nature's ways and means of creative action. This is the
ethical side of our work. Second, the constructive usage of these ways and
means, or their application to the growing demands of social life, and
their usage in the regulation of human conduct. This is the moral side.
And, third, the conservation of our ethical and moral gains through educa-
tion. The first two we may now ignore, for their significance is duly
appreciated and their future is promising. But the educational side of our
work is in a very serious condition, and it may even now be too late to
avoid disaster. It little matters how much we may develop either our
technique, or the spear-head of our research, if the so-called common
people still have the ghost-hunter's paleolithic mental attitude toward
natural phenomena, and their leaders a similar attitude toward social
problems.

No social life can endure that is not under some common compulsion
to united action. With the growth of the spirit of freedom and democracy,
and the absence of any commonly recognized dictatorship in church or
state, that compulsion can come only through a common understanding of
the elemental necessities of social life, and through that sense of personal
benefit and personal ownership in social institutions which alone can create
the will to cherish and protect them.

The compulsion of elemental intelligence, acting in social unison, can
alone provide the enduring directive and cohesive power essential to social
cooperation. Man's will to create can be steadfast in purpose only when
his intelligence becomes stabilized in its tropic attitudes, and rightly
oriented to elemental realities. Man, stumbling in ignorance, must be
bandaged with restrictions and propped up with crutches of force. A
nation, pricked by the poisoned shafts of a lying propaganda, will dissolve
in anarchy, though the armies and navies of the world have failed to
break it.

In our education, we continually over-emphasized social rights and

424 APPENDIX

individual freedom of action, and ignore the obligations essential to part-
nership in any social or constructive compact. It is not without significance
that ordinary people, like you and me, can discover no specific mandate in
the Constitution of the United States. It broadly defines what the state does,
or will do, in certain contingencies, and what its citizens may, or may not
do, but says nothing about what the citizen must do in return for what
the state does for him. The absence in citizenship2 of a formal and specific
contract, defining a common purpose and recognizing mutual liabilities
and mutual benefits in its attainment, is in marked contrast with modern
business procedure, as well as with almost every other form of intelligent
cooperation. It is, therefore, not surprising that an international covenant
for the specific purpose of reducing the danger of international wars to a
minimum, in which an attempt is made to define national rights and obliga-
tions in that undertaking, has a strange and unfamiliar sound.

The absence of this covenant principle is noticeable in almost every
phase of modern education. Science, even, does not formally recognize a
covenant with nature, although nature virtually says to man "Know me,
and serve me, and I will serve you." Much of our biological teaching is
like a shop window display of nature's competitive goods, with a varied
assortment of human notions thrown in, but with no guarantee as to their
significance, or quality, or usefulness. The pedagogical barker, seldom
having convictions of his own, proudly displays the impartiality of his
"purely scientific" attitude, and leaves the callow purchaser to decide for
himself which trinket he will select for his mental adornment.

Perhaps all of us can get together again on common ground by put-
ting our concepts of nature-action into simpler, more comprehensive formu-
las, universal in application, and somewhat as follows. In so far as we
have a right to assume that purposeful action is involved in any construc-
tive functioning whatever, or in anything that has been accomplished, we
may assume that the purpose, or grand strategy in nature-action, is evolu-
tion, or self-construction, or growth. To that end, serviceable agents must
first exist, or be constructed, in which is resident a basic right to receive
service, and a basic obligation to give service. As all constructive action
is contingent on the fulfilment of these mutual rights and obligations, the
categorical imperative to existence is mutual service.

As corollaries to this categorical imperative, the following compulsions
are laid upon these constructive agents. In all sustained constructive
action there must be: (i) A mutual directive discipline, or mutual adapta-
tion; that is, a mutual subjection, and yielding to one another's influence.
(2) An individual freedom of opportunity for self-constructive, or egoistic
action, within rigidly circumscribed limitations. (3) Mutual service or
cooperative action, in which, sooner or later, the profits of egoism must be
surrendered, through altruism, to some ulterior creative act. (4) Con-
servation of these profits as an accumulating capital in constructive right-
ness, and its endowment to other individualities for usage in further con-
structive action.

In that phase of cosmic evolution which we call social growth, science
and religion are the outstanding cooperative agents. They better serve
their ulterior purposes the better their mutual services, and the better their
mutual adaptation of thought and act to creative ends.

"Every member of the community has a right to be protected by it in
the enjoyment of his life, liberty, and property. He is, therefore, bound
to contribute his share in the expense of such protection, and to yield his
personal service, when necessary, or an equivalent."

BILL OF RIGHTS, Art. rath, Constitution of the State of New Hampshire,
"Colby's Manual," 1902.

APPENDIX 425

Science and religion always have asked, and doubtless always will ask,
the same fundamental questions. What creates, what preserves, and what
destroys the products of nature, and how may man profit thereby? The
answers, whatever they may be, must ultimately be expressed by them in
essentially equivalent terms, their verification sought in constructive action.

The large element of unpredictable returns resident in all phases of
nature-action demands trial ; creative turns justify the experiment.

These unsuspected potentialities are revealed in the triumphs of nature's
creative art and thus reveal a measurable independence of established laws
and precedents. Therein is the source of man's undying hope and faith, his
abiding impulse to endeavor.

INDEX

Acromegaly, 344.

Adaptability, as a universal creative

tropism, 76.

Adaptation, 72; compulsory, 296.
Agreements, constructive, 394; social,

393-

Ahrimet, 318.

Altruism, 62; defined, 38; mental,
287; of metabolism, 130; nature,
148; of organization, 134; par-
ental, 148 ; social, 148.

Amulets, 316.

Animal life, architecture of, 204.

Animism, 315, 385.

Anthropomorphism, 317.

Architectural plans, 188; problems,
195; tropism, 238; values, 178.

Architecture and function, 172; and
knowledge, 171 ; and nature ac-
tion, 171; and philogeny, 188; and
response, 176; of animal life, 182,
204; of inorganic growth, 196; of
organic growth, 198; of plant life,
182, 201 ; of social life, 252; orien-
tation of triaxial, 241.

Aspects of Nature, 21.

Assets of life, 140.

Asymmetry of outer world, 240.

Attribute, 29.

Australians, social life of, 346.

Authority, delegation of, 367, 369.

Autonomy, external, 114; internal,
114.

Balance, cooperative, 178.

Behavior, defined, 58.

Benevolence, defined, 38, 129; men-
tal, 287, 288.

Betterments, social, 406.

Blastoderm, social, 268.

Blood, 230.

Brahma, 348.

Buddhism, 348.

Business, 334; ethics and morality
of 334-

Cadence, creative, 107.

Capital, mental, 288; organic, 131.

Categorical Imperative to existence,
50; in social evolution, 403.

Centralization of function, 234.

Chance, decrease of, 48 ; defined, 48.

Christianity, 348.

Circulation, international, 386.

Class, differences, 358 ; functions,
358; interests, 359.

Cleavage, social, 361.

Cognition, retroactive, 292.

Colonies, 101.

Commerce, 156.

Competition, 106.

Compulsion, cumulative, XII ; of
achievement, 362; of established
methods, 187; of intelligence, 302,
278, 320; of nature action, 302;
of self-preservation, 282; of social
possessions, 277 ; of truth, 303 ;
to growth, 387; to social coopera-
tion, 273.

Concepts, basic, 295.

Conduct, defined, 58 ; social, 297,
306.

Constitution of United States, 163.

Constructive action, basic factors in,
21 ; agreements, 394.

Conveyance, 32, 35; cultural, 268;
social, 268.

Cooperative covenant, 394; law, 313.

Cooperation, bisexual, 146, 192;
chemical, 29, 34; compulsion to,
277; defined, 33; law of, 33; of
animal life, 148 ; of mass action,
34; of plant life, 182; of plants,
148; power of, 50; protoplasmic,
35; as universal attribute of na-
ture, 391 ; as universal creative
law, 391.

Cosmogeny, 31.

Cosmos, 1 8.

Covenants, cooperative, 393 ; inter-
national, 410; religious, 394; sci-
ence, with nature, 394; social, evo-
lution of, 393.

Creation, 295 ; defined, 28, 30.

Creative action, continuity of, 28;
drift, 41, 44; law, 403.

427

428

INDEX

Cultural Evolution, 257.
Culture, Greek, 348.

Democracy, of common things, 301 ;
mental, 368; new, 351.

Development, 94.

Discipline, 128; civic, 161 ; cosmic,
157; cumulative, 158; directive,
156; germinal, 158; in nature ac-
tion, 26; in religion, 164; of na-
ture, 116; of science, 165; social,
297. ^

Dominion, mental, 367.

Education, 160, 311, 371, 400; func-
tion of, 278.

Egoism, 27, 133; mental, 287; of
metabolism, 130; of organization,

134-

Endowments, 52; spiritual, 271.

Entail system, 136.

Entailed estates of life, 138; habitat,
138; principal, 139.

Evil, defined, 48, 76; as centralizing
agency, 76; as directive agency,
78.

Evolution, alturism of, 164; as a
triumph of constructive action, 31,
97; categorical imperative of so-
cial, 403; collateral lines of, 190;
influence on human conduct, 21 ;
highway of, 279; main lines of,
190; of individuality, 40; of men-
tal imagery, 291 ; profit in, 46 ;
purpose of, XII ; essential process
in XIII; rate of, 109; of social
covenants, 393.

Fantasy, 293.

Fear, 310, 380.

Fitness, 62; by design, 65; by mu-
tual influence, 65; criterion of, 62;
defined, 55; kinds of, 63; measure
of, 68 ; permanent, 67 ; social,
71, 74; temporary, 67.

Forces, preparation for, 77.

Freedom, growth of, 89 ; instruments
of, 90; new, 354; social, 311;
world, 295.

Functional authority, delegation of,

369-

Functions, centralization of, 234;
class, 357; international, 410;
state, 410.

Genesis, logic of, 108.
Giantism, 344.

Gills, 228.

Good, defined, 48, 76.

Greek culture, 316, 349.

Growth, 295 ; architecture of inor-
ganic, 196; architecture of organ-
ic, 196; by combination, 99; checks
and releases to, 93 ; compulsion to,
387; cultural, 261 ; demands of, 93 ;
formal accents of, 101 ; insistent
power of, 91; limitations to, 97;
by multiplication, 99 ; motive, 401 ;
phases of, 112; pressure, 392;
purpose, 47; rhythm, HI; spiral,
201 ; triaxial, 201 ; unadaptive so-
cial, 343 ; unicellular, 204.

Habitat, entailed, of life, 138.
Heart, 228.

Heritage, mental, 287, 288.
Highway of animal evolution, 280.
Hinduism, 318, 348.

Idealism, 54, 288.

Image chains, 292.

Imagery, evolution of, 291 ; right-
ness of, 291.

Imagination, 292.

Individual, defined, 41 ; stability of,
no.

Individuality, altruism of, 51; arch-
itecture of, .196; components of,
59; egoism of, 51; evolution, of
40, 45-

Instinct, teacher, 288.

Instruments of animal life, 185; of
plant life, 185.

Intelligence, 57, 155, 290; compulsion
of, 161, 303, 364, 367; construc-
tive uses of, 367; legal symbols of,
304; militant phase of, 309; pur-
pose of, 290.

International covenants, 410; func-
tions, 410.

Knowledge, 171.

Kultur, militant, 196, 335.

Law, cooperative, 313; cultural,
269; elemental creative, 403; mu-
nicipal, 393; social, 305.

Leadership, germinal, 107; mental,
298; orientation of, 54; voluntary
submission to, 358.

Learning, 387.

Leviathan, new, 357.

Life, administration of, 118; ex-
ternal, 120; federal, 120; internal,

INDEX

429

120; college, 123; cosmic formula
of, 224 ; cosmic sanctuary of, 87 ;
directive discipline of, 88, 118; en-
tailed estates of, 109, 138; habitat,
138; germinal principle of, 139;
industrial, 364; quick assets of,
140; organs of social, 254.

Logic of science, 180.

Lungs, 228.

Memorizing, 292.

Mental benevolence, 288 ; capital,
288; democracy, 368; dominion,
367; freedom, 270; heritage, 288;
imagery, 290; imagery, evolution
of, 291; inheritance, 312; leader-
ship, 298 ; limitations, 343 ; play,
293; procreation, 289; profits, 289;
reorientation, 307; Tightness, 288;
Tightness, conservation of, 311.

Mental life, altruism of, 287; ego-
ism of, 287 ; strategy of, 304.

Metabolism, altruism of, 133; cul-
tural, 269 ; nature, XIII ; of men-
tal life, 133; social, 360, 384, 405.

Mergers, colonial, 101 ; conjugal,
lor ; germinal, 101 ; parasitic, 101 ;
profitable, 101 ; sexual, 101 ; sym-
biotic, 101.

Metamere, 219.

Metamerism, 219; decline of, 234.

Militant Kultur, 196, 335.

Militarism, 400.

Morality, defined, 58.

Motives, social, 362.

Mouth, old and new, 227.

Municipal laws, 393.

Mutual service, increment of, 45.

Nature-action, compulsion of, 302;

ethics of, 56; morality of, 56.
Nature, discipline of, 116.
Nature science, 297.
New Leviathan, 377.

Obligations, mutual, 50; to science,

372.

Orchid, 69.

Orientation of mental imagery, 285.
Ormazd, 318.

Papuans, 315.

Parasitism, 102.

Perceptors, 266.

Philogeny, 189.

Philosophy, 320; business, 334;

egoistic, 338; of the biologist, 332;
social, 331.

Plan, radial structural, 206.

Plasmodium, social, 382.

Possessions, mental, 288.

Procreation, mental, 289.

Profit, 295.

Profitable mergers, 101.

Profits^ 53; in evolution, 46; in
Tightness, 322 ; mental, 289.

Progress, defined, 42.

Prophecy, justification of, 108.

Protoplasm, 198; cooperation of, 35;
social, 382.

Protozoa, 204.

Prussia, 399.

Purpose, in evolution, XII ; in re-
ligion, 322; in science, 322.

Radial structure, 206.

Reality, test of, 47.

Receptors, 266.

Red Cross act, 37.

Regeneration, religious, 345 ; social,
340; incentive to, 345.

Religion, 298, 318; discipline in,
164; purpose in, 324.

Religious covenant, 394.

Reorientation, mental, 307.

Reproduction, social, 404.

Retroactive cognition, 292.

Rhythm, growth, in.

Rightness, conservation of, 311; de-
fined, 46, 58 ; increment of, 45 ;
inheritance of, 312; mental, 288,
321; pathways of, 322; profits in,
322; profits of, in evolution, 46;
reciprocating functions of XIII,
78; serial order of, 108 ; social,

73-

Rights, mutual, 50.
Rita, 45.
Romans, 316.
Ruthlessness, 52, 53.

Science, altruism of, 299, 319, 338,
351; covenant of, 394; discipline
of, 165; egoism of, 299, 338; func-
tions of, 324; logic of, 1 80; na-
ture, 297, 319, 351; obligations to,
372; purpose in, 324. ,"...4

Selection, 62. ,

Selfishness in nature, 52.

Self-sacrifice, defined, 54.

Sense-organs, 266.

Service, defined, 35; lure of, 401.

430

INDEX

Sex, attributes of, 143 ; properties of,
70.

Sexual cooperation, 145, 150.

Siva, 316.

Slavery, 106, 307.

Social agreement, 393 ; betterment,
405; cleavage, 361; conduct, 306;
covenants, evolution of, 393 ; fit-
ness, 71, 79; laws, 305; life, or-
gans of, 254; metabolism, 360, 405;
motives, 362; protoplasm, 372; re-
production, 404; Tightness, 73.

State, as a sphere of cooperative ac-
tion, 391; autocratic, 397; biolog-
ical interpretation of, 395; demo-
cratic, 398; functions of, 403, 410;
government of, 396; as sphere of
cooperative action, 391.

Sovereignty, external, 114; internal,
114; of individuality, 114; of na-
ture, 114.

Stomodaeum, 207.

Strategy of evolution, XI ; of mental
life, 304.

Super-service, 314.

Symmetry, cooperative functions of
bilateral, 403 ; false radial, 209.

System, entail in sexual reproduc-
tion, 136; nervous, 252; triaxial,
212.

Tao, 45.

Teacher instinct, 288.

Teaching, 287.

Totems, 260, 316.

Tragedy, in nature, 25.

Tropic action, 246.

Tropism, architectural, 77, 237, 248 ;

universal creative, 77.
Triaxial architecture, 248 ; system,

212; orientation of, 241.
Truth, biological interpretation of,

393 ; compulsion of, 303 ; creative

value of, 312.
Tunicates, 192.

United States, constitution of, 163.

Veracity, tests of, 300.
Vishnu, 318.

Will, 371; creative, 315; to create,

315-

World life, evidences of, 385; mo-
saic of, 383; quickening of, 377;
ways and means to, 389.

Yeast, 69.
Zoroaster, 318.

597

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