THE SCIENCE OF POWER

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

SOCIAL EVOLUTION, 1894.

Translated German, 1895; Swedish, 1895; French, 1896;
Russian, 1897; Italian, 1898; Chinese, 1899; Czech,
1900; Danish. 1900; Arabic, 1913.

PRINCIPLES OF WESTERN CIVILISATION, 1902.
Translated Spanish, 1903.

THE
SCIENCE OF POWER

n v

BENJAMIN KIDD

tr .

EIGHTH EDITION

METHUEN & CO. LTD.

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CONTENTS

PART I
THE FAILURE OF WESTERN KNOWLEDGE

CHAP. fAGK

I. THE GATHERING OF THE WORLD REVOLUTION 3

II. THE PSYCHIC CENTRE OF THZ GREAT PAGAN

RETROGRESSION . . . .41

III. THE CULMINATING PHASE OF THE PAGAN ETHIC

IN THE WEST . . . . .68

PART II
THE BASIS OF INTEGRATING POWER

IV. POWER IN CIVILIZATION RESTS ON COLLECTIVE

EMOTION, NOT ON REASON . . . 101

V. THE EMOTION OF THE IDEAL is THE SUPREME
PRINCIPLE OF EFFICIENCY IN THE COL-
LECTIVE STRUGGLE OF THE WORLD . 121

VI. THE STUPENDOUS POSITION IN THE WEST . 152

PART III

THE NEW PSYCHIC CENTRE OF POWER
VII. THE FIRST LAWS OF THE SCIENCE OF POWER . 18 1

VIII. WOMAN is THE PSYCHIC CENTRE OF POWER

IN THE SOCIAL INTEGRATION . . 192

IX. THE MIND OF WOMAN . . . .223

X. SOCIAL HEREDITY . . . . .258

A CHART OF HUMAN PROGRESS . . . -299

INDEX . . . . . . .303

b V

THE SCIENCE OF POWER

PART I

THE FAILURE OF WESTERN
KNOWLEDGE

CHAPTER I

THE GATHERING OF THE WORLD
REVOLUTION

AT some future time the nature of the drama
which is at present unfolding itself in history
must make a powerful appeal to the human
imagination. Under our eyes, with the confused
details of the transition spread before us from day
to day in the events of the leading countries of the
earth, we see the curtain rising upon an entirely
new order of the world.

It is one of the curious features 'of our day that
the nature of the change is as yet scarcely appre-
hended. The shadow of it rests upon all the events
of the time. The meaning of it encircles the world.
The instinct of it moves in the minds of distant
peoples and of strange races. But there is yet
scarcely any conception of its nature. We are
undoubtedly living in the West in the opening stages
of a revolution the like of which has never been
experienced in history. We are witnessing the
emergence of causes and the marshalling

4 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

leaguing of forces utterly unknown to textbooks.
They will make history for a thousand years to
come. But for the understanding of the great
transition going on around us the very elements
of thought do not at present exist.

It has been a feature of the time which has
witnessed the greatest war in the history of the
human race to talk as if the existing conditions
of the West were the result of peculiar causes
introduced by a single nation or affecting a single
period of time. We must put aside such concep-
tions. The present conditions in the West are the
result of causes which are universal, which have
come slowly to a head in history, which extend far
beyond military aspects, and into the meaning
of which the development of the entire world will
in the future be drawn.

It is a fact, the significance of which has been
almost overlooked in the past, that Western civiliza-
tion has been in a special and peculiar sense founded
upon force. All the reasoned knowledge of the
West is the science of force in one or other of its
phases. Our civilization has been brought to the
birth in time as the result of a process of force,
which is unparalleled in the development of the
race, and the conditions of which can almost
certainly never be reproduced in history. For

THE WORLD REVOLUTION 5

countless ages before history has view of him, the
fighting male of the West has streamed across
Europe in successive waves of advance and con-
quest, vanquishing, exterminating, overwhelming,
overmastering, taking possession. The fittest, who
have survived in these successive layers of conquest,
have been the fittest in virtue of the right of force,
and in virtue of a process of military selection
probably the longest, the sternest, the most cul-
minating which the race has ever undergone.

It is this fighting pagan of the world who has
made the history of the West. The civilization
which he has produced is the strangest flower in the
fields of time. He has introduced into it at every
point the spirit of the unmeasured ages of conquest
out of which it has come. Into all the institutions
which he has created he has carried the spirit of
war, and the belief in force as the ultimate principle
of the world.

But at the same time he has inherited a religion
which is the utter negation of force, and which in
every phase of his development has remained the
outstanding challenge to his conception of the
omnipotence of force. He has struggled with
this extraordinary inheritance for centuries in
history. Deep in the inmost recesses of his nature
he has continually persuaded himself against belief

6 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

in it. He has set his science and his philosophies
to reason it away. He has gone forth on his business
to the conquest of the world fortifying himself
against it and with his spirit resolutely tuned to the
doctrine of force. In his national wars he has made
the right of conquest the ultimate right of the
fittest. In the social struggle he has trained himself
to see, in the steel claws of devouring tyrannies
closing on the worsted, the natural law of efficiency.

It is only our lifelong familiarity with the out-
standing features of our civilization, which has
dimmed our vision to its altogether surprising
features. As the spirit of the belief, which is the
flat denial of the conception of the omnipotence
of force, has gradually overmastered the world-
builder of the West, the results baffle all adequate
description. The pagan has captured the world
by force. He holds it by force. But the system of
ideas in which he is enmeshed flings into sight an
unparalleled significance. While his philosophies
have argued with it, while his sciences have branded
it as foolishness, it has slowly enfranchised the
world around him. It is bringing into the rivalries
of life on terms of equality with him every class and
substratum of his societies, every race of men on
the planet.

The problems which are evolving themselves out.

THE WORLD REVOLUTION

of the deep are illimitable. The blinding vision
of which the West has caught sight has been that
there is but one class, and but one colour, and but
one soul in humanity. It is a vision under which
the soul of the pagan world-builder flames in
rebellion. But it has come to haunt the n oo Is of
industrial Demos as he hums his rag-time music
in the midst of the mills of force which he has
erected. The spirit of it moves in the dreams of
strange peoples at the ends of the earth. And on
the mind of Demos and of the distant peoples
the effect is the same. It has brought a haunting
sense of some meaning, infinite but unexplained,
through which our civilization moves towards a
fulfilment in which the past may pass for ever, and
in which new standards of efficiency, that men
have not dreamt of, may possibly arise in the
world.

The male of Western civilization has become by
force of circumstances the supreme fighting animal
of creation. History and natural selection have
made of him what he is. For at least four thousand
years, and possibly for a period ten times as long,
his forbears have represented the highest expression
of force in the world. Every instinct of the fight,
every quality of the rule of force exists in him
through an ancestral inheritance measured by the

8 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

meaning of hundreds of generations of successful
fighting.

The consequences are felt to-day throughout
every fibre of our civilization. As race after race
of the peoples of the earth, as class after class, and
layer after layer of their societies have been gradually
brought into the struggle under the emancipating
influence described, there has resulted a conflict
of forces never before known. The problems there-
of have become in every field of activity in the
West the centres of movements molten with human
passion. There has never been anything like the
daily sequence of events which is spread before us
in the record of civilization during the past half-
century. It is a record of a war continuous and
intense under every phase of human activity.
In the programmes of parties, in the relations of
nations, in business, in labour politics, in art, in
literature, in the whole realm of economic activ-
ity, it is war in progress under every conceivable
aspect.

But this cannot be the meaning of the West.
Through it all there runs a sense of new eras,
of new values, of emerging types, of widen-
ing horizons, of more spacious ideals of human
brotherhood seen through the social emotion.
But it is a world of revolution, of sinking temples,

THE WORLD REVOLUTION 9

of falling idols, of rending veils, of darkening skies
under which the gods of force huddle towards vast
Armageddons muttering, " We know not fear,"
while the past moves from under them.

If we could unly see the age which preceded the
universal war of nations which began in 1914 as the
historian of the future will see it, it would present
a surprising spectacle, for we should see this war of
the nations to be no more than an incident in a
universal movement, involving every leading form
of thought and activity in the West, gradually rising
to a climax throughout the world.

There is a striking feature which we may perceive
to be characteristic of the half-century which
preceded the war which began in 1914. At the
centre of every movement of opinion in the West
the same fact is to be noticed. There is visible a
gradual falling back upon first principles, a retreat
all along the line to those conditions of elemental
force under which the civilization of the West first
came into being.

The Darwinian thesis, presented to the Western
mind in the middle of the nineteenth century, had a
remarkable effect on civilization. It presented to
the masters of force in the West a conception of the
world which they rendered exclusively in terms of
force and struggle. It was not science which

10 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

created the universal fame of the Darwinian con-
ception. It was rather the half-informed pagan
mind of our civilization. For centuries the Western
pagan had struggled with the ideals of a religion
of subordination and renunciation coming to him
from the past. For centuries he had been bored
almost beyond endurance with ideals of the world
presented to him by the Churches of Christendom.
He had stiffly bowed his armoured back to them,
but mostly without inward comprehension. But
here was a conception of life which stirred to its
depths the inheritance in him from past epochs of
time. This was the world which the master of
force comprehended. The pagan heart of the
West sang within itself again in atavistic joy. Its
Schopenhauers, its Omar Khayyams, its Haeckels,
its Nietzsches, its Weinigers, its Wagners became
the prophets and interpreters of a meaning in the
world which it drank in with understanding.

There can be no more remarkable experience in
store for the observer than that which comes to him
if, in any of the leading countries of the West, he
sets himself to compare at any of the centres of
higher learning the questions being set a few years
ago to students of the social and political sciences
and those which were set in the same subjects but
half a century before. The trained understanding

THE WORLD REVOLUTION 11

reading between the lines beholds in progress a
change far exceeding in significance any political
revolution which has ever taken place in the world.
The iron of conviction has passed from the mind
of authority. The doctrine of force has taken its
place. The ears of the present generation have
been glued to the ground, strained to catch the dis-
tant meaning of vast, formless, approaching causes,
speaking a language absolutely unknown to those
who occupied the seats of knowledge in the past.

The full effect of the change long in progress in
civilization has come into view almost suddenly.
The significance of it was from the first perceived
by the Churches, those historic centres for centuries
of the idealisms of the West. It soon reached to
every centre of opinion. For a prolonged period
previously the Western nations, even in their darkest
hours of struggle, had ever placed before themselves
and regarded with unfaltering gaze an inward vision.
They had conceived our civilization as gradually
ripening, through the perfection of principles in-
herent in it, towards an age of universal peace and
balanced harmony among all the nations of the earth.

The first startling effect in the West of th>*
recrudescence of the pagan doctrine of the omni-
potence of force was upon this ideal. For fifteen
centuries, since the full adoption of Christianity

12 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

by the continent of Europe, the scandal and paradox
of the world, says the Honourable George Peel, was
that European history was a tale of blood and
slaughter.1 But always hitherto this record had
been shamed into irrelevancy by the permanence
and supremacy of the vision in the background.

Within the short space of some fifty years all this
has been changed. Those living have watched
civilization becoming openly and of set purpose
a universal place of arms. Within the half-century,
by a process of development marking the intensity
of the causes at work, they have seen standing
armies, on a scale previously quite unknown, becoming
a normal feature of the life of modern communities.
The sun has followed its daily course from East
to West over the nations of the world standing
to arms and preparing for war. The full significance
of the change, moreover, has lain in the fact that
now it was preparation for war without any higher
vision whatever of peace perduring in the back-
ground.

For the changes in the direction of thought have
been far-reaching and rapid. The state of war
became spoken of again among men not as a shame
and a rebuke to civilization but as a state of nature.
During the first period of the twentieth century

1 The Future of England, p. 169.

THE WORLD REVOLUTION 18

in the reviews, books, newspapers, parliaments,
congresses, and even in the schools of the principal
countries, war has been the principal subject of
interest. The discussion of war by experts and
publicists — the methods by which war is to be carried
on, the enemies against whom it may have to be
directed, and the objects and policies for which it
may have to be waged — has gone on continually.

As the result of tendencies which in a short space
have enveloped the world, settled modes of thought
regarding war, which in countries like Great Britain
and the United States had been the slow growth of
centuries of previous development, have become
profoundly modified and altered. Men have come
to listen silently, as they would not have listened
half a century previously, when they have been told
by leaders of opinion that the ultimate principles
of civilization do not justify the prophecies since
the beginning of our era as to an eventual age of
peace and goodwill; that war is the natural con-
dition of man, that it is not an evil but a necessity
and even a good, and that the modern resources of
science are not tending to abolish war but only to
render it more terrible and destructive by raising
to the n^ power the possibilities of savagery.

The alteration taking place in the nature of the
pleas urged in favour of peace have become even

14 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

more striking and significant. Fifty years ago
the most prominent feature in the case for inter-
national peace was that it was made to rest on
the high ground of an immutable moral doctrine.
War was held to be a crime, a crime against the
principle of civilization, a direct challenge to the
fundamental conception of Christianity. It was
held, therefore, that the higher nations must evolve
beyond war, just as the higher individual has
been raised beyond crime, through the growth of
an internal moral standard producing a feeling of
absolute abhorrence.

But almost under the eyes of the current genera-
tion this view became replaced by another con-
ception. The high inflexible conviction urged
against war in the past, that the spirit of war was
a crime, that peace was a moral end to be sought
for its own sake and irrespective of any cost or
sacrifice whatever, ceased to be urged. Peace came
to be advocated because it was said to be the con-
dition which paid best in civilization ; war was
argued to be economically unsound because it
was said to be a great illusion to believe that a
national policy founded on war could be a profitable
policy for any people in the long run.

In no phase of the time has the rapid lowering
of the standards of opinion in the West been more

THE WORLD REVOLUTION 15

directly in evidence than in this modification oi
the principle upon which the demand for peace was
based. The degeneracy and futility of the argu-
ment which had come to rest the cause of peace on
no higher ground than this was deeply and in-
stinctively felt by every mind which understood
the nature of the forces on which Western civiliza-
tion rests. Even in the standards of those who
had begun to base the policy of nations upon the
omnipotence of force, the demand at least was
everywhere for the capacity for sacrifice.

The state of international relations in the West
for many years before the outbreak of the war
which opened in 1914 will be one to cause marvel
to students in history in times to come. We have
passed so rapidly through such moving events in our
time that the existing world has never seen in focus
the period through which we are living. It has
never fully realized that the great movements in
the West in recent times are but phases of a larger
development which in a generation or two has come
to envelop the whole of civilization.

The gradual lowering of the standards of opinion
and conduct has extended to all centres of Western
thought and action. But it was at the beginning
most clearly visible in international relations. One
of the most influential of British Liberal journals,

16 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

writing some years before the war, described in a
vivid article the altogether extraordinary conditions
which for a considerable period had come to prevail
in European diplomacy. It seemed, the journal
urged, as if civilization in Europe in the highest
environment of culture had returned to conditions
of primitive savagery. The crudity of the purposes,
the danger of the aims, the thinly veiled barbarisms
of the methods which were coming to prevail
amongst diplomatists, were forcibly described.

Speaking of the conditions surrounding the
diplomatists who were guiding modern affairs
at the points of contact of the principal nations
of the West, the journal with great seriousness
continued: "We see them pulling wires, stealing
marches on each other, laying long and crafty
plans which almost invariably miscarry, and missing
obvious events which throw all their designs into
confusion. And on one side or the other there is
a perpetual exploiting of the inherent loyalty and
patriotism of their countries in quarrels which are
mere combativeness for no purpose." In inter-
national relations, in short, the minds of the men
of leading and culture who were guiding the affairs
of the West seemed to the journal in question to
have returned so near to a state of primitive
barbarism that the journal gravely wondered why

THE WORLD REVOLUTION 17

the immense majority in the nations did not assert
themselves and sweep it all away.1

Whatever these symptoms might imply in their
more immediate relations there could be even then
no mistaking their import in the deeper aspects of
history. The West was getting down to the first
principles of force. The powers which had com-
mand of force were, with a sure instinct, preparing
for a stage in which strength would be measured
again in the West in those conditions of primitive
force which the West understood. But the times
were evidently pregnant with a wider meaning
than this. It was a period more elemental still
in which some new, vast, and fundamental con-
ditions were assembling in the world, presently to
emerge into full view in another era of civilization.

When we turn from these external symptoms
to the social conditions existing within the frontiers
of the nations before the outbreak of the war of
1914, the spectacle becomes more arresting. The
world-wide reach of the revolution which has been
in progress becomes more clearly visible.

For centuries it had been a commonplace of
political thought in the West that the world that
is, represents the world that always will be. The
masters of force from the beginning took the Dar-

1 Westminster Gazette, 31 October 1911.

18 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

winian conception as giving lasting support to the
view that the social struggle supplied the stern, inevit-
able condition out of which social efficiency emerged.
They took it as confirming that theory of the world,
which was already presented in economic science,
according to which the natural and unchangeable
condition of society was one of extreme polarity.
At one end there was the accumulation of property
and influence in the hands of the few representing
the leaders and the capables, and at the other
end there was the vast majority of the population
ruled down by the iron necessities of the competitive
struggle to the lowest wage at which they would
work efficiently and reproduce themselves.

In little more than the lifetime of a generation
we have seen the foundations of this world of know-
ledge transformed. The emancipating influence
at work in civilization has gradually brought to
the multitudes the political enfranchisement in-
herent from the beginning in the conception of
human equality and human brotherhood. In every
leading country the working millions constituting
the greater part of the population were to be seen
becoming consolidated and organized by the actual
mechanism of the process in which they were caught,
with the gift of political power in their hands,
with the dawning light of an intelligence in their

THE WORLD REVOLUTION 19

eyes never before seen in history, crowding at last
at the head of every avenue of authority and stretch-
ing out waiting and impatient hands towards all the
levers of power in the State. And in the day-dreams
of this multitude the sombre, insistent, infinitely
widening instinct of the social emotion has already
begun to close with the vast problems of the future.

Writers and historians will attempt in days to
come to limn the bold outlines of the world drama
in which we behold Demos in the West with the
inheritance behind him of thousands of generations
of successful fighting awaking in history in this
situation. It is a position with every element of
human passion, every element of tragedy, every
element of revolution in it, and all represented on a
scale without precedent or comparison in the past.

Throughout the West it may be observed that for
generations the idea of the world presented by text-
books of economic science has been based on a
central conception. However deftly the realisms
of the human struggle have been glossed over,
however faithfully the artists of its apologies may
have softened the grim silhouettes of that struggle
into a background of the public weal, of one thing
there can be no doubt. The fundamental idea of
the economic science of the West has always been
the conception of society as a state of war.

20 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

And in this state of war the central figure has
been none other than that of Demos himself as
the victim of it. The leaders of the proletariat as
they gradually took in the details of the position
have not been slow to interpret it to the masses in
their own version. Every textbook of economics in
the West, it was said, presented the same picture of the
toil-stained millions. In the struggle of the world the
overlords of the capitalist age of force took all they
were able to hold as the wages of capacity. And the
millions of the wage-earners were scaled down to the
minimum condition of existence upon which the great
beast of the proletariat would consent to reproduce
its useful kind. That has been the rendering.

But the masses of the West have been themselves,
and in their own right, and no less than the over-
lords of capital, the inheritors of the spirit of the ages
of fight and conquest out of which the West has
come. Gradually as they have drunk in with their
new-born political consciousness the position thus
explained to them, a new spirit passed over the
West of the like of which and of the significance
of which the world has had no previous experience.
Firmly and consciously the hand of the working
multitude has stiffened on the levers of supreme
power which they have come to grasp under the
forms of Democracy in the West.

THE WORLD REVOLUTION 21

The leading features of a position which moves
towards greater events than any recorded in the
past of the world may be rapidly summed up.
There was no long parleying with the situation.
The leaders of the proletariat went straight to the
centre of it. History will record of them that
without hesitation they simply accepted the world
which the economists and the interpreters of
Darwin had thus rendered to them in terms of force.
But they accepted it with one reservation, the
significance of which has begun to overshadow all
the events of Western civilization. It became the
avowed intention and determination of the leaders
of the proletariat so to use the weapons which the
political power of labour had placed in their hands
that the result of the social war should be entirely
changed. It should no longer be against their
class ; it should be in favour of it. There can
be no mistaking the wider bearing of such a resolu-
tion. Under its inspiration the movement of the
proletariat in all the leading countries of the West
has gradually taken on a meaning in keeping
with the character of the general world movement
in which all the institutions of civilization have
become involved in our time. It has begun to
present all the same symptoms of a development
slowly concentrating on first principles, namely,

22 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

on those actualities of force which are deeply
inherent in it.

As we turn to watch the character of the inter-
national situation contemporaneously developing,
we have to observe how the cause of the working
classes of civilization gradually becomes involved
as part of the universal movement in progress in
the West.

Historians of the future will note that it took
roughly the whole span of the nineteenth century
for the masters of force in Europe, while re-
maining carefully hidden behind the screen of our
current civilization, to evolve the principles of force
scientifically applied in international war. The funda-
mental condition of the science of force as applied
among nations was that which, first systemati-
cally developed by Prussia, has changed the
face of the modern world, namely, universal con-
scription or the compulsory levying of the whole
available male population of a nation for purposes
of war.

The second and equally fundamental condition
of force scientifically applied has been the gradual
formulation, also behind the screen of a civilization
founded on the ethics of the Christian religion, of
the original code of pagan ethics which placed the
interests of the State resting on force above all

THE WORLD REVOLUTION 28

principles of universal Right and Justice. The
great aim and object of scientific war as set forth
in textbooks, now notorious, of the military nations
of Western Europe, was to be successful. Every
means to that end was, in the last resort, held to
be justifiable. All questions of right, of feeling, of
justice, of the sanctity of agreements or treaties,
or even of humanity, became, in the last issue,
nothing more than questions of expediency or the
reverse in aiming at success.

Our time has witnessed the fighting leaders of
races with unmeasured ages of conquest behind them
turning in the middle of current civilization with
the silent joy of the essential pagan to the stupendous
task of organizing all the accumulated resources of
the world to the making of war on these principles.
The first outward result of a gradual return to
the standards of savagery in European diplomacy
has just been described. The next world-shaking
chapter in the international position was about to
open. But the conditions in which we have to
witness the labour movement in the social war be-
coming involved in all countries in the same cycle
of events have an extraordinary interest.

It has been said that the first principle upon which
the supreme overlords of force had, 'with far-seeing
vision, based all their plans for the organization of

24 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

international war was universal military conscrip-
tion. It has to be remarked that the first object
at which the leaders of labour with the same supreme
instinct of the fight upon them aimed in the West,
indicated an insight equally clear. The first demand
of labour was for nothing less than the compulsory
organization of its own class throughout all the
nations. Those who do not understand the magni-
tude of the position towards which the proletariat
of the West has attempted to move in our
times, and who do not therefore perceive the
vitality to labour not only of organization but of
compulsory organization, often miss the peculiar
but fundamental feature of the struggle which has
been opened. A study of the democratic State as
it has been in history no longer supplies us with
any clue to the future. It is the state of war
between nations which henceforward furnishes
the only parallel for enlightenment on the prin-
ciples which control the existing class war in the
West.

In many parts of the Western world the observer
sees labour still under the old conditions of its
struggle with capital, using the weapon of the local
strike, throwing down its tools and engaging in
feats of endurance to obtain by collective bargaining
better terms than could be obtained by individuals.

THE WORLD REVOLUTION 25

But in reality this era of the straggle has been left
behind in the main movement where the struggle
with capital has now begun to converge upon
essentials and fundamentals.

The principal leaders of the proletariat in the
West have hitherto shown an extremely far-reaching
grasp of the conditions and the limitations in our
civilization of a struggle resting ultimately on
force and conducted on a world-wide scale. By all
the principles of effective war labour was bound to
make a most determined effort to obtain exactly
that same first object which the masters of military
force in international war had attained by universal
conscription. Its leaders proceeded, therefore, to
secure throughout the world the first tremendous
principle of solidarity for which labour stands.
They formulated the programme known as the
" closed shop."

This is, in effect, nothing more or less than the
demand that no workman shall ultimately earn
his livelihood without first being a member of a
trade union. It is the history of the war to secure
this fundamental object of labour which constitutes
the real history of the labour movement during
recent times. At one end of the scale we see the
first phase of the struggle still represented in the
United States, where the effort of labour to enforce

26 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

this hitherto illegal demand for the closed shop has
been accompanied for years by riots, outrages, and
bloodshed, which have deeply disturbed the public
mind of a continent. At the other end of the scale
the struggle is represented in Great Britain by the
example of the cotton trade, where in the most
highly organized industry in the world the principle
of the closed shop is to be seen emerging at last as
a successfully established objective of labour. The
world has, indeed, actually witnessed in recent
times the operatives of this industry, having
successfully insisted in the full daylight of legality
that capital shall employ no workers who are not
members of their union, proceeding completely to
hold up the premier manufacturing industry of
civilization for such a period as the exigencies of
their warfare demanded.

The interval between these two stages in securing
this, the cardinal position of the labour movement
in the West, has represented a large part of the
internal history of the leading nations of the world
for a generation. The struggle has been in progress
throughout Europe and America. It has furnished
the principal events for a considerable period in the
politics of countries like Australia and New Zea-
land. And it has everywhere presented the same
features of a universal struggle in which a movement

THE WORLD REVOLUTION 27

representing world- wide and fundamental interests in
civilization is tending to fall back upon the prime and
elemental conditions of force underlying it.

As the conditions of force governing the struggle
have rapidly developed it has become visible how
vital, how far-reaching, and how true to type has
been the military instinct of labour. The principles
of the democratic State from this stage forward
begin to be pressed one by one into the background.
One of the most effective and hardly won of the
instruments of Democracy in recent times for the
protection of right against force was the secret
ballot in the election of political representatives.
At an early stage in its own struggle we see the open
ballot in the election of its representatives becoming
a characteristic demand in the labour movement.
In other leading features the transition of the
movement towards principles of ulterior force of
the kind which were being worked out elsewhere in
military textbooks was rapid.

The press of the leading countries of the West for
several years preceding the outbreak of the great
world war of the nations in 1914 presents in this
respect a most remarkable spectacle. Its leading
organs are to be seen registering the opinion that a
new era of civilization was arising under the pre-
vailing conditions. Hitherto one of the most

28 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

pronounced of all aspects of legality in the West
had been the accepted sanctity of agreements.
But in the course of the labour struggle it began to
be a subject exciting profound feeling that in the
agreements made by organized labour on the one
side, and organized capital on the other, this principle
was often no longer observed. The Times, surveying
in England the labour movement for a number of
years,1 laid great stress on this remarkable feature,
maintaining that in a long series of crises legal
contracts deliberately entered into by labour had
been " continuously violated as if they had meant
nothing at all."

In these violations of agreements, moreover,
remarkable features were pointed out. They were
all ultimately condoned. The enormous voting
power of labour in the State rendered any other
action impossible. A still more striking feature,
showing the retreat on the ultimate principles of
force which was taking place, was the nature of the
defence coming to be urged for these breaches
of contract by labour. The proletariat, in a state
of war, it was said, had often no option but to
accept for the time being the terms of capital.
But, as it began to be characteristically put on be-
half of labour, " a defeated nation may have to sue

1 Times, 26 January 1912 and 27 March 1912.

THE WORLD REVOLUTION 29

for peace, and if the conquerors exact hard terms
a defeated nation will, at the first favourable oppor-
tunity, repudiate such terms — and so with the men." l

Here it will be seen we are face to face with the
standards of international war, where all conditions
of legality have come to rest on force. We are,
indeed, in the presence of that last argument
already being advocated under many forms in the
official military textbooks of the central States
of Europe in which expediency had become the sole
criterion of conduct directed to the end of success
in war at any cost whatever.

There need be no desire to attribute to the
responsible leaders or to the body of the rank and
file of the labour movement in the West a conscious
intent or consent to these lowering of standards.
Enormous forces of quite a contrary direction were,
indeed, behind the labour programme. What we
are watching is rather the labour movement as
a whole becoming enveloped in the irresistible
tendencies of the universal movement in civilization
which was now everywhere falling back rapidly on
the actualities of force inherent in it. As syndical-

1 Cf. "When a class issue of any importance is raised. Might
makes Right always and everywhere," quoted from a Syndical-
ist handbook written by Charles Watkins, and indorsed by Tom
Mann. Vide The Nineteenth Century, Sept. 1911, "The Labour
Revolt and its Meaning," by J. Ellis Barker.

30 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

ism developed in the next stage it brought into
clear view the ultimate features of this position.

In syndicalism the controlling factors in the great
class war of civilization were defined with firm grasp
in the programme set out in 1912 in the leading
organ of the movement in England. The demand
for the nationalization of industry so prominently
displayed in all the earlier pronouncements of
socialism was, in that programme, shifted definitely
into the background. Syndicalism, it was asserted,
had ceased to put its trust in the State. Labour
was fighting for its own cause. For syndicalists,
it was said, had come to foresee a condition in the
future in which the power of the State would be
inferior to the power of organized capital, and in
which the power of the State under the control of
the capitalist would be turned against the workers
in an industry that had become nationalized. The
universal strike, therefore, to be thoroughly effective
in the future must be directed, it was asserted,
not simply at curtailing profits. It must aim to
become a menace to the community itself through the
stoppage of supplies.

We have to observe, in short, the labour move-
ment in the West hi this phase becoming at last
consciously instinct with the principles of universal
war resting ultimately on each side on the armed

THE WORLD REVOLUTION 81

forces of civilization. This instinct expressed itself
quite clearly in syndicalism in two forms. In one
form it urged the programme of a determined propa-
ganda, addressed to labour by the more moderate
leaders, urging the workers to obtain command of
military force by acquiring as rapidly as possible poli-
tical control in all the parliaments of the world which
vote supplies for the armed forces of nations. In the
other form the programme became, in the hands of
the more extreme leaders, a propaganda addressed
direct to the soldiers of the nations as the ultimate
units of a civilization in which armies could be turned
against labour in the last arbitrament of war.

In both these positions the leaders of the extreme
wing of labour had come in sight of the situation
which was already actually being discussed by the
leaders of militarism in the military textbooks of
Germany. For in these textbooks the masters of
force had foreseen and had anticipated the day
when, under universal conscription, the soldier him-
self having become the ultimate unit of civilization
would be subject to " all the tendencies which make
him the child of his time." l The disturbing effect
of such a propaganda as syndicalism contemplated
had indeed haunted the dreams of the masters of

1 The German War Book (Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege), J. H.
Morgan's translation.

32 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

force. It would, they foresaw, interfere with the
efficiency of the instrument of irresistible force
which they were forging in civilization. But their
policy, in this last resort, had been thought out.
It was already outlined in the textbooks of war.
It was " to smash the whole fabric of that spiritual
life " in the soldier himself, — equally with that of the
enemy, for they had counted upon the necessity in
both cases, — which ran counter to the policy which
demanded success as the supreme object of war.1

Thus had the essentially pagan mind of the West
reached to the elementals of the atavistic creed of
omnipotent force — biological necessity it had become
in the military textbooks of Germany — into which it
had rendered the thesis which Darwin had given to
it fifty years previously. Slowly but with increasing
momentum the curtain was beginning to rise upon
the greatest world-drama of force in the history of
humanity.

It is necessary to turn now to watch other as-
pects of this movement in civilization into which all
local phases, national and social, have rapidly been

1 For the teaching as to smashing the spiritual life of the
enemy compare The German War Book (Kriegsbrauch im Land-
kriege), translated by J. H. Morgan, M.A. For the teaching as
to smashing the spiritual life of the soldier when it ran counter to
the necessities of war compare passage quoted from Austrian
military textbook, for which and reference see p. 71 of this
volume.

THE WORLD REVOLUTION 83

drawn. The causes which have driven labour to
organization within recent times have been irre-
sistible. But causes operating with a similar
intensity have at the same time been driving
capital into a position in which all the landmarks
of the past are one by one disappearing from view.
The enfranchising tendencies in the life of the
West have gradually set in motion tidal movements
in civilization in which the social emotion is sub-
merging all the fixed points of the past. But there
is no indication whatever on the thought or activity
of the time that the power-holding interests in
civilization have any clear grasp of the situation
in which they are involved. We see them rather
everywhere falling back instinctively upon positions
calculated to give them command in an environment
of force if the struggle should resolve itself into one
for mastery under more primitive conditions.

In the old individualistic age of the past capital-
ism had come to rest in large part on the convenient
maxims of a science of political economy which
identified the operations of capital with the per-
manent public weal. But the spokesmen of capital
have on the whole shown no consciousness that the
foundations of this world have moved bodily in our
time. As the demand of the proletariat in the
modern class war has threatened to become nothing
3

34 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

less than the demand for the replacement of capital-
ism by collectivism supported by the enormous
voting power of organized labour, capital has had to
face round to meet problems which bring into the
front rank of the conflict the most fundamental
issues connected with our civilization.

As the spirit of the world fight has gradually
enveloped the whole range of the complex activities
of the West, the position of capital in relation to the
social emotion has assumed features of great in-
terest. One of the most striking developments of
the age has been the colossal concentration of
wealth. Relentlessly driven from two sides to-
wards concentration, from without by labour and
from within by the nature of modern enterprise,
capital has become aggregated into immense
organizations worked on the basis of joint-stock
companies. It has been a peculiar and inherent
feature of these aggregations that they have tended
through causes which they have been quite unable
to control to bring capital profoundly and on a world-
wide scale into conflict with the social emotion.

As the leaders of labour with the gathering
instinct of the fight strong upon them have sensed
the omens of the time in the West, the antagonism
to capital has grown rapidly. In almost every part
of the civilized world it has deepened in intensity

THE WORLD REVOLUTION 85

in the first period of the twentieth century. The
case, moreover, which we see being put forward on
behalf of the proletariat — a case which is based on
the voting power of labour and which orientates
itself in the last resort to the armed forces of civiliza-
tion— has become more uncompromising. It has
come to take the form of a determined frontal
attack on the whole cause of capitalism.

It amounts, as we see it put forward now, to the
arraignment by labour before public opinion of the
entire system of modern capitalism on the ground
that it is inherently and fundamentally anti-social
and therefore impossible. The attack has closely
followed the lines I foreshadowed in 1908 in the
Herbert Spencer Lecture to the University of Oxford.1
Everywhere in the struggle we see capital in the
West essaying to defend itself on the old lines.
The modern tendency to gigantic concentration and
control by the few is taken to be a development
quite inevitable and in the public good. The circle
of shareholders of its joint-stock companies will,
it is maintained, become ever wider and wider.
Its Companies and its Trusts will tend, therefore,
to become at length identified with the general
public itself. Its Corporations will tend more and
more to become governing industrial republics rest-

1 Individualism and Afier.

36 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

ing on their own representation within the body
politic — a kind of industrial democracy gradually
supplementing and superseding political democracy.
But on the other side we see labour closing for
battle with a vision which it has fixed far beyond
this horizon. It sweeps away almost without
parley the case put against it. The financial re-
publics of joint-stock enterprise, it asserts, have
no counterpart in political democracy. They
manage public utilities on a scale so great that their
affairs are comparable only to the affairs of a first-
class state or a federation of states. But they
outrage the fundamental principles of democracy,
labour asserts, in that they have no relation to
any social or moral principle outside the earning
of dividends ; while they violate the cardinal
necessity of democracy in that voting power is
according to the amount of shares held, and that
control is in the hands of the few who work in the
dark, the vastest returns being obtained by the arti-
ficial raising and depressing of the Stock Exchange
value of their securities. Labour does not stay to
argue with the overlords of capital the case for the
wages of capacity in this direction. The gigantic
growth of speculation in Stock Exchange values and
the vast system of finance which accompanies it
have come to be described as parasitic on modern

THE WORLD REVOLUTION 37

industry, representing no function that can be
expressed in terms of social utility. So the pro-
paganda becomes an appeal for the votes of the
proletariat to sweep the whole system away. And
the argument, as we have seen, has come in the last
resort to envisage without hesitation the ultimate
conditions of force and to be consciously addressed
to armed men as themselves the ultimate units of
civilization.

All these profound movements in the West in
which we see the foundations of society being
challenged proceed with the same spirit moving
through them. We appear to be everywhere
witnessing a retreat upon the first principles of war.
The Westminster Gazette, speaking at the centre of
British politics, recently recorded a change in
political conditions in Great Britain which a genera-
tion ago would have been unthinkable. The
journal noted a peculiar fact of our time to consist
in the substitution of a condition of uncompromising
war resting on violence for a condition of free
discussion in all the principal institutions on which
popular government rests. The inevitable result,
the journal went on to say, is that in parliamentary
government the proceedings are becoming " battles
rather than deliberations, and that the whole pro-
cedure has to be organized on the basis of war . . .

38 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

it is now the practice of all minorities to say that
they will concede nothing to the majority and to
threaten to carry on every controversy by violent
and extra-constitutional means." l

This is the spirit, the effect of which meets us at
every turn in the times in which we are living. We
seem to see the male of the West under every form
of the activities of civilization enveloped in a kind
of monstrous aura of the fight which has become
essentially and profoundly atavistic. Speaking of
the current life of the West in the year before
the outbreak of the great world war, Mr. Harold
Begbie asserted : " Look where you will, it is the
spirit of I Myself which is paramount. Life exists
for Me : all the dim aeons behind have toiled to
produce Me : This brief moment in the eternal
duration of time is only an opportunity for My
pleasure and My ease : I care not a jot for the ages
ahead and the sons of men who shall inhabit the
earth when I am dust beneath their feet. Give Me
My Rights. Stand clear of My way. I want and
I will have/' 2

The questions which leap into view at this point
cannot be avoided. What is the meaning of this
tremendous process of life which under all these

1 Westminster Gazette, 30 July 1913.
1 The Weakest Link. p. 43.

THE WORLD REVOLUTION 89

aspects in the West is undoubtedly rising to a
climax in history ? No observer in his senses can
doubt the infinite significance in the world of the
process of enfranchisement, new in the history of
the race, which, moving slowly through long periods
in the past, has brought our civilization to its present
position. But what is the import of the apparent
rebirth in the West of the pagan mind drunken
with the spirit of force and of that recrudescence of
the forms of force in all the institutions of the
West which in a space of fifty years has followed
the interpretation of the Darwinian thesis of the
world in terms of efficiency resting on force ? It is
a development which cannot contain the meaning
of the West. It is a development which is indeed
entirely overshadowed by the significance of another
and counter phenomenon — the ever-rising tide of
the social emotion in our civilization. For through
all the stress of conflict in the West there swells
the deep diapason of the social passion calling
for service, for subordination, for sacrifice, for
renunciation on a scale unprecedented. The pro-
paganda which it inspires is, moreover, addressed
no longer to nameless mobs, but through every
avenue of emotion in art and literature to the
minds of voting millions who are themselves the
armed millions and the ultimate units of civiliza-

40 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

tion. It is an age of elementals. In the midst of
the rising to the surface again in civilization, on a
scale approaching the universal, of aspects of
savagery belonging to epochs of the past, we are
watching the assembling in the world of the govern-
ing forces of new eras of history.

Have the interpreters of Darwinism in the past
missed the great secret of the humanity of the
world ? It is becoming evident that all the truth
there is in Darwin's great conception may be summed
up in a single word — integration. For long we have
wasted our breath in talk about the survival of the
fittest and in discussions as to which the fittest
may be. But the fittest in life is simply the most
advanced integration. Darwinism dealt with the
individual and with the individual mostly before
the advent of mind. The law of the integration
of the individual has been the law of the supremacy
and the omnipotence of brute force. But other and
higher integrations are now on foot in the world
which rest on mind and spirit. It is the laws and
the meanings of these integrations which are carrying
the world into new horizons. And in the upbuilding
of the civilization founded on this wider knowledge
it is the stones which the builders of the past have
rejected which are about to become the master
stones of the edifice.

CHAPTER II

THE PSYCHIC CENTRE OF THE GREAT
PAGAN RETROGRESSION

WHEN in the autumn of the year 1914 the
nations of the world entered almost
without warning on the greatest war of
all time, in which more than half the human race
became engaged, and in which forces numbering
considerably more than thirty millions of men
met each other armed in the field, the world
stood aghast. The magnitude of the conflagration
seemed to emphasize in a special manner some
gigantic failure of the West in bringing to fruition
in history those high expectations of universal
peace and goodwill which its leading minds had for
centuries held up to humanity. The war was,
indeed, an event of far greater significance than
any military development that had ever happened
in the world. It marked the fact that the climax
had been reached in that extraordinary set of con-
ditions described in the last chapter, in which
under every phase of its civilization we beheld

42 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

the West getting down to the first principles of
force.

Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, even
in the midst of the fiercest, most prolonged and
most savage wars, the West had remained con-
sistently steadfast to its conception of civilization
as ripening towards a golden age of world peace.
The ideal of permanent goodwill among nations
and of international arbitration as an ultimate
substitute for war had continued to deepen its
hold on men's minds during the whole of the period.
The Congress of Vienna in 1814-5, at the close of
the Napoleonic wars of conquest, although it led to
reaction and was a congress of princes rather than
of peoples, was held under the influence of visions
of a coming age of permanent peace in the world.
In 1834 Mazzini and the " Young Europe " associa-
tion were dreaming of universal fraternity. In
1841 the poet Tennyson, in England, was singing
in fervent anticipation of the day when the battle
flags of the nations were to be furled in the parlia-
ment of man. Through the whole of this decade
up to the Saxon revolution in 1848-9 the struggle in
progress in most of the central States of Europe
was for constitutionalism, and the dreams of their
peoples were of lasting peace amongst States and
nationalities. A little later many of the foremost

GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 48

minds oi civilization were allowing themselves to
think with the rulers of Great Britain under the
lead of the Prince Consort, that the opening of the
Great International Exhibition of 1851 in London
marked the practical inauguration of such an era
of universal peace.

A change radical and sudden took place soon
after 1850 in the spirit of the West. It was a
change which did not arise from any causes merely
social or political. It was due to forces which were
profoundly jpsychic. It is necessary to under-
stand these forces, for it is in the psychic develop-
ment which preceded the world war of 1914, that
we have to witness the almost incredible spectacle
of the entire organized system of that knowledge
of the West, which is essentially the science of
force, passing gradually to monstrous forms of
extravagance and failure, and at length to irre-
trievable bankruptcy in Western civilization.

By far the most important event in the history
of the modern West is that of the publication in
1859 of Darwin's Origin of Species. There is no
precedent in the history of the human mind to
compare with the saturnalia of the Western
intellect which followed the publication of this
book. Speaking of the event in his Presiden-
tial Address to the Royal Society in London in

44 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

1905, Sir William Huggins said of the instantaneous
revolution it produced : " The accumulated tension
burst upon the mind of the whole intelligent world
with a suddenness and an overwhelming force for
which the strongest material metaphors are poor and
inadequate. . . . In a way to which history furnishes
no parallel the opinions of mankind may be said
to have changed in a day." The change, more-
over, produced by the Darwinian hypothesis
was not simply one of detail. The revolution
seemed to involve the reversal of a position
fundamental in Western thought which, to use
Sir William Huggins' simile, " like a keystone
brought down with it an arch of connected
beliefs " that for centuries had formed part of
the permanent life inheritance of the civilization
of the West.

Darwin's presentation of the evolution of the
world as the product of natural selection in never-
ceasing war — as a product, that is to say, of a struggle
hi which the individual efficient in the fight for his
own interests was always the winning type — touched
the profoundest depths of the psychology of the
West. The idea seemed to present the whole
order of progress in the world as the result of a
purely mechanical and materialistic process resting
on force. In so doing it was a conception which

GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 45

reached the springs of that heredity born of the
unmeasured ages of conquest out of which the
Western mind has come. Within half a century
the Origin of Species had become the bible of the
doctrine of the omnipotence of force.

The hold which the theories of the Origin of
Species obtained on the popular mind in the West
is one of the most remarkable incidents in the
history of human thought. The first effect of this
presentation of the existing world as the result
of selection through struggle and merciless war
was immediate. Everywhere throughout civiliza-
tion an almost inconceivable influence was given
to the doctrine of force as the basis of legal
authority.

This effect had two deeply marked phases.
In countries like England and the United States
the striking resemblance which the doctrine of
the survival of the fittest in the war for exist-
ence bore to those doctrines of political economy
which had come to prevail in business and com-
merce was immediately recognized. Almost every
argument of the Origin of Species appeared to
represent a generalized conception of the effec-
tiveness of the war of competition. The condi-
tions of the social war which Maurice, Ruskin,
and a crowd of writers had condemned, but

46 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

which Bent ham, the Mills, and the influential school
of English utilitarians had long been attempting
to realize in the political State, seemed to have
become justified at a stroke. The central thesis
of Darwin appeared as nothing less than a cul-
minating scientific condemnation of all the labour
programmes of the West conceived in a spirit of
socialism. The prevailing social system, born as it
had been in struggle, and resting as it did in the
last resort on war and on the toil of an excluded
wage-earning proletariat, appeared to have become
clothed with a new and final kind of authority.
Darwinism seemed to the rulers of civilization to
have lifted the veil from life and to have disclosed
to the gaze of the time the self-centred struggle of
the individual ruthlessly pursuing his own interests,
and pursuing them as in the competition of business
to the exclusion of all other conceptions, and to
have revealed this individual as the basal fact of
the world in evolution.

This was the first phase of the effect of Darwin's
conception on civilization. But although Darwinism
was a product of the English-speaking peoples it
was neither in England nor in the United States
that it passed rapidly into the second phase of its
influence. In this phase on the continent of Europe
the extraordinary position was soon reached in

GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 47

which Darwin's theories came to be openly set out in
political and military textbooks as the full justifica-
tion for war and highly organized schemes of national
policy in which the doctrine of Force became the
doctrine of Right, and in which force in a manner
which had not been known for centuries was openly
made the basis of all legal authority.

As the prestige of Darwinism increased and as the
new ideas became entrenched in the handbooks of
popular science and in systems of revolutionary
criticism, it was almost as if the desert and the jungle
had begun to voice themselves in human thought.
The world beheld the champions of force gradu-
ally becoming again in their own right the Super-
men of systems of popular philosophy. In solemn
treatises of social science it saw them emerging as
" efficients." In political science lectures they be-
gan to appear as " we who have the Right because
we have the Power " of systems of national policy.
The doctrine of the supremacy and the omnipotence
of force became the doctrine of absolute Right
expounded as the law of " biological necessity " in
books of state-craft and war-craft, of expanding
military empires. And through it all the world
saw the " right of conquest " becoming justified
and glorified by warlike and military organizations
as civilization had never dared to glorify and justify

48 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

it before. Soon after the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury and onward the history of the West takes on a new
spirit. From this date forward George Peel's terrible
saying that history and homicide are indistinguish-
able terms l becomes a truth pregnant with a mean-
ing which it never possessed before in civilization.

To understand clearly the character of this sur-
prising development of which modern Germany
became the life centre in civilization it is necessary
to glance briefly at Darwin's central thesis. The
truth of Darwin's conception may be compressed
within clear boundaries. It is of great importance
to grasp the characteristic outlines thereof. Darwin
gave to the world the true science of the evolution
of the animal in the past epochs of the world. Dar-
winism is essentially the science of the integration
of the individual efficient in his own interests. " If
A was able to kill B before B killed A, then A sur-
vived. And the race became a race of As, inheriting
A's qualities." 2 This was Bagehot's brief and vivid
summary of the Darwinian doctrine. Darwinism is,
in short, the science of the causes which have made
those who are efficient in the struggle for their own
interests supreme and omnipotent in the world.

Now this doctrine has nothing to do with the

1 The Future of England, p. 142.
1 Physics and Politics, p. 188

GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 49

science of civilization. It is the doctrine of the
efficiency of the animal. It has absolutely nothing
to do with the causes making for collective efficiency
in the social and moral world founded on mind which
is evolving in civilization. Darwinism represents
indeed the very antithesis of the principles of that
social integration which is taking place in civiliza-
tion. The dividing line, moreover, is absolutely
fundamental. For the first principle of evolution
in the world of the efficient animal of Darwinism
is the supremacy and omnipotence therein of in-
dividuals or groups of individuals efficient in their
own interests. The first principle, on the contrary,
in the evolution of the social world of civilization lies
in the subordination of individuals. The ascending
history of the human race is indeed nothing else
than the progressive history of the sacrifice of the
individual efficient for himself to the meaning of
that collective efficiency which is being organized
in civilization gradually merging in the universal.

The progress of humanity has, therefore, over and
above every other feature this meaning. It is the
epic of the vast, tragic, ennobling, immortalizing,
all-conquering ethic of Renunciation. The story of
creation up to and including human savagery is
simply the story of the supremacy in the world of
physical force organized in the life of the efficient

50 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

individual or the efficient group or the efficient
State. But the story of evolution above savagery
is nothing else than the story of the gradual rise
to supremacy in the world of those psychic forces
organized in civilization which are subduing indi-
viduals or aggregations of individuals efficient in then-
own interests to those universal principles which are
making for the limitless efficiency of civilization.

It happens through all this that there has never
been since civilization began any reconciliation
between the morality of the individual efficient
for himself and the morality of evolving civiliza-
tion. There never will be any such reconciliation
to the end of time. The two things are inherently
incompatible. The meaning which underlies all
forms of progress in advanced civilization is that it
represents the great spiritual integration of mind
which has raised the conception of Right to the
plane of the Universal by projecting the sense of
human responsibility outside all theories of limited
interests whatsoever which rest merely on force.
It has made Right independent of and superior
to all interests of the individual, the group or the
State resting on the successful application of Force,
on whatever claim or mission they may be based,
on whatever scale they may be represented, by
whatever force they may be backed.

GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 51

The contrary doctrine that Right rests on the
successful a plication of Force in the individual was
broken when the day of the highwayman passed
in civilization. The organized form of the same
doctrines in the State that no Right is above the
State, and that the State has no standard but that
of "power and expediency" l resting on omnipotent
force, has been the standing challenge to liberty
and progress in every phase of the tremendous
struggles which make the history of civilization.

Now if we take up any of the superficial
philosophies or false systems of social science
of which the world is full, we have the clue at
once to their unsoundness. It may be distin-
guished immediately that they have all one un-
mistakable mark on them. They represent
endeavours to construct the science of evolving
humanity without the subordination of the in-
dividual to the universal, and therefore without the
iron ethic of Renunciation. They are all hopeless
attempts foredoomed to failure, to set out the mere
science of the animal efficient in his own interests
as the science of civilization.

A name may be given to all these sham cults of
civilization. They are all essentially pagan. The
pagan was originally a villager, the worshipper of

1 Bernhardi, Germany and ike Next War, chap. v.

52 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

local and therefore of false gods. He was the anti-
thesis of the universal. The modern definition of
paganism may be put clearly and briefly thus :

The pagan man is the man whose standard of

Right does not extend beyond his own

interests.
The pagan state is the state whose standard

of Right does not extend beyond its own

interests.

The pagan man and the pagan state may confuse
us at the present day by the profession of exemplary
principles or of exemplary standards of culture
from motives of expediency or opportunism in the
midst of the world by which they are surrounded.
But if they have as part of them no standard ot
Right raised to the plane of the Universal and pro-
jected outside their interests, they are essentially
pagan. And systems of religion, systems of ethics
and philosophies are all in whole or in part pagan or
the reverse in this sense, as well as men and states.
Now in the light of these facts it is a matter
of peculiar interest to attempt to follow the vast
effort in the life of the modern West to clothe the
ideas of the great pagan retrogression resting on
Darwinism in the language of science and philo-
sophy, and then to embody them in gigantic schemes
of world politics. They all conform to one type.

GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 53

They all represent historic efforts in one form or
another to present what is essentially Darwin's
science of the individual animal as the science
of civilization. The task is in the nature of things
impossible, for it represents a fundamental con-
fusion of individual efficiency in the animal with
social efficiency in civilization, of the non-moral
with the moral, of the pagan ethics of primitive
man with the advanced ethics of civilization, of the
standards of the jungle with those of evolving
humanity. The elemental extravagances involved
reveal themselves, therefore, at every step, as
almost the whole of civilization is gradually brought
under the influence of these attempts.

It was Prussia first, and then the whole of
Germany, which became the seat of this develop-
ment. The centre of Darwinism in Germany was
in the writings of Haeckel. But Darwin's theories
and Haeckel's ideas were absorbed and utilized by
a most powerful group of authors and men of action
who, from various standpoints, perceived how
closely the Darwinian doctrines of efficiency re-
sembled the doctrines of efficiency resting on
force, in which they had for long endeavoured to
embody their own conceptions of the national policy
of modern Germany. It was from this intellec-
tual ferment that there gradually spread throughout

54 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

civilization a surprising movement the like of which
the human mind will probably never see again.

In watching modern Germany advancing towards
the Armageddon, a psychic centre of particular
interest and significance is in Nietzsche's writings
and in Haeckel's effort to define the ethic of
Darwinism and to compare it with that previously
prevailing in Western civilization. Haeckel's
popularization of Darwin began early, but its
bearing may be best studied in its clearest
form in his Riddle of the Universe. In this effort
it may be observed that all the ideas revolve
round a single fundamental conception. According
to Haeckel the supreme mistake of the Christian
ethic consists in this. It conceives that there
exists in the ordinary man a kind of dualism, some
fundamental principle of opposition, that is to say,
between himself and society, between the good of
himself and the good of the world, between the
individual and universal.

According to Haeckel all this is undiluted non-
sense. There is no place whatever, he tells us, for
anything of the kind in the Darwinian ethic. Man,
in Haeckel's interpretation of Darwinism, is simply
a " social vertebrate." His social duties and his
duties to himself are, therefore, one and the same,
and grow from the same root in the past. The

GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 55

whole matter, in short, is that altruism or the
good of others " is only enlightened egoism " for
the good of oneself. And " this fundamental law
of society, " concludes Haeckel, " is so simple and
so inevitable that one cannot understand how it can
be contradicted in theory or in practice as is done
to-day and has been done for thousands of years." *

This is Haeckel's system of monistic ethics.
What it represents in reality is the standard of
primitive man. There is naturally and as a matter
of course no place in it for that stupendous conflict
between limited interests resting on force and the
interests of the Universal which forms the main
theme of human history.

Thus the categorical imperative of the moral
law which demands by an overwhelming instinct
the sacrifice of self, and which Kant, therefore,
summarizes in the maxim, " Act at all times in
suchwise that the act may hold good as a
universal law," becomes to Haeckel " Kant's
curious idol."1 Similarly, the command of the
Founder of Christianity, " Love your enemies,
bless them that curse you, do good to them that
hate you, and pray for them that despitefully
use you and persecute you," is pronounced by
Haeckel to be "as useless in practice as it is un-

1 The Riddle of the Universe, chap. xix.

56 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

natural/'1 And as for the doctrine that "if any
man will take away thy coat let him have thy cloak
also/' " what in the light of Darwinism," asks Haeckel
in effect, " could be made of such a doctrine in the
midst of the conditions of the modern world ? "

Haeckel's writings gave to the pagan doctrine
of force an extraordinary prestige in the minds of
the millions who read the popular editions of his
works in Germany, in English-speaking lands, and
in other countries. But Haeckel's attempt to
apply Darwinism to civilization was . from the
beginning made in that spirit of compromise which
could not long endure. It was made in that spirit
which distinguished Herbert Spencer's similai
attempt in England, a spirit which has been
described as essentially demoralizing in that it
attempted "to combine the Christian standard of
manners with a materialistic standard of values."
In this it was like the later attempt of the German
General Staff in the Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege
so admirably summarized by Professor Morgan
in his translation. It consisted in " laying down
unimpeachable rules (representing the ethic of
civilization) and then destroying them by excep-
tions (representing the ethic of savagery)."3 It was

1 The Piddle of the Universe, chap. xix.

aFord Madox Hueffer, When Blood is their Argument: an An-
alysis of Prussian Culture, Pt. II. chap. n. § ii. * Op. cit. p. I .

GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 57

Nietzsche who flung to the winds all such futile
attempts at compromise and who first proclaimed
aloud to the world the inner meaning of popular
Darwinism, the true ethic of the great pagan revival
of the modern West.

The permanent significance of Nietzsche in Western
literature springs from a tremendous fact. It is in
Nietzsche's writings that the Western mind first
beholds laid bare with unspeakable fidelity that
overmastering animal soul of the West which repre-
sents the individual efficient in the struggle for
his own interests, of which Darwin gave us the
science. The West was born of force. Its con-
ditions through millenniums of time have been the
product of force. All the characteristic science
of the West is the organized knowledge of force.
Yet the world-shaping tragedy of our times is that
the modern West does not stand for the supremacy
of force. It represents, on the contrary, that
spiritual integration of mind which is making
Right superior to force. The modern West repre-
sents the doom of the doctrine of force in history.
But it is Nietzsche of all the world who has voiced
for us the animal soul of the past as it recognizes
this terrible issue and as it rages against the meaning
of the new world which it feels to be destined to
overwhelm it. There is no event in humanity to

58 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

compare with the drama of the meeting of these
two epochs of human evolution in the life of the
modern West.

There is not one of us in the dark, efficient, and
terrible West who does not feel deep in him the
stir of this soul of the past as he watches Nietzsche's
tragic spirit go forth in modern literature casting
dust to heaven as he curses the advancing armies
of progress. There is no foolish and futile effort
in Nietzsche as there is in Haeckel to identify his
doctrines with the ethic of Christianity, " I impeach
the greatest blasphemy in time — the religion which
has enchained and softened us." These are
Nietzsche's words. And again : " What have we
to do with the herd morality which expresses itself
in modern democracy ? ... It is good for cows,
women, and Englishmen." He turns, therefore, to
voice his soul in the doctrine of the superman —
the animal efficient in the struggle for his own
interests : "A new table I set over you, oh my
brethren. Become hard ; " l " For the best things
belong to us, the best food, the purest sky, the
fairest women, the strongest thoughts. And if
men do not give us these things, we take them." *
Thus do we see the ethic of popular Darwinism
passing towards its embodiment in the politics of

1 The Twilight of the Idols. • Zarathustra.

GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 59

the modern State. Thus do we watch it develop-
ing into those maxims which applied to the national
policy of modern Germany, come in due time to
carry it to the world developments which began in
the opening days of August 1914.

Nietzsche's teachings represented the interpreta-
tion of the popular Darwinism delivered with the
fury and intensity of genius. They fell on unusually
fertile ground in the conditions of modern Germany.
Towards the middle of the nineteenth century the
struggle for constitutionalism was brought to a close
in that country with the collapse of the Saxon
revolution. The policy of Prussia had become the
policy of the sword, and the maxim that " the
destinies of the German people are in the hands
that hold the sword " emerges into open light as
an established principle in the aims of that State.
The incomparable machine of the Prussian army was
used to enforce and to justify the doctrine of force.

Bismarck, in the development of the State policy
of his country, gradually brought into full view in
civilization the working of Nietzsche's conception
that the State founded on successful force is a law
of Right to itself. The idea, inherent in the Dar-
winian conception of progress, that the main business
of the efficient State is to wage war, came to be
formulated at the same time with increasing clear-

60 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

ness and persistence. " We have now agreed/'
concludes Treitschke in one of his most important
lectures, " that war is just and moral, and that the
ideal of eternal peace is both unjust and immoral
and impossible." l

The tendency to exalt, at the expense of society,
the absolute claim of the State thus founded on war,
went hand in hand with this development. It was
put in the most striking manner in a statement
quoted from Treitschke : " I have never in my life
given one thought to my duties to society ; I have
never in my life, by so much as one single thought,
neglected to consider my duty to the Prussian
State." 2 The intellect of Germany under the
lead of those at the head followed suit and set
itself almost as a body to justify and embody in
the State, first in Prussia and then in Germany, the
Darwinian conception of force. " The Seminars of
the German universities," says Professor Morgan,
" were the arsenals that forged the intellectual
weapons of the Prussian hegemony. They all
have this in common — that they are merciless to
the claims of the small States whose existence
seemed to present an obstacle to Prussian aims." a

1 Treitschke : his Life and Works, "Essay on International Law."
1 F. M. Hueffer, When Blood is their Argument, Pt. I. chap. iv.
8 The German War Book, translated by J. H. Morgan. Trans-
lator's Introduction, chap, iv.

GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 01

We have to observe in modern Germany, says
a recent writer, a grim development, " how pro-
fessor after professor, whether merely truculent like
Treitschke or sedate and comparatively mild-spoken
like professors of the school of Ranke and Delbrtick,
have always come nearer and nearer to the doctrine
of force until finally the blinding light of the argu-
ment that the first object of the State is the waging
of war bursts upon the professorial brain." l

It was Darwinism pure and simple, embodied in
the State. " If A was able to kill B before B killed
A, then A survived. And it would become the
destiny of the race to become a race of As inherit-
ing A's qualities." 2 This in actual effect became in
large measure the national policy and the national
idealism of a great people for two generations in our
time. And the theory of Right which accompanied it
was simply that those who held the power of the State
were not bound by any code of morality save that
dictated by the interests of the State thus resting
on successful war.

In all these developments the influence of Nietzsche
on his tune was profound. It exceeded in its own
way even the influence of Treitschke's lectures
and of Wagner's music. Nationalism, militarism,

1 F. M. Hueffer, op. cit., Pt. I. chap. 11. §iv.
* Walter Bagehot, op. cit.

62 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

materialism became the three dominant notes in
the life of modern Germany. After the death of
Bismarck Nietzsche almost took Bismarck's place.
Gradually, as these developments were in progress,
the voices and tendencies which up to the middle
of the nineteenth century had led to the great
democratic movement in the West, and in particular
in Germany, became subdued and muted. Rapidly
from 1860 onward the spirit of the Darwinian
ethic gathered towards ascendancy in the national
politics of Europe. Germany fought Denmark,
Germany fought Austria, Germany fought France.

After 1880 the impulse took on a wider and more
intense world-phase. The Western nations, driven
by the new spirit and in conditions of rivalry in
which they could not help themselves, entered on
the scramble for the world outside of Europe,
engaging in what has been called " the most rapid
and vast career of acquisition that the world had
witnessed since the days of Islam." l Within the
two closing decades of the nineteenth century and
the opening decade of the twentieth century the
leading nations of the West in this period of con-
quest and annexation added to their dominions areas
fifty times as large as that of the United Kingdom.

The spirit underlying these world movements was

1 George Peel, The F^tture of England, p. 126.

GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 68

everywhere the same. The development accom-
panying it was marked by the international phase
so accurately described in the quotation given in the
previous chapter from the Westminster Gazette in
which that journal saw the diplomacy of the leading
European nations openly reverting to the principles
of savagery. The doctrine that Right was ulti-
mately based solely on military strength, and that
military power was the supreme test of fitness and
efficiency amongst civilized nations, was simul-
taneously being rapidly developed in textbooks of
political and military science in Germany : that
the Right of a State turns not on international
morality, but " simply and solely on power and
expediency " ; l that treaties and national engage-
ments ceased to be binding and became " scraps of
paper " when they could no longer be supported
by the sword, were all the culminating steps by
which the doctrine that irresistible force was the
sole test of fitness brought the world to the brink
of the cataclysm which plunged nine hundred millions
of the human race into war in 1914.

The pagan doctrine of force as the supreme test
of efficiency in the world which had come out thus
naked and unabashed in modern Germany and
which was moving towards its organized expression

1 Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War, chap. v.

64 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

in national policy had its springs deep down in the
tendencies of the intellectual life of every leading
Western nation.

There has been nothing in the history of the
human mind in the past, there will probably be
nothing in the history of the human mind in the
future, to compare with the phases of the intellectual
movement which in other countries of the West
contemporaneously accompanied the phases of the
political movement in which the doctrine of the
efficient Darwinian animal became embodied in
the world policy of modern Germany.

Almost every reading mind of the West which
attempted, under the influence of the Darwinian
hypothesis, to apply the doctrine of evolution to
human society became affected in the same way.
Darwin's science of the animal efficient in his own
interest was conceived to be the science of civiliza-
tion itself. In every case the conception gave rise
to some monstrous form of extravagance. In the
military state in Germany where Darwinism from
the beginning took a political direction its cul-
minating phase was found to be in its application
to Weltpolitik. Nietzsche gave Germany the doc-
trine of Darwin's efficient animal in the voice of
his superman. Bernhardi and the military text-
books in due time gave Germany the doctrine of the

GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 65

superman translated into the national policy of the
superstate aiming at world power. Through all
the many phases of the movement there ran the
same dominating note of intensive self-assertion,
the same fundamental conception of the supremacy
of force. " Life exists for Me. All the dim aeons
behind have toiled to produce Me. I am the
Fittest. Give Me My Rights. Stand clear of My
way. I want and I will have."1

All this was in Germany. But in the ultra-
democratic State as represented in England, France,
and the United States the development of Darwin'*
ideas took on different but even more surprising
forms. In the article on Sociology in the current
edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica I have
dealt with some of these phases. As early as 1860,
the year after the publication of Darwin's Origin of
Species, Herbert Spencer published in England his
famous article on the Social Organism. The article
contained the central idea around which Spencer
afterwards constructed his system of Synthetic
Philosophy, the principal books of which have been
translated into every leading language of the West.

Nothing has ever existed in the world or will ever
exist therein like the social organism which Spencer
conceived in this essay. For the characteristic

1 Harold Begbic, op. cit.
5

66 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

feature of the social organism of human society,
as Spencer described it, was that it is an organism
in which the interests of the individuals com-
prising it can never be subordinated to any
supposed interest of the whole. Extraordinary as
the fact may seem, this conception is actually put
forward by Spencer in all seriousness. It is the
leading idea in his system of Synthetic Philosophy.
Yet the mind staggers and boggles at the conception.
For how could there be such a thing as a social
organism while the interests of the individual in it
were supreme over every good of the whole organism !
Even the arrogance of Nietzsche's superman did not
reach that of Spencer's individual as thus conceived.

In ages to come, as men watch the phenomenon
of the passing at this time to gigantic catastrophe
in history of the whole system of the knowledge
of the West which is founded on force, interest
will centre in the extraordinary intellectual position
thus being developed in England by Spencer side
by side with the political development taking place
in Germany.

At the time when Spencer wrote the German
people were being rapidly enveloped in those theories
of the absolute State aiming at world power and
resting on militarism which had been placed on
the anvil by Frederick the Great of Prussia long

GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 67

before Nietzsche voiced the spirit of these theories,
and Haeckel clothed them in the terms of Dar-
winian science. But Spencer was an Ultra-democrat.
He hated militarism. He lived in England. He
therefore applied the Darwinian doctrine of the
efficient animal in his own way.

Yet the result was essentially identical in both
cases. Spencer expressed through the individual
challenging with his rights the good of the whole
social organism the same Darwinian doctrine of the
primitive animal which Haeckel, Bernhardi, and the
German General Staff were seeking to embody in the
policy of military Germany challenging the world.
" The Christian duty of sacrifice for something highei
does not exist for the State, for there is nothing higher
than it in the world's history," said Bernhardi.1
"The Christian duty of sacrifice for something higher
does not exist for the individual/' said Spencer in
effect, " for there is nothing higher than the individual
in the world's history." It was the same voice. It
expressed the same overwhelming intensive self-
assertion of the efficient Darwinian animal aiming
to be supreme and omnipotent in his own interests.
" All the dim aeons behind have toiled to produce
Me. Give Me My Rights. Stand out of My way.
There is nothing in the Universe higher than Me." *

Germany and the Next War, chap. ii. a Harold Begbie, op. cit.

CHAPTER III

THE CULMINATING PHASE OF THE PAGAN
ETHIC IN THE WEST

IN England the development of the pagan
revival progressed with extreme rapidity, and
on every side it continued to give rise to
similar phases of extravagance.

Darwin had kept mainly to the purely biological
aspect of his own subject. He attempted no com-
prehensive or systematic study of social affairs or of
political society. But in a few chapters of the Descent
of Man he raised the veil for a moment, sufficient to
disclose to the world the true nature of the hopeless im-
passe towards which that movement in thought receiv-
ing its impetus from Darwinism, so forcibly described
by Sir William Huggins, was carrying the world.

Now the significance of the true application of the
law of natural selection in society consists in this.
The first step in understanding what lies beyond
Darwinism is to recognize in all its far-reaching
import that the human evolution which is proceeding

in civilization is a social, not an individual integra-
te

THE PAGAN ETHIC 69

tion. The individual of the primitive ages of the
race, when A killed B before B was able to kill A,
and left his descendants, was the individual efficient
in his own interests. He was the individual of whom
Darwin gave us the science, of whom Nietzsche's
superman gave us the voice, of whom the empire
of pagan Rome gave us the culminating stage in
history, and of whom the war textbooks of modern
Germany gave us some of the maxims revived in
terms of the modern military State. But despite
these phases the epoch of this individual represents
an epoch which is passing out of account in human
history. This is the meaning of the modern West.
It is the psychic and spiritual forces governing
the social integration in which the individual is
being subordinated to the universal which have
become the winning forces in evolution.

There is not, however, the slightest fore-glimpse
of the principles of this wider science of evolution
in Darwin. For instance, where in the Descent of
Man Darwin brings us for a moment into touch
with the psychic causes in civilization, he shows no
comprehension of the results as the phenomenology
of a larger principle of natural selection operating
on a higher plane in human society. The sub-
ordinating psychic causes which are upbuilding
civilization seem simply to bewilder Darwin. He

70 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

sees them in civilization only as interfering with
natural selection — that is to say, with the natural
selection of the individual efficient in his own
interests. Natural selection, Darwin complained,
is tending to become inoperative in civilization.
" For/' he continued in a surprising passage, " we
civilized men do our utmost to check the progress of
elimination (of the unfit) : we build asylums for the
imbeciles, the maimed and the sick ; we institute poor
laws, and our medical men exert their utmost skill
to save the life of every one to the last moment." l

Darwin did not proceed to press to practical issues
the conclusions involved in this remarkable and pro-
foundly significant passage. But the effect which
such opinions involved of carrying the standards of
civilization back to those of primitive man and of
eliminating the psychic sense of responsibility to life
from its wider function in civilization was evident.

This inevitable effect inherent in Darwinism
became more and more pronounced as the mili-
tarism of Europe began openly to base itself on
the theories of the Origin of Species. The re-
version to the standards of the jungle as the basis
of natural selection in civilization soon became
clearly visible in all the literature of the modern
military movement in Europe. Thus, in a passage

1 Darwin, Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, chap. v.

THE PAGAN ETHIC 71

quoted by William James in his Varieties of Religious
Experience, this standpoint was put with the utmost
simplicity in an Austrian military textbook. As
the writer viewed the youth of the nations of
civilization being called under conscription to the
standards of war he says of them : " . . . War and
even peace require of the soldier absolutely peculiar
standards of morality. The recruit brings with him
common moral notions of which he must seek
immediately to get rid. For him victory, success,
must be everything . . . the barbaric tendencies
in men come to life again in war, and for war's uses
they are incommensurably good." x

The same appalling practical logic was put later
with more directness in the Kriegsbrauch im
Landkriege, the textbook issued by the German
General Staff for the instruction of German officers.
Professor J. H. Morgan in the Introduction to
his English translation of the book thus summarizes
some of its rules of war in which we see this work
of eliminating the psychic sense of human responsi-
bility to life from its higher function in civiliza-
tion actually being accomplished. " Should they
(the peaceful inhabitants of an invaded country)
be exposed to the fire of their own troops ? Yes :

1 Ftiedens- und Kriegs-moral der Heerc. Quoted by Hamon,
Psychologic dit Militoire Professional, 1895, P* 41*

72 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

it may be indefensible, but its main justification
is that it is successful. Should prisoners of war
be put to death ? It is always ugly, but it is
sometimes expedient. May one hire an assassin,
or corrupt a citizen, or incite an incendiary ?
Certainly : it may not be reputable and honour may
fight shy of it, but the law of war is less touchy.
Should the women and children, the old and the
feeble, be allowed to depart before a bombard-
ment begins ? On the contrary : their presence
is greatly to be desired ; it makes the bombard-
ment all the more effective." l

In England all the first attempts to apply the
Darwinian conceptions to society were carried along
well-marked lines. In the early stages Huxley,
Tyndall, Grant Allen, and a crowd of popular writers
give currency in England to the applications of
Darwinism which Haeckel was voicing in Germany
and Renan in France. But the embodiment of the
Darwinian theories in the policy of the State did
not take place in Great Britain. The movement
as a whole reached in England its high-water mark
in phases of wider extravagance but all of which
preserved their own peculiar characteristics.

1 The German War Book : being " The Usages of War on
Land," issued by the great General Staff of the German Army.
Translated by J. H. Morgan, M.A., Professor of Constitutional
Law, University College, London, p. 2.

THE PAGAN ETHIC 73

One of the last and greatest of Darwin's con-
temporaries in Great Britain was Darwin's relative
Sir Francis Galton. In the opening years of the
twentieth century Galton, who in 1907 was my pre-
decessor in delivering the annual Herbert Spencer
Lecture to the University of Oxford, embodied in the
lecture for that year1 a conception which he had
communicated shortly before to the Sociological
Society in London, for applying Darwinism to the
world on a grand scale. It is a conception which
will assuredly live long in the history of thought.

There is nothing in any literature of the world
quite like this scheme which Galton propounded
for applying the standards of Darwinian efficiency
to humanity. In its own particular way it exceeded
in boldness even that conception developed in
Germany by Clausewitz, Treitschke, Sybel, Von der
Goltz, Bernhardi, and their group, for applying the
standards of the Prussian military caste to civiliza-
tion. Galton's scheme for improving the world
formed the counterpart from the point of view of
English individualism of that which Treitschke
and Bernhardi desired to achieve through the
methods of the Prussian military State. For what
Galton by his method aimed at, although it was
not a type of the State, was nothing less than the

1 Probability, the Foundation of Eugenics.

74 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

scientific breeding on a universal scale of the
Nietzschean superman. There have been those
who have imagined that the greatest revolution in
the history of humanity still lies implicit in Galton's
conception — could it only be applied to the world
by the methods of the German General Staff !

Galton called his new science Eugenics. Its
object, in his own words, was " to deal with all the
influences that improve the inborn qualities of the
race and develop them to the utmost advantage/'1
The author has as clear a view of his requirements
as the German General Staff had of theirs. He
found no difficulty whatever with his standards of
the best specimens of the race. Even the animals
in the Zoological Gardens, he said, might be expected
to know the best specimens of their class. This
remark was the keynote of the scheme. The best
qualities to be bred from would, he intimated,
include those such as health, energy, ability, and
the like; in particular, the aptitudes required to
obtain supremacy in the struggle for success in the
various professions and occupations. It was in
the purest form the Darwinian science of the selec-

1 In connection with the research fellowship in the University
of London, endowed by Galton in 1904 for the promotion of
Eugenics, the subject was defined as "the study of the agencies
under social control that may improve or impair the racial
qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally."

THE PAGAN ETHIC 75

tion of the individual efficient in the fight for his own
interests. For Galton did not propose to be troubled
with any of the difficulties to which codes of ethics
had given rise in the past of the world. He had
as short a way with moral standards as the Kriegs-
brauch im Landkriege. In the scientific breeding of
the race morals, Galton said, would not be con-
sidered. He simply proposed to leave moral standards
out of account altogether as involving, to use his
own words, " too many hopeless difficulties."

This in all its gaunt simplicity wasGalton's proposal.
Its object, it will be observed, was the " scientific
breeding " of humanity. Its method was by " the
improvement of the inborn qualities " of the race.
Almost the first question which comes naturally to
the mind to ask on being confronted with a scheme
so far-reaching as one for the improved breeding of
civilized humanity is : What were Galton's qualifica-
tions in putting forward a proposal which went to
the roots of every ideal involved in civilization ?

As the result of his earlier observations and
researches Galton had been one of the leading
upholders previously of that doctrine recently so
mercilessly dealt with in the history of the world
and now generally discredited, to the effect that the
difference between the higher races of civilization
and the less developed races of men was one of

76 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

marked intellectual inferiority on the part of the
less developed races. In some of Galton's published
researches, as, for instance, those concerning the
mental faculties of uncivilized races in South Africa,1
he went so far as to compare disparagingly the
mental faculties of a highly intelligent race like the
Demaras with those of the dog. In these researches
and subsequent writings Galton seemed to be quite
unconscious of the fact that this assumed great
intellectual superiority of civilized man over the
less developed races had no existence. Like
Darwin, Galton had no clear comprehension as to
what efficiency in civilization really consists in.
He did not see that the superior efficiency of the
man of the advanced races was superior social
efficiency, and that this came to him almost ex-
clusively through the social inheritance, a complex
material and psychic inheritance which did not
necessitate or indicate anything whatever of the
great intellectual superiority which Galton supposed
to be inborn in the advanced races.2

1 Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa.

3 I have dealt with this matter at length in Social Evolution.
Galton subsequently perceived his original belief, as to the
interval between the man of advanced civilization and the
savage being mainly one of inborn mental or intellectual differ-
ence, to be untenable, but in correspondence, and in conversa-
tions I afterwards had with him, I recognized how strongly
he remained to the end of his life under the influence of ideas
associated with his first conception.

THE PAGAN ETHIC 77

Yet it was Gallon, with no higher equipment
of knowledge than thus indicated and the subject
in the past of so misleading an illusion about a
matter so fundamental, who now proposed to enter
upon the stupendous task of reconstructing civiliza-
tion by the scientific breeding of the race ! As might
be expected, Gallon's conception of civilization in
such circumstances was so elementary that there was
no place in it for moral standards or for any of those
problems of the responsibility of the individual for
the universal which have distracted the human mind
since the dawn of knowledge and in which centre all
the meaning and all the laws of the social integra-
tion which humanity is undergoing in civilization.

I was present as one of the members of the
Council at the meeting of the Sociological Society,
in London, at which Gallon first made this scheme
public. I remember the day as one of the landmarks
of my life. It was the point at which the knowledge
first came home to me :

(1) That Darwinism was the sum and flower of
the peculiar science of the West, a compound of
astonishing learning and incomparable ignorance :

(2) That the characteristic knowledge of the West
which had been reduced to science was but the
organized form of the doctrine of the supremacy of
material force :

78 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

(3) That this characteristic science of force could
never become the science of civilization : but that
as embodied in the West, alike in the military State
and in the economic struggle, it was moving through
world-shaking catastrophe to irretrievable bank-
ruptcy in history.

There were present at the meeting in London at
which Galton read his paper many of the repre-
sentative men of the time, politicians, publicists,
professors of many subjects, doctors of many
sciences, authors representing various branches of
literature. The chair was occupied by Professor
Karl Pearson, now holding the Professorship of
Eugenics, which Galton soon after founded in the
University of London. As I walked out into the
Strand from the room in the London School of
Economics in which the meeting had been held I
well remember the state of my mind. I found
myself looking round in the street for the face of
a child to restore me again to the feeling and to
the atmosphere of civilization. For my dominant
mental impression was that never before had I
been so nearly in touch with the mind and with the
standards of primitive man.

It had been rumoured at the meeting that Karl
Pearson, who had presided, was to be Galton's
intellectual heir in carrying out this Eugenic scheme,

THE PAGAN ETHIC 79

and he afterwards accepted the Chair of Eugenics
founded at the University. Karl Pearson had been
one of the ablest of the group of contemporary
evolutionists. To me he had hitherto appeared
to have applied the Darwinian hypothesis to carry
him to horizons in thought far wider than almost
any one of his contemporaries had reached in
England. When I arrived home it was with new
interest, therefore, that I took down from its shelf
his Ethic of Free Thought, the book in which most
of his boldest ideas had been clothed in the language
of science and philosophy.

In the light of Galton's proposals the essays of
the book now presented a most remarkable study.
I followed the mind of the author through the
essays as it rose against the leaders of the great
wars of religion of the West, against the spirit of
" the seething mass of fanaticism " that the epochs
of the past presented to him, against the prejudices,
the beliefs, the creeds, the tortures, the butcheries,
the blood bath3 which represented the long struggle
of the mind of the terrible pagan West, as it en-
countered in the integration of the universal world
something greater than itself which it understood
not. How the author in the name of the intellect
stooped over the record, now in sorrow, anon in
shame, ever in remote superiority. Yet what

80 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

an inexplicable spirit appeared to me now to surge
through the essays. Despite the immaculate
maxims it seemed the voice of Nietzsche's superman.
The Ethic of Free Thought presented itself to me,
as the ethic of Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege was
afterwards to present itself to Professor Morgan.
It laid down unimpeachable rules which repre-
sented the ethic of civilization, and then it destroyed
them by a spirit and exceptions which represented
the ethic of the jungle.

For what did the sum of all the essays in the book
amount to ? It was expressed perhaps in the
clearest terms in the essay entitled the " Moral
Basis of Socialism." Professor Pearson urged
the claims of his socialist ideal with the fervour of
a religious enthusiast. And this was what he con-
ceived the ideal to be. The primary educative
mission of modern socialism was, he said, to preach
afresh the old conception of the State as it pre-
vailed in ancient Greece. The mind staggered
before the atavism of the conception. For has not
the whole meaning of the integration which the
struggle in Western history has represented for
thousands of years consisted in projecting the sense
of human responsibility outside the State as it
existed in the world of ancient Greece ? All the
intervening struggle of the ages for the liberty and

THE PAGAN ETHIC 81

progress of the world has consisted in making
Right independent of and superior to all theories
of the political State on whatever claims they may
be based, by whatever force they may be backed.
Despite the unimpeachable maxims, despite even
the outward appeals to the universal and the
infinite, I saw the book as the book of the mind of
primitive man. I realized it as pagan from cover
to cover.

For not only was the apostle of Eugenics in
England making exactly the same claim for the
ideal embodied in his socialist State that Treitschke,
the apostle of militarism, was making for the ideal
embodied in the military State in modern Germany.
Not only did both ideals represent exactly the same
essentially pagan conception of Right identified
with a limited absolutism, but each was reared on
the same basis of intolerant force. Bernhardi has
given the world the ethic of his supreme military
State. No one stands above it. Its Might is supreme
Right. The whole of its ethic " turns simply and
solely on power and expediency." And so also in
Karl Pearson's ethic of his socialist State. Our
ideal as socialists, he tells us, is this : " Society
embodied in the State." No one stood above this
State also. For " Socialists," said Karl Pearson,

" have to inculcate that spirit which would give
6

82 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

offenders against the State short shrift and the
nearest lamp-post. Every citizen must learn to
say with Louis XIV, ' 1'etat c'est moi ! ' " * These
are his words. Nothing more. From the apostle
of Eugenics in his ideal socialist State short shrift
and the nearest lamp-post for the offender at the
hands of the bystander !

From savagery onwards every excess of the human
mind has tended to be surpassed when it brings
force to support these limited absolutisms of its
own conception. But Karl Pearson seemed to
have outbid all precedents, even those of the
terrible drama of the Anabaptists of Minister, in
his intolerance of offenders against the standards
of his own ideal State. Even the zealots of the
Inquisition gave the right of trial. Even the lynch
law of the backwoods sometimes gave the offender
a jury of his peers.

In the passage quoted above, I have given Pro-
fessor Pearson's exact words. It is necessary thus
to repeat them — ipsissima verba. For it is not
improbable that future generations will find it
difficult to believe that such things could be in our
time. We can imagine that to those who come
after it may appear almost incredible that men
could stand in the modern West and, in the name of

1 The Ethic of Free Thought, p. 307.

THE PAGAN ETHIC 83

culture and science, give currency thus to standards
and conceptions which represent the childhood of the
world and give utterance to them, apparently un-
foreseeing the bankruptcy and catastrophe in
history of the intellectual movement from which
they sprang.

As these manifestations of the great pagan move-
ment in the West ran their due course in Great
Britain, the incidents of the drama on other sides
continued to display the same vast spirit of extrava-
gance. The year before the outbreak of the world
war in 1914, the Bishop of Winchester, reviewing the
outlook in civilization,1 emphasized in a striking
manner and with a high degree of insight the nature
of the principles upon which the characteristic
civilization of the West had been based in history.
The meaning of the movement which had produced
Western civilization the Bishop summarized in a
number of principles which may be briefly reduced
to two, as follows : —

(1) The gradual assertion in the history of the
world of the value, and the equal value, of every
human life.

(2) The gradual rise to supremacy in the history
of the world of the principle of sacrifice and service
over force.

1 Presidential Address. Chnrch Congress, 30 September 1913.

84 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

The Bishop of Winchester upheld the ideal inherent
in these two movements as a touchstone to dis-
tinguish the vitality and permanence of every current
social and political development in civilization. It
was a true view which represented an accurate sum-
mary of the meaning of history, and it embodied
roughly in outline the fundamental law of evolution
which lies at the base of Western civilization.

When with this fact in mind we turn to the
further phases of the Darwinian development the
interest deepens as the movement mounts towards
its culminating phases. The Herbert Spencer
Lecture to the University of Oxford in the year 1912
was delivered by one of the most distinguished of
living exponents of biological evolution — namely,
Mr. William Bateson, until a short time previously
Professor of Biology in the University of Cambridge,
and the leader in England of the movement and
researches arising out of the Mendelian doctrine of
heredity. The title of Mr. Bateson's lecture was
Biological Fact and the Structure of Society. This
lecture possesses a peculiar interest, and its signi-
ficance for the reasons about to be mentioned
exceeds even that of Sir Francis Gal ton's lecture in
the same series just referred to. In Germany the
ruling military class had made the Darwinian
doctrine of the efficient individual as he existed in

THE PAGAN ETHIC 85

primeval times the biological justification of Ger-
many's world policy. It was Bateson who put
forward in England the same doctrine as the bio-
logical justification for casting the whole set of
ideas upon which Western democracy rests upon the
rubbish-heap of time.

Down to the time in which we are living a great
part had been played in the theories of society of
nearly every school of thought in the West by the
doctrine of Altruism — that is to say, of the service
or the love of others as an evolutionary force in civil-
ization. Mr. Bateson proceeded in this lecture to
sweep aside all views of civilization founded on this
conception. They were, he said, biologically false.
The only instinct, he asserted, which is sufficiently
universal to supply the motive for exertion in
civilization is the desire to accumulate property
in the competitive struggle. Other instincts, among
which he puts the altruistic emotions, might, he
said, be strongly developed in some. " But," he con-
tinues, " they are permanent in very few individuals.
They are apt to weaken after adolescence, and to
disappear as middle age supervenes." l

In the light of this biological generalization Mr.
Bateson proceeded with his own remarkable pro-
posals for the improvement and reconstruction of

1 Biological fact and the Structure of Society, p. 26.

86 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

the world. They were proposals which involved a
direct challenge to the most fundamental of all the
principles associated with the life of Western civiliza-
tion. In Social Evolution I had previously summar-
ized the central principle of the world development
which the West represented in the phrase equality
of opportunity}- The phrase as expressing a clearly
defined and fundamental ideal was immediately
taken into currency in British politics, and soon
after into world politics, being permanently regis-
tered as representing an international aim in the
Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1905. It was against
this central ideal underlying all forms of social and
political progress in the West for centuries that Mr.
Bateson' s challenge was principally directed.

The main proposals in his lecture 2 were in
principle reducible to three, which may be briefly
stated as follows : —

(1) Civilization was not founded on altruism.
The only instinct, Mr. Bateson asserted, which is
sufficiently universal to supply the motive for
civilization, and without which the whole com-
munity would slacken and decay, is the desire to
accumulate property.

(2) In civilization so constituted Mr. Bateson

1 Social Evolution, chap. vi. pp. 150-155, etc.
1 Biological Pact and the Structure of Society.

THE PAGAN ETHIC 87

asked for the final rejection of the conception that
all men are equal, and of the demand in politics that
all men shall have equality of opportunity. For
the conception and the demand were, he said,
"founded in natural falsehood." *

(3) Mr. Bateson asserted, therefore, that in
civilization in the future, again to repeat his words,
" the aim of social reform must be, not to abolish
class, but to provide that each individual shall so
far as possible get into the right class and stay
there, and usually his children after him." a

As we regard these proposals carefully they almost
take our breath away. For it will be observed
that what Mr. Bateson demanded in the midst of
one of the oldest and most influential centres of
learning and culture in the West was, in effect,
nothing less than the stultification of the character-
istic principles which have brought the whole
modern world of the civilization of the West into
existence. He demanded in particular, it will be
observed, the stultification of that fundamental
assumption of equality with which the Bishop of
Winchester identifies Western progress and which
underlies every characteristic demand and pro-
gramme of Western democracy. The details with
which Mr. Bateson supplemented his proposals, such
1 op. cit., p. 28. * Op. cit., p. 32.

88 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

as Mendelian segregation rising to the sterilization
of certain classes of criminals, were all in keeping
with the spirit of these two demands.

Now the characteristic mark in history for all
time of the modern Prussian school of militarism
will be recognized to be this. Its Professors gradu-
ally convinced themselves and then a whole people
that the principal business of the State is the making
of war. They took the Darwinian standard of
efficiency as it prevailed in the childhood of the
world, and boldly applied it to politics and war,
imagining this primitive conception to represent
the science of efficiency in civilization. They
returned thereby to the standards of the pagan
spMt of the West, and made force successfully
applied in aggressive war the basis of Right in
civilization. So far all has been clear.

But there was a second and wider conception
involved in this doctrine of war as the principal
business of the State which Treitschke at first and
then the leaders of modern Germany deliberately
adopted. Wars of conquest are but exceptional
incidents in the life of civilization. The second
and more significant conception was that it is
the economic exploitation of the world under
the conditions of modern business and commerce
which constitutes the permanent conditions of war.

THE PAGAN ETHIC 89

What Mr. Bateson did in effect in these circumstances
was to put forward the same biological justification
for aggressive war organized in the economic activities
of civilization as the Prussian military school did for
aggressive war organized in the military activities.
I And in applying this justification Mr. Bateson
proposed to put all the characteristic doctrines of
Western democracy on the scrap-heap.

The practical significance of this departure, it
will be observed, lay in the proposed application
to the world of a more dangerous and more wide-
reaching embodiment of the pagan doctrine of Right
than any that had ever been made before in history.
In the conditions described in the first chapter the
world of the West was a hotbed ready to receive this
extended doctrine of war. Germany had accepted
in full the doctrine that underlying her economic
activities was the permanent state of war. But the
observer had only to regard the leading political issues
in any important country of the West to see that in
all countries alike the organization of the world in
business and commerce was gradually coming to be
treated by all parties as an actual state of war.

It is evident, moreover, that the acceptance by
a strong nation of the view that her economic life
represented a permanent phase of war was bound
to compel other nations to adopt standards in

90 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

which this fact was recognized.1 The same driving
necessity began thus to operate in the economic
world as in the military world under the phase
of universal armaments. In such circumstances a
large and growing section in most of the leading
countries in the West had come to regard the
external shock of nations in military war as only
the last and external phase of the internal form of
the economic and social war.

In recent times it was even to be observed
how the opposition parties in most countries were
ready to accept a modified form of this view. The
dominant note in the programmes of all the popular
and progressive parties in the leading countries of
the West had come to consist in the standing accusa-
tion that governments were the expression of the
war of business interests, that it was the war-
ring overlords of business who controlled national
resources and international policies,2 who created
public opinion, who made and unmade Governments,
who were the real masters of all the resources
and affairs of the people. Modern politics, as the
New York World put it recently in effect, were

1 1 was in close consultation with Mr. Joseph Chamberlain
at the period when he abandoned the traditional free trade
policy of Great Britain and he often discussed this point of view
with me.

• Cf. chapters in Mr. J. A. Hobson's Imperialism.

THE PAGAN ETHIC 91

becoming the wars of interests carried on through
the Government. " Practically all the evils the
people are battling with," it continued, " are pro-
tected by law and buttressed in government." l

It was over this raging battlefield of the
underworld of the economic life of the West,
the underworld where the idealisms of mind
are almost without influence, where all the en-
franchising influences of thousands of years of
civilization struggle against the deep, massive,
primordial instincts of human nature, that Mr.
Bateson unfurled his new standard. And the
affirmation, which in the name of biological science
he proposed to inscribe on it, was that the ruling
principle of civilization was not altruism but the
desire to possess property ; that the conception
that all men are equal must be rejected ; that the
demand that all men should have equality of
opportunity must be finally refused. For they were
all " founded in natural falsehood."

Two years later, before the meeting of the British
Association in Australia, Mr. Bateson further de-
veloped these views.1 He saw civilization existing
as the result of differentiation transmitted through

1 Quoted from Naw York World in Continental edition of Daily
Mail, 19 Jan. 1913.

1 Nature, 20 an«1 27 August 1914.

92 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

individual heredity. His ideal was, therefore, the
revival in civilization of a kind of hereditary caste
system in which every member of society should
be got into his right class and should stay there.
The methods of government in this eugenic civiliza-
tion were apparently to be almost as drastic as
in Professor Pearson's ideal socialist State. Mr.
Bateson proposed to begin comparatively mildly
with the feeble-minded. To use his words, " The
union of such social vermin we should no more
permit than we should allow parasites to breed on
our own bodies." l

It was an astounding spectacle. The absolute
unconsciousness in the mind of the man of science
of the part played by the psychic forces in the evolu-
tion of society and of the causes of efficiency in
civilization could hardly be more strikingly marked.
Mr. Bateson abolished with a stroke not only
the principles of Western civilization — the sense of
responsibility to life, the value, and the equal value,
of every human life — as they were set out by the
Bishop of Winchester. He proceeded, in the frame
of mind in which he was able to speak of a class of
his fellow-creatures as " social vermin/' to wipe out
the very spirit of that sense of responsibility to life
which had created the ethos of the Western world,

1 Nature, 27 August 1914.

THE PAGAN ETHIC 98

which was gradually raising the mind of the West
to the plane of the universal, and which lay behind
all the influence of the liberating ideals of Western
civilization upon humanity.

The mind struggles for a time with the train of
ideas which are suggested. But in this case also
it is the picture of the childhood of the world which
at last holds it against other conceptions. On
reading through these lectures of Mr. Bateson it is
almost as if we saw in imagination the primitive
man of past aeons of time presenting himself before
a congress of civilization, holding again a dripping
head in one hand and an ensanguined spear in the
other, and, entirely unconscious of the meaning of
all the vast struggles for human liberties, demanding
in the name of science the restitution of that primal
law of the jungle by which the fittest to secure
property in the fight survived and transmitted his
qualities, all subsequent social conditions being
denounced as " founded in natural falsehood."

Mr. Bateson was President of the British Associa-
tion for the Advancement of Science at its session
for the year 1914 held in Australia. It was a
fitting climax which awaited this surprising phase
in the history of the Western mind. When Mr.
Bateson and the British Association left England
in the summer of 1914 the world was in a state of

94 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

armed peace. Before they reached Australia the
Armageddon was upon the nations, and the rulers
of the German people and the German Military
Staff were in the midst of the practical application
in the national policy of their country of the ideas
and principles discussed in this chapter. They had
embarked in that great experiment in the science
of social efficiency spoken of by Huxley, where the
subjects are peoples and types of civilization, but
where all deductions and verifications come too
late, and are only in time to be embodied in great
systems of history, of morality, and of religion.1
It was a personal part of this vast climax that Mr.
Bateson should return to his native country in a
ship continuously in fear of the acts of the war in
progress, a war soon to be developed by Germany
along the lines denned and defended in the
Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege into a policy which was
to shock, astonish, and awe the world of civilization.
In following the great pagan revival in the history
of the Western intellect as here described the mind
feels that it indicates that kind of preliminary
elemental phase which separates two epochc of
evolution. It is impossible to believe that the
doctrines discussed in this chapter, put forward in
the name of science under so many different phases in

1 J. H. Huxley, Lay Sermons.

THE PAGAN ETHIC 95

the activities of the West, but always with essentially
the same meaning under all the forms, have any per-
manent place of authority in evolving civilization.

" Western Science," said P. Raman athan,
Solid tor-General of Ceylon, speaking some years
ago of its teaching in relation to the causes of
efficiency in civilization, " is ignorant knowledge." l
It was a saying so daring that the Western mind
merely passed it by. But it is a saying likely to
arrest the thought of the West long into the future.

The revolutionary changes that have taken place
in recent times have left the essentially pagan and
unimaginative mind of the West in a state of
indescribable collapse as regards its higher faculties.
The fighting male of the West, the product of war
long before history has account of him, has turned
in our time, bored beyond the last degree of sus-
tenance, from all the problems of the intellect.
From the blasphemies of his superman ; from those
sterile quests after the nature of the Absolute which
represent the exhausted residuum of mediaevalism ;
from the hopeless efforts of the intellect to hold the
mind of youth at our centres of learning in the West
like those displayed in the appalling records of the
Moral Science Tripos for the last two generations
at Cambridge University, England; from the

1 " The Miscarriage of Life in the West," Hibbert Journal, 7. I.

96 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

cynicisms, the nihilisms, the paradoxes of our
schools of intellectual criticism ; from the vast
libraries created in the name of culture, mausoleums,
houses of the dead, accumulations of books for
which there are no readers, to use Lord Rosebery's
description ; from the futilities of Eugenics,
ignorantly endeavouring to construct a science of
civilization out of the Darwinism of the animal ;
from the sociology of the schools moved to profound
depths of scholarship over the significance of
totemism or the rites associated with the age
of puberty in the savage maiden while remain-
ing utterly unconscious of the significance of the
psychic forces expressing themselves in the great
systems of emotion and idealism, the social meaning
of which envelops the planet ; from the gigantic
problems of his Trusts and Corporations with their
systems of graft and scandals on one continent ;
from the equally gigantic problems of his proletariat
on another ; and then again from the problems of
all the races which he has alternately endeavoured
to enslave, to exploit, and to enfranchise in the other
continents of the world ; from the Churches which
have filled the world with wars of dogma while
remaining unconscious of the greatest dogma of
all, that the system of truth which has superseded
paganism has its living credentials in its meaning

THE PAGAN ETHIC 97

as the science of civilization — from all these the
essential pagan of the West turned in our time to
the gross unimaginative materialism of military and
economic war.

But with the sense of his coming bankruptcy
upon him the moods of atavism in the pagan of the
West are like the moods of Saul. In one phase he
is the being who has created the hell of the Arma-
geddon. In another he is maudlin with the pity
of reaction and babbles of beating his swords into
ploughshares. In one phase he is emancipating
his womankind, representing half the population of
the earth, from the effects of the ages of the rule of
brute force upon her. In another the savageries of
his Schopenhauers, his Nietzsches, and his Weinigers
towards her awake in his soul the fierce animal
delirium of the jungle. In one hemisphere he wags
his head sentimentally to the chorus of Tannhauser.
In another the echoes of his rag-time music move
him to shuddering ecstasy as he hears in them the
iron clang of the mills of force in the world he has
created. In one phase his adventurers accumulate
private fortunes in commerce and industry so vast
that they are reckoned in tens of millions of pounds,
so power compelling that they throw those of the
age of Marcus Licinius Crassus into insignificance.
In another the chief medical officer of the governing
7

98 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

body of the largest and richest city in civilization
reports that of the 172,619 school-children examined
by him in a single year one-half were suffering
from some definite organic defect " resulting from
sheer poverty." * In one phase he is the champion
of his civilization as the universal triumph of mind
and enlightenment. In another, in the highest
intellectual nation of the West, the silent verdict
of the people on the conditions in which they lived
at the outbreak of the world war of 1914 was that
they had gradually ceased to bring into being as
many children as were necessary to the community.

1 Annual Report, 191 :> {London County Council). Cf. Times,
2 April 1912.

PART II

THE BASIS OF INTEGRATING POWER

CHAPTER IV

POWER IN CIVILIZATION RESTS ON
COLLECTIVE EMOTION, NOT ON REASON

IN setting out to write the chapters in this
section and those which follow, I feel that I
am engaging in the presentation in brief
outline of the system of knowledge which must in
the order of nature become the basis of a new type
of civilization. The reason for this conviction
will appear presently ; but it is desirable at this
point to endeavour to get as clear and firm a grasp
as possible of a few fundamental positions which
are involved at the outset.

It will have been noticed in the preceding chapters
dealing with the failure of Western knowledge that
all the leaders of the great pagan revival in the
West have given prominence to one leading idea,
namely, that of inborn heredity as the basis of
the fabric of civilization. For over half a century
this idea has been put forward with great force as
the direct opposite of two conceptions previously
deeply entrenched in the life of the West and both

102 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

inherent in the Christian system of ethics. The
first was the conception of the equality of all men,
fundamental alike in the Christian religion and in
all the ideals of the democratic movement in
Western history. The second was the conception
that the mind of the child in each generation is
like a blank page upon which good or evil training
produces indelible results, this being also a root
conception of Christian ethics.

To both these ideas, basal in Western thought
for centuries, the science which Darwin ex-
pounded ran directly counter. It was based
on struggle resting on inequality. It centred in
inborn heredity. If in the struggle for existence
A was able to kill B before B killed A, then the
race became a race of As inheriting A's qualities.
This was the Darwinian science of evolution in brief.
It was based on inborn heredity. There is, accord-
ingly, no idea more in prominence in all those modern
phases of Western science in which the endeavour
has been to make the Darwinian hypothesis the
basis of a science of civilization than the concep-
tion of the dominant influence of inborn heredity.

It may be noticed how this idea of a fixed and
almost unchangeable heredity for the races and
peoples included in civilization has come in our time
to colour nearly all political and social theories in

POWER IN CIVILIZATION 108

the West. Writers in the newspapers and reviews
of the day continually give it great prominence.
In Great Britain and America, since Herbert
Spencer's social theories began to affect opinion,
those sharing his views have been strongly under
the influence of the idea of inborn heredity as the
controlling factor in civilization. On the continent
of Europe the Conception of Darwinian heredity
has formed the basis of nearly all modern theories
about the relations of the individual to society.
Haeckel made heredity the foundation of his
ethics. Lombroso and his school made heredity
the basis of their characteristic theories about
individual faculties in their relation to society.
The group of writers on political science which most
profoundly influenced the development of modern
Germany in the period before the Great War which
opened in 1914 were deeply influenced by the idea
of heredity. Bernhardi in his pages continually glori-
fies in Darwinian terms the characteristic fighting
heredity of the West. Even Treitschke's essays are
strewn with expressions such as "noble nations,"
" brave races," and with references to the physical
and mental inheritance of the Germanic and other
peoples, all of which, like most of the Darwinian
theories quoted by Bernhardi. imply this conception
of the overruling importance of inborn hereditv.

104 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

The idea that civilization is based on fixed and
permanent heredity in the individual has been in
recent times in a special sense an overwhelming pre-
possession with that large group of modern writers
in all Western lands who have attempted to apply
pure biological conceptions to theories of civiliza-
tion. The assumption that civilization rests on a
great intellectual superiority, imagined as inborn in
civilized man as contrasted with the savage, was the
fundamental preoccupation of Gal ton's mind in his
discussion of the difference between men of the ad-
vanced and the less advanced races. It was the
assumption of a corresponding great intellectual
inferiority inborn in uncivilized man which led him
to his notorious comparison of the mental traits of
the Demara race with those of his dog, in which he
told us that taking the two, the dog and the Demara,
" the comparison reflected no great honour on the
man." 1 In all his eugenic imaginings Galton
remained strongly under the influence of this con-
ception of inborn heredity.

Bateson similarly may be seen to have his mind
fixed in the same direction in his dream of civiliza-
tion relapsing into a kind of caste system, founded
upon inborn faculties. Bagehot had a conception
of inborn heredity permanently in view in his

1 Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa.

POWER IN CIVILIZATION 105

theories of politics. Karl Pearson, whose horizon
is wider than that of Galton, may be distinguished
to be always more or less under the influence of the
same idea of the slow change and comparative
permanence of type in human society. The man
of the study and of the laboratory, whom he con-
siders to be the proper judge in these matters, knows
full well, Pearson tells us, that human society
cannot be changed in a year, scarcely in a hundred
years ; for it is controlled, he points out, by laws
of psychological influence such as temperament,
impulse, and passion relatively so unchangeable
in their direction that " no single man, no single
group of men, no generation of men, can remodel
human society." l

Now one of the first steps necessary for a true
conception of the forces controlling civilization
and, therefore, to a true conception of the possibility
of an entirely new order of civilization, is to under-
stand that most of these assumptions about in-
born heredity as the basis of civilization have
no foundation in fact. They are, on the contrary,
directly in the face of incontrovertible facts of
quite a different significance. The increasing
interval between civilization and savagery does not
depend upon inborn heredity. The science of

1 The Ethic of Free Thought, v.

106 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

civilization has almost nothing to do with the facts
of inborn heredity. So far from civilization being
practical!}' unchangeable or only changeable
through influences operating slowly over long
periods of time, the world can be changed in a brief
space of time. Within the life of a single genera-
tion it can be made to undergo changes so profound,
so revolutionary, so permanent, that it would almost
appear as if human nature itself had been completely
altered in the interval.

The mechanism and the forces, moreover, capable
of producing changes of this nature already exist
in the world. They are to be witnessed at work
on every side of us. The science of the organiza-
tion of this mechanism and of the control of these
forces is the real science of civilization. It repre-
sents, at present, an almost unexplored world of
knowledge. If but one-half the intelligence and
effort which nations have hitherto directed towards
the collective organization of society <for war were
directed towards the study and collective organiza-
tion of society in the light of this knowledge, it
would result in it becoming visible on all hands that
civilization can be altered so radically and so
quickly that the outlook of humanity on nearly
every fundamental matter can be changed in a
single generation.

POWER IN CIVILIZATION 107

Let us see if we can grasp the first outlines of a
position the complete understanding of which will
within a short space in the future be perceived to
have become the first necessity of all governments,
of all reformers, and of all masters of force in
civilization. The mechanism by which limitless
and transforming power is capable of being almost
suddenly embodied in advancing civilization is
absolutely different from that mechanism with
which, until quite recently, it was the almost
universal custom of the world to believe that
human progress was associated.

Germany has been the first country of the West
to bring home to the minds of men, though un-
fortunately only in relation to the atavisms of war,
the fact nevertheless indisputable and of the very
highest significance to civilization, that an entire
nation may be completely altered in character, in
outlook, and in motive in a single generation. A
great number of recent books deal with the subject
from various points of view. But nearly all the
writers agree in the absolutely fundamental and uni-
versal nature of the change which was accomplished
on a whole nation in a brief period. This vast
transformation of a people was practically achieved
in some twenty years, says a writer of experience.1

1 Charles Tower. Changing Germany.

108 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

It was accomplished so thoroughly, says another
well-informed writer, that almost everything
previously included in the type of " German "
disappeared within a few decades. The alteration
which took place in the psychology of the German
peoples the writer describes to be a phenomenon so
vast and so powerful that it permanently influenced
the human mind, while it has been on such a scale
that there is nothing to compare with it in history.1
The suddenness even more than the completeness
of the change is a fact to arrest attention even in
the least observant. Most private persons with
any considerable experience of Germany and the
German people will have been struck with this
feature. One of the closest friends of my youth
for many years was a retired captain of the German
navy, whose type of mind, ideas, and motives ap-
peared to me from practical contact with his sur-
roundings in his own country to be quite usual among
the educated classes in Germany in the days when
he grew to manhood. In the uprising genera-
tion of the German nation of sixty-five millions
there is probably not a single individual of this
type now in existence. The alteration was not
principally a change in individuals in relation to

lCt. F. M. Hueffer. When Blood is their Argument, Pts. II.
and III.

POWER IN CIVILIZATION 109

their interests. It was a change so profoundly
and dynamically affecting the entire German nation
in its attitude to the world that it has already
influenced to an incalculable degree the history of
civilization.

All this, it must be remembered, was accomplished
by a ruling class in Germany almost exclusively
in pursuit of those ideals of war described in the
previous chapter. But, quite apart from the nature
of the ideals involved hi the change, it is the fact
of the change itself, its thoroughness, its com-
pleteness, its universality, and its suddenness,
which are to be noted here as a phenomenon of an
importance of the very first order.

A revolution of a different character which has
taken place under similar circumstances in the
psychology of another nation in almost as brief a
period is even more remarkable. In the Japanese
people the West has beheld an Eastern nation
within the space of less than two generations pass
through the whole interval which separates feudalism
from modern conditions. In this space of time, a
change in general habits, in social and mental
outlook, and in national consciousness, was accom-
plished as by the wand of a conjurer. The new
social inheritance thus almost suddenly acquired
has been so transforming in its effects and has so

110 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

powerfully affected the potentiality of Japan in the
world that in the brief period mentioned results
have been attained absolutely in the face of all
that was previously believed to be possible.

Civilization has seen a people formerly negligible
and regarded as unfit for association with Western
nations attaining almost at a bound an efficiency
in the arts of peace and later in the stern stress of
war which has given them a place of equality as a
great power amongst the leading nations of civiliza-
tion. By collectively submitting themselves with
full intent to a new kind of social inheritance the
Japanese people attained in less than two genera-
tions to a position which it has taken the principal
Occidental nations centuries of stress to reach in
the ordinary process of development.

The historian of the future, looking back, will
perceive that for three centuries there have been
no events in the world to compare in significance
and in the lessons which they bear for the future
with this sudden transformation of modern Japan
and modern Germany. A new science, a new order
of ideas, a new kind of knowledge of which the very
elements are still almost unknown has come within
the vision of civilization.

Some years ago, when I published in Social
Evolution a destructive criticism of Galton's ex-

POWER IN CIVILIZATION 111

amination of the mental faculties of members of
what he imagined to be the lower races, it came as a
kind of revelation to a large number of minds and
even to many minds scientifically trained to learn
that there existed no wide inborn interval of
superiority, intellectual or mental, between even
the foremost races of civilized men and the savage.
The efficiency which civilization possessed over
savagery rested, I asserted, on a basis quite other
than that which had been hitherto almost universally
assumed.

It was in this connexion that I put on record at
the time a prediction which must now be referred
to.1 I ventured then to assert that sooner or later
it would become clear in the actual stress of the
world, that the Western peoples in basing a claim
to supremacy on the assumption that they possessed
any inborn intellectual or other mental superiority
over the less advanced races of men, were building
on a false hope. All the promise of the intellect
in the past in this respect was destined, I foretold,
to end in disillusionment. Civilization rested, it
was asserted, not on the intellect or on the reasoning
processes of mind, but on the psychic inheritance
transmitted from generation to generation and
entirely independent of inborn heredity in the

1 Social Evolution, chap. ix. p. 244 and following.

112 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

individual. All that part of the inheritance of
civilization which consisted of the conquests of the
intellect and of the arts, sciences, and other products
of mind would, I asserted, be rapidly acquired by
the less advanced peoples and would in the future
be utilized with surprising effect against the most
developed races by peoples upon whom they had
previously looked down.

This prediction has been literally fulfilled in the
world since I wrote it. It was made over twenty
years ago, not only before the recent Russo-
Japanese War, but before the war between Japan and
China which preceded it, and at a period when no
Western power had yet dreamed of Japan obtaining
admission to the circle of the great powers of the
world in virtue of her own proved military efficiency
displayed through the acquired art and methods
of Western war. All the science of expanding
civilization in the future is related to the as yet
unexplored principles underlying the changes thus
almost suddenly effected hi the recent history of
Japan, and in the surprising history of modern Ger-
many. We have touched therein only the fringe
of a vast subject, and this only in one phase of it.

It is necessary to get a grasp of the physical basis
of the process in human nature underlying these
events before the reach of it in the future of civiliza-

POWER IN CIVILIZATION 118

tion can be fully distinguished. A zoologist in the
front rank who has carried the purely biological
phase of this subject furthest since I wrote is Sir
Edwin Ray Lankester, F.R.S. In the article on
Zoology in the current edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica this writer has recently remarked with
great emphasis on the significance to civilization
of the mechanism of that kind of social inheritance
which I described in Social Evolution.

Sir Edwin Ray Lankester describes the main fact
with which it is concerned as " a new and unpre-
cedented factor in organic development." All
inquiry in the past has been, he asserts, dominated
by erroneous ideas. The heredity with which
civilization is supremely concerned is not that
which is inborn in the individual. It is the social
inheritance which constitutes the dominant factor
in human progress, this kind of heredity being, to
use Sir Edwin Ray Lankester 's words, " completely
free from the limitations of protoplasmic con-
tinuity. ... It grows and develops," he continues,
" by laws other than those affecting the perishable
bodies of successive generations of mankind," so
that in every generation the child has to begin
with, as it were, a clean slate, the inheritance thus
conveyed exercising " an incomparable influence on

the educable brain."
8

114 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

It must always be remembered there is not inborn
in any one of us any part of the effects either of the
good or of the evil of this collective heredity, includ-
ing its psychic elements. If it were interrupted,
therefore, in the case of society and the inheritance
was not thus conveyed between any two generations
either by teaching or by imitation, the result would
be extraordinary. There would be a sudden breach
in the whole order of civilization. Men would be
born mentally and physically the same, but they
would inherit in themselves no trace and none
of the effects of the past knowledge or training
of society,

This impressive fact is to some extent already
dimly apprehended by the general mind through
the bearings of it being constantly brought under
notice by systems of education. But the contrary
fact has never been grasped by the human mind
in all its significance. If the incoming generation of
men were submitted to a new collective inheritance,
including in particular its psychic elements, they
would take it up as readily as they did the old.
We should then have the surprising spectacle of a
great change in the world, appearing to the observer
as if a fundamental alteration in human nature had
suddenly taken place on a universal scale.

It is to this fact more than to any other in the

POWER IN CIVILIZATION 115

entire domain of human knowledge that the science
of civilization is fundamentally related. All facts
and theories concerned with the inborn qualities of
individuals have an entirely minor significance in
comparison. To obtain control of the mechanism
of this collective heredity which, as we shall see
presently, is principally psychic in its main elements,
is the coming problem of civilization over which
the mind of the world will be engaged for long into
the future.

Now the immense potentiality of this collective
heredity as the cause of efficiency in civilization
is due to two things, one of which carries us con-
siderably beyond the extended horizon of Sir Edwin
Ray Lankester's striking outlook. It is due, in the
first place, to that accumulation of recorded know-
ledge in the social inheritance which this writer
had mainly in view. But it is due, in the second
place, and far more distinctly, to the creation and
transmission as part of the collective heredity of that
psychic element which consists of ideas and idealisms
that rest on emotion, and which are conveyed to
the young under the influence of psychic emotion.
These have a different physical basis in human
nature from the laws of the reasoning process of
mind with which the textbooks of the West have
hitherto been mainly filled. But this psychic

116 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

inheritance in civilization is the most influential
of all elements in the collective heredity. The
importance of it is profound, and far exceeds that of
inborn heredity hi the individual. It is capable of
bringing into existence orders of men permanently
endowed with characters, feelings, standards of
conduct from the influence of which they can
never free themselves, and the distinctive mark of
which is the power of renunciation and sacrifice
which they create in the individual.

In the future it will be seen clearly that all Western
knowledge is passing in our time through a pro-
found revolution. In the past the Western intellect
has been exclusively concentrated on that phe-
nomenon in time which may be described as the
emergence of the efficient individual. The science
of this efficient individual is founded on Reason.
Reason is essentially the knowledge of material
force and not the knowledge of the world as it is.
It is the far-flung science, that is to say, of the
causes which enabled A to kill B before B was able
to kill A in the environment which has prevailed
in the past of the world. The higher controversies
in Western knowledge for half a century past,
in which minds like those of Bergson, Bradley,
James, Balfour, Ward, Schiller, Lange, Lodge,
McTaggart, Tolstoy, McDougall, and a multitude of

POWER IN CIVILIZATION 117

others have taken part, have one clue that runs
through all the various positions developed therein.
They all represent that phase of modern thought in
the West in which the effort is being made to separate
the psychology of the individual integration from the
psychology of the social integration, this last merg-
ing in the universal and the infinite.1 It is with the
laws of the integration of the individual efficient in
the struggle for his own interests that nearly all the
scientific textbooks of the West have hitherto been
filled. From physiology to ethics, from economics
and political science to psychology, this is so. All
this system of knowledge is passing to the rubbish-heap
of time as the science of civilization.

It is in the social integration that man must reach
his highest efficiency. The laws of the social inte-
gration are psychic in character, and they must in
the nature of things control the evolution of the
human mind and all its contents. The laws of
social emotion, as Dr. A. Sutherland2 was the
first clearly to indicate, have a different physi-
cal basis in the human organism from the laws
of mind which express themselves in Reason.
The cause of human progress is psychic emotion.

1 This has been the most striking fact in evidence in the pages
of periodicals like Mind and the Hibbert Journal for a considerable
period.

8 Origin of the Moral Instincts.

118 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

The great secret of the coming age of the world is that
civilization rests not on Reason but on Emotion.

One of the most remarkable results of the con-
centration of the Western mind for ages on the
phenomenon of the emergence of the individual
efficient in his own interests just referred to is our
position in relation to emotion. We know of
emotion mainly only as related to the science of this
efficient animal. In civilization we are constantly
under the necessity of controlling this kind of
emotion in the daily conflict of life. But it has
followed as one of the consequences resulting from
this that a considerable part, even of the educated
world, has acquired the habit of conceiving a
restricted capacity for emotion to be a feature of
advancing civilization. The mistake arises from a
fundamental confusion of ideas. It is the control
of emotion, not the absence of it, which is the mark
of high civilization. Other things being equal, the
higher and more complete the individual or the people,
the higher and more complete the capacity for emotion.

In civilization as it exists around us at present
there is visible on every hand the influence of this
element of psychic emotion transmitted in the
collective inheritance. We get phases of it in the
deep effects of national training and national ethics
on different peoples, directed in the past almost

POWER IN CIVILIZATION 119

solely to the realization of the ideals of war. It is
visible in the influence of ideas, and of standards
of opinion on classes, groups, and unions of men.
But the most striking and permanent results of
psychic emotion thus transmitted in civilization are
visible in the intensive culture of mind and spirit
which forms of belief, and especially the higher
types of religion, are capable of producing on men
and peoples.

With the single exception of gigantic effort devoted
to the national ideal of sacrifice in the cause of
successful war, of which the results in recent history
have been astounding, the world has witnessed no
example in its history of the idealisms of mind
universally imposed through intensive culture on
the youth of civilization in conditions of emotion
and with all the equipment and resources of modern
civilization in the background. The great systems
of religion which have come nearest to realizing
such a conception in the past have not so far even
remotely approached what is possible under modern
conditions of knowledge. We are on the verge of a
new era of civilization, and the people or the type
of civilization which will first succeed in this experi-
ment will obtain control of all the reservoirs of force
in civilization in a manner which has never been
thought possible in the past.

120 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

There is not an existing institution in the world
of civilized humanity which cannot be profoundly
modified or altered, or abolished in a generation.
There is no form or order of government or of the
dominion of force which cannot be removed out of
the world within a generation. There is no ideal
in conformity with the principles of civilization
dreamed of by any dreamer or idealist which cannot
be realized within the lifetime of those around him.
Treitschke, as a young university lecturer, speaking
in 1863, was prophesying further and truer than
he knew when he said there was no ideal which a
living people chose to put before themselves that
they had not the power of realizing in history.1
If only the German people had been free to embody
this teaching in an ideal of civilization, what might
not modern Germany have accomplished in the
world !

» Adolf Hausrath, Life of Treitschke.

CHAPTER V

THE EMOTION OF THE IDEAL IS THE
SUPREME PRINCIPLE OF EFFICIENCY
IN THE COLLECTIVE STRUGGLE OF
THE WORLD

TO get outside the effects of the obsessions of
the past, and to be able to look the world
straight in the face as it exists, is to have the
conviction take possession of the mind with over-
whelming force that the civilization of the West is
as yet scarcely more than glorified savagery. What
has happened in it is that those who have obtained
power have endeavoured in the main to found all
Western institutions on the heredity of the indi-
vidual efficient in the struggle for his own interests.
Taking this inborn heredity coming straight down
from the time when the universal effort was for A
to kill B before B was able to kill A, those who
have prevailed thereby have organized it into what
is called civilization. The result has been in-
evitable. In our international relations, to use the
Hon. George Peel's memorable phrase, Western

122 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

history is synonymous with universal homicide.
And as the scales fall from our eyes we see our econ-
omic systems driven by the same inherent heredity,
not indeed clothed in the euphemisms with which
our textbooks have sought to robe them, but naked,
and rather, as Treitschke described them, the per-
manent types of this business of war in which men
stand continuously facing each other.

Civilization, in short, has not arrived. The
characteristic power of civilization which renders
it irresistible has never been brought into action.
The stupendous potentiality of civilization as dis-
tinct from barbarism consists in its cultural or
collective heredity imposed on the rising generation
under suitable conditions. The most important
element in this, namely, the idealisms of mind and
spirit conveyed to the young of each generation
under the influence of the social passion, is absolutely
limitless in its effect. The power which is repre-
sented thereby is capable of creating a new world
in the lifetime of a generation. It is capable of
sweeping away in a single generation any existing
order of the world. But it has never been seen actu-
ally in being, directed and controlled by civilization.

The recent fitful example of the reach of this
power in the astounding history of modern Germany
is the greatest event in modern history. But it is

THE EMOTION OF THE IDEAL 123

an event in which we have but the record of the
creation and the use of cultural heredity directed
almost exclusively to the ends of war, and to the
fastening on the world of ideals founded on war,
and dependent on war for their maintenance.
Even so directed it has produced an example in
history of organized self-sacrifice so colossal and so
admirable as to appear, to use the words of a
recent American writer, " almost superhuman,"
albeit an example of almost superhuman power so
misdirected as to constitute " one of the most
pathetic events in the history of mankind." l

It is impossible to believe that civilization will
allow the limitless power which it thus possesses
to continue to be misdirected in this manner or to
continue to lie latent. The endeavour to impose
the idealisms of civilization collectively on the
mind of the rising generation on an immense scale,
with deliberation and intent, and with all the
machinery of high organization under conditions
in which the social emotion is profoundly moved is
bound to be made in the future on a great scale.

The processes of the age have become a machinery
for presenting the idealisms of mind to the general
imagination with a hypnotic effect never before
possible. The significance of the new forces has

1 " From an American," Times, n June 1915.

124 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

naturally been felt first and most deeply at the
great centres of the nervous system of civilization
represented by the national life of the leading
countries. But this significance extends far beyond
its relation to the ideals of nationality. Every
institution in civilization is in fore-grips with a new
kind of knowledge, the control of which will become
a matter of life and death to it. It is clearly in
evidence that the science of creating and transmit-
ting public opinion under the influence of collective
emotion is about to become the principal science
of civilization to the mastery of which all govern-
ments and all powerful interests will in the future
address themselves with every resource at their
command.

It represents an enormous advance in knowledge
once to grasp firmly in all its far-reaching import
the fact that the human faculty in which centres
the integration that is taking place in civilization
is not the reasoning process of mind but the emotion
of the ideal. At no distant time it will be seen that
all the principal movements in Western thought
since I published Social Evolution represent the
ever- widening adjustment to this fact of the old
intellectual positions. Whether we watch at our
centres of learning writers like Mr, F. C. S. Schiller
declaring the reasoned quest after absolute truth to

THE EMOTION OF THE IDEAL 125

be no longer an operative ideal,1 or Bergson describ-
ing the characteristic force of the world as that
driving man to extract from himself more than there
is by actual creation,1 or William James declaring
that it is absolutely hopeless to attempt to demon-
strate by purely intellectual processes the nature of
the inner life in us which is nevertheless creating
the world,8 the reach and significance of the process
of change is apparent.

The immature imaginings of the past about the
place of reason in the world will all in time be put
aside. Reason, whether it weighs the planets or
discusses the nature of the Absolute, is but the
mechanism of mind evolved in the past in corre-
spondence to those forces which produced the
individual integration. The individual of the past
has of necessity been the individual efficient in the
struggle for his own interests. But in the social in-
tegration which is proceeding, the eternal law of effi-
ciency cannot be stated in terms of reason. For it
can only be summarized in one word — Sacrifice.

In this stage the law of efficiency is always sacrifice
— that sacrifice of the unit, the capacity for which
in man proceeds from the emotion of the ideal

1 " Infallibility and Toleration," Hibbert Journal, 7. I.

* Hibbert Journal, October 1911.

3 The Varieties of Religious Experience.

126 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

alone. Ihe power of sacrifice and renunciation is
the first and last word in that kind of efficiency
which is deepening in the social era of the race.
Man can only reach his highest power in the social
integration ; and there is no cause in the universe
which is able to render the individual, who is efficient
in the struggle for his own interests, capable of the
principle of sacrifice upon which the social integra-
tion rests, save only the Cause which expresses
itself through the emotion of the ideal. Civiliza-
tion has its origin, has its existence, and has the
cause of its progress in the emotion of the ideal.
It is through this faculty that the human mind
rises to the Universal. It is his capacity for the
emotion of the ideal and not his reasoning mind
which constitutes Man the God-like, and which
separates him from the brutes.

The first remarkable feature of the emotion of
the ideal is that it is an attitude of mind which,
for the deep physiological reasons to be referred to
later, is most highly developed in the child. To
produce the most permanent results — results which
in most cases are ineradicable afterwards — the
emotion of the ideal must always be appealed to
in the mind of the child. One of the most significant
passages in Mr. Bateson's essay dealing with inborn
heredity in relation to society is that in which he recog-

THE EMOTION OF THE IDEAL 127

nizes, while not discussing the full bearing of the fact,
that the altruistic emotions — which, as here stated,
give that capacity for sacrifice upon which civilization
is founded — are most highly developed in the young.
As the inborn heredity of the individual of our exist-
ing civilization develops, "the altruistic emotions,"
Mr. Bateson asserts, tend " to weaken after adoles-
cence and to disappear as middle age supervenes." *
This is a true observation, in which is recorded
a fact, the application of which is of the widest
reach and import in the future of civilization. The
extraordinary intensity of the emotion of the ideal
in the mind of the child, and the part which this
faculty plays in producing that capacity for sacrifice
upon which civilization rests, must always be kept
in view. It is the basal fact in the science of cultural
heredity. Mr. Havelock Ellis repeats Professor
Stanley Hall's saying that "the normal child feels
the heroism of the unaccountable instinct of self-
sacrifice " at a very early age, even " far earlier and
more keenly than it can understand the sublimity
of truth." a The bearing of this fact and its physio-
logical import have only just begun to attract the
attention of science. But knowledge of it has for
long governed the direction of development in the

1 Biological Fact and the Structure of Society.
1 Man and Woman.

128 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

higher movements in art, in religion, and in all great
literatures.

The effect of the conceptions of mind conveyed
to the young by training and example under the
influence of the emotion of the ideal is absolutely
ineradicable. It gives a permanent direction to
character which can never be altered. It creates
in the individual a capacity for sacrifice in the
service of those ideals which rises above self-interest
and which is entirely independent of the reasoning
faculty of the human mind. In recent times the
control of this limitless power through the direction
of the emotion of the ideal in the young has been
seen directed in its most characteristic forms to
national ends. It has given in this connexion the
astonishing examples of sacrifice which have been
witnessed in the great world war that began hi 1914.

Throughout this war the capacity for sacrifice in
men has been exhibited on an unparalleled scale under
the sternest conditions. It has been seen continu-
ously enabling great aggregates of men, amounting
in total to millions, to meet resolutely almost certain
death in massed formation in the service of Germany.
It produced the same examples of sacrifice on a
stupendous scale in the case of other countries
engaged in the war. It gave civilization the example
of millions of men enrolled by Great Britain and her

THE EMOTION OF THE IDEAL 129

peoples by voluntary enlistment going to meet death
in the service of their cause with a cheerful and con-
sidered judgment on a scale which under such con-
ditions is without any precedent in history. But in
all these cases it would be found on inquiry that
the strength of the devotion compelling to sacrifice
for the ideals of nationality owed nothing to the
inborn heredity of the individual, but had its spring
and origin in the first instance in the collective
heredity imposed on the rising generation under
the influence of the emotion of the ideal powerfully
awakened by teaching and example at some stage
in the mind of childhood.

An indirect influence of the capacity for
sacrifice thus created is to be witnessed far
beyond that stage described by Bateson in which
the altruistic emotions tend to weaken and dis-
appear. A powerful effect is to be seen in its
influence on general opinion. For however selfish
the general outlook may become, men still, as
William James has asserted, " tolerate no one who
has no capacity whatever for heroic sacrifice. ... No
matter what a man's frailties otherwise may be, if
he is willing to risk death in the service he has
chosen, the fact consecrates him for ever." l

It lias been already said that the work done by

1 The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture xiv. p. 364.

130 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

Germany in the creation and by the imposition
on the rising generation of the collective idealisms
of h r nationality is the greatest event in modern
history. It is a record, it is true, of immense power
misdirected to atavistic ends. But this fact does
not take from its significance. The true app'iea-
tion of the lesson which it contains has yet to come
within the full vision of civilization. It is exactly
the lesson which I prophesied in the Herbert Sp ncer
Lecture to the University of Oxford in 1908 that
modern Germany had to deliver to the world.1
It has become a lesson which must now, as a matter
O' life and death, be applied by civilization as soon
as it is apprehended. It is, for this reason, of vital
importance to concentrate attention on the mech-
anism of the process as it is to be seen actually in
being.

In that process in modern Germany by which the
psychology of a whole people was changed in a
generation the fundamental fact to be grasped is
that the seat and centre of the vast experiment
throughout the whole period of accomplishment
was in the mind of the young. It was the German
educational system which created the psychology
Which carried modern Germany into the world war
of 1914 with all its far-reaching consequences. The

1 Individualism and After, pp. 30-1.

THE EMOTION OF THE IDEAL 181

giving of definite direction to the German educa-
tional system was, moreover, the work of but a few
persons. It was in the main the achievement of
but two persons — of Adalbert Falk, Prussian Minister
of Education up to 1879, and of the Emperor
William II. In most countries the leaders of great
national movements are looked for amongst the
intellects that have been prominent in the various
national activities and in the national systems of
culture. But hi Germany in this work it was differ-
ent. In Prussia it was to the teachers of the
elementary schools that the State looked first for
support in its attempt to create the idealisms of
German nationalism and to impose them on the
young. After these it looked to the teachers of
the higher schools and then to the university pro-
fessoriate. It was only in the last phase that the
adult mind of the nation was considered.

Soon after his accession the Emperor William II
personally addressed the elementary and upper
school teachers of his realms and laid before them
his ideas as to the necessity of concentrating the
mind of the young on national ideals through the
scheme of education which was immediately after-
wards imposed on the nation. In the address and
in the scheme the idealization of war, the idealiza-
tion of the German nation as resting on war, and

132 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

the idealization of the part played in each by the
House of Hohenzollern occupied a prominent place.
The spirit of this speech and of the measures which
followed it was carried afterwards into every detail
of education by the whole organized power of the
State in Germany.

The effect on the rising generation in Germany of
this auswdrtige Kulturpolitik, which may be trans-
lated to mean in practice the continuous presenta-
tion of national conceptions to the young mind of
Germany under the influence of the emotion of
the ideal, was profound. It is necessary to try
to imagine, however imperfectly, what actually
took place. The ideals which were set up were
continuously impressed by teachers on the mind
of the young of a whole people from the earliest
age. We must get rid of the common and super-
ficial notion that these ideals of German nationality
could be visible to outsiders of other nations as they
were visible to the German people. For the power
of the whole experiment lay in this. The German
system touched the springs of mind at its deepest
psychological centres in always presenting the
national aims closely associated with that con-
ception of sacrifice and duty to which the emotion
of the ideal is inseparably allied in the mind of the
young.

THE EMOTION OF THE IDEAL 133

The leading ideas underlying the German educa-
tional system bore in nearly all their features a
strong resemblance to those propounded earlier
by Mazzini to his countrymen.1 Mazzini's clarion
cry of the ideal re-echoes throughout it. The
bearing, moreover, of Mazzini's profound distinction
that education is addressed through emotion to
the moral faculties in the young and instruction to
the intellectual and that the life of a nation is
always in its education was everywhere apprehended
by the German mind.

It is necessary then to imagine this organized
teaching of the ideal of German nationalism imposed
on the young of the nation in the elementary schools
following the youth of the country into the higher
schools. It is necessary to consider it again follow-
ing the rising generation into the universities at a
more advanced stage. And still later it is necessary
to imagine the whole adult nation with the same
ideals preached to it continuously by officials, by
the organized State, and last of all by the Emperor
at the head of the State.

The higher collective policy of the State in the
final stage was well described in a letter written in
June 1913, a year before the outbreak of the great
war, by Heir von Bethmann-Hollweg to Professor

> On the Duties of Man. IX. " Education."

134 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

Lamprecht of the University of Leipzig,1 urging the
constant support and co-operation of the educated
classes in the work of keeping the national ideals
before the German people. It was particularly
denned with surprising earnestness, simplicity, and
power by the Emperor William II in a long series
of addresses, Rumbering nearly one thousand,
during the first twenty-five years of his reign,
delivered on occasions of nearly every type of
public duty.

The aim of the State throughout this work was
everywhere to orientate public opinion through
the heads of both its spiritual and temporal de-
partments, through the bureaucracy, through the
officers of the army, through the State direction of
the Press, and last of all through the State direc-
tion of the entire trade and industry of the nation,
so as to bring the idealism of the whole people to
a conception of and to a support of the national
policy of modern Germany.

It is the emotion of the ideal that we have in view
through all this stupendous making of history in
modern Germany as it has influenced the world.
It was the conception of duty and the capacity for
sacrifice evoked in the mind of the young at an
early stage through the emotion of the ideal on which

1 " German Ideals," Times, 13 December 1913.

THE EMOTION OF THE IDEAL 135

the whole fabric was based and in which the vitality
of the whole conception lay.

This fact already remarked on as regards the
schools is particularly in evidence in the Emperor's
speeches on almost all matters. In the Emperor's
addresses to the recruits of the army and navy on
the occasions of the annual swearings in and in his
addresses tc the army there was mingled even with
that note of appeal to the primal instinct in man
which on one occasion l drew severe condemnation
from Tolstoy, the continuous note of the neces-
sity for sacrifice, duty, discipline, devotion, iron
obedience in the service of the national ideals. On
wider public occasions side by side with the extra-
ordinary mixture of the ethics of Nietzsche and
Haeckel with the ethics of Christianity it was still the
inculcation of the spirit of the effort and the sacrifice
needful in the service of the national ideals which
constituted the most characteristic note in the
Emperor's addresses — ' To us, the German people,
great ideals are a lasting possession ... the foster-
ing of the ideal is the greatest work of Culture." *

It is impossible to overestimate the influence of
the emotion of the ideal in such a case. It is the
effect of the capacity for sacrifice which it produced

xThe Emperor's Speech, Potsdam, 23 November 1891, on
swearing in recruits.

•Speech, Berlin, 18 December 1901,

136 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

that resounds through the history of modern
Germany. Even as applied therein to the realiza-
tion of the lowest and coarsest aims of war the
effect in organized form is such as to support fully
the description used by the American writer already
quoted of " almost superhuman." If the national
ideals which were placed in the foreground had not
been atavistic and had been in line with the meaning
of evolving civilization it is not too much to say
that there is nothing which modern Germany could
not have accomplished in the world by the means
that were employed.

The conclusion upon which the mind must be
concentrated is that it is inevitable that civilization
will look in future to the emotion of the ideal
employed under such conditions for the accomplish-
ment of its aims. The science of the function of
the emotion of the ideal in the social integration
that is proceeding is nothing more and is nothing
less than the science of efficiency and therefore the
science of all winning causes in civilization. The
immeasurable futility of any other kind of know-
ledge appealing to us as the science of efficiency
in civilization will gradually be borne in with
conviction on the mind of the world. Once we
have grasped the elemental difference between the
cause of efficiency in the individual integration

THE EMOTION OF THE IDEAL 187

resting on self-assertion and the cause of efficiency
in the social integration resting on selflessness, the
fundamental importance of the emotion of the ideal
as a cause of human progress becomes steadily
visible.

It is the principles of the child mind in their
relation to the capacity for sacrifice in the individual
which underlie the ascending curve of efficiency in
every social institution of the race. It is the mind
of the child, before the child passes under the
influence of that inborn heredity of the individual,
efficient in the struggle for the possession of property,
as described with such extraordinary illumination
by Bateson, which constitutes the basal fact upon
which the social integration is being reared.

Every organized force in civilization, from that
of political parties and of the national life of peoples
down to those represented by the vast hidden under-
world of finance which wraps and enfolds all things,
is grasping this fact by the fundamental instinct of
its life — that the emotion of the ideal has become
the first cause in the world to be reckoned with under
modern conditions.

It was the emotion of the ideal, similarly applied
through the collective inheritance imposed by the
nation on the rising generation, and applied so as
to bring into existence the strong sense of duty and

138 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

the capacity for sacrifice with which it is always
intimately allied in the minds of the young, which
created that other utterly unforeseen and incal-
culable phenomenon of the modern world, namely,
the new-born power of Japan. There is still no
Western nation outside of Germany which has so
clearly apprehended the significance in the future
of the fact that the science of the emotion of the
ideal is the science of power in civilization. In all
her recent dealings with China it may be noticed
that behind the more sensational events that
excite the attention of politicians, it is the struggle
of Japan for the mind of the young and for control
of the schools, through which the young of the rising
generation can be influenced under the conditions
desired, which occupies consistently the attention of
the leaders of the Japanese nation.

That the result to be obtained in civilization by
the method of influencing the world through the
social inheritance as here described reduces to in-
significance those possible by any eugenic scheme
whatsoever founded on the inborn heredity of the
individual, is a conclusion which comes to the mind
with great strength of conviction. The prolonged
concentration in the past of the intellect of the West
on the comparatively unimportant part played by
the inborn heredity of the individual in human

THE EMOTJON OF THE IDEAL 189

evolution, instead of on the immense function of
the cultural heredity of society imposed on the
mind of the young of each generation under the
influence of the emotion of the ideal, is one of the
most remarkable, as it is one of the most pregnant,
facts in the history of mankind. It is a cause
which has undoubtedly for long retarded the delayed
development of civilization.

This fact is all the more striking, as there has
been for a long period foreshadowed in the West
in nearly every leading branch of the activities
of the Western mind an instinctive perception of
the true line which human evolution is taking, and
of the importance in the development in civilization
of qualities reaching their highest expression only
hi the mind of the young.

For instance, in science the fact has been on
record that the development of the human face
after childhood into the usual adult maturity,
corresponding to the period wherein Bateson
described the altruistic emotions as tending to
weaken, represents development towards a type
of face which for some unexplained cause is in-
stinctively recognized by the mind as nearer the
apelike in character.

Havelock Ellis, remarking on this fact, speaks of
the type of face which the child represents as appear-

140 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

ing to be for some reason the standard to which
universal civilization is moving.1 In this con-
nexion it has often been remarked, as we shall see
in detail later, that the type of face amongst peoples
of advanced civilization is quite distinctive in its
youthfulness. Progress from savagery to civiliza-
tion is marked by an increasing youthfulness of
appearance amongst typical races in the advance
upwards. Professor Chamberlain in his studies of
the child mind has laid emphasis on a conclusion
bearing in the same direction. The human child, he
considers, acquires a more apelike appearance as
it advances towards the adult stage. When the
individual enters upon that mature stage after
adolescence discussed by Mr. Bateson, in which it
is stated that the altruistic feelings begin to fail
and disappear, there has been lost in him what
Professor Chamberlain calls " the comparative
ultra-human characteristics of his early childhood."
The qualities foreshadowed in the child, he adds in
another chapter, " seem to be those which will one
day be the most valued possession of the race." 2

Again it may be noticed that the instinct that the
qualities which reach their highest development in
the young are related to the highest standards of

1 Man and Woman.

1 A. F. Chamberlain, The Child : a Study in the Evolution of
Alan.

THE EMOTION OF THE IDEAL 141

civilization in the future, is expressed with remark-
able strength and consistency throughout all the
higher phases of Western Art. Every student
who has reached the last meanings of Greek Art
will have come in view sooner or later of the fact
that there was a clear conception of the Greek mind
ever seeking with great force to express itself
through Greek Art. He will have come to the con-
viction that it was in its representations of the
quality of the childlike in the human face that
Greek Art struggled to express its highest content.
In this effort of the Greek genius to reproduce the
content of the child mind in its ^presentations of
the human face, the beholder, in short, is witnessing
nothing less than the sustained attempt of this
surprisingly endowed Western people thus to utter
the soul of the world through the medium of its
art.

It is the note of this struggle which re-echoes
throughout all Western art down to the present
time. The instinctive perception of the superiority
and of the supremacy of the child mind in civiliza-
tion is witnessed in all the higher phases of Western
literature. The conception that genius represents
or is closely allied to the childlike and that the
mark of both is their superior relationship to the
universal permeates all the literature of the West,

142 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

as indeed it does to a lesser degree all the great
literatures of the world. It is a similar note which
characterizes the inner life of all the higher forms of
religion. " Except ye become as little children "
ye cannot enter the higher life or see with the higher
vision is the sustained expression of this fact in the
Christian religion.

The evolutionary bearing of these phenomena
cannot be mistaken. Once there has been grasped
the central significance of the emotion of the ideal
in relation to collective efficiency and of the cir-
cumstance that it is only in the mind of the
child that the emotion of the ideal can be
evoked in the conditions in which it produces
its highest, its most permanent, and its most
transforming results upon the cultural heredity of
civilization, the reach of the facts is evident. A
knowledge of the meaning of such facts is the first
step to the science of power in civilization. For
what we are really watching in the phenomena
described is the gradual emergence into view of
what has become the principal cause of collective
efficiency in the era of the social integration of the
world.

The overmastering and revolutionary effect of the
emotion of the ideal in the mind of the child directed
through the cultural inheritance of civilization

THE EMOTION OF THE IDEAL 143

cannot be better exemplified than by attempting
to imagine it in operation in the most difficult
and extreme example which it is possible to con-
ceive.

The most distant ideal, in the sense of being the
most remote from realization, which the human
mind could possibly have set before itself in the
West for some generations past has been the ideal
of permanent universal peace. The utter remote-
ness of the prospect under existing conditions was
visible to all thinking minds immediately before
the outbreak of the world war in 1914. It was
visible in the spectacle of the armed and arming
nations of civilization getting down to the first
principles of force. But it was apparent also for a
deeper reason through another fact, namely, the
nature of the case for peace which had come to be
presented by pacifists to the world.

In the case for peace, as it had come to be put
before the war which began in 1914, peace was urged
upon civilization, not because it was an object
worthy of the vastest sacrifice in its attainment,
but because it was the sound economic policy of
the nations. War was condemned vehemently, not
because it was the last crime of civilization, but
because it was held to be a great illusion to believe
that it was a more profitable national policy than

144 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

peace. It would of course be quite unfair to imagine
this as the full meaning of the case for peace, for the
spirit if not the form of the propaganda rose far
above this level in most minds. Yet the fact re-
mained that war was denounced essentially not as
war but as the policy which, to use Sir William
Robertson Nicoll's scathing phrase, " would post-
pone the blessed hour of tranquil money getting." *

The inherent hopelessness of attempting to con-
vert a warring world to a policy of universal peace
with such a creed stood revealed to all thinking
minds. For the first credential of every living
movement in civilization is the capacity for sacrifice
which it is able to create, sacrifice at whatever
cost for the ends believed in. Even the creed of
war demanding as it has continuously done the
greatest sacrifice of which human nature is capable
for its cause, was immeasurably nobler and greater
than the creed of peace as thus declared.

Now it is evident that no doctrine of interests
can ever abolish war. In civilization where the
first principle of life is sacrifice any utilitarian creed
of conduct whatsoever founded on the greatest
material interest of the existing individual is always
and essentially what Mr. Arthur Balfour once
luminously defined systems of opinion of this type

1 British Weekly, 3 June 1915.

THE EMOTION OF THE IDEAL 145

to be — parasitic. It may flourish in the midst of
the other life around it, but it has no roots of its
own and it will wilt in the first stress of realism.
Nothing can supersede war in civilization except
some cause strong enough to overwhelm and
control that inborn heredity of the fight in man
which has come down in him from all the. ages
of the past and which has been carried by him
in particular into every institution of Western
civilization.

Can such a cause ever exist in the world ? To
imagine it universally operative between nations
there is no answer but to turn to a cause now
operative between men within the civil law of
civilization.

To the average man it scarcely ever occurs to
imagine the reason why the ordinary law-abiding,
honour-respecting citizen whom he meets in daily
life observes the law of civilization and never
dreams of becoming a swindler or a highwayman.
To the mind which is simply shrewd the overruling
reason seems to be that in civilization a well-
organized system of society resting on law, which
rests in turn on irresistible force, makes such a
course unreasonable by rendering it a venture
foolish and unprofitable in the extreme for any
person to attempt to break the law. That honesty

10

146 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

is the best policy just as peace is urged as the best
policy is regarded as a quite obvious and sufficient
reason for pursuing it.

Yet how utterly wide of the truth such an answer
would be. The ordinary law-abiding citizen does
not break the law and does not become a swindler
or a highwayman. But not for any cause which
rests on any reasoning of this kind. He does not
break the law simply because it is impossible for
him to do so. It would be impossible for him to
do so if there were no self-interest of this nature to
warn him, and no irresistible force to overtake him,
and no organized system of society to punish him.
He cannot break the law, not because he fears
civil punishment, but because he knows beyond doubt
that however successfully he might hope to attempt
it, however great the gain which he might expect
to secure from it — it would be of no use to him.
For he would have lost by the act all that makes
life worth living in losing the internal standard ot
himself which he carries in his mind.

At some stage of his career, in short, the average
individual of civilization whom we meet on every
side of us has passed permanently under the in-
fluence of the emotion of the ideal. It was conveyed
to him by teaching or example through the cultural
inheritance. And he has, thereby, passed irre-

THE EMOTION OF THE IDEAL 147

vocably into another world. He can never free
himself from the influence of that internal standard
which has been set up within him. It will pursue
him to the end. Thompson invoked it as the Hound
of Heaven. " I fled him," he groaned in his
anguish, " down the nights and down the days, I
fled him down the arches of the years, I fled him
down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind/'
But in vain ! Never can the individual escape
the pursuer, never can he revert to be the man
he would otherwise have become. Even the
lowest and meanest individual is in such circum-
stances capable of the most surprising degree of
sacrifice before he will prove entirely unfaithful to
that unseen internal standard which he carries in
his inner mind.

This miracle takes place around us in the world
on a universal scale in every generation. There is
no way the human mind can conceive in which war
can be abolished amongst nations except by a
similar miracle. Universal peace can only be
secured in one way — by raising the mind of civiliza-
tion, through the emotion of the ideal conveyed to
the rising generation by the collective inheritance,
to a plane where the barbarism of war would be
so abhorrent to it that the degradation of engaging
in it would take away from a people that principal

148 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

motive of self-respect which makes life worth
living.

Given clear vision in the general mind, this cultural
inheritance, utterly impossible as it might seem, could
be imposed on civilization in a single generation.
Only in a condition of the world in which such a
collective inheritance would be imposed on the
mind of each generation is it possible to conceive
international law ever becoming endowed with the
same irresistible authority among nations as the
civil law now possesses amongst men. Only in
such circumstances is it possible to conceive material
force reduced to that legitimate function among
nations which it now occupies in civil life, namely,
the protection under the direction of civilization of
the higher and more developed standards of the
race against what would then become the criminal
standards of the less-evolved societies of men.

It is evident on reflection that there is no goal
to which the emotion of the ideal thus directed
is not capable of carrying the human mind. Fit-
fully and ignorantly as it has been employed in the
past, it is the cause which has been behind all the
progress of the world. It is capable of accomplish-
ing any purpose to which it may be steadily directed
over long periods of time. It is the nature of the
inner vision which it brings into being, that it leaves

THE EMOTION OF THE IDEAL 149

the possessor never satisfied with the world as it
is, and that it drives him through every degree of
effort to endeavour to realize his ideal. Evoked
under suitable conditions in the mind of the young,
it is able to render the successive generations of
men upon whom it acts fixed of purpose, capable
of the most surprising labours, and sufficient to
otherwise impossible measures of self-subordination
and self-sacrifice.

It is in this cause of the emotion of the ideal
that we have undoubtedly the springs of all power
in the modern conditions of the world. It is no
exaggeration but a sober statement of fact to say
that it is capable of sweeping out of civilization in
a single generation any institution, or any order of
society, or any inheritance of the past. Although
it has never been organized in the science of civiliza-
tion on a vast scale in modern conditions it has been
the cause which every leader of men has employed
in the past. Every deep-seeing mind of the race —
from the founders of its first religions, from Plato
in his groping after the meaning of the soul in the
Phaedrus, from the prophets of Hebraism and
the leaders of Christianity down to the seers of the
current age— has felt the illimitable significance of
the emotion of the ideal in the development of the
world. It is the characteristic cause of the social

150 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

integration, the cause which Mr. Compton Leith
attempted to define to us in Sirenica when he
described it as a passion more powerful in man than
any animal desire.

The science of this Cause is the science of power
in civilization. The manner in which it con-
structively works in the individual mind is well
described by James in his Text Book of Psychology,
although he did not touch those wider collective
aspects to be discussed later in Chapter IX.1 A
leader-writer in the Times 2 recently accurately
described the emotion of the ideal, when he spoke
of it as giving that inward call in the human
mind under the influence of which every human
institution has the power of prophesying to us its
finer self so as to make us for ever discontented
with its present state.

Under this influence the human mind rises
permanently above all reasoned theories of utili-
tarian conduct. It is thus that the higher religious
beliefs of the world have permanently influenced
successive generations of men to seek to reach those
apparently unattainable inward ideals of perfec-
tion which it is characteristic of every living religion
that it sets before its adherents. It is thus that
Professor GDbert Murray saw the Greek mind in

1 See p. 227. 3 Times, 25 October 1913.

THE EMOTION OF THE IDEAL 151

the development of the Greek epic endeavouring
to cast off in history the brute inheritance of the
past of the race.1 It is thus we behold the passion
of the Absolute in the soul of the poet and the
artist challenging the world for an ideal which has
never yet been realized.

Every mind of the race possessing the vision of
genius has at some moment felt thus the illimitable
superiority of the emotion of the ideal to every
other human quality. "It is not by anything
written since the beginning in textbooks of social
science that the world has advanced," said Mr.
H. G. Wells on one occasion to the writer. " The
human mind has always accomplished progress by
its construction of Utopias." This is a true saying.
It has been the emotion of the ideal which has
brought to the harvest of action the souls of all the
leaders of all the causes which have been since the
world began. How to organize this illimitable
Cause under the conditions of the modern world
is the problem before the human spirit. The master
fact of the social integration is that the science of
power in civilization is the science of the passion
for the ideal. The passion for the ideal is the
passion of perfection, which is the passion for God.

1 Rise of the Greek Ebic.

CHAPTER VI

THE STUPENDOUS POSITION IN
THE WEST

IN the vast problems with which the Western
mind is struggling in history there are thus,
it will be seen, two distinct but absolutely
opposing sides. For centuries past the attention
of the Western intellect has been concentrated
on the forces on one side only of this problem.
From time immemorial the dominant theme of the
West has been everywhere the same — the activities
of the individual successful in the struggle for his
own interests. It is the science of these activi-
ties, the heredity of this individual, the laws of
this struggle, which constitute the principal sum
of Western knowledge and which have contributed
the main elements of Western history. The era
of evolution which this development represents is
the era of the integration of the individual. And
Darwin, and Darwin only, is the true exponent of
the natural laws of the phase in human history in
which it culminates.

POSITION IN THE WEST 158

On the other side of the picture there is now the
surprising opposing phenomenon in the West of the
gathering of the forces which represent the superses-
sion or the negation of every one of the ruling prin-
ciples of this era of the past. For the goal towards
which the face of civilization is set is not the individ-
ual integration but the social integration. It is in the
social integration that the soul of the world is being
brought to the birth. And the laws of the social
integration are not the laws of the individual in-
tegration. It is not in the heredity inborn in
civilized man, so accurately described by Bateson,
but in the immeasurably more important cultural
heredity imposed on civilized man by civilization
itself through the action of the emotion of the ideal
on the young of each generation that we have the
cause of efficiency and the seat of power in the
future of the world.

This is the basal fact which underlies all phases
of the life of the West. The powerful and universal
interests of civilization are already instinctively
conscious of it. They may be observed on every
side staging themselves, often with the strangest
Caliban-like movements, into the particular atti-
tudes which represent this knowledge. Through-
out the West all institutions in which power is
centred, from the military empires to international

154 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

organizations of finance, feel themselves to be
envisaged with conditions wherein the past has
ceased to be a guide to them. Absorbed in the
seething struggle of the time they know by a sure
instinct of their life that the emotion of the ideal
in the general mind is a cause of the first magnitude
to be reckoned with in the future. But the fact
which has to be noticed, standing out above other
phenomena, is that the interests which have
hitherto ruled in the West do not understand the
function of the emotion of the ideal, and are
proving themselves unable to reckon with it. They
are like organisms in an environment to which
they have no developed organs of correspondence.
In the marshalling of forces in the present con-
ditions of the West it may be observed that the
stake for which nearly all the desperately in earnest
combatants are playing in the last resort is to win
to their side and to organize in their interests the
emotion of the ideal in the general mind. Yet
there is nothing within the range of human ex-
perience to compare with the actual fact of the
failure throughout the West to employ in the cause
of civilization the emotion of the ideal in any of its
forms. The American writer already quoted re-
garded the attempt made to direct the mind of the
German people for two generations to support the

POSITION IN THE WEST 155

ideals which resulted in the world war of 1914 as
one of the most pathetic instances in the history of
mankind of colossal power misconceived and mis-
directed. But the full truth goes much further
than this. The Western mind has, in reality, almost
completely missed in every form the employment
in the service of civilization of the emotion of the
ideal. And where it has hitherto sought to employ
this illimitable cause it has hitherto only directed it
to some aim so essentially barbarous and monstrous
in conception that the effort has been fore-doomed
from the outset to failure.

What is the explanation of this strange and
stupendous position in the West ? The emotion of
the ideal when directed by civilization is a cause
so potent to transform the world that there is
practically nothing which cannot be achieved
through it, even, as we have seen, to the complete
altering of the psychology of a people in a single
generation. It is the cause in the function of
which the whole social integration centres. Why
then has the mind of the West so completely missed
or misconceived this function ? Why should a
cultured mind of the East strike a note which rings
true in describing Western science as no more than
ignorant knowledge ? Why after centuries of in-
dustrial progress should we have still throughout

156 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

the West the economic system, untouched by the
slightest breath of collective idealism, against which
Marx declared the social war or against which
a President of the United States formulated the
terrible indictment that it is only a struggle for
interests, of which the law is, " Let everyone look
out for himself : let every generation look out
for itself : while we reared giant machinery which
made it impossible for any but those who stood at
the levers of control to have a chance to look out
for themselves " ? l Above all, why in the single
instance in which the West has hitherto grasped
the conception of employing the emotion of the
ideal on a large scale towards a collective aim,
namely, in organizing nations for war, has it hitherto
only directed it to results so atavistic and so de-
vastating that for a thousand years Western civiliza-
tion has rendered universal history synonymous
with universal homicide ?

Now if we regard the history of the West in the
past, the first fact which stands out before the
imagination is the overwhelming and dominating
influence of the heredity of the fight in all Western
peoples. The peoples of the West represent, it
has been already said, the largest, the most intense,

1 " Inaugural Address of President Dr. Woodrow Wilson,
1913," Times, $ March 1913.

POSITION IN THE WEST 157

and most prolonged process of military selection in
the world. For thousands of years before the dawn
of history the West has been the seat of the highest
expression of force representing the highest ex-
pression of the individual efficient in the fight for
his own interests. The consequences of this fact
are felt to-day throughout every fibre of Western
civilization. It is the qualities of the fight (the
qualities, that is to say, dominant in the age of
evolution when the universal effort of the efficient
individual of the race was for A to endeavour to
kill B before B was able to kill A) which survive in
overwhelming strength in all Western institutions.

If we turn now and regard the collective attempts
made in the history of the West to employ the
emotion of the ideal collectively as a creative and
transforming cause in relation to the cultural inherit-
ance of civilization, the spectacle which is presented
in these conditions has most remarkable features.

By far the greatest attempt hitherto made by the
West to apply the emotion of the ideal to the
cultural inheritance of civilization has been made
through Christianity. In this religion the social
passion transfigures and transcends all other emotions.
The sanction for sacrifice is the greatest that can be
conceived. Christianity was accepted by the West,
and has been for centuries taught by the West

158 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

throughout the world, as the religion of universal
peace. It is essentially, among all religions, the
religion of brotherhood, of love, of goodwill among
men. It proclaims these conditions uncompro-
misingly as universal, as operative beyond the
boundaries of all creeds, and as extending even to
enemies. It recognizes neither race nor colour nor
nationality in the presence of the all-subordinat-
ing ideals which it uplifts. The essence of these
ideals, as it was recently described with great
insight and accuracy in a leading article in the
Times, is the fact of what was apparently the most
complete and terrible of world failures becoming,
because of that apparent failure and only through
it, the most incredible triumph over all the powers
of the world.1

Yet the result, if it could only be seen by a mind
absolutely free from the prepossessions in which we
are steeped, is one which would stagger the imagina-
tion. The terrible dominating heredity of the fight
inborn in the West has made of this ideal through-
out history a cause of blood and war and of world-
embracing conflict. The unfolding of the Christian
religion in the West has been a record of lighting
and slaughter aiming at worldly triumph which is
absolutely unparalleled in any other phase of the

1 Times, 21 March 1913.

POSITION IN THE WEST 159

history of the race. In all the developments in
which we see the West endeavouring to present
to the human mind the tremendous ideals of the
Christian religion, one aim seems almost invariably
at some stage to become dominant in the fighting
mind of those who have held power in the West.
In the development of its churches, of its creeds,
of its nationalities, of its theories of the State in
relation to civilization, the West has continuously
made interpretations of the interest or of the aims
of the Christian religion, or of some system of
national policy proceeding from them, the occasion
for entrenching itself in absolutisms always resting
on force, always organized by force, and always
aiming directly or indirectly to impose themselves
by force on other people.

The principal theme of the history of the West
is the theme of these universal wars of slaughter
carried on by nations and peoples in the name of
the principles of the religion of universal peace. In
these conflicts, despite all appearances to the con-
trary, right, truth, and justice have been almost
without exception, just as in the pagan world, made
to rest in the last resort on successful force. The
combatants on each side proclaim the principles of
Christianity to be part of their cause. And after
their victories they carry the battle-stained banners

160 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

of their wars even into the churches and temples
of the Christian religion, exactly in the manner of
the pagan systems of old, in which truth and
right were no more than local expressions of suc-
cessful force. Western civilization throughout
history has professed to be the civilization founded
on Christianity. Yet almost every development of
the West has been based on war, and has taken
place with the menace of war or the fact of war
accompanying and pervading it.

The terrible individual heredity of the fighting
male of the West is so blinding to the mind in all its
effects that the violent contradictions of standards
which it provokes mostly pass absolutely unnoticed.
Men of culture, and even the actual leaders and
teachers of Christianity, seem quite unconscious of
the spirit of a contradiction which in actual fact ex-
ceeds anything that has been witnessed in the world
under any other standards. The spectacle of the West,
for more than a thousand years under the influence
of the inborn heredity of the fight in its ruling
classes, devastating the world with war in the name
of the religion of universal peace, will beyond doubt
strike the mind of the world in the future as pro-
bably the most monstrous phenomenon in the
history of humanity.

The spirit of the fight which accompanies and

POSITION IN THE WEST 161

produces this contradiction pervades all phases of
Western life, political and economic alike. It has
sterilized for centuries every attempt to apply the
emotion of the ideal in the service jof civilization.
Any detached mind which takes its way through
the notable charters, speeches, bulls, greater State
documents, and social pronouncements in which the
vital decisions of the West have been put on record,
will receive this conviction with overwhelming
strength. The influence, moreover, of the blighting
cause which has prevented the West from utilizing
the function of the emotion of the ideal in the
service of civilization has never been more powerful
and more all-pervading than in the time in which we
are living.

For two generations past the dominant feature of
the history of the West has been nothing else than
the struggle of the comparatively small class who
have held military power in modern Germany against
the soul of the world. History has produced no
more striking set of documents than those in which
the phases of this gigantic conflict are recorded.
And there are no more characteristic documents in
this collection than the public utterances made during
his reign of the Emperor William II. It would be
impossible to have in evidence in more impressive

form than in these addresses the clash of the stand-
ii

162 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

ards of two epochs of time as it existed in the mind
of the sovereign who more than any single individual
held military power concentrated in his hand, and
who at the same time grasped even in the midst of
the struggle the overwhelming collective significance
of the emotion of the ideal in the future of the
world.

For instance, we witness this Western ruler on his
accession to the throne in 1888 addressing his people
as a Christian sovereign,1 extolling the acts " born
of Christian humility," and vowing to God "to be
a righteous and gentle Prince." We turn back a
few pages, and then behold him almost simultane-
ously addressing the army. The reader seems to
live in another world. Instantly the army is placed
before the nation. The heredity of another epoch
of time seems to dominate every thought and utter-
ance. In the address to the army we behold force
as the ultimate fact of the world. It is the depend-
ence of the Emperor's ancestors on the army which
is emphasized as the vital and significant fact in the
history of the State. " So we are bound together,"
the address continues, " I and the army — so are we

1 In this and the references to the Emperor's speeches which
immediately follow, the text quoted is that in the translation of
Christian Gauss, Professor of Modern Languages, Princeton
University, who has dealt only with the speeches which he
states to have received official or semi-official sanction.

POSITION IN THE WEST 163

born for one another . . . you are now about to
swear to me the oath of fidelity and obedience, and
1 vow that I shall ever be mindful of the fact that
the eyes of my forefathers look down upon me from
that other world, and that I one day shall have to
render up to them an account of the fame and the
honour of the army." 1

In the spirit of this extraordinary document the
atmosphere of the modern West falls away from us
as if it had never existed. The reader would experi-
ence no surprise if, unconscious of its historical
associations, he were informed that it was the record
of a speech of some ruler of men to his army made
anywhere on this planet ten thousand years ago.

This conflict of standards in which the Western
heredity of the fight in the individual struggles with
and at times completely dominates the spirit of the
Christian religion is visible continuously in almost
every page of this notable record. Again and again
in the Emperor's addresses throughout his reign
the spirit of the Christian religion appears 'to be
uppermost. The standards of Christianity are held
high before the German nation as ideals. His
soldiers, he tells them, as in the address on ad-
ministering the oath to recruits in Berlin in 1897,
must be good Christians. But ever and again it
1 op. tit. • op. ctt

164 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

is as if we were ushered suddenly into another
world. In the address at Potsdam in 1891, when
the feeling against socialists ran high, these same
Christian soldiers were told that " more and more
unbelief and discontent raise their heads in the
Fatherland, and it may come to pass that you will
have to shoot down or stab your own relatives and
brothers. Then seal your loyalty with your heart's
blood ! " l This was the pronouncement which
roused Tolstoy to describe as an " abyss of de-
gradation " the condition which the recruits reached
when they promised obedience. And he called
the world to witness the paralysing self-contradic-
tion and self-stultification of the West, when " men
— Christians, liberals, cultured men of our time, all
of them — are not only not provoked by this insult,
but do not even notice it." 2

The heredity of the fight allied to uncontrolled
power in the mind of the West is capable of pro-
ducing results so extreme that without the facts in
evidence they could scarcely have been conceived.
In his address at Bremen in March 1905 on the
mission of Germany, the Emperor put aside on
behalf of the German nation all dreams of empty
world empire. " I have made a vow, " he continued,
*' never to strive for an empty world dominion.
1 op. cit. » op. dt.

POSITION IN THE WEST 165

For what has become of the so-called world empires ?
Alexander the Great, Napoleon I — all the great
warriors — have swum in blood. . . . The world
empire of which I have dreamed shall consist in
this, that a newly-created German empire shall first
of all enjoy on all sides the most absolute confidence
as a quiet, honourable, and peaceful neighbour ;
and that ... it shall not be founded upon ac-
quisitions won with the sword, but upon the mutual
trust of the nations who are striving for the same
goal." *

This pronouncement in which we seem to see the
spirit of Christianity uppermost must be kept in view
to gauge to the full the extent of the position of self-
stultification in which the West is locked. For it
proceeded, it must be remembered, from the absolute
ruler of the nation which was compelled by its ruling
classes to play Germany's part immediately after in
the world war of 1914, with all its consequences to
neighbouring States and to the whole world ; the
State whose diplomacy and policy was being almost
at the same time defined by its military writers like
Von Bernhardi as resting not on " the most absolute
confidence on all sides," but, as it was frankly
expressed in Bernhardi's words, " simply and solely
on power and expediency." It was the utterance,
» op. cii.

166 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

moreover, of the supreme military head of the
nation, whose General Military Staff issued soon
after for the instruction of German officers the
Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege, in which every ethic of
the German State at war is made to turn similarly
to power and expediency applied in the most
terrible conditions of war.

For to quote again Professor J. H. Morgan's sum-
mary of some of the Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege rules
of war : " Should they (the peaceful inhabitants of
an invaded country) be exposed to the fire of their
own troops ? Yes : it may be indefensible, but its
main justification is that it is successful. Should
prisoners of war be put to death ? It is always
ugly, but it is sometimes expedient. May one hire
an assassin, or corrupt a citizen, or incite an in-
cendiary ? Certainly : it may not be reputable
and honour may fight shy of it, but the law of war
is less touchy. Should the women and children,
the old and the feeble, be allowed to depart before
a bombardment begins ? On the contrary, their
presence is greatly to be desired ; it makes the
bombardment all the more effective. " l

In all this picture of the illimitable genius of
humanity directed thus to monstrous ends, a feature
upon which special attention has to be fixed is the

1 Vide p. 71.

POSITION IN THE WEST 167

effect of the concentration of power in a few hands.
The fact has great significance in the future of
democracy. For it is in such conditions of power,
even where they prevail in institutions outwardly
representative in character, that the primitive in-
born heredity of the fight in the individual struggles
with and, in the end, completely dominates the
cultural heredity which is imposed on the individual
by civilization.

After Christianity, nationality has been the
principal institution through which the West has
sought to apply the emotion of the ideal on a col-
lective scale in the service of civilization. But the
inborn heredity of the fight in vast strength has
everywhere throughout the West carried the ex-
pressions of nationality into similar forms of
combativeness.

In the result we see nearly every function of
nationality amongst Western peoples diverted, just
as in the pagan world, to some expression of ex-
clusiveness, with the ultimate fact of war in the
background. The appeal to the emotion of the
ideal through nationality in the West has, in short,
ever been an appeal to the instinct of combative-
ness, and nearly always with the conception of war
in the background. Every living nation idealizes
itself. But throughout the West the idealization

168 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

of a people through nationality has almost invari-
ably taken the form of idealization in contrast to,
or in opposition to, some other people or nation.
Western history displays an ascending curve of
slaughter as it rises to the Armageddon of 1914
which furnishes an example of the instinct of
combativeness expressing itself through nationality
that would be absolutely incredible if we were not
familiarized with it and if we had received it as the
record of some savage order of the world.

Even within national frontiers the influence of
this heredity of the fight pervades all forms of the
national consciousness of the Western races. When
we see a leader like Mazzini dreaming of the high
ideals of the Italian nation in its relations to the
wider fellowship of humanity, we behold him driven
by necessity inherent in his environment still
thinking and reasoning in terms of combativeness
and force.

" What we have to do to establish the new order,'*
he tells his fellow-countrymen, " is to overthrow by
force the brute force which opposes itself to-day to
every attempt at improvement." 1 And what we
see Mazzini thinking in Italy in the first half of the
nineteenth century is precisely what the West-
minster Gazette sees the leaders of democracy thinking

1 On the Duties of Man, I. "To the Italian Working Man."

POSITION IN THE WEST 169

nearly a century later in England when it deplores
the fact that the internal politics of the British
nation are becoming " battles rather than delibera-
tions, and that it has become in our time" the practice
of all minorities " to threaten to carry on every
controversy by violent and extra constitutional
means even when Parliament has decided against
them."

Nor is there any essential change in the note of
all-pervading combativeness when the horizon of
that class-consciousness which expresses itself
externally and internally in nationalism extends
into organizations world- wide in their aims. The
principal opponents in Germany against whom the
extreme sentiments of the speech of the Emperor
William II at Potsdam, already quoted, were sup-
posed to be directed, were the socialists who followed
Karl Marx. But we have only to read with insight
to see that in the pages of Marx's Kapital, as in the
Emperor's addresses, the distinctive fact is that we
are in the presence of the same furious heredity of
the fight. It is only the conditions which have
changed. In Marx the national war has become the
social war, and the frontiers of Marx's Fatherland
have become extended to those of international
socialism. But we are still only in the presence
of the primitive Darwinian man whose heredity

170 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

Bateson so accurately described to us as furnishing
only one universal motive of action, namely, that
which drives him in the struggle with somebody else
for the possession of property.

And when we turn from Marx's programme of
socialism in the pages of Kapital to Professor Karl
Pearson's programme of socialism in the Ethic of
Free Thought, it continues still to be the same
spirit. Professor Pearson draws in academic
seclusion in England the picture of his new order
of society under socialism. And then the frantic
heredity of the fighting male of the West takes
possession of his soul. To those who offend against
the laws of public property in Professor Pearson's
new order of society it is to be, to use his actual
words before quoted, " short shrift and the nearest
lamp-post." The rules of the Kriegsbrauch im
Landkriege could hardly furnish a more character-
istic example of the spirit of the Darwinian man.
The self -stultification of the West is, in short, as
complete and as absolute at the hands of the
socialistic Professor in England as Tolstoy con-
sidered it to be at the hands of the Christian
Emperor in Germany. And the tragic irony of it
is that, in this case also, Tolstoy would have had
equal cause for saying that persons of culture,
liberals, even the fellow-men of free thought

POSITION IN THE WEST 171

whom Professor Pearson is addressing, are " not
only not provoked by the insult, but do not even
notice it."

The history of the emotion of the ideal in the
West, in short, has been the same in all its principal
manifestations. When controlled by those who
have held power, especially when power has been
concentrated in few hands, it has ever tended to be
directed and dominated by the qualities of the
primitive heredity of the fight. In the propagandas
of parties and the marshalling and organizing of the
great forces of the day, the orientation of all the
arguments, of all the interests, is instinctively, as
just observed, towards the emotion of the ideal in
the general mind. But the failure of this effort in
every form is one of the most marked features of the
time. It is a fact that the mind of the West, on
the whole, has completely failed to understand the
emotion of the ideal. It has not grasped either
the nature, or the magnitude, or the management of
its function in the future of civilization. The only
medium through which it has hitherto attempted
to utilize collectively this transforming cause of the
future in imposing the cultural inheritance of civiliza-
tion on the general mind, on a universal scale, has
been through the primitive and characteristic
instinct of combativeness.

172 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

The level at which the argument proceeds in any
great question of the day in the West is, therefore,
above everything remarkable. It is almost as if
we saw continuously the leaders of civilized men
making an appeal before an audience of savages.
It is the same kind of emotions which are being
stirred, the same feelings of combativeness which are
being aroused, the same kind of arguments which
are being used. Every device, every ruse, every
absurdity, even to grotesque distortions of the
truth, are pressed into service to move or excite
the feelings of combativeness.

It is a wonderful sight. As party government
has developed in the West under democratic in-
stitutions, a new world of literature and art has
come into existence in the press to supply all the
machinery of this appeal to the instinct of com-
bativeness. Every capable editor understands
that in all the leading questions of the day the most
effective appeal to the multitude is the emotional
appeal through the spirit of combativeness. An
appeal to the pure instinct of the fight or to that
class consciousness upon which combativeness is
based, and which man shares with the animal world,
is known to be the most direct and effective means
of moving the general mind on public questions.

In such circumstances, the standards of effective-

POSITION IN THE WEST 178

ness which have come to prevail in the press of
Western countries in the midst of the struggle of
commercial and financial interests on the one side
and the war of political parties on the other, are
altogether remarkable. Until recently in the West
the press had been, after the organized institutions
of Christianity, the greatest agent in moving the
world through the emotion of the ideal. Its
activities have been one of the main ultimate facts
upon which Western liberties have rested. Its
spokesmen have exercised in the past an influence
exceeding a thousandfold that of the orators of the
Pnyx in ancient Athens in creating and sustaining
in the imagination of the multitude the ideas
through which the cultural inheritance of civiliza-
tion was imposed on the people. But the con-
ditions of the past have been profoundly altered
as the press has passed, like all other institu-
tions, under the sway of the dominant forces of the
time.

Mr. R. Donald, the editor of the London Daily
Chronicle, speaking recently in Great Britain as
President of the Institute of Journalists, described
in a remarkable address * the great revolution
which the British press has undergone in this respect
in less than a generation. The leading feature of

1 Times, 19 August 1913.

174 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

the change, as stated by Mr. Donald, is that the
press had been commercialized on a gigantic scale.
The central fact of this transition is that corporate
ownership of the joint -stock type is superseding
individual ownership of the idealist type. The
effect of this, coupled with other changes, was,
he said, to " place enormous power to sway public
opinion in the hands of a few people." It was an
inherent feature of these agglomerations, he con-
tinued, that they were controlled by exactly the
same forces which operated in other fields of financial
and commercial activity. Under the old system
the proprietor " preferred less profit to compromise
with principle," but under the new the culminating
aim is necessarily the payment of dividends.
" Dividends," said Mr. Donald, " must be earned
even if principle is to suffer in the process."

The conditions under which the work of publicity
is done in the midst of this raging war of interests,
both external and internal, in which the press itself
has become centrally engaged, have been described
recently in striking and earnest language by more
than one experienced observer. A writer in the
British Review put in moderate language the party
feature of it as seen from the outside in saying that
the public is becoming uneasily aware that " a
fair presentment of the truth is not the main ol>

POSITION IN THE WEST 175

ject." l Mr. Chesterton, writing as an experienced
journalist, has described the struggle as he sawitfrom
the inside in the press itself. He sketched in a few
bold and vivid strokes the work as it proceeded in the
office of an effective newspaper. In the conditions
which prevail, Mr. Chesterton saw the directing
mind continually abolishing truth as Turner
abolished a tower because it did not suit him. He
described him, as it were, the arch creator of fact,
with the great instrument of publicity in his hands,
daily plunging a whole people into darkness, as
Rembrandt would plunge a whole picture into dark-
ness— to bring out a purpose. He saw him as the
master artist of his time, at work- upon events
effacing and disguising the lineaments of affairs as
Whistler would efface the lineaments of a woman
—so that more important matters should not be
interfered with.2

This description of the inside conditions of the
press as they prevailed in one of the freest countries
of the West in the first quarter of the twentieth
century is of the profoundest interest. The cal-
culated lightness of touch only adds to the signifi-
cance as we read between the lines. It was written
at a time when Great Britain was at peace with all
the world, at a period when all the commercial and

1 British Review, December 1913. ' Ibid,

176 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

industrial interests of the West were in the full
flush of the highest prosperity. It was given on
first-hand knowledge by one of the foremost of British
journalists. But as we scrutinize the description,
the extraordinary import of it grips and even shocks
the mind.

Two years later, most of the principal countries
of the world had closed in the greatest war of all
time. The public press in the greater part of the
Western world was held, as it had never before
been held in history, in the dominant grasp of an all-
embracing military censorship. The surprising sig-
nificance of the fact just referred to is this. Reading
Mr. Chesterton's description now it seems to be,
line for line and word for word, almost an exact
description of the conditions of the press which
prevailed in the principal countries of the West
under the most ruthless form of military censorship
to which public news and public opinion on a large
scale has ever been subjected.

For during the Armageddon truth in the press
throughout the greater part of Western civiliza-
tion was indeed abolished — because it was not suit-
able. Peoples were, indeed, daily plunged into
darkness on a universal scale — to bring out a
purpose. The faces and lineaments of men and
affairs were indeed effaced — so that they should

POSITION IN THE WEST 177

not interfere with more important matters. Yet
Mr. Chesterton's description was a description of
the conditions prevailing in the press in one of the
foremost countries in the world with regard to
its social, political, and industrial affairs in a time
of peace and under normal conditions. No more
searching indictment of our civilization was ever
written. It brings out the meaning of our Western
life in these normal conditions as with a flash of
universal illumination. It is a state of permanent
war — relentless, remorseless, truth-extinguishing,
primitive war throughout all our institutions,
national and political, social and economic.

And the tragic irony of it in this case also is that
Tolstoy would again have equal cause for saying
that " men, — Christians, liberals, cultured men of
our time, all of them " — can listen to these and
similar descriptions of our current institutions and
remain unconscious of their significance and of the
sett-stultification of our civilization which they
imply. " They are not only not provoked by the
insult ; they do not even notice it ! "

This is the condition to which the long intensive
heredity of the fight inborn in the man of the West
has carried civilization. It is the culminating phase
of the epoch of the individual integration ; the
epoch, that is to say, of the ascendancy in the world

12

178 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

of the individual efficient in the struggle for his own
interests. The future lies in the social integration.
The social integration rests on organization. And
in this organization the seat of efficiency and the
centre of all power in the future is in that cultural
heredity which civilization imposes on the individual
through the emotion of the ideal. There is practi-
cally nothing which cannot be accomplished through
the emotion of the ideal in civilization. There is
absolutely no aim, which civilization chooses to set
before itself, which it is not possible for civilization
to achieve, even to the sweeping away of this exist-
ing world and the creation of a new world in a brief
space of time. The great question of the age, the
question to which all others are subordinate is :
Where are we to look in the new order for the psychic
centre of this cultural heredity of civilization ?

PART III

THE NEW PSYCHIC CENTRE OF POWER

CHAPTER VII
FIRST LAWS OF THE SCIENCE OF POWER

WHEN the mind of the West comes to grasp
in all its far-reaching applications the fact
that the Science of Power in the social
integration is the science of directing the collective
will over long stretches of time to definite ends
through the emotion of the ideal, it will be the
first step to a new order of civilization. It is
desirable therefore to look in the face some of the
controlling facts which lie behind this cardinal
position.

In concentrating attention on the subject of
Power, it is necessary for me to ask the reader's
attention at this point for a matter which is funda-
mental. From the beginning of knowledge, the
human mind has been exercised in seeking the
answer to the question — What is Truth ? Strange
as the fact may appear, this question has carried
the West into many long eras of stress and violence.
Throughout all the changing phases of these periods
of development, there has been a position which

182 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

has never been permitted to present itself in the
full light of day to the minds of the combatants,
namely, that Truth is inseparably related to Power.
Men did not consciously allow themselves to con-
sider this most basal of facts — that in the science
of the developing world, Power is the clue not
only to human action but to all the principles of
knowledge.

The academic system of ideas and arguments
about the nature of Truth which the Western mind
had reared for centuries was in reality broken to
pieces by bringing into sight the actuality which
lay behind a statement that formed the heading
of one of the chapters of Social Evolution. This
statement was to the effect that in the social in-
tegration there is no rational sanction for the con-
ditions of progress. It was the assertion of the
essential relationship of Truth to Power, and to
Power only, which was expressed in this simple
form of words, that constituted the claim to at-
tention. The perception of that relationship sent
something like a thrill of re-creation through the
dry bones of the philosophies of the West. In
the half-articulate period which followed the
publication of Social Evolttiion, the leaders of the
new movement in Western thought which took the
name of Pragmatism, feeling the connexion between

FIRST LAWS OF SCIENCE OF POWER 188

Truth and Power that had been brought into view,
ventured hot-foot upon definitions of Truth that
swept the builders and definers of dialectic systems
of Truth into a state of amazed defence. And well
it might be so. For pragmatists began forthwith
to define Truth in a way in which the conception
of Power alone was visible. They proceeded to
define Truth as "That which works"; "That
which is expedient " ; " That which has value " ;
and so on.

The time has come when I must respectfully
ask pragmatists to give me that right-of-way which
is my due. The beginning of this development
has not been with them. These definitions of
Truth have a lasting value in the history of know-
ledge. But they are in the nature of things tentative
and incomplete attempts, the natural product of
that period of transition which followed the un-
covering of the position which I had brought into
view. I must in my own way carry this philosophy
of Power to the further issues that are involved in
it. I, therefore, ask the reader not to be startled
if I proceed to give him the answer to the question
-What is Truth ? and to follow it up by asserting
that it is a complete answer and that the develop-
ment of knowledge two thousand years hence, or
twenty thousand years hence, will only have served

184 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

to establish the conviction that it is the final
answer.

I. Truth is the Science of Power.

To this axiom may be added a second equally
fundamental : —

II. Evolution in all the phenomena of Life follows

the line of maximum Power.

When Christ, claiming to be the exponent s of
Truth, stood before Pilate's judgment seat, appar-
ently a man utterly beaten and defeated, the
cultured Roman asked him the question, " What is
Truth ? " Christ, it is recorded, " answered him
nothing," so that Pilate marvelled. The position
was complete. Nothing could be added to it.
For the true answer was utterly beyond Pilate's
comprehension. The centre of the greatest Power
system which has arisen in history stood before
him and he knew it not. For Pilate did not and
could not understand the science of Power as it
had passed over from the individual to the social
integration.

There have been three stages in the definition of
the science of Power in the West. In the first
stage of it Newton in the Principia set forth the
laws of the material universe in terms of Force. In
the second stage Darwin defined the laws of the
individual integration in life in terms of Power.

FIRST LAWS OF SCIENCE OF POWER 185

The third stage is that in which we are now en-
gaged, in which the laws of the social integration
in life are being defined similarly in terras of
Power.

To understand the application of the doctrine
of Power to the current personal and collective
activities of the modern world of civilization, it is
desirable to have a firm grasp of a few leading
principles. The two most essential matters are
(i) to understand the distinction to be made
between Force and Power; and (2) to understand
the nature of the fundamental difference between
the controlling law of the individual integration
and the controlling law of the social integration.

Now Force and Power are words continually
used loosely and often as interconvertible terms
in the West.1 In this chapter, and in future, they
will be used by me strictly hi the sense in which
they are here defined.

Force or Energy is the characteristic or constituent
quality of the material universe. Its modes may
be changed, but the quantity thereof in the universe
cannot be taken from nor added to.

The distinction between Force and Power is
fundamental.

1 Cf. Newton's Principia, Introduction to Book III., or the
example referred to by Karl Pearson. Ethic of Free Thought,
p. 32-

186 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

III. Power is ike capacity for utilizing Force or

Energy by integration — that is to say, by
organization, — so as to produce more in-
tense or higher results in one place than
would otherwise be possible.

IV. Power is the characteristic or constituent

quality of life as Force is the character-
istic or constituent quality of the material
universe.

V. Life in all its forms is a process of integra-
tion— that is to say, of organization, — of
Force or Energy.

The mind which brought us to the fundamental
law of evolution in life as Newton brought us to the
fundamental law of the material universe was
Darwin's. Darwin and Herbert Spencer gave us
the first law of evolution in life in stating the prin-
ciple which is summarized in the expression sur-
vival of the fittest, or, in another form, natural
selection. Both these formulae have been radically
criticized. " To say that to survive is to be the
fittest is merely to tell us that to be the fittest is to
survive. To say that life progresses by natural
selection is merely to tell us that life progresses
in the manner in which it does progress." So the
criticism has run. Something essential is said to
be missing.

FIRST LAWS OF SCIENCE OF POWER 187

As a matter of fact, both formulae are lacking in an
essential element. The axiom or law of progress
which supplies what is missing in Darwin's con-
ception and which expresses the characteristic
meaning of integration in life so as to bring
that meaning into line with the principles set
out in Book I. of Newton's Principia must be
put as follows : —

II. Integration in life follows the line of maxi-
mum Power.

The principle of the survival of the fittest or
natural selection coming to us from Darwin and
Spencer is, it will be observed, a less complete ex-
pression of this law of maximum Power.

The feature of life is its two phases of integration
governed by quite different applications of the law
of maximum Power. First, there is the Individual
Integration. It was practically with the Individua 1
Integration alone that Darwin was concerned. His
conception did not in any real sense extend to the
higher or Social Integration. The distinctive
governing principle of each of these two phases of
evolution may be set out as follows : —

VI. In the Individual Integration evolution
follows the line of maximum Power through
the self-assertion of the individual. The
centre of gravity in the process is in the

188 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

life of the individual, i.e., it is in the
present.

The highest form of Power in the individua
integration is that which Darwin described, namely,
the highest survival efficiency of those units which
are successful in the struggle for their own lives and
interests. But —

VII. In the Social Integration evolution follows
the line of maximum Power through the
entire subordination of the lives and welfare
of the individual units to a survival effi-
ciency in the social integration which is
Projected beyond that of the lives and wel-
fare or even the consciousness of the existing
units. The centre of gravity in the process
is beyond the individual, i.e., it is in the
future.

The highest form of Power in the social integration
is that which produces the highest efficiency in
securing this type of subordination. I have else-
where denned this as Projected Efficiency*

As we scrutinize closely this statement of the
difference between the principles of Power in the
individual integration and in the social integration,
we have unveiled before us the cause of all the funda-
mental and deep-seated confusion and conflict in the

1 Principles of Western Civilisation, chap. ii.

FIRST LAWS OF SCIENCE OF POWER 189

standards of the modern West. Almost the entire
effort of the Western mind to apply Darwinism to the
collective standards of the world has been an effort to
apply to the affairs of civilization the principles of
Power in the individual integration conceiving them to
be the principles of Power in the social integration. It
is evident that the Western mind therein is up against
an impossible task. For Power as expressed through
the forms of the social integration is immeasurably
greater than Power expressed through the forms of
the individual integration of which Darwin gave us
the laws. The principles upon which Power rests
in the social integration will therefore be the winning
principles in the world.

The ascendant and winning quality in the era ot
the individual integration has been Reason. It may
be defined as follows : —

VIII. Reason is the highest form of the sum of
the Self-Regarding emotions. It is the
principal expression of that capacity in
mind by which the individual senses the
sequences through which Power is related
to Force. It is the chief human organ o>
the science of Force.

Even where reason carries us into the highest
regions of practical science, or of thought, or of
speculation, its achievements all remain applications

190 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

of those winning or survival qualities acquired by
mind in sensing the relations of Force to Power in
the environment out of which man has emerged in
the past. On the other hand —

The ascendant and winning quality in the era of
the social integration is the Emotion of the Ideal.
This quality may be defined as follows : —

IX. The Emotion of the Ideal is the highest
form of the sum of the Other-Regarding
emotions. It is the principal expression
of thai ultra-rational capacity in mind
through which the individual senses the
sequences through which individual
Power is related to social Power in
higher integration. It is the chtej human
organ of the science of Power.
When these two statements (VIII and IX) are
carefully scrutinized and compared, it will be per-
ceived that there is a far-reaching significance in
the different manner in which Power is transmitted
by heredity in the social integration as compared
with the individual integration. This may be
expressed as follows :—

X. In the individual integration the. heredity
through which Power is transmitted is in
the individual. It is passed from one
generation to the next with protoplasmic

FIRST LAWS OF SCIENCE OF POWER 191

continuity. Great change on a large
scale is rare and is usually only slowly
established.

It is on this kind of heredity that the attention
of science has been almost exclusively concentrated
in the past. As contrasted with it we have in the
social integration the following principles : —

XI. In the social integration tlie heredity through
which Power is transmitted is in the
cultural inheritance.* It is independent
of protoplasmic continuity. The trans-
mitting agent is the emotion of the ideal.
Transforming change on a universal
scale can be established quickly, i.e.,
within the lifetime of a single generation.
The foregoing axioms carry us to new horizons
in Western thought and action. They form the
foundations of the science of Power. We have to
turn now to their practical applications — applica-
tions of immeasurable significance in the future of
civilization.

1 See Social Evolution, chap, ix., and Sir Edwin Ray Lankester's
article " Zoology," Encyclopedia tiritannica, nth ed.

CHAPTER VIII

WOMAN IS THE PSYCHIC CENTRE OF
POWER IN THE SOCIAL INTEGRATION

FOR long throughout the past human energies
have been cramped and limited on every
side through the concentration of the Western
intellect on the causes which have governed the
individual integration as described in the preceding
chapter. The mind and will of civilization have
been overwhelmingly absorbed in the study of the
facts which have made for the efficiency of Power
in the struggles of this era. This is a passing phase
of the world. The principles of Power in the future
all lie in the social integration. And in the social
integration the fact of first significance is that
Power centres in emotion. The social integration
is related in all its phases to that supreme capacity
in the collective mind which senses and directs
Power, namely, the emotion of the ideal.

One of the strangest facts of our time is this.
The West knows practically nothing of the science
of emotion. It knows scarcely anything, that is to

WOMAN THE PSYCHIC CENTRE 193

say, of emotion in- its most important manifesta-
tions which are in the social integration. If one
takes up any of its leading textbooks on psy-
chology at the present time it is to encounter
the strange spectacle of every Western writer on
the subject, with the prominent exception of
Mr. William McDougall and a small group, think-
ing and theorizing about the facts of emotion
almost as if emotion related only to the indi-
vidual. Emotion is considered as some relatively
inferior quality in the individual closely associated
with the animal past and mainly connected with
functions which man shares with the animal
world. The science of emotion in its collec-
tive aspects is practically a sealed book to the
West.

Throughout the stages of the great world war,
for instance, it was a matter of daily occurrence, in
the Western press and particularly in the press of
Great Britain, to see the German peoples con-
temptuously referred to as the mo3t emotional
race in Europe : as if this description at once
decisively relegated them to a category of inferiority.
Of course the German people were emotional.
The stupendous lesson in Power which Germany
was giving the world was in all its phases and
issues a lesson in the illimitable and incalculable
'3

194 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

power of emotion. Under our prevailing standards
in the West we continually think of the control of
emotion as if it indicated absence of emotion.
So entirely contrary to fact is this misconception
that it may be taken as a maxim of civilization that
other things being equal, the higher the capacity
of any individual or of any people, the higher the
capacity for emotion.

It is emotion only which can in its collective appli-
cations direct the general mind in the long sequences
through which Power must express itself in the
social integration. It is through the emotion of
the ideal, and through this cause alone, that the
collective will can be concentrated and directed
over long periods of time to particular ends. It
is through emotion only that the present can be
subordinated to the future and the organized will
of civilization transmitted from one generation
to the next through the young. It is through the
emotion of the ideal that any collective aim whatso-
ever that the organized imagination of a people
may set before itself in civilization becomes possible
of achievement, and this in an incredibly brief
interval of time.

Where are we to look for the principal source
and reservoir in the future of this supreme capacity ?
It will be the seat of all Power. It will be the

WOMAN THE PSYCHIC CENTRE 195

ultimate cause of dominant efficiency in the coming
struggle of the world.

The answer to this question is the most striking
which it has ever been the lot of a writer to give.
There can be no doubt as to what the reply must
be. It is not in the fighting Male of the race : it is
in Woman that we have the future centre of Power in
civilization. This, strange and paradoxical as it
may appear, is the first lesson in Power which
emerges in history from the great world war of
civilization in the second decade of the twentieth
century.

If we look at the history of the righting male of
the race in the vast struggle for Power which formed
the past history of the world, the significance of
certain facts begins to stand out with great dis-
tinctness before the mind. The existing world in
every phase of its life has been the culminating stage
of the prolonged drama of individual efficiency.
It is the flowering stage in every institution of the
qualities which have made the individuals who are
supremely efficient in the struggle for their own
interests the centres of all systems of Power and
the masters of the world. It represents the age
when interests have been short-circuited into the
hands of those who have power to hold them by
force, and when the instant need of individuals and

196 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

institutions has been either absolutely or relatively
for A to be able to kill B before B is able to kill A.

Now it is evident that in all Power systems in
this stage of the human world the fighting male
has been, in the nature of things, the ultimate source
and origin of supreme Power. He has been the
maker, the doer, the creature of the instant and
urgent need from the beginning of things. All the
qualities based ultimately on his sex have been in
the fighting male of the race those of instant realiza-
tion. It has been the imperious condition of his
efficiency in the struggle for Power that there should
be no to-morrow in him like to-day. The idealisms
of the long sequences, the long-drawn-out dramas
of renunciation and sacrifice, have never in reality
had more than a pallid meaning for the man of the
fighting races of the West.

For this reason there is no practical or business
people of the West in which the typical male in
his inner heart does not despise idealism and all
the characteristic emotion on which idealism rests.
At the back of the male mind of every fighting and
business people the spirit of the pagan rules and
the philosophy of Omar Khayyam is enthroned.
In the course of my life, in which my experience has
been considerable, I have never known an English-
man who really believed any of the dogmas of the

WOMAN THE PSYCHIC CENTRE 197

Christian religion through his reason. In all cases
the individual held to them as part of an inheritance
which has been imposed on him from without by
causes in which his reason had had no share.

In the integrating systems of Power in the world
this basis of things is being swept away. In the
social integration where Power rests on the causes
described in the last chapter the story of humanity
is becoming with increasing intensity the vast
tragic drama of duty, of sacrifice, of renunciation.
All the winning systems of Power in the social
integration are those in which the centre of gravity
is outside the limits of the individual's own con-
sciousness, and in which, in the long sequences o'.
cause and effect, the units are subordinated to a
meaning far beyond that of their own lives and
interests through the emotion of the ideal. Reason,
in reality, is quite unable to carry any of us from
the principles of the individual integration into the
principles of the social integration. The individual
dies that the world may live, cannot really be ex-
pressed in any terms of the individual's reason.
Are you willing to be damned for the glory of
God ? — is a question which cannot be answered in
the affirmative by any process of reason. But when
human nature staggering upwards with its face
towards the infinite and universal gives this answer,

198 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

it has simply reached the highest expression of
Power.

These systems of Power in the social integration
do not rest on reason. They appeal to no facts—
the facts have not arrived. They answer nothing,
to argument. They are Power itself. They rest on
emotion. And through the emotion of the ideal,
man therein has hitched himself to omnipotence.

Now if we turn from the fighting male of the race
to the other half of the world which is represented
in woman, the effect on the mind of these principles
is very striking as we begin to perceive their reach.
At the back of human consciousness, as the literatures
of nearly all peoples bear witness, there has always
lurked a conception of woman's mind as being;
in circumstances which men have never allowed
themselves freely to imagine, a power of incalcul-
able magnitude. Save in the expressions of it,
which arise directly out of its relations to the
opposite sex, woman's mind at the present time, even
in the highest systems of human culture, remains
the greatest mystery of the race.

Throughout the whole span of the human era, the
development of the mind of woman has represented
one fact of absolutely supreme significance, namely,
that there has been expressed in it the struggle of
the interests of the future against the ascendency

WOMAN THE PSYCHIC CENTRE 199

in the present of those Power systems, which arise
from the activities of the male mind, which rest on
force, which by the categorical necessity of the fight
must always be directed to sectional and short-
range objectives, and which from an outlook thus
inherently limited to the need of the present and
under the control of reason seek always to impose
their own conceptions under the name of the Absolute
upon every form of human activity. These systems
of Power, characteristic of the individual integra-
tion, have ever sought to exploit woman in all her
capacities as no other being has been exploited in life.
Out of this struggle the mind of woman has emerged.
It is like the emerging mind of civilization itself
in the upward stress of progress. Woman is indeed
the actual prototype of all the great systems of
religion, of morality, of law, upon which integrating
civilization rests. For in all these the controlling
meaning in which their development has centred
has been this same struggle for the interests of the
future against the systems of force seeking to
exploit and overwhelm in the present the interests
of the future which were represented in them.

In the individual integration, of which Darwin
gave us the laws, the clue to Power in all the qualities
and all the institutions of the winning types lies
in one fact. The heredity through which Power is

200 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

transmitted is in the individual. The centre of
gravity in Power is, therefore, in the present. The
line of maximum Power which evolution is following
is the individual efficient in the struggle for his own
interest — the efficient individual, that is to say,
whom Nietzsche described to us as acknowledging
no authority but his- own will and no morality but
his own interests. Everything in this individual
has been controlled and is still controlled by interests
centred in the present, and by the necessity, actual
or implicit, in all his institutions for A to be able to
kill B before B is able to kill A.

In the social integration the clue to Power is quite
different. The heredity through which Power is
transmitted is not in the individual. It is the
social or cultural inheritance. Evolution continues
to follow the line of maximum Power, but it is the
characteristic principle of the social integration
that immensely greater Power centres in those
systems which while remaining efficient in the
present at the same time subject the present to the
future. The centre of gravity of Power in the social
integration is therefore always in the future. The
control of the long organized sequences of cause
and effect through which evolution thus follows
the line of Power in the social integration can be
only attained in one way — by emotion directing

WOMAN THE PSYCHIC CENTRE 201

action through the cultural inheritance over long
periods of time to ideals beyond the lives and
interests of the existing individuals. It is woman
who, by the necessities of her being, has carried within
her nature from the beginning in its highest potenti-
alities the ruling principle of this new era of Power.

By her history in evolution, by her function in
relation to man, by her position in relation to the
future generation, woman has ever been the creature
of fruition in the future as contrasted with man.
The driving principle of woman's nature at all its
highest levels has ever been by pure physiological
necessity the subjugation of the present with all its
imperious demands to a meaning beyond herself
and beyond all visible interests in the present.
By the necessities of evolution every strand of
woman's deeper being has vibrated to this meaning
for untold ages. The fighting male is through the
nature of his history the creature of those short-
range animal emotions which are becoming of less
importance in advancing civilization. Woman, on
the contrary, through her history has ever been the
creature of the long-range emotions through which
the instant needs of the present are subordinated
to the meaning implicit in the long sequences of
cause and effect through which maximum Power
expresses itself in the social integration.

202 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

Nothing is more surprising to numbers of women
who have long worked in public matters in con-
junction with men, and also to numbers of men who
have had experience of a similar kind in working
with women, than the popular impression that
woman represents the sex which is liable to be
diverted from distant ends by passing emotions,
while men are held to be relatively uninfluenced by
emotion. Wide experience almost invariably brings
home to the mind that this is the opposite of the
truth. In men all the more powerful emotions are
short-range emotions. They are all, moreover, the
emotions intimately related to the overpowering
heredity of the fight. In civilization the necessity
for outwardly controlling emotions of this class is
constant and imperative. Men throughout their
lives are consequently in constant conflict with
their emotions, suppressing them, hiding them,
ashamed of them. The continual object of the
male sex in civilization is to appear unemotional,
with the result that this pose has become one of the
outward marks of culture amongst civilized men.

But this is only on the surface. The emotions
of the male exist beneath in overwhelming strength.
Women always by a true and deep-seated instinct
despise what they perceive to be the short-range
emotions in men in public affairs. Even in the

WOMAN THE PSYCHIC CENTRE 203

highest affairs of State, in legal trials, in debating
assemblies, the relatively weak emotion of the ideal
in man is nearly always a short-range emotion. All
displays of eloquence and rhetoric in the male are
intimately connected with the emotions of the fight.
There is no situation in which a civilized man is so
suddenly and so completely transformed into a
creature of the short-range emotions of the fight as
when he becomes an orator in public affairs. The
gesticulations of eloquence, the beating and thump-
ing motions of emphasis, the flashing eye, the excited
visage in which the expressions varying from the
sublime to the sinister rapidly succeed each
other, are all characteristic of early man in the
ecstasy of the emotions of the fight.

Lecky has described with striking effect the
appearance of Gladstone, with many of the aspects
and accompaniments of emotion in the fighting
savage, delivering with great eloquence a speech on a
high moral cause. I have often seen members of
the native fighting races of South Africa, like the
Zulus, after drugging themselves with narcotics,
wrought up to the highest flights of rhetoric in
which suddenly jumping on their feet they deliver
to empty space long periods of fiery eloquence
and declamation all imbued with the passion and
coloured with ideals of the fight.

204 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

Even in the service of the highest causes it is the
short-range emotion of the fight which most power-
fully drives men. I was once present at a private
meeting at a crisis in British politics when leaders
were being chosen. The name of one leader,
now a prominent statesman, was put forward with
strong and impressive recommendations by a
member present. The most urgent qualification
of leadership mentioned 'was that he was a man
capable of reaching any goal in action if only he
were excited by the spirit of combativeness, which it
was pointed out was powerfully present in the case
in question. In pursuit of principles, and in the
quests of the intellect in scientific research, it may
also be observed continually that it is the emotions
inherited from the environment of the hunt, the
chase, and the fight which most powerfully operate
in the male mind, and this even in the highest
regions of abstract knowledge.

As compared with this psychology of the male
so strongly developed in all the fighting races of
the world, the psychology of woman is absolutely
distinct. It is separated from that of man by
meanings which are poles apart from those just
described. The mind of woman, as we shall see
more clearly in the next chapter, has in reality
outstripped that of man by an entire epoch of

WOMAN THE PSYCHIC CENTRE 205

evolution in the development of those characteristic
qualities upon which Power now rests in the social
integration. Nearly all the past discussions about
woman may be perceived at a glance to be occupied
with aspects of the case which have no important
relation to the fundamental issue with which we
are about to become involved in civilization. Man
has been engaged in discussing woman in the past
from the point of view of woman's case with man
or of man's case with woman. But civilization is
not ultimately concerned in a fundamental way
with either of those issues. The central problem
is the relation of woman, not to man, but to the
needs of society.

In this matter developing civilization is being
driven by causes which are inherent in a direction
which is inevitable. Evolution will follow the line
of maximum Power. It is this question of Power
which will ultimately control everything. And the
significant fact towards which we have to turn is
that the qualities through which maximum Power
must express itself in the long sequences of the
social integration, the qualities, that is to say, for
which civilization cries aloud now with the living
hunger of a type in evolution, are precisely those
which are most characteristically represented in the
mind of woman. They are the qualities by which

206 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

woman instinctively subjects the present to the
future through sustained emotion, accompanied
by a power of sacrifice in the service of the ideal
which greatly exceeds this capacity in the male
sex.

When we turn for the case about woman from this
point of view of Power the facts deeply impress
the imagination. It is well to put entirely aside
all the comparisons upon which the popular mind
has run in the past of woman's capacities with man's
capacities at the level of man's standards — strength,
endurance, brain qualities, work capacities, character
inheritance — all the comparisons of these qualities
in woman with man's standards with which we have
been usually occupied have no real significance.

Woman's relationship to Power is so different
from man's in the social integration that it is at
present almost beyond the full comprehension of the
male mind.

To get the matter into focus it is better to avoid
all preconception arising from the past, and to do
this most thoroughly it is better not to take the case
for woman in relation to civilization from any of its
advocates, but to go straight to the discussions about
woman's sex and woman's mind which have been
carried on by those who have put the case against
woman in civilization in the most thorough-

WOMAN THE PSYCHIC CENTRE 207

going manner and in the most extreme spirit of
hostility.

The whole modern attack in the West on woman's
mind and the qualities of her sex centres primarily
in Schopenhauer.1 The most savage but also the
most reasoned and influential case that has been
made against woman in the literature of the West
has come from Schopenhauer. In his oft-quoted
essay on woman Schopenhauer represents, as nobody
else either in literature or in science does, the cry
of the inmost heart of the pagan of the West who
has built the world of the individual integration on
force. Nearly all the current arguments against
woman's position find their best statement in this
essay. Even the crude, fierce, animal attacks on
woman in later literature, like those of Nietzsche,
Weiniger, and others which have followed them,
are scarcely more than echoes of Schopenhauer.
Their point of view is best studied in Schopenhauer's
essay, where the essential positions are made with
greater strength and moderation.

The first thing which strikes the observer of in-
sight on reading Schopenhauer's essay is that
Schopenhauer's mind, in the contemplation of
woman, is revealed to the reader in a state of fear.

1 Schopenhauer's Essay on Woman, Belfort Bax's volume of
Selections.

208 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

The essay exhibits the dread of woman's mental
influence as a kind of overwhelming obsession
of Schopenhauer's intellect, just as the fear of
woman's physical influence is exhibited in the early
patristic writings as an overwhelming obsession of
the ascetic mind. It will be perceived clearly at a
later period that the mental attitude of Schopenhauer
in this case is characteristically true to type. The
psychology of Schopenhauer in the essay is the
typical psychology of Power recognizing its true
relation to Power, which it fears to be destined
to supersede it.

Schopenhauer's central position is extraordinarily
fundamental and uncompromising. He declares
woman to be the natural enemy of man. The reason
given for thus describing her has to be noted. She
is, he asserted, the breaker and subduer of man's
will power. We recognize on scrutiny that this will
power which Schopenhauer has in mind is none
other than the will power of the fighting male of the
race — the terrible, all-subduing, dominant creature
of efficiency in the individual integration, acknow-
ledging no authority but his own will and no morality
but his own advantage. And it is as the repre-
sentative of this dominant will power of the past
that we see Schopenhauer standing before woman
in a state of instinctive and almost vindictive in-

WOMAN THE PSYCHIC CENTRE 209

tellectual hostility. His description of her in such
remarkable circumstances reads almost like a hymn
of hate.

Schopenhauer forthwith describes woman as
inherently a creature of evil. Her relations to life
have made of her, he said, an inborn liar. He
declares her to be an intellectual myope. He
describes her fundamental failings to be injustice,
treachery, and deception. He asserts her to be
wanting in all objectivity of mind. He will not
allow her the conditions of originality. She is, he
said, below the male standard in intellect. He
even denies woman's sex beauty. It was only, he
said, the male intellect of humanity when befogged
through the sexual impulse which could consider
the female sex fair.

Moved by his emotions thus to curse woman alto-
gether, Schopenhauer advances immediately to one
of the most remarkable positions in the history of
thought. Driven by the true instinct of genius,
Schopenhauer in the same essay proceeds to write
woman's charter of authority for all ages in the future
of civilization. For the cause of all the qualities,
which he has thus enumerated as making of woman
a creature to be dreaded, Schopenhauer puts down
the one significant cause. The root quality of evil
in woman Schopenhauer declares to be this. The
14

210 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

race is always to her more than the individual. The
natural, the inborn, and the unchanging attitude
of the whole of woman's sex to man Schopenhauer
asserts to be the attitude of woman to an all-
powerful opponent whose strength to enforce his
will has to be subdued to a purpose in the future.
For in the darkest recesses of their hearts, he
continues, " women live altogether more in the
race than in the individual ; they regard the affairs
of the species as more serious than those of the
individual." *

It is this extraordinary insight into woman's
true relationship to Power which constitutes
Schopenhauer's main contribution to the sum of
human knowledge. In the result it drives him into
a kind of frenzied opposition to woman. The line
of Schopenhauer's successors in the modern West
have since consistently striven to develop the
doctrine of Power with their faces set resolutely to
the past, until it becomes at length in the individual
and in the state alike the disastrous Nietzschean
doctrine of strength acknowledging no authority but
its own will and no morality but its own advantage.
Of Woman, said Nietzsche, " Thou goest to her : do not
forget thy whip." 2 Of the State, said Bernhardi,
" the whole discussion turns not on international

1 Op. cit., p. 343. a Zaralhustra.

WOMAN THE PSYCHIC CENTRE 211

right but simply and solely on power and ex-
pediency." 1

Yet it was the same Schopenhauer who, standing
at the head of the great modern pagan retrogression
thus indicated, visualized woman as its natural and
invincible antagonist. It is Schopenhauer who has
given us woman's charter for all time in civilization.
As distinct from man she is the creature to whom the
Race is more than the Individual, the being to whom
the Future is greater than the Present. Let civiliza-
tion remember it.

When we turn now to the practical affairs of
civilization and try to focus the light of this prin-
ciple on the facts of the world, the illumination will
be found to extend to a great distance. The evidence
for the statement that it is woman by reason of her
functional, racial, and evolutionary history who is
the principal organ in the race of that emotion of the
ideal upon the function of which developing civiliza-
tion depends, is of great extent and significance.

In the integrating systems of civilization Power,
as we have seen, is not transmitted through the
heredity of the individual but through the cultural
or social inheritance. To be able to direct or control
this social heredity through the emotion of the
ideal is to be able in a relatively brief period to

1 Germany and the Next War.

212 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

alter or profoundly modify the world or any of its
existing institutions. It is to obtain control ovei
all the reservoirs of Power in civilization. Th<
relationship of woman to the cultural heredity o
the world through the emotion of the ideal is there-
fore the first fact which meets us on the thresholc
of the science of Power.

The emotion of the ideal is an inseparable anc
the most essential part of that rapacity in the
human mind which senses Power. Woman from her
history in the past in subjection to force has doubt
less from an early period possessed this capacity ir
a high degree. It is peculiar to her now that undei
more complete conditions of civilization she pos
sesses, in a far higher state of development than il
has reached in man, the sense which instinctively
recognizes the sequences through which Power is
transmitted in the social integration. Power is
the social integration, as Spencer long ago pointed
out, resides in those causes which produce the long
sequences of effect as contrasted with the motives
and impulses which in savagery produce the less
important, rapid and short-range effects. It is
not in the nature of things that the male who has
been from the beginning the doer, the maker, the
builder, the fighter, the instrument of force, the
attendant on all the instant need of things in the

WOMAN THE PSYCHIC CENTRE 213

present, should be the equal of woman in this
quality of subordinating the present to the future
by the emotion of the ideal.

It is a circumstance which has to be noted that
amongst the advanced fighting races this fact is
nearly always instinctively recognized by men.
Almost every male of the Western races, as soon as
he becomes involved in the activities of Power
which are characteristic of the social integration,
has the same instinct. When he has need of the
emotion of the ideal to carry him beyond the thick
of his present difficulties, or beyond the outlook of
his environment, or into these higher regions of
leadership which require sacrifice prolonged beyond
all interests of the present, he turns instinctively,
not to another male of his kind, but to woman for
support and instinctive understanding.

Men tend to hide this characteristic from their
fellows in a world in which the standards of the
individual integration still survive in great strength.
But it is developed to the highest and completest
extent in the leading and strongest minds. One
has to turn to such records as Moltke's love letters
and his letters to his wife to see to what an extent
minds which in the popular imagination have
represented the personification of power — power
precise, calculating, methodical, mathematical —

214 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

have possessed this characteristic. Power in mind!
of the highest calibre is nearly always thus exhibitec
as in the closest association with the emotion of th
ideal. And in such circumstances when we knovt
the facts we see them turning instinctively anc
naturally to woman to give strength to that qualitj
in them which is the principal element in Power ir
its highest expressions.

It is characteristic of woman that the habit o
mind required in these circumstances is nearly
always present. It is generally inborn even though
it remain latent. It renders members of the sex
capable of attaining over long stretches of time a
lofty, permanent, and controlled excitement which
exercises a profound influence over all the activities
of ordinary life. It is this kind of capacity which
enables even delicate women to maintain constancy
to an ideal for a prolonged period in the face of the
greatest difficulties and persecutions. Women in
such circumstances have the same capacity foi
devotion to causes as they have in other circum
stances to persons even through a long succession
of mental and bodily tortures. J. S. Mill described
the type of mind from which this quality proceeds
either in man or woman as always closely associated
with the power of leadership of mankind.1
1 Subjection of Women, chap. iii. § n.

WOMAN THE PSYCHIC CENTRE 215

It is one of the strongest and most fundamental
traits of woman's nature closely associated with
this quality that in a conflict between present interest
and principle she instinctively and instantly tends to
take the side of principle rather than that of interest.
It is in the possession of this characteristic that
woman is in high degree actually and literally what
Schopenhauer described her to be, namely, the
being to whom the race is more than the individual
and the future greater than the present. It is
in such circumstances that Schopenhauer correctly
estimated her as the enemy to be dreaded by the
strong man acknowledging no authority but his
own will and no morality but his own advantage ;
because, to use his words, " always with woman the
spring of her secret, unexpressed, and indeed un-
conscious and inborn morality, is the belief that
the welfare of the species is placed in her hands."1
Woman is, in short, by nature the custodian of ends
distant in the future to which she subdues the
present : so that, again to use Schopenhauer's words,
" in the recesses of her heart she lives always and
altogether more in the race than in the individual." *

These facts possess a significance of a high order
when their relationship to the science of Power
as directed through the cultural inheritance of

1 Schopenhauer's Essay on Woman, op. cit.

216 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

civilization is distinguished. There is no more
remarkable phenomenon of the modern Western
world than that vast change, now in progress in
the psychology of the race, which has a bearing
intimately related to this subject.

In the literature of imagination and idealism it
is impossible to ignore certain features. In the
imaginative literature of the peoples of the modern
West as contrasted with the literature of peoples
of more primitive times and standards, a fact which
strikes the mind is the position occupied therein
by woman. She stands out as the central figure.
It is woman who inspires nearly all the deeds, and
nearly all the deep passions of men, which form
the subject of the imaginative literature of the
modern races. Even under the fiercest practical
and competitive aspects of life we do not escape
from the presence of this fact. The imagin-
ative literature of the West is the vehicle in one
form or another of all its highest idealisms. But
it is woman who is always in evidence therein as
the touchstone of man's ideals. Wherever man
becomes an idealist in imaginative literature it is
almost invariably woman who is the measure of
it. It is to the woman that man always brings his
idealisms to prove them and to look for support.

So deep seated is this instinct that it has become

WOMAN THE PSYCHIC CENTRE 217

one of the most fundamental canons of modern
Western Art, that it cannot be violated without a
sense of failure being created. Wherever man is
represented in Art as the higher idealist and woman
as the lower cause which has dragged him down the
result is artistic disaster. We feel that the ideal
has been lowered and that we have returned to the
depressing atmosphere of a more primitive stage
of human evolution. However great the ability
or the genius of the creator it cannot save us from
this effect. As in Robert Henick's The Healer, or
as in George Gissing's New Grub Street, the result is
invariably the same. A sense of failure and outrage
is present in the mind of the reader.

It has to be kept in view in considering this
significant transition in the standards of Art that
in the present epoch of the world woman's mind is
the greatest mystery of the time. In the stunting
and restraining conditions of the era out of which it
has emerged it has been driven in upon itself at
every point to such an extent that the world knows
scarcely anything about it, save in those expressions
of it which arise directly out of woman's relations
to the opposite sex.

The most notable and probably unforeseen effect
on many Western minds of Pierre Loti's Desen-
chantees, which produced so remarkable an im-

218 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

pression in the harems of Turkey, was to bring
home to those minds to a degree never before
experienced the peculiar and intensely restricted
relationship of woman to the general world, not
simply in Eastern harems but throughout the whole
of Western civilization at the present day.

The qualities of the male mind inherited from
lower levels of evolution have been ennobled and
transmuted at higher levels with enormous effect
in the service of civilization. Not so has it been
in the case of the mind of woman. The effect of
woman's entire education, and of the social training
which accompanies it down to the present day in
civilization, has been to shut off to an incalculable
degree the characteristic and peculiar inherent values
of her mind from access to the service of civiliza-
tion. The culminating effect in the past of the
attitude of civilization to woman even amongst
the most advanced peoples has been to incul-
cate the doctrine that the only duty which
woman owes to the world is that which she owes
through those to whom she is related through the
sexual bond. Her deeper and more characteristic
nature has been prevented as much by Western
usage as by Eastern from being released into any
other channel than that of her husband and her
family

WOMAN THE PSYCHIC CENTRE 219

Yet even in such conditions in which the access
of woman's mind to the larger world of affairs has
been walled up at all the principal approaches the
results have been remarkable. It is one of the most
pregnant facts in the upward progress of the race
that the emotion of the ideal in its relation to
Power has always had its chief and deepest ex-
pressions in the mind of woman. Even with all
the disabilities under which her sex has laboured,
woman's mind in the past has been the principal
source of the creative idealism of the world. When
all other channels have been closed to her, woman
has carried the creative capacity of the emotion
of the ideal into the practical world of affairs mainly
through her influence on the mind of the young.
She has done this to an extent of which a large part
of the world is quite unconscious.

If it were possible in periods of unusual growth
and crisis in the history of the world to uncover the
foundations of events and to get a view of causes
and origins, it would be found that the creative
and sustaining influence of woman's mind in the
formative stages preceding action is enormous. A
knowledge of the methods by which the standards
and ideas of the time are imposed on successive
generations of men leaves no doubt that the influ-
ence of woman on the cultural inheritance has

220 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

equalled and probably far exceeded that of all
other agencies whatever.

The effect of the emotion of the ideal transmitted
to the young of the rising generation by woman
can never after be entirely effaced in the individual.
It is greater, deeper, and more enduring than the
effect of any system whatever of subsequent educa-
tion. Where it is combined with the effects of
such subsequent education, as to some extent it is
in the systems of modern Germany and Japan, it
becomes the most powerful element in character
formation, giving after results in capacity for per-
manent and sustained aim and sacrifice in the
individual absolutely impossible of attainment by
any other means.

Wide acquaintance with the personal memoirs of
men who have been centres of Power in history, who
have become leaders of causes, or who have given
direction to the idealisms of classes, of interests,
Or of nations or of peoples in civilization, leave
developed in the mind with great strength the
conviction that the part played by woman in
giving direction to the mind of the young
through the emotion of the ideal far exceeds that
imagined by the world. It has been one of the
principal determining factors throughout human
history.

WOMAN THE PSYCHIC CENTRE 221

Knowledge of the influence which it is capable
of exercising has been the basis of many potent
systems of education. But it has been knowledge
which has fallen far short of the reality. To
measure the influence of woman in shaping and
determining the mind of civilization through the
young in the past is possible only to the most
experienced minds. It has extended even to the
regions of the highest abstract thought. Leslie
Stephen, in reviewing the history of philosophical
systems, gave it as his own experience that however
honestly and eagerly the philosopher may desire to
try his conclusions by the severest test, always in the
end his real problem came to be : " How con-
clusions which are agreeable to his emotions can be
connected with the postulates which are con-
genial to his intellect." l That is to say, in short,
that it is always the emotion of the ideal which
predetermines the conclusions.

And in nearly all such cases when the inquiry is
carried far enough, the significant controlling fact
in the background is found to be that the emotion
of the ideal has had its strength and direction given
to it by the influence of woman's mind at an early
stage in the development of the individual.

All the foregoing results, and they are of the

1 The English Utilitarians, vol. i.

222 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

highest order of significance to the existing world,
have been under the conditions of the past when
woman has been practically without any contact,
in her own right or in the right of her sex, with the
living facts of the real world of human activities.
They open to the mind a vision of possibilities of
the science of Power of which men have not dreamed.
A new horizon in the history of Power will be
reached in the world when civilization perceives
the significance of utilizing towards the aims of
collective Power this being to whom, through the
emotion of the ideal, the race is always more than
the individual and the future greater than the
present. The type of civilization which first or
ganizes itself around this central capacity of
woman's mind will have a stupendous advantage
over all others in the coming struggle of the
world.

CHAPTER IX
THE MIND OF WOMAN

IT has been said in the last chapter that in
the background of human consciousness there
has always been present the conception of
woman's mind as being, in circumstances which
men have not allowed themselves to imagine, a
power of incalculable magnitude. This concep-
tion is visible in the records of many primitive
peoples. It is to be found in later Roman history ;
it was in evidence for a brief space in the second
and third centuries, from the period of Gaius
onward, when woman, at the height of Roman
civilization, having with the assistance of the legal
mind emerged from the restrictions of manus,
attained to a position of almost complete inde-
pendence and the equality of the sexes was assumed
by Roman jurisconsults as a fundamental principle
of equity.

The same fact is to be witnessed strongly pre-
senting itself in various forms in modern times.
The violent dislike and distrust of woman shown

224 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

by the crowd of writers, and later by many men
of action, who have followed Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche, in imagining the winning principles of
Power in the Individual Integration to be the
winning principles of Power in the Social Integration,
are in reality a striking tribute to the mind of
woman. For what has to be recognized therein is

v

that the fear of woman's mental influence is ex-
hibited as a kind of overwhelming obsession of the
male intellect. Even the more reasoned opposition
to the claims of the sex, often encountered in the
current world in persons of the highest ideals, is to
be taken as testimony to the underlying perception
of the reach of woman's powers. For in the case of
most persons of this class, especially those of the
strongest convictions and sincerity, it is the instinct
of the enormous potential influence of woman's
mind in the coming order of civilization which drives
them to oppose with all their might attempts to
employ that influence in what they conceive to be
a wrong and misguided manner.

In dealing with the mind of woman in the future
of civilization the fundamental fact that must ever
be kept clearly in view is the relationship of woman
to Power. Scarcely any of the writers of social
science textbooks have yet grasped the full signi-
ficance of this relationship, and of the fact that the

THE MIND OF WOMAN 225

clue to all events and to all principles in the future
is that Power in the highest form of integration
will win.

Now the highest form of Power in the social
integration is that in which society is rendered
organic to the highest possible degree. Almost the
only object to which society as a whole has been
collectively organized in the past has been the
object of successful war directed to the smashing
and conquest of other peoples or to resistance
against such an attempt. There has been no
example hitherto in the world of Power in its
highest and supreme type, that is to say, in a
society in which mind has been organized and
steadily directed through all the forms and
functions of civilization over an indefinite number
of generations towards the attainment of an ideal
conceived to embrace the highest and the whole
meaning of human effort. It is this type of
society which is inevitable in the future of the
world ; for in the struggle for survival it will
exceed in Power all other types. But to organize
Power in this supreme type is possible in society in
one way only. The existing individuals must be
rendered capable of subordinating their minds,
their lives, and all the interests within the span
of their lives, to an ideal which is beyond their
15

226 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

lives, and which may even at times be beyond their
understanding.

In this deeply organized type of society efficiency
projected thus into the future always of necessity
implies and includes efficiency in the present. A
society which is capable of consistently subordinating
the present to the future has within it the power of
realizing practically any aim which it may set
before itself in civilization. The social mind
directed forward with great strength and unity
over long stretches of time to an ideal end held in
view is a force absolutely irresistible. The political
systems of Power organized in this way will win out
over all others in the struggle of the world in the
future.

The cause which makes these higher systems of
Power possible has been designated in these chapters
the emotion of the ideal. Many years ago William
James graphically described in the first edition of
his Textbook of Psychology the manner in which this
cause of illimitable Power mainly represented in
the mind of woman works in the individual. He
did not call the cause the emotion of the ideal.
He did not deal with its transmission through the
social heredity, or with its wide effects as related
to Power as I have discussed these matters here.
But within the limits that confine it, James's descrip-

THE MIND OF WOMAN 227

tion of the manner in which the emotion of the
ideal works in the mind of the individual is complete
and of the first importance. There is enshrined
within me, as within every one of us, says James,
an inner man. This inner or real man he describes
to be the ideal social or other- regarding self. " It
may be remote," he continues, "it may be represented
as barely possible. I may not hope for its realization
during my lifetime. I may even expect the future
generations, which would approve of me if they
knew me, to know nothing about me when I am
gone. Yet still the emotion which beckons me on
is indubitably the pursuit of an ideal social self." 1
James proceeds then to analyse the workings of this
cause in the mind of the individual almost up to the
point at which we begin to be concerned with its
collective function as the vehicle of illimitable Power.
"What is the nature of the ideal social self ? "
asks James. The reply is to the effect that it is
a self which seeks to set up within the individual
nothing less than the standards of Universal Mind.
They are the same standards of Absolute or Universal
Mind which we attribute to God. It is character-
istic of this inner self that, to quote James's words,
" it can find its adequate socius only in an ideal
world." All social progress, he continues, consists

1 Text Book of Psychology, ch. xii.

228 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

in the substitution of higher standards for lower;
and it is the distinctive quality of this inner tribunal
that it sets up the highest standard of all — that of
Universal Mind. "Most men," he concludes,
" either continually or occasionally carry a reference
to it in their breast. The humblest outcast on this
earth can feel himself to be real and valid by means
of this higher recognition."

It is in making the standards of this other-regard-
ing self the basis of the social inheritance, and in
the organization and transmission of this inheritance
under the influence of the emotion of the ideal, that
there lies the road to the attainment of any object
that a people may set before itself. Once the influ-
ence of the ideal is imposed upon the individual by
social heredity, as described in Chapter V, he can
never escape from it. It is this creation of the ideal,
and the organization of the minds upon which it is
imposed into the collective will, that constitute the
first objective in the science of Power in the future
of the world.

From tune immemorial the interests in which
Power has expressed itself through the self -regarding
emotions have imposed their will on the world. The
systems of Power, acknowledging no law and no
morality but their own advantage, to which the
interests resting on self have given rise, have

THE MIND OF WOMAN 229

organized themselves until they have filled the world
in the past with the stress and fury of their activities.
But never hitherto have the higher systems of Power
which rest on the other-regarding emotions organized
themselves throughout civilization with similar
intensity, determined to obtain control of the social
inheritance and determined to impose on the world
the ideals which they have the power of realizing in
civilization.

In considering the principles of Power in its highest
forms, the significance and the reach in the era that
is before us of the principles of the inner mind of
woman become now more clearly visible. As soon
as we perceive the character of the conditions as-
sembled in the world it is evident that all systems
of political utilitarianism founded on self-interest,
such as those which Bentham, the Mills, and Herbert
Spencer helped to build up in Britain, and all the
systems of military utilitarianism in which self is
glorified, as in the system which modern Germany
sought to establish in the West, must pass in time
to the rubbish-heap. Their final condemnation lies in
the fact that, despite all appearance to the contrary,
they have no ultimate validity as systems of Power. As
soon as civilization knows its own mind and perceives
its own objective, with the means and instruments to
attain it, it will be perceived, strange as it may appear,

230 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

that these systems have not a chance in the long run
in the stern struggle of the world. They will all go
down in the end before the long-range, long-sequence,
integrating systems of Power of which the meaning
transcends self and all the interests of self, of which
the centre of gravity is always in the future and of
which the history in all the stages constitutes that
vast, tragic, ennobling, world-building drama of sub-
ordination and duty resting on sacrifice. These are
the systems organized in the highest degree and there-
fore powerful in the highest degree, towards which
life by the laws inherent in it must evolve in the
social integration.

To the evolutionist who understands his subject
and who has once firmly grasped in all its bearings
the leading fact that the science of evolution is the
science of Power, the conclusion suggested in these
chapters begins here to present itself with great
strength as a conviction. He sees clearly that the
part which he has played in the past will not remain
to the fighting male. It is the mind of woman which
is destined to take the lead in the future of civiliza-
tion as the principal instrument of Power.

It will be recognized in time as a fact beyond dis-
pute that it is in the mind of woman that there is
reached the completest expression of the sum of the
other- regarding emotions which has been defined

THE MIND OF WOMAN 231

throughout these chapters as the emotion of the
ideal. Schopenhauer spoke with an iasight in
advance of all the philosophers and reasoners of his
century when he described woman as the being of
the race rather than of the individual. It is woman
who, in the long aeons of evolutionary stress out of
which her mind has emerged, has ever been, by reason
of her relations to the man on the one hand, and to
the next generation on the other, the creature in the
constitution of whose mind, to a far greater extent
than in the case of the mind of a man, the interests
of the future, the distant, and the universal have been
represented. She has lived continually in every kind
of motive and emotion driving her to express herself
in others and to subordinate the present to the
future.

The struggle of woman with Power for untold ages
has thus been a struggle which has gradually brought
her mind far closer to the principles of the universal
mind than the mind of man. It is for this reason
that, as we saw in the last chapter, woman naturally
and instinctively subordinates interest to principle.
The secret of man's progress Is that he has gradually
released into the service of civilization, ever at
higher and higher levels, all the stern qualities of
the chase and the fight bred in him through long
ages of primitive struggle. But when the ^motion

232 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

of the ideal in woman, similarly bred in her through
the long stages of our primitive past, is in like manner
released into the service of civilization, the effect
will transcend the effect of man's qualities. Woman
as a sex will reveal in these circumstances the same
power of devotion to ideals, to causes, as she does
to persons. Her relationship to the future through
the long eras of her evolution in the past has per-
manently endowed woman's mind with a capacity
for self-sacrifice and renunciation, persisting through
every variety of opposition and of suffering even to
death, which is the highest product of the other-
regarding emotions, and which in woman is without
any superior example in the whole realm of mind.

The elemental hunger of civilization at the present
moment is for a public opinion able to subordinate
the present to the future — for a public opinion,
that is to say, which would express through the
collective will just the qualities which are here
described as reaching in woman their highest ex-
pression. By no other means than this can civiliza-
tion secure to itself the capacity to rise above the
rule of the systems of Power, knowing no law but
their own interests, namely, than by a public opinion
which is touched with and sustained by emotion
in the manner described in Chapter V. The miracle
which was related in that chapter as taking place in

THE MIND OF WOMAN 238

every lifetime in the will of the individual, when he
is made to pass irrevocably into another world by
the influence on him of the internal standards set
up in his mind through the cultural inheritance, is a
miracle which under proper conditions is bound to
be wrought equally in the collective will.

This direction of the collective will through the
cultural inheritance to definite ends over long
stretches of time has become the most urgent need
of civilization. But the fact of the age which goes
deeper than any other is that the male mind of the race,
as the result of the conditions out of which it has come,
is by itself incapable of rendering this service to
civilization. It is in the mind of woman that the
winning peoples of the world will find the psychic
centre of Power in the future.

The immense importance of the function of the
cultural heredity of civilization imposed on the
mind of the young of each generation under the
influence of the emotion of the ideal was described
in Chapter V. It is the most pregnant fact in the
history of Power as written in the struggles of
modern peoples. Any end towards which the will of
civilization is directed in this manner has become
possible of attainment. Any existing institution
of the world can be altered or transformed in a
brief period.

234 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

The bearing of these facts has already become
visible to the occupying interests in civilization.
Under a multitude of aspects it has become the
chief aim of the interests which have ruled in the
past to move the world now through the organiza-
tion of opinion and to enlist the emotion of the
ideal in the service of their own schemes of Power

But this to the occupying interests of the past
is an infinitely difficult task. For these interests
cannot enlist this quality, nor maintain it, nor
inspire it, except at its lowest levels. It is an
important fact that it has never been .possible in
history to organize on a large scale and to steadily
direct over long periods of time to a clearly defined
end in the service of civilization the emotion of the
ideal at its highest potentiality. The reason has
been that it has not been possible hitherto to carry
the emotion of the ideal into action on a universal
scale except through the male mind. Civilization
has therefore never been able to enlist in its service
at the highest level of possible achievement this
capacity of mind. The chief reservoir of it as it
exists in the race is in the mind of woman, and it
has never been uncovered. This is the most signifi-
cant fact in the science of Power.

It may be observed that it is this struggle between
the characteristic standards of mind that express

THE MIND OF WOMAN 285

themselves in man, and the characteristic standards
of mind that express themselves in woman, which
has come to dominate all the leading activities of
civilization. The overwhelming heredity of the
fight compels every form of Power expressing
itself through men, and particularly through men of
the Western races, towards that objective of self-
realization in the present which is distinctive of the
male mind. All the standards of conduct to the in-
fluence of which war is due are essentially standards
of the self-regarding emotions thus driving men
to self-realization in the present. " There are no
Rights in the world like Mine." " There are no
People in the world like Us." " There is no To-
morrow in the world like To-day. " These are the
cries which have from the beginning represented
the elemental emotions underlying war. They
carry a challenge to the primary law of civilization
with its centre of gravity in the future as deep
seated as is the challenge of the highwayman to the
first law of ordered society.

Nothing can ever reconcile this elemental anta-
gonism between the principles of civilization and
the principles of war. One side must ultimately
annihilate the other. But no material or economic
cause, no agreement between nations, can in itself
abolish war. War can never be brought to an end

236 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

until the cultural inheritance of civilization imposed
on each generation from childhood onwards under
the influence of the emotion of the ideal renders it
as impossible for a nation to engage in war and lose
that principal motive of self-respect which makes
life worth living as it is now impossible for the
normal civilized man, apart from any question
whatever of material loss or gain or punishment, to
engage in robbery or murder.

It is one of the most remarkable facts of human
nature that the emotion of the ideal, which is the
sum and highest form of the other-regarding emo-
tions, is hardly represented at all in the male mind
when the wide and particularly the future interests
of civilization are concerned. Alike in the history
of its external State policy and in the history written
in its own statute books, nearly every Western
country bears witness to this fact. The spirit of the
saying noted by Durkheim as attributed to the
Emperor of Germany, that, " For me, humanity
ends at the Vosges," x is not peculiar to any country.
It is the true inborn spirit of the heredity of the
fighting male of the West coming down from ages
before the dawn of history.

The inability to subordinate the present to the
future is a pronounced characteristic of civilization

1 Germany above All, p. 23.

THE MIND OF WOMAN 287

under the rule of the male mind. While Western
countries, in order to carry on war, have drawn
mortgages on the future which stagger the imagina-
tion, there had not arisen up to the date of the
world war of 1914 any democracy which possessed
the power of subordinating itself to an ideal in the
future even to the limited extent of paying off its
national debt in times of peace in the interests of
posterity. The lack of this capacity to conceive
the importance of the future is visible in nearly all
public and class movements in the West. How
many workmen, asks a living writer, with the
object of reducing all such idealisms to absurdity,
would refuse an annuity of £200 a year on the chance
that by doing so he might raise the rate of wages
i per cent 300 years hence ? The more practical the
nation, the more successful the class of men in the
struggle for their own interests, the more absurd does
such a standard of renunciation appear to them.

As soon as we get down to the realities which lie
behind the science of Power in civilization, it will
be perceived that in all that pertains to the emotion
of the ideal at those higher levels at which it
is most powerfully capable of influencing public
opinion in sustained effort directed to an objective
beyond the present, the mind of woman has in
reality already outstripped the mind of the male

238 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

of the race by an entire era of evolution. It is not
without significance that in the four principal forms
of activity through which public opinion in the West
is influenced most directly and on the largest scale,
namely, in art, literature, philosophy, and religion,
all the principal revolutionary and developmental
movements in recent times have a common meaning
which is related to this fact. They are all best
summed up as movements which represent the
effort of the male mind to reach consciously, through
slow, laborious, and painful stages and by an
entirely different road, the position which is already
woman's by inborn inheritance.

In the recent leading article, the Times, in com-
menting on a letter of Sir Martin Conway in its
columns, called attention to a remarkable change
which has been silently taking place under our
eyes over a long period in the standards of art in
the West.1 The chief aspect of this change was
pointed out to consist in the fact that, to summar-
ize Sir Martin Con way's words, we are gradually
losing sense of all the formative arts (meaning
thereby arts like painting and sculpture) as a
means of expression, the products of such arts
coming to be regarded merely as decorative objects ;
while, on the other hand, the greatest living art of

1 Times, 23 March 1914.

THE MIND OF WOMAN 289

the present is tending more and more to find its
expression in literature and similar mediums through
which the world is being powerfully moved by the
creation of opinion.

Now the clue to development in art, as in ail
other forms of human activity, is the underlying
relationship to Power. The beginning and end of
the meaning inherent in art is capable of being
expressed in a single word — Emotion. All art is
nothing else than the capacity of rendering emotion
contagious and so of becoming an instrument of
Power by influencing human action. The history
of development in art is, therefore, the history of
the development in the artist of the power of render-
ing emotion contagious at various levels, as mind
in evolution gradually rises from the standpoint
of the individual in the self-regarding emotions to
the standpoint of the universal in the other-regarding
emotions. This is the fundamental law of progress
in art and it is identical in meaning with the
fundamental law of progress in ethics.

What, then, is the significance of the transition
in current Western art described by Sir Martin
Conway, for in it we are called to witness the
products of the formative arts like sculpture and
painting declining from the function of living art
and coming to be regarded merely as decorative

240 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

objects, while the greatest art of to-day is tending to
find its expression in literature and similar mediums ?

The true answer to this question carries us far.
It is doubtless to this effect. The characteristic
art of the West in the past, which has expressed
itself through formative mediums like sculpture
and painting, is the art of the era of the ascendancy
in the world of the fighting male. It is, therefore,
art which, as Tolstoy with profound intuition per-
ceived, is essentially pagan in character.1 It is
the art of which Grant Allen tried to give, and in
large measure succeeded in giving us, the true
Darwinian principles in his Physiological Esthetics.
In it there is expressed, over and above everything
else, the feelings and emotions through which the
individual was rendered successful in the struggle
for his own interests, and through which the in-
dividual, thus successful, became the dominant
power in creation. The formative art of the West
is, in short, the art of all the world which most
profoundly expresses the pyschology of the male.

That the essentially male psychology of the
formative arts of the West, which glorifies the self-
regarding emotion under every aspect, is the cause
which directs and rules the artist in all his efforts,
may be observed on every hand. The reflective

1 What is Art? p. 161 et seq.

THE MIND OF WOMAN 241

observer who walks through the ancient sculptures
in the Grecian and Roman galleries of the British
Museum, and who then carries his mind to the
similar effects reproduced in modern statuary in
the open spaces and public buildings of London,
will have this impression bred immovable within
him. He will have it confirmed and reinforced in
an unmistakable manner by an extended study of
the art of Europe as it is expressed in sculpture in
almost every Western city.

The effect aimed at in the art of statuary is every-
where the same throughout the West. In groups with-
out number of classical and sham-classical statues and
effigies the sustained effort in sculpture is to glorify
or deify almost every human attribute through
which the self-regarding emotions can be expressed
in their most intense form. Representations of
athletes, winged figures, helmeted warriors, dying
heroes ; representations of struggles, duels, rapes,
battles ; representations of youths, men, women,
crowds, animals ; representations, in short, of power
and mastery in every position and adventure are
intended to make contagious admiration for the
qualities through which the self-regarding emo-
tions can be expressed at their highest power.

This spirit has reached in Europe in the cities of
modern Prussia a peculiar efflorescence, which has
16

242 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

been contemporaneous with the development in
Germany of the intellectual and military standards
described in previous chapters. A recent writer,1
describing the remarkable effects to be witnessed
in a view of the Schlossbruecke and Museum at
Berlin, recapitulates the enormous number of
groups and the attitudes portrayed. " To crown
everything," he continues, " and to introduce
strikingly the Prussian symbol, above the plinth
of the main entrance of the Museum are no fewer
than eighteen representations of the Prussian eagle.
Thus, on a space of ground represented by a frontage
of what cannot be much more than fifty yards,
there are to be seen no fewer than forty-nine
classical representations in stone of one attribute
or personality and another." The dominant aim
in all the effects, whether represented thus or on
a less ambitious scale, scarcely ever varies. Ex-
pressed in sculpture in all its forms in the West,
this aim is to typify the self-regarding emotions and
to portray them triumphing in the most perfect
living instruments of force.

In the sister art of painting, the underlying
influence is not so visible at first sight. But the
discriminating mind soon perceives that the in-

1F. M. Hueffer, When Blood is their Argument, Part III.
chap. i. § vi.

THE MIND OF WOMAN 243

fluence of the same dominating male psychology
pervades all its expressions. It may be distinguished
how it penetrates to details, even in an art like
landscape painting. " How the aesthetic value of
a picture of a wood is enhanced," says Schopenhauer,
the typical pagan of the West, " if the artist paints,
as he should, a solitary pine standing out above the
others, high and erect towards heaven.'* Why ?
Because, in the formative arts of the West, the
meaning which the artist seeks to utter always
springs from a subconscious psychology which is
profoundly male. Unconsciously the fighting mind
realizes and revels in every feature and detail which
suggest to it the omnipotence of force. In the
detail of the solitary pine standing out high and
erect towards heaven, it translates into contagious
emotion the symbol of power thus portrayed as
conquering gravity.

This tendency in art is in conflict with the deep-
est and most characteristic evolutionary tendency
underlying Western civilization. All the leading
movements in modern art, from Pre-Raphaelism
to Post-Impressionism and Futurism, reflect phases
of the meaning of the struggle between these two
forces engaged. The monstrous inspiration which
Western art inherited from the ancient civilizations
was that of the self-regarding emotions triumphing

244 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

through the perfection of the living instruments
of force. The formative arts have been the chief
mediums through which this inspiration has been
interpreted.

But the inspiration which underlies all the for-
ward movements in the civilization of our time, is
that of the triumph of the other-regarding emotions
through the belief that the life of the individual is
related to ends and principles which transcend in
importance every present interest in the world
around us.

It is for this reason that the tendency in our
time is for the greatest art of the day to become
more and more what may be termed invisible art.
The highest art is, therefore, seeking to express
itself in the mediums through which the emotion
of the ideal, which, it must be remembered, is
itself the sum of the other-regarding emotions,
can be most profoundly influenced. These mediums
are not the formative arts. The chief vehicles of
this art have now become the word and the spirit,
and its highest expressions, as Sir Martin Conway
described, are in literature and similar mediums
through which the world is being powerfully moved.
Its exponents, therefore, are the master-minds of
literature — the seers of the visions of the writers,
the poets, the reformers, the teachers who create

THE MIND OF WOMAN 245

the mind of the rising generation under the influence
of emotion. They are the inspirers of causes, the
founders of faiths, the sustainers of the ideal, the
authors of those great policies of mind in which
the human spirit, rising through contagious emotion
from the individual to the universal, is transmitting,
through the cultural inheritance, an accumulating
power to subordinate itself in civilization to the
spiritual meaning which is immanent in the world.
And the meaning which underlies it is Power,
always Power. It is the systems in which this
inspiration lies in its highest might and reality
which will win out over all competition in the
future of the world.

The characteristic inspiration which is accom-
panying this development in which the imaginative
and emotional literature of the West has become
the medium of the highest art, is a very striking
phenomenon. In the imaginative literature of all
the peoples of the modern West as contrasted with
the literature of all other people and all other times,
the outstanding feature is the position acceded to
woman. In the current literature of the Western
world woman stands triumphant as the central
figure. In it, as I have stated elsewhere, wherever
man becomes an idealist it is almost invariably
woman who is the measure of his idealism. It is

246 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

to the mind of woman that he brings all his ideals,
to prove them and to claim support for them.
Almost without exception, it is woman who inspires
the strongest deeds, the deepest passions, the highest
idealisms of men throughout the imaginative litera-
ture of our time.

This fact, which is the most distinctive feature
of the idealism of the modern West in literature,
stands out alike in poetry, in the drama, and in
the modern novel. Since the rise of the novel in
the sixteenth century, the idealization of Woman
is the feature which has grown and deepened in
this medium down to the present day. It has
made of the novel the predominant form of Western
literature. The standard, moreover, which this
fact of the idealization of woman has set up in art
has become so fundamental that, as I have shown,
it has become a canon of art in the modern novel,
that man cannot be represented as the higher
idealist and woman as the lower cause which has
dragged him down, without a sense of artistic
disaster and a feeling of failure and outrage being
created in the mind of the reader.

The highest expressions of living art in the West
are, in short, coming more and more to have a very
close relation to the great movements of opinion
touched with emotion out of which the world is

THE MIND OF WOMAN 247

being organized into larger systems of Power. Genius
expressed in its highest form through the medium
of art is always the capacity in the artist to render
contagious through the emotion of the ideal the
power of subduing the immediate world and all its
existing interests, to the larger meaning which is
conceived to lie in the universal. The highest type
of genius in the race has ever been, for this reason,
that of the great religious teachers. The tendency
in living Western art at present is a tendency
through which the function of the artist is again
approaching that of the great religious teacher.

The controlling meaning which stands out in this
progressive tendency in Western art amounts to this.
We are watching in art, under a great number of
phases, what I have described as the conscious and
infinitely laborious effort of the male mind to reach
by slow and painful stages, and by a different road,
a position which the mind of woman has already
attained in the evolutionary process. In the
position which it now occupies, the mind of woman
is greatly in advance of the mind of the male of the
race, in the development in it of those qualities
upon which Power in civilization will rest to an
increasing degree in the future.

This clue to the upward transition in art is the
clue to progress in all its phases The advance

248 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

therein represents the developing challenge to the
triumph in the past of the world of the self -regarding
emotions. But it is the qualities characteristic of
the mind of woman which are bound to form the
principal basis of Power in this significant change.

Tolstoy's insight was true when he asserted
that it is the ideal of the other-regarding emotions,
as seen in that conception of the brotherhood
of man which lies behind all the winning develop-
ments of civilization, which will supply the dominat-
ing influence in Western art in the future. This
concept of the oneness of humanity in which
the future becomes greater than the present has
been, like the concept of God, inherent from the
beginning in the process .in which evolution is
following in history the line of maximum Power.
And the upward development which both concepts
represent is under all its forms a development
towards the ascendancy in the world of qualities
that have attained a higher development in the
mind of woman than they have reached in the mind
of the male.

Progress in the standards of ethics in the West
has the same underlying significance as this develop-
ment which is taking place in the standards of art.
Power in civilization, whatever the length and
stress of the historical process through which the

THE MIND OF WOMAN 249

principle is established, always rests in the last
resort on the displacement of the lower standards
of ethics by the higher. The character of this
development in which the higher standards in
ethics are displacing the lower has never been more
illuminatingly summarized than in a brief sentence
by Green. The command in human conduct,
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, has never
varied, said Green in effect ; all that has varied in
the upward progress of humanity is " the practical
answer to the question, Who is my neighbour ? " l

Progress in ethics is, in short, to be described as
the gradual extension of the reach of the other-
regarding emotions till it includes the universal.
The reasoning capacity of mind has no part in
this world-shaping transition. The principal in-
strument of Power accomplishing the development
has consisted always and altogether in qua ities
of emotion which have their chief expression in the
mind of woman. God is the highest concept to
which mind is carried by the emotion of the ideal.
The command, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God
with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with
all thy mind, is the highest term of the command-
ment, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

It will be seen at no distant date that the funda-

T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, chap. iii. § 207.

250 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

mental mistake made by the leaders of the in-
tellectual movement which has pursued its course
in the Western world since the Reformation has
consisted in this. In identifying the progress of
the world with the development in history of the
rationalizing process of mind they have miscon-
ceived the basis of Power in civilization. Power
in civilization rests ultimately on knowledge which
is conveyed through emotion and not through
the reasoning processes of mind.

There is a remarkable passage in the literature
of the West, in which the blinding light of this
conclusion and its bearing is seen as it first flashes
on the mind of one of the leading rationalists of
our time. In an essay on the influence of the
ethic of renunciation as it has been the inspiration
of conduct in the great religions, Karl Pearson
finds himself towards the conclusion of his argument
facing this position. " A predisposition or a pre-
judice having absolutely no rational basis may,"
so he puts it, " have a social value and tend to
preserve an individual or a group of individuals
in the struggle for existence. Do we not here/'
so he ponders, " catch a glimpse of how a nearly
universal predisposition may exist without our
being able to give it a rational basis ? " l The en-

1 Ethic of Free Thought.

THE MIND OF WOMAN 251

lightened and reasoning individual, he continues,
may renounce for himself as untrue or as a
delusion the doctrines of sacrifice and subordina-
tion as taught by the great religions. " But
can such renunciation become a general rule ?
May not the non-renouncing sections ultimately
survive ? "

The answer to Karl Pearson's last question here
placed in italics is that by necessity inherent in the
evolutionary process, of which Darwin gave us the
laws in a lower stage, it is the non-renouncing
sections in this sense alone of the race which will
ultimately survive. It is an answer which closes the
rationalistic controversy in the West. Truth and
falsehood in the sense in which Karl Pearson uses
them have no meaning. For Truth is the Science
of Power. Truth, therefore, does not make its
way in the world by controversy or reason. Its
standards in the social integration are incompre-
hensible to the pagan mind. Confronted in the
systems of the world with the standards of the
pagan era, the exponents of Truth stand like
Christ before Pilate's judgment -seat. They answer
nothing. They represent the Science of Power.
The Facts of the world to which they belong have
not yet arrived.

A question which will have risen to the minds of

252 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

many throughout this chapter is this : Can it be in
keeping with the order of the evolutionary process
that the mind of woman, which has hitherto occupied
a position of inferiority, should thus become in a
relatively brief period the principal instrument of
Power in the world ?

It may be laid down as a rule in the history of
evolution that all the great developments which
have carried life into new horizons have arisen
in the same way. They were based on qualities
previously developed in obscurity and in conditions
of apparent inferiority. But as soon as the con-
ditions of the new era were assembled in the world,
the qualities which had hitherto appeared inferior
were ready to assume the function which was to
carry the world into an entirely new era of
progress.

Thus it was that the land forms of life, now the
dominant types in the world, were developed from
forms which, though possessing in embryo the
qualities required in the new era, would have ap-
peared to an observer as quite inferior types in the
midst of those then dominant in the ocean. Similarly
among the land types, in the long era of the domin-
ance of the fighting types of life possessing huge
bodies or clothed in defensive armour, there were de-
veloped, amongst forms appearing quite subordinate

THE MIND OF WOMAN 253

and inferior at the time, those qualities of brain
which were to become the dominant factor in the
struggle of types, and which were destined to carry
life into new horizons.

So again in the era which dawned in life when
the transmission of the accumulated results of
past training in the individual became possible
through language in the primates, no limited
intelligence could have foreseen the nature of the
new horizon into which life was to be carried through
such qualities developed in conditions of apparent
inferiority. For the primates would have appeared
to have had stamped upon them all the marks of
inferiority and even defeat in the struggle for
existence in their adaptation to an arboreal life as
a retreat from the forceful ascendant forms which
then crowded the plains and valleys of the world.
Every comparative student of form and function
in the development of life down to the later phases
represented in the struggle between races and
civilizations, and even in the conflict between
human institutions, will be able to multiply these
examples indefinitely.

It may be laid down that all the eras of progress
in which life has been carried to new horizons have
had their origin in qualities developed thus in special
conditions, qualities which would have been judged

254 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

by prevailing standards to be associated with
inferiority in the midst of the types then dominant.
When the changing conditions of the world offered
the opportunity, the qualities thus developed were
ready to assume the function suitable to the new
era which made the type of life possessing them a
dominant one in evolution.

In the social integration the governing principle
slowly rising into sight in the modern struggle of
the world is that civilization rests on the social
emotion. The principal instrument of the social
emotion is the mind of woman. Power in the
future of civilization is the science of the organiza-
tion in society of the emotion of the ideal. The
people who first grasp this tremendous lesson in all
its practical bearings will have the world at their
feet.

This is the lesson which the Emperor William II
sought through the elementary school-teachers of
Prussia to interpret to civilization in the world-
compelling history of modern Germany. The
lesson remains in all its mind-subduing significance,
despite the calamitous misdirection, despite the
tremendous misinterpretation.

I carry to the end of my life the memory of a
certain summer afternoon in the year 1908. It
was my place to deliver to the University of Oxford

THE MIND OF WOMAN 255

the Herbert Spencer Lecture for the year.1 In the
restrained and sobered language suitable to the
occasion I endeavoured to convey the message I
had to deliver. To the audience present I en-
deavoured gently to break it, that the world
into which they had been born was dead. Those
who were still young, I said, would probably live
to see great happenings. The rule of the old
individualistic theories of Power upon which the
world, and in particular the mind of England, had
been nurtured in history had passed for ever.
My message was that it was the beliefs and the
conceptions possessing the power of organizing
the minds of men through long stretches of time
into systems of action in which the present was
subordinated to an ideal in the future which would
rule the world in the times at hand. I did not
hesitate to apply the message in the prediction to
which I passed. " The next age will probably be
the age of the Germanization of the world. For
it is those lessons of which the first stages
have been displayed in the history of modern
Prussia which are likely to be worked out in
their fuller applications by successful States in the
future." *

This message to the mind of England of a few

1 Individualism and After, p. 31.

256 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

years ago was as words fallen on sand. Even
William James, who listened to the lecture and
who spoke to me in the name of the United States,
took me to task afterwards for this prophecy.

The world which existed then has been wiped
out of our Western age as if a sponge had closed its
record in history. Its ruling principles have been
deposed. The example of organized Power given
by Germany in the world war which began in 1914
has changed for ever the direction of the main
currents of Western history. It was an example of
stupendous power misconceived and misdirected to
the revival in the West of the ideals of Power char-
acteristic of the pagan past. But the significance
of the example remains for ever in the lesson
which was given to the world as to the almost
superhuman reach of organized Power based on the
emotion of the ideal in the collective mind.

The message which is conveyed to civilization in
this war is in all its fundamental meaning the
message which I attempted to deliver to Oxford in
1908, namely, that Power in the future of the world
will be to the peoples who find the true application
of the lessons of which the first stages have been
displayed in the history of modern Prussia. In this
lesson, the first step is to the knowledge that
Power in the future of civilization is the science

THE MIND OF WOMAN 257

of the emotion of the ideal in the collective
mind. The second step is to the knowledge
that the principal instrument in the race of the
science of the emotion of the ideal is in the mind
of woman.

CHAPTER X
SOCIAL HEREDITY

AS soon as we come to grasp the application
of the principle of evolution described in the
previous chapters we can hardly fail to
perceive that the significance of its bearing on the
future of civilization is quite out of the ordinary.
The peoples who apply to practical affairs the lessons
which are involved will inevitably become the
leaders and organizers of the world.

The future science of civilization may be summed
up in a sentence. It will be the science of Power.
It is waste of time to spend effort discussing other
principles of society. There is only one type
towards which the universal process of civilization
moves — the type of society in which Power is
realized to the highest degree. It is therefore of the
first importance to grasp firmly the essential facts
that distinguish tne science of Power in society from
the science of Power everywhere else throughout
life.

Now it has been already said that Darwinism is

SOCIAL HEREDITY 259

strictly the science only of the evolution of the
individual. It is not the science of the evolution
of society. This latter science rests fundamentally
on a principle which is never encountered in the
evolution of the individual. It may be noticed
in the world with which Darwin dealt that the
mechanism through which Power has been accumu-
lated and perfected in the individual in the rise
upwards through orders and types to the highest
forms of life is always the same. The entire order
of progress rests on the single fact of the continued
transmission of the winning qualities from genera-
tion to generation through heredity in the individual.
In a few words the Darwinian hypothesis may be
summarized. We are met in life by the fact of
universal variation. Every organism is variable
throughout.1 Darwin exhibited the process of
natural selection, sorting out from this variation
the characters useful to the individual in the struggle
for existence, that is to say, the characters upon
which Power rested. The universal means by which
the gains of progress thus hall-marked as they arose
were held and increased was the transmission of the
winning qualities from generation to generation
through inborn heredity in the individual. In the

1 Or as Dr. James Johnstone has recently put it in extreme
form, " Every character of an organism or of a part or organ
of an organism is variable " (Science Progress, April 1916).

260 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

Darwinian conception thus all progress rests ulti-
mately upon the mechanism of heredity in the
individual.

It is for this reason that Darwinism in all its
phases down to the latest Mendelian development
is primarily concerned with inborn heredity. It is
from the study of the facts and laws governing the
transmission of qualities inborn in the individual
that modern Darwinians found their claims to have
important contributions to make to the science of
human society. In the writings and researches of
representatives like Galton and Bateson we are
accordingly always in the presence of the sustained
effort to exhibit the science of society as related to
and dependent on the study of the laws of inborn
inheritance in the individual. Human progress is
presented to us as the scheme of organizing and
controlling in the race the mechanism of individual
heredity.

When with this feature of current Darwinian
teaching in mind we turn now to human society,
the first fact which holds attention is perceived to be
of great importance as soon as we grasp its applica-
tion. As society, like the individual, advances in
evolution the gains of progress are accumulated
i and are transmitted from generation to generation
by heredity. But here the parallel ceases. The

SOCIAL HEREDITY 261

mechanism of social heredity in no way resembles
the mechanism of inborn heredity. The mechanism
of inborn heredity is in the individual; the
mechanism of social heredity is outside of the in-
dividual. The medium through which the gains of
progress are held and are transmitted in the in-
dividual is inborn at birth, and is in the physical
apparatus of his body as it has come down from the
past. But the medium through which the gains of
progress are held and transmitted in society is the
accumulated social culture which comes down from
the past. No part and no quality in this social
inheritance is inborn in the individual. It is en-
tirely acquired by him from without. It is imposed
upon him by society in every generation.

Anthropologists have been disputing for a long
time about the fact that the human brain does not
appear for tens of thousands of generations past to
have increased in size or quality in any marked
manner. What is really meant by one side is that
it has not increased in a manner which corresponds
to the enormous and almost incalculable interval
which separates the results of mind in modern
civilized man from the results of mind in primitive
man ages before the dawn of history.

But the point, the significance of which is nearly
always overlooked in the controversy, is that the

262 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

equipment which separates the mind of modern
civilized man from the mind of primitive man is
almost entirely an equipment which comes to the
former through the cumulative social inheritance
that he receives from civilization. This inheritance
is not inborn in any of us. We have not yet fully
grasped the immense import of the fact that
since man became a serial creature the winning
variations upon which Power has rested in his evolu-
tion have been to an ever-increasing degree neither
variations in the structure of his body nor in the size
of his brain, but variations in the type of social culture
to which he is being submitted.

The importance of the principle here emphasized,
namely, that the Power which is characteristic of
organized society rests upon and is transmitted
through social heredity and does not rest upon and
is not transmitted through heredity inborn in the
individual, is incalculable. Fifty years hence the
attention of civilization will be permanently focused
on this distinction as the cardinal fact in the science
of Power.

The distinctive conception which in the past
has underlain the ideas of modern Darwinians of
all schools is that the control and organization of
Power in the future of civilization will be in the
hands of those who obtain possession of and who

SOCIAL HEREDITY 268

direct to preconceived ends the mechanism of
heredity in the individual. This is a fundamental
error. Those who understand the science of Power
in society see that all Power in the future will be
in the hands of those who obtain possession of and
who direct to preconceived ends not the mechanism
of individual heredity but the mechanism of social
heredity. And the instrument of social heredity
is the organized Culture of society.

What, therefore, is the peculiar nature of social
heredity, and what have we to do to obtain possession
of this source of omnipotent power in the future of
civilization ?

The marked features of social heredity in which
it differs absolutely from that inborn heredity upon
which Darwinians and many general theorists
have attempted in the past to found a science of
society are as follows. In inborn heredity the
constituent qualities tend to be indefinitely persistent
and difficult to alter. Despite all the work which
has been done on the subject we have not yet
arrived at any real knowledge or control of the
causes of variation. The deeper our acquaintance
with the subject the more clearly we perceive its
uncertainties and its limited possibilities.1 Slow

1 The recent utterances of Bateson on the subject, and there
is no one whose knowledge of the facts and principles under-

264 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

change can only be produced in the elements of
inborn heredity in the manner in which breeders
attempt to produce change in plants and animals
and in conditions which we can foresee to be quite
impossible in human society in the future.

With the elements of social heredity everything
is different. We can perceive at once, as soon
as we grasp the principles of the subject, that it
is along this line, namely, through the control of
social heredity, that mind will ultimately direct
the course of human evolution. For social here-
dity resting on mind is the direct basis of Power
where Power will be supreme, namely, in its collective
expressions. The most revolutionary change can
be effected in a brief space of time through control
of the elements of social heredity. The cause and
agency of variation are here absolutely under the
-direction of mind. We can foresee that the control
of social heredity will be practicable. And through
the control of the elements of social heredity it will
be an ideal not impossible of realization to transform
the world in the lifetime of a few generations.

It is now some fifty years since one of the most

lying it goes further, are full of caution. " That species have
come into existence by an evolutionary process no one seriously
doubts ; but few who are familiar with the facts that genetic
research has revealed are now inclined to speculate as to the
manner by which the process has been accomplished " (The
Problem of Genetics, by William Bateson, F.R.S.).

SOCIAL HEREDITY 265

blighting and retrograde conceptions which ever
influenced the mind of civilization came to obtain
wide currency in the West . As soon as the Darwinian
hypothesis was accepted it was correctly perceived
that it made all change and progress in life dependent
on the laws of inheritance in the individual. At
the same time it exhibited the qualities thus trans-
mitted by inborn heredity as relatively so fixed
and unchangeable that they were to be considered
as almost beyond control in the lifetime of the
individual.

Up to the time that Darwin published the Origin
of Species a different idea had been widely prevalent
in Western thought and particularly in all teachings
founded on the characteristic religious beliefs of
the West — that the mind of each generation as
represented in the child was practically a blank
sheet upon which good or evil might be written in
the future according to the nature of the training or
the nature of the education to which the young
were subjected. Human character was presented
in this conception as the result of training, and the
note which underlay the effort of nearly all social
and religious reformers had been a note of emphasis
on the paramount importance of the environment
in which the young were to be reared and educated.

One of the most revolutionary results of the

266 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

Darwinian hypothesis in the West was to undermine
and discredit this conception. There was, of course,
no doubt as to the transmission of inborn qualities
by heredity in human beings just as in animals and
in plants. But this fact came to obscure almost
entirely to Darwinians the immensely more import-
ant fact that the qualities upon which efficiency
and Power rest in collective evolution as distinct
from individual evolution are qualities of character
which are almost exclusively imposed and trans-
mitted through social heredity. For a period of
years the fact was completely lost sight of in
science that the upward progress of the world
in civilization rested on qualities in the individual
imposed on the individual from without, and not on
the nature of ancestral heredity inborn within him.

The influence of the retrograde Darwinian con-
ception spread with lightning-like rapidity through-
out Western thought. Darwinians like Galton,
through a series of writings which attained wide
publicity, fixed general attention in a marked manner
on the nature of inborn heredity and brought forward
ambitious schemes for the improvement of the race,
conceived, not as in the past as dependent on the
training and education of the young, but on success
in selecting and breeding from the required strains
of heredity in individuals after the manner of

SOCIAL HEREDITY 267

breeders of stock animals. Social reformers who
accepted Galton's standpoint began, like Karl
Pearson in the passages before quoted, to enlarge on
the peculiar nature of inborn heredity in the indi-
vidual and on the great length of time required
to produce any fundamental change in human
nature.

Within a short time the imaginative literature of
the West was deeply affected. It became tinged
throughout with the idea of biological predestination.
The idea of the persistence and the relative un-
changeableness of qualities in human nature resting
on inborn heredity became a dominant note, uttered
now, as it seemed, with authority coming direct from
the leaders of science. The quality of inevitableness
in inborn heredity conceived as overruling all the
elements of motive and intention imposed on the
individual by training was soon perceived to be a
principle in art which was capable of yielding pro-
found dramatic effect.

In the literature of Great Britain, Russia, Germany,
and other countries it began to be used with telling
effect in the novel and the drama. The dominating
influence of inborn heredity was one of the principal
conceptions through which a writer of international
influence like Ibsen deeply moved the mind of
the West. The Norwegian dramatist used it with

268 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

powerful effect in some situations, as where in the
play Ghosts he makes the tendencies of evil inborn
heredity coming down through the father overbear
in the son in the presence of the mother all the effects
of training and religion imposed through life on the
son.

In the writings of another author of international
fame, like Anatole France, the conception of the
determining influence of inborn heredity and its
power to override in the individual all the effects
of prolonged training became an instrument in the
hands of genius through which the faith of a whole
people was made to feel humiliated and abashed.
There is no more poignant and cynical drama of
human defeat than that exhibited by Anatole France
in the story of the material and spiritual ruin of
the Bishop of Trinqueballe who, after recalling from
death three children of tender age but of evil parent-
age, caused them to be trained and educated in his
own saintly principles. The inevitableness with
which the gifted French writer made the elements
of inborn heredity in the children to develop and in
the end to completely triumph over the influences
imposed on them by the Bishop through training and
education is one of the most striking examples of
the working of a principle in art which is capable of
producing intense dramatic effects but which gradu-

SOCIAL HEREDITY 269

ally shocked, startled, and in the end deeply impressed
for evil the average mind throughout the West.

As the movement ran its course in literature its
effects became many sided. Following in the wake
of the Darwinian development, conclusions about the
effects of inborn heredity, such as were reached in the
study of diseases by medical researchers, in the study
of crime by criminologists like Lombroso, in the study
of inheritance in plants and animals by Mendelians
like Bateson, tended to be carried in literature far
beyond their legitimate applications. They were
made by imaginative theorists to supply the basis
for vague, far-reaching generalizations about human
society, and about races and nations, and even about
civilization as a whole, the effect of which on the
general mind throughout the West was profoundly
disintegrating and demoralizing.

The movement came in time to influence widely
social and political affairs even in world- wide aspects.
Darwin's cousin, Francis Gal ton, the founder of the
branch of study to which he gave the name of
Eugenics, maybe said more than any single individual
to have helped to give direction to theories about
the effect of inborn heredity in peoples and races
which it has taken the results of the two greatest
wars in the world's history to counteract and per-
manently discredit in the Western mind.

270 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

Five years before Darwin published the Origin of
Species, Gallon in his Narrative of an Explorer in
Tropical South Africa was giving wide currency to
the view that the vast difference between the position
in the world of the advanced and less advanced
races was due to a corresponding difference in their
inborn mental qualities. The inborn mental faculties
of aboriginal peoples, like the intelligent Damara
tribes amongst whom he travelled in South Africa,
was made by him the starting-point for generaliz-
ations which were widely repeated throughout
civilization.

Galton formed a very low estimate of the mental
capacity of peoples like the Damaras. The evid-
ence upon which his conclusions were formed was
mainly evidence to the fact that they could not
count. When bartering for cattle, the Damaras
appeared to have no conception of number. Two
sticks of tobacco had to be put into the native's
hand and one sheep driven away, and then another
two sticks and the second sheep driven away, or
he could not follow the transaction. Galton
described how he observed a Damara floundering
hopelessly in a calculation of this sort, while his
own spaniel which had new-born puppies from
which two or three had been removed was equally
confused. She evidently, said Galton, had a vague

SOCIAL HEREDITY 271

notion of counting, but in the two attempts to
grasp the nature of numbers, Gait on remarked,
" the comparison reflected no great honour on the
man." l

That the members even of the highest civilized
race when without the artificial enumeration scale
inherited from civilization have no more natural
ability to count than the Damara whom Gait on
observed ; that the children of African aborigines,
and even the children of the aborigines of Australia,
learn when taught the same things quite as easily
and readily as the children of Europeans ; and that
the apparent difference which he noted between the
mental faculties of the advanced and less-advanced
races of the world was due to the nature of their social
inheritance and not to the nature of their inborn
faculties, were matters which were beyond the
horizon of Galton's mind at the time.

The standpoint in these matters of men of Galton's
calibre was accepted widely throughout the edu-
cated world of the West. It was a firm belief at
the time among a certain type of Galton's fellow-
countrymen that the Englishman had a vast inborn
mental superiority over other peoples with which he
came in contact. Other nations held like beliefs
about themselves. Informed and cultured Russiaas

1 Narrative cf an Explorer in Tropical South Africa.

272 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

before the Russo-Japanese War spoke habitually
of a people like the Japanese as yellow monkeys. A
similar habit of mind pervaded in great strength
the characteristic type of German literature which
led up to the world war that opened in 1914. In
all its phases that literature in Germany may be
observed to have been saturated with the influence
of the assumption that the Germanic races possessed
some inborn mental heredity which made them
superior to other peoples.

When the question is asked, What basis is there
for the conception, thus put forward under so many
recent forms in the West, which sets up inborn
heredity as the determining influence in the evolu-
tion of civilization ? The answer must be emphatic.
The idea has no permanent basis in knowledge.
The movement in the West which has essayed to
establish the science of human progress on the
control and organization of any peculiar inborn
heredity either in races or in individuals is based on
illusion. It is a movement which has given rise
to one of the most pernicious and reactionary de-
velopments which has characterized the Western
world for five centuries.

In the evolution of Power in civilization the
heredity which controls everything is the social
heredity which is transmitted through social culture.

SOCIAL HEREDITY 278

The greatest lesson which modern Germany has
taught civilization in the world war which began
in 1914 is not any of the lessons upon which at-
tention has been mainly concentrated. It is the
lesson that the collective heredity which is trans-
mitted through culture is the master principle of
the world. Every inborn quality in a people is
ultimately subordinate to this social heredity.
For the highest of all abilities with which a people
can be equipped is the ability to organize and to
subordinate themselves to the kind of culture upon
which Power rests and which is always transmitted
through the social heredity. There has been no
people in the world who has possessed in a higher
degree the power of subordinating themselves to
the social heredity transmitted through culture
than the German peoples. If it had been the fortune
of those peoples to have had impressed upon them,
preceding the outbreak of the war of 1914, an en-
lightened culture there is no goal in civilization to
which they might not successfully have aspired.

The social heredity transmitted through social
culture is infinitely more important to a people than
any heredity inborn in the individuals thereof. It is
through collective heredity that the long sequences
of cause and effect upon which Power rests are

imposed on the human mind in civilization.
18

274 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

Through the organization of an ideal transmitted
through this social heredity any result whatever
that may be aimed at may be produced in the world.
The science of heredity transmitted through culture
is the science of Power upon which the attention
of all who desire to change the world will be con-
centrated in the future. Let us turn therefore and
look at some of the facts which help us to under-
stand the first principles of this science.

For the past fifteen years I have been engaged
on a series of experiments on heredity which
exhibit the reach and influence of social heredity
as distinct frpm inborn heredity in a manner which
it is of the first importance to understand. The
attention of science has been so exclusively directed
in the past to the study of inborn heredity that as
a rule no other kind of heredity has been discussed
or even thought of. This has been particularly
so in the case of animals. One of the most interest-
ing results obtained in these experiments was that
the heredity of every species of wild animal upon
which I experimented was found to consist of two
kinds, inborn heredity and social heredity. The
latter was nearly always found to be the most strik-
ing and the most important in its effects.

There has been no more widely held idea in the
past than that the characteristic habits of any

SOCIAL HEREDITY 275

species of wild animals which persist under all
conditions are the results of heredity which is in-
born in all the individuals of the species. For
instance, one of the most persistent and dominant
of the characteristics peculiar to wild animals is
that quality, held to be inborn, which is called
instinctive fear of natural enemies. Darwinians
have dealt at great length with this instinct. At
first sight it appears to be an obvious example
of inborn heredity, developed by natural selection.
For individuals which did not possess it would
always tend, it was said, to be weeded out and to
leave no descendants. Fear of natural enemies
is one of the most powerful of the instincts existing
in wild animals, and it usually appears to be so
deeply registered in the physical basis of the animal's
mind that it is nearly always ineradicable by train-
ing in the adult.

Now anyone who is acquainted with the literature
of this subject, and who recalls how Darwinians
like Romanes dwell on fear of natural enemies in
animals as an inborn inheritance transmitted from
ancestors in whom it was developed by natural
selection, will probably experience great surprise if
he turns to one of the most valuable and interesting
records of observation and experiment on animals
published in recent years, namely, the Childhood

276 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

of Animals, by Dr. P. Chalmers Mitchell, F R.S.,
Secretary to the Zoological Society, London.

The natural enemy, which of all others probably
preys on the largest number of species of animals
throughout the world, and which should, therefore,
be the most universally recognized through inborn
heredity, is the snake in all its varieties. The idea
that animals of nearly all kinds recognize the snake
with panic and terror by inborn instinct has been
one of the most widely accepted ideas in the past.
It is of exceptional interest therefore to find
that a large series of Dr. Chalmers Mitchell's
experiments in the Zoological Gardens is directed
to testing the existence in animals of an inborn
instinct of fear for this almost universal enemy
of birds and mammals in the greater part of the
world.

The first fact established by Dr. Chalmers
Mitchell's experiments is remarkable. His observa-
tions were concerned at the outset with the consider-
able number of species of animals which are usually
given in the Zoological Gardens to the snakes
as food, the victims being placed alive in the cages.
The noteworthy fact is recorded that in the case of
every one of the species of animals experimented
with, there was observed, to use Dr. Chalmers
Mitchell's words, " no special dread of snakes nor

SOCIAL HEREDITY 277

the slightest instinctive fear or foreknowledge of
their approaching doom."

The experiments were then conducted on a wider
scale, and Dr. Chalmers Mitchell continued : " More-
over, nearly every kind of mammal that we tried
was indifferent to snakes. Guinea-pigs and rats
would run over them ; a hyrax, which is both
intelligent and which from living in trees and on
rocks must often encounter snakes, was hardly even
interested. . . . Small carnivores, dogs, foxes,
and wolves, sheep, antelopes, and deer, zebras and
donkeys, were either quite indifferent or came up to
the bars and sniffed," and, on finding the snake was
not something to eat, " moved away with an air of
wearied disgust." Frogs, which form the natural
food of snakes in this country, showed not the
slightest trace of instinctive fear. The lower
monkeys also showed no general instinctive know-
ledge or fear of snakes.

This is a most striking record from an observer
of the experience and standing of Dr. Chalmers
Mitchell. The large number and the representative
character of the species experimented with will be
noticed. The experiments as a whole give results
which are directly in the face of previous general
assumptions — that is to say, in the representative
species of animals above mentioned there was found

278 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

no trace of any transmission from ancestors of in-
born fear or recognition of such a universal natural
enemy as the snake. Even the few cases mentioned
by Dr. Chalmers Mitchell as forming the exception
to the rule indicated have probably an explanation
which goes to confirm the general result of the
experiments as a whole.1

Whence, therefore, comes this most powerfully
developed instinct of fear of natural enemies which is
undoubtedly almost universally present at an early
age under certain conditions in all the individuals
of wild species ? T will proceed to the answer.

I turn now to my own experiments, which were
conducted over a long period of time and in which
care was taken to exclude disturbing influences.
They are in many respects even more remarkable
than those just referred to. I experimented with a

1 The exceptions mentioned by Dr. Chalmers Mitchell were
some of the higher monkeys and a few of the more intelligent
passerine birds. These appeared to Dr. Chalmers Mitchell to
show the same instinctive recognition of snakes that most human
beings are said to display. As the result of my own observa-
tions in South Africa, I have the strongest doubt as to whether
there is in the human child any fear of snakes which represents
inborn heredity recognizing an ancestral enemy. What is
however present from an earlier age in the child is simply the
intelligent brain which distinguishes in the unusual appearance
and movements of the snake a suggestion of exceptional power
and danger. I feel sure that it is the same explanation and
not inborn heredity recognizing an ancestral enemy which applies
to the behaviour of the more intelligent passerine birds and the
higher monkeys as mentioned by Dr. Chalmers Mitchell.

SOCIAL HEREDITY 279

number of wild species of British birds and mammals.
In none of them did I find any trace in the young
of an inborn, instinctive fear of the natural
enemies which were regarded with fear and terror
by the adult of the species. Young wild hares
and young wild rabbits showed no inborn fear of
either dogs or cats. Young wild rabbits and young
wild hares became as friendly and playful from the
beginning with specially trained cats to which they
were introduced as if they had been all of the same
species. Young rabbits, showing no inborn fear
of dogs, would frisk and play with the hereditary
enemy of their kind by whom their species had been
hunted for tens of thousands of generations. The
young of our common wild birds showed no inborn
fear of the cat when, fully fledged, they were under
proper conditions introduced to it for the first time.
Nor did they develop any fear afterwards. And
so also when they were introduced under similar
conditions to birds of prey like the hawk or the
carrion crow trained to friendly relations.

If it be asked now whence comes the universal
and ineradicable fear of natural enemies, which is
present under natural conditions in the whole of the
adult members of the species in these cases, the
answer is of great interest. The conclusion which I
arrived at was that in the numerous typical wild

280 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

species experimented upon the whole of this powerful
influence, representing a most dominant and in-
eradicable habit of animal nature, was entirely the
result of social heredity imposed on the young of
each generation by training and example and nearly
always under conditions of strong emotion.

As the experiments were extended it was found,
also in the face of generally accepted ideas, that
in many cases deep-seated habits of species, extend-
ing even to such fundamental matters as the nature
of their food and the usual manner of living, were
not matters of inborn heredity but were acquired as
part of the social inheritance which the adults of
the species imposed by example and training on
the young of each generation. Once acquired the
habits were as fixed and unchangeable as those
which are the result of inborn heredity. But it was
found that a different habit, proving equally un-
changeable once acquired, could be imposed in
the beginning in the same way.

It has been already pointed out that the dis-
tinctive characteristic of social heredity, as con-
trasted with inborn heredity, is that the elements
of social heredity can be completely changed and
different elements imposed in a short time. It
became evident in these experiments that, if
control could be obtained of the social heredity of

SOCIAL HEREDITY 281

a species, many of its apparently ingrained and
fixed habits could be entirely changed in a single
generation.

The case of a wild species of New Zealand parrot
which, although previously vegetarian, acquired after
the introduction of European sheep the habit of
feeding on the kidney fat of these animals, causing
the death of the sheep which it attacked, is often
quoted as an extraordinary example in nature of a
sudden change in the fundamental habit of life
in a wild species. But there can be no doubt that
sudden changes equally deep seated in the habits
of a whole species could be effected at will by obtain-
ing control of its social heredity.

Many of the experiments gave the strongest in-
dications in this direction. There is no more
established vegetarian British bird than our common
wood pigeon. In one of my experiments with the
young of this species a young bird was brought
up with a carrion crow and a hawk which were
fed on raw meat. The young pigeon by example
was led to feed on the same food, and throve on
the exclusively meat diet. So fixed did the habit
thus acquired by social heredity become that when
the adult pigeon at a later stage was offered the
grains which formed the natural diet of its species
it did not recognize them as food.

282 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

The common wild hare never makes a burrow in
its natural state. But when a young wild hare
was brought up with rabbits, which did not show
it the hostility which is usual between the species,
the young hare acquired from its companions the
habit of burrowing and would cast the earth ex-
cavated with forepaws backwards between its
hind legs exactly in the manner of a rabbit.

When there was any physiological insufficiency in
the organs of an animal to prevent it from acquiring
or maintaining the habit usually imposed by social
heredity results of this kind did not follow. It was
found for instance that a diet of grains could not be
imposed by any effect of example on meat -eating
birds. But the striking fact which has to be
emphasized is that, where no natural physio-
logical insufficiency existed, the most unexpected
habits could easily be imposed on young animals by
example and training. And further, the habits so
imposed were found to be transmitted again to the
next generation through ordinary social heredity.

Some grasp of the manner in which the elements
of social heredity are imposed on the young under
conditions of the strongest emotion, and some
perception of the extraordinary reach and strength
of the habits thus imposed, may be obtained from
the study of an example which exhibits the facts

SOCIAL HEREDITY 288

clearly in relation to their bearing upon the subject
of social heredity in human society.

One of the species of wild animals with wh'ch a
considerable series of my experiments was con-
cerned was the wild duck. There is probably no
creature which has been more universally hunted by
man from pr meval times than the wild duck.
The adult bird is one of the shyest of creatures In
alertness and craftiness in her nesting habits, in
the tricks and stratagems for avoiding pursuit
which both the parent and the young have developed,
this ancestor of our breed of domestic ducks has
few equals in the wild. It breeds plentifully in
remote places, usually near water, throughout
northern Europe, and in all my experiments eggs
or newly hatched young were taken from the nests
of the wild birds in their native haunts. In all the
experiments I found no evidence that some of the
most characteristic habits of the wild duck were the
result of inborn heredity developed by natural
selection. On the contrary, the experiments
furnished evidence from which it was impossible
to avoid the conclusion that the habits were trans-
mitted by social inheritance imposed on the young
mainly under conditions of strong emotion.

The record of a single example will exhibit the
meaning that was found to be inherent in a great

284 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

number of experiments. I came on a nest of the
wild duck in a marsh as the young birds had just
emerged from the eggs. The mother duck flew off
and disappeared in the sedge, flapping a wing to which
she pretended injury. I stood by the nest for some
hours and watched the young birds. The greater
number were already active and displaying an
interest in their surroundings. They began to
try to get out of the nest, and I took them one
by one in my hand and placed them in the water,
where in the stillness that reigned they splashed
and twittered and enjoyed themselves. They
showed not the slightest fear of me, nestling from
time to time on my feet, and turning intelligent
eyes upwards to look at me, evidently quite ready to
accept me in the fullest confidence as their guardian.

The wild duck had been in these marshes for
untold ages. She had been here even in the days
when the woolly rhinoceros left its remains with
those of the cavemen in the adjacent hills. During
all this time her kind had been one of the most
universally hunted among wild creatures. The spent
cartridges of the modern sportsmen strewed the bog
around. Yet here were her offspring just entering
on the world and showing no sign of any kind of any
inborn fear of this the hereditary enemy of the species.

After a time I moved away some distance to

SOCIAL HEREDITY 285

watch what would happen. The mother bird
returned and alighted near by. The little ducks
rushed towards her as she called. I could observe
her. She was chattering with emotion. Every
feather was quivering with excitement. The Great
Terror of Man was upon her. After a short interval
I advanced towards the group again. The mother
bird flew away with a series of loud warning quacks.
The little ones scattered to cover, flapping their short
wing stumps, and with beaks wide open cheeping in
terror. With difficulty I found one of them again
in hiding. It was now a wild, transformed
creature trembling in panic which could not be
subdued.

It is in this way, and under conditions of the
strongest emotion, that the accumulated experi-
ence of tens of thousands of generations of the
species is imposed on young birds. Once having
received it, within a few days, even within a few
hours, they pass into another world from which they
can never be reclaimed. In the numerous experi-
ments with wild ducks which I made, the following
conclusions stood out without any exception. The
little ducks, hatched out from the eggs taken from
the nest, or taken themselves from the nest the first
day after hatching, knew nothing of any fear of man,
and they never acquired it afterwards if brought up

286 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

with domestic birds.1 But when once the Terror
had been transmitted to them through the social
heredity of their species they could not afterwards
be tamed. When brought up by a foster-parent the
young wild ducks acquired that exact relationship
of friendliness to man which the foster-parent dis-
played and which differed considerably according
to the birds used as foster-parents.

I have found from observations in many countries
and on different animals that it is in the same way
that the exact distance up to which wild animals will
allow man to approach them is always imposed on
the young through social heredity. It represents the
accumulated experience of the species in the past.
The manner in which the inheritance is imposed on
the young in every generation may be watched even
in the streets of London in the case of the common
sparrow. When the young sparrows leave the ne t
they are comparatively tame. But they are
watched on the ground assiduously by the parents,
and when an enemy like man approaches to within a
certain distance, the cock parent utters a loud shrill
note expressing strong emotion which causes the

1 Darwin, noting that " young chickens have lost that fear of
the dog and cat which no doubt was originally instinctive in
them," and perceiving the difficulty of explaining such a change
solely as due to selection, attributes it to an " inherited change
in mental habit" (Origin of Species, chap. viii.}.

SOCIAL HEREDITY 287

young birds instantly to take flight. The exact
distance to which man is allowed to approach is the
danger limit fixed by the long accumulated experi-
ence of the species, which is thus transmitted to the
young and which is fixed in them ineradicably
under conditions of emotion. But when a group of
tamed birds is isolated and the social heredity is
thus changed, it is found that the altered inherit-
ance is similarly transmitted to future generations.
The supreme interest of the foregoing facts is
not in their relation to any of the problems of
animal life. Their great importance lies in the
application which they bear to the highest and most
vital problems of human society. When we re-
member how few and unimportant are the examples
of the social state among the higher animals below
man, the unexpected magnitude of the part played
by social heredity even in such conditions has great
significance. If social heredity thus transmitted
anew to the young in every generation is the agency
through which there may be imposed and fixed on
whole species possessing no distinctive social habits
some of the most characteristic qualities of these
species, and if these qualities ineradicable in the indi-
vidual can nevertheless be entirely replaced in another
generation by quite different qualities, similarly im-
posed by social hervdity, what then must be the un-

288 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

imagined importance of social heredity in a creature
like man whose almost unlimited power on the
horizon before him in civilization rests exclusively
on the potentiality of mind in the social state ?

As the observations on social heredity begun with
animals were carried into human society, the first
fact encountered was very remarkable. Notwith-
standing the supreme importance of social heredity
in the evolution of civilization, there has not been
in the past any wide or systematic study of it
conducted on modern scientific lines. Nearly all
the research work on the subject of heredity in
human society that has been done in the past
consists of experiments, observations, and discussions
concerned almost exclusively with the relatively
less important subject of inborn heredity. In
much of this work also, as in a considerable propor-
tion of Gal ton's observations and in the studies
of many writers in criminology, the subject of
inborn heredity and of social heredity is almost
inextricably confused.

My own studies of social heredity were under-
taken with the definite object of endeavouring to
distinguish, as in animals, between the effects of
inborn heredity and the effects of social heredity.
They were conducted in various parts of the world
amongst aboriginal races, ruling races, aristocracies,

SOCIAL HEREDITY 289

subject peoples, and slave peoples. They were
extended to various grades and classes of society
in the United Kingdom, to boys embraced in the
boy scout movement, and to children at schools
and public institutions. In all the studies I
was concerned primarily with the subject of
collective heredity in its relation to Power in
civilization.

I will not discuss at length here the first conclusion
to which researches of this kind are bound to carry
the observer at an early stage. I have referred to
it with some emphasis elsewhere.1 In the face of
the evidence which is to hand on all sides it is im-
possible to avoid being convinced that none of the
leading races or nationalities which have ruled in the
past or which wield power on a large scale over other
peoples in the present have done so, or do so now,
because of any distinctive superior intellectual
faculties inborn in the ruling race. The ideas on
this subject which prevailed a few generations ago
will not survive the test of being brought into contact
with facts.

Turning first to aboriginal races, Galton's hasty
generalizations about what he conceived to be the
greatly inferior mentality of aboriginal races like
the Damaras have become, when submitted to

1 Social Evolution, ch. ix.
19

290 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

examination in the light of facts, no more than
nonsense. In nearly all the British colonies, where
aboriginal children of various races are educated
in elementary schools under the same conditions as
European children, it is in evidence in the published
State records that the former learn just as easily
and readily as European children, and are capable
of showing equally good examination results. The
same is true of the negro children in the public
elementary schools of the United States.

Coming to higher education and to the results
displayed in conditions where students of European
races are trained and educated for the higher
activities of the world side by side with representa-
tives of almost all the leading peoples outside Europe,
the facts are equally noteworthy.

At many centres of university and higher educa-
tion in England, and at a large number of centres
of learning and higher training on the continent of
Europe, students of Indian, Japanese, Burmese,
Siamese, Chinese, Negro, and many other races are
to be found undergoing preparation for the higher
professions and for the superior work of the world
under exactly the same conditions as students of
European races. The results go to show that non-
European students quite hold their own in intel-
lectual achievement in comparison with European

SOCIAL HEREDITY 291

students. When every allowance is made for the
fact that the non-European students are often
selected representatives of large numbers, there
remains nevertheless no evidence to which weight
can be given tending to establish the existence of
any inborn quality of superior intellect in the
students of European races. More than once in
my inquiries experienced and competent observers,
familiar with the capacities of students of various
races in University or Bar examinations in England,
have expressed to me the opinion that it would be
impossible to make out a serious case for accepting
the existence of any inborn intellectual superiority
in the English students, and that if such an opinion
were urged the case would be quite as strong for
holding the opposite view.

Confining attention to the peoples who have played
a ruling part in the history of the Western world in
the past, it would in the same manner be impossible
to make out a case for inborn intellectual pre-
eminence in any one of them over other European
races. In the face of world- wide evidence it would
be entirely foolish to attempt to maintain that the
Teutonic peoples possessed inborn intellectual
superiority over the Celts, or the Celts over the
Slavs, or the Slavs in turn over the Teutons. It
would be equally absurd in face of the evidence to

292 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

maintain that any European people possessed inborn
intellectual superiority over the Jews.

Facts of the same significance are encountered if
the scrutiny is restricted to the different races which
combine to make up any of the political aggregates
that have played a great part in the development
of Europe. The Saxon and Norman peoples have
probably, on the whole, performed a larger practical
part in the development of Great Britain and of
the British Empire than the Celtic peoples with
whom they have been so closely associated in
history. But so far as there are any grounds for
estimating separately the achievement of the differ-
ent races in Great Britain, it would represent a
claim in face of the facts of history to assert that
there is proof of any superior intellectual faculty
inborn in peoples of Saxon or Norman descent in
comparison with peoples of Celtic descent.

Conditions of the same kind are encountered
amongst the races who make up the peoples of
Germany. In modern Germany it is often pointed
out by Germans themselves that notwithstanding
the ruling part played by Prussia in the evolution
of the modern German Empire the intellectual part
of the work has not rested to any corresponding
degree with natives of Prussia. The two men who
more than any others created the intellectual ethos

SOCIAL HEREDITY 298

in which the deeds of modern Prussia became
possible were Treitschke and Nietzsche, neither of
whom was Prussian in descent. A very large
proportion of the thinkers and leaders of Prussia
have not l?een Prussians. It is curious to note,
remarks a recent writer,1 "that the majority of
Prussian figures that have held the Western imagina-
tion have not been Prussian by birth, and have
seldom been even Germanic in origin."

In none of the dominant peoples of the world to-
day, and in none of the ruling races which have been
prominent in history in the past, is the basis of Power
to be found in inborn intellectual superiority over
the peoples ruled. What, therefore, is the basis of
Power in human history ?

The answer to this question carries us very far.
In arriving at it, the belief, which prevailed in the
popular mind throughout the West until recently,
as to the inborn nature of the causes establishing
superiority in races, and the prepossessions as to the
controlling importance of inborn heredity in ruling
races and ruling peoples, of the kind which have come
down to us in England through Gait on in science and
through Freeman in the teaching of history, will have
to be abandoned. There can be no doubt that the

1 F. M. Hueffer, When Blood is their Argument. Part I.
chap. n. § ii.

294 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

first essential in the constitution of Power in all the
forms through which Power expresses itself in the
history of races and of peoples lies in the elements
of their social heredity. The character of a people
is formed by the nature of its social heredity. It
is the nature of its social heredity which creates a
ruling people. It is what it lacks in its social
heredity that relegates a people to the position of an
inferior race.

In the national and racial inheritance of a people
the influence of the elements of its" social heredity
insensibly envelops and saturates the entire col-
lective mind. Imposed on the young at an early
age and under conditions of emotion the effects of
inheritance thus transmitted exceed and outlast
those of every other influence in life. It was with
well-founded instinct that William II of Germany
on his accession turned to the elementary school
teachers of his country when he aimed to impose
the elements of a new social heredity on the whole
German people. The result was the concentration
of mind and the extraordinary collective strength
with which Germany went into the world war in
1914.

The higher end was missed by William II.1 But

1 Mazzini penetrated further towards the central principles of
Power in the coming era of civilization, when from 1840 onwards

SOCIAL HEREDITY 295

it remains in full view of the world. Civilization
is absolutely invincible once it realizes the secret
of its own unity. The main cause of those deep
dividing differences which separate peoples and
.nationalities and classes from each other and which
prevent or stultify collective effort in all its most
powerful forms lies exclusively hi the nature of
the social heredity which is imposed on the young.
In a generation they could all be swept away if
civilization put before itself the will to impose on
the young the ideal of subordination to the common
aims of organized humanity.

The influence of a collective ideal imposed on the
mind of the young under conditions of emotion is
incalculable. It is the only cause capable of bring-
ing into action the deepest strength of which human
nature is capable. Every individual in the mass
is continuously driven by it to endeavour to lift
himself to the level of his inner ideal social self
exactly in the manner described by William James
in his Text Book of Psychology,1 but driven now
towards a collective instead of towards an individual

he was outlining to the Italian working classes the maxims under
which their progress towards emancipation in history must pro-
ceed. " Your task is to torm the universal family. . . . Humanity
is the living word of God. . . . Religions govern thn world . . .
Seek in Woman strength, inspiration, a redoubling of your moral
faculties. . . . Education, this is the great word which sums up
our whole doctrine" (On thf Duties of Man, vni., HI., n , I.).
Book of Psychology, chap. xii.

296 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

end. The influence affects all the processes of
mind. It colours and directs in after life the con-
clusions of the thinker so that these are in reality
predetermined in him by the emotion of an ideal
imposed on him at an earlier stage. The influence
reaches to the uttermost workings of mind, so that
in the development of abstract systems of thought
the main problem which has continually beset the
mind of the philosopher in history is simply, as
Leslie Stephen has described it, " how conclusions
which are agreeable to his emotions can be con-
nected with postulates which are congenial to his
intellect."

In nations the inheritance transmitted in social
heredity may be very complex. Geographical,
economic, and material causes of many kinds may
contribute important factors to it. But the essential
element of Power in all social heredity is the emotion
of the ideal. Once effectively imposed, this idealism
becomes the expression of the living soul of a
people. Its influence cannot be estimated. It
subordinates everything. It becomes Power
incarnate. There is no object which a people or
a race can set before itself which is not possible
of attainment through the organization and the
transmission of an ideal in its social heredity. In
the days when modern Germany was on the anvil

SOCIAL HEREDITY 297

the chief conception underlying all the lectures of
the teacher who above all others expressed the soul
of Germany was that which drew the rising genera-
tion of young German students to Treitschke. It
was expressed in the saying that the most precious
natural possession that a people can hold is its
idealism,1 and in the sustained assertion, that any
aim that a living people aspires to, that aim it
will infallibly attain.*

It was in this way that Japan achieved the
greatest miracle in modern civilization by re-creating
herself, and in a few decades transforming herself
into a surprising vehicle of Power. It was in this
manner that modern Germany astonished humanity
by transforming herself within two generations
into a potentiality for good or evil which eclipsed
that of ancient Rome. Only through the character
of her idealism did Germany fail to reach the world
goal at which she aimed. The leaders who imposed
the mechanism of Power on her missed the chief
knowledge of the law of Power in civilization, namely,
that the winning type of Power rests on the prin-
ciples which subordinate us to the universal. If
her leaders had grasped this central fact of human
evolution there is no dream that the German peoples

1 Essay on Freedom, by Heinrich von Treitschke.
» The Life of Treitschke, by Adolf Hausrath.

298 THE SCIENCE OF POWER

had dreamed that Germany would not have realized
in the modern world.

The will to attain to an end imposed on a people
by the emotion of an ideal organized and transmitted
through social heredity is the highest capacity of
mind. It can only be imposed in all its strength
through the young. So to impose it has become
the chief end of education in the future.

Oh, you blind leaders who seek to convert the
world by laboured disputations ! Step out of the
way or the world must fling you aside. Give us
the Young. Give us the Young and we will create
a new mind and a new earth in a single generation.

The idealism which will win out in the stress of the
world is that through which Power must obtain the
com pie test expression. Power in its highest ex-
pression is the science of organizing the individual
mind in the service of the universal. Tnith is
nothing else than this science of Power. This is
the test by which every religion will have to stand
or fall.

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INDEX

All- n, Grant, 72, 240
Altruism. " only enlightened
egoism," 55

— rejected by Bateson, 85-6,

91, 127

— paramount in the young,

127, 137, 139

Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 86
Animals, experiments on

young, 276-87
Armageddon, 9, 54, 94, 97,

168, 176
Art and literature, recent

movements in, 238-9,

243
Australia, labour movement in,

26
Austrian military textbook,

Bagehot, W., on Darwinism, 48
-- his theory of heredity,

104

Balfour, Arthur, 116, 144
Barker, J. Ellis, 29 n.
Bateson, William, his applica-

tion of Darwinism, 84, 85,

86.87
-- his system of caste, 86-9.

91-3, 104
-- on altruistic emotions,

126, 127, 129
-- oil the child mind, 137,

139. i4fJ

-- on self-interest, 170
— T— on the origin of species,

tf'} n.

Bax, Bclfort, 206 n.
Begbie, Harold, 38, 65, 67
Bentham, 46, 229

i, H., 116, 125

303

Bernhardi, 63 n., 64, 73

— on sacrifice, 67

— on ethics of military State.

81, 165, 210

— on superior races, 103
Bethmann-Hollweg, 133
Biological Fact and the Siruc,

ture of Society (W. Bate-
son), 84, 85, 86, 127 n.

Bishop of Winchester, 83, 84,
87,92

Bismarck, 59, 62

Bradley, 116

British Association, 91, 93

British Review, cited, 174,
175 n.

Capitalism, anti-social tend-
ency of, 35-6
Censorship, military, 176
Chamberlain, A. F., 140

— Joseph. 90 n.

Changing Germany (C. Tower),

107 n.
Chesterton, G. K., 175, 176,

177
Child, mind of, 102, 113, 126,

142
capacity of sacrifice in,

137
expressed in Greek Art,

141
Child. The : a Stw'y in ihf

Evolution of Alan (A. F.

Chamberlain), 140
Childhood of Animals (P. Chal-
mers Mitchell), 276
Christianity opposed to force,

5, 14. 55. 163-5
to Darwinian doctrine of

heredity, 102

304

THE SCIENCE OF POWER

Christianity supplies a sanction
for sacrifice, 157

— the religion of peace, 14, 158

— its history a record of war,

158-60

Church Congress, 83 n.
Churches, ideals of the, 10, 1 1
Civilization, foundations of, 83,

86

— as distinct from barbarism,

122

— not dependent on inborn

heredity, in, 113, 272
Civilized man contrasted with

savage, 104, in, 126
Clausewitz, 73
Collective bargaining, 24

— heredity, psychic elements

in, 114-6. 117, 118, 266

Combativeness, the real motive

of nationality, 167-71

— in the press, 1 72-7

— in Parliament, 169
Conscription, 22, 23, 25, 71
Contract, breach of, 28
Conway, Sir Martin, 238-9
Cultural (or social) inheritance,

influence of, 146, 228

rapidly acquired, 148,

191.233

woman's part in trans-
mitting, 217-9

Daily Chronicle (London), cited,

1.73
Darwin, 21, 32, 40, 46, 48, 70,

102, 152, 184, 186
Darwinism, its effect on

thought, 10, 1 8, 44, 46,

266

— based on evolution of in-

dividual, 49, 52-7, 74,
152, 258, 260

— basis of modern militarism,

32,47,58.59.60,84,85

— a condemnation of socialism,

46

— element of truth in, 40, 48

— summarized, 259

— a biological conception, in-

applicable to civilized life,
68, 69, 70, 104

! Darwinism, as developed in

Germany, 48-65
in England and France,

65-6

Delbriick, 61
Demaras, 76, 104, 270, 271,

289
Democracy, ideals of, 7, 19

— its acceptance of the Dar-

winian doctrine of force,
20, 21

— its attitude towards capital,

36
Descent of Man (C. Darwin),

68,69
Desenchantees, Les (P. Loti),

cited, 217
Diplomacy, principles of

savagery in, 16, 23, 63
Donald, R., quoted, 173, 174
Durkheim, 236
Duties of Man, The (Mazzini).

quoted, 133, 168, 295 n.

Economic war a permanent

condition, 88-91
Economics, basal concept of,

19, 20
Efficiency, collective, 49

— of civilization, 50

— confusion of individual and

collective, 53, 64, 136-8
Efficient individual, 47, 49,
116, 120, 152, 195

morality of, opposed to

that of evolving civiliza-
tion, 50

Ellis, Havelock, 127, 139
Emotion, unjustly disparaged,
118, 193; because regarded
as pertaining only to the
individual, 193

— capacity for, a character-

istic of high development,
118, 193

— suppressed by the civilized

male, 202

— of the ideal, the cause

of human progress, 115,
117-9, 124, 126, 136, 149,

I5I/I94
results of, 119. 128

INDEX

805

Emotion of the ideal, not
understood in the West,

153-7. I7i
omnipotence of, 1 19, 120,

151. 178

in the child, 126-7

denned, 190

expressed in mind of

Woman, 230-1.

its source in Woman, 195

its manner of working,

227
not understood by the

male mind, 236-7
God, the highest concept

of, 249
Encyclopedia Britannica, art.

" Sociology," 65
art. "Zoology," 113,

191 n.
English Utilitarians, The (L.

Stephen), quoted, 221
Equal value of all men, 83, 87,

92, 102

Equality of opportunity, 86, 87
Essay on Woman (Schopen-
hauer), 206, 215
Ethic of Free Thought (K.

Pearson), 79, 80, 82 n.,

105, 185 n., 2500.
Ethics, pagan, make interests

of the State supreme, 22,

52. 53

— Socialist, 81-2

— Christian, 54, 55, 102

— Darwinian, 54

— false systems of, 5 1
Eugenics, object of, 74, 81, 82,

269

— denned, 74

— Chair of, 78, 79

— errors of, 06

— contrasted with social hcred

ity, 138

Evolution of new forms of life,
252-4

Face, child and adult type
compared, 139-40

Falk, Adalbert, 131

Feeble-minded, Bateson's pro-
posals for dealing with, 92
20

Force, doctrine oi, the basis of
Western civilization, 4-8

— and science, 77-8

— increased sway of , 9, 1 1 , 12

— failure of, 43, 94-5, 101

— Prussian doctrine of, 53, 56,

59-62, 165 .

— denned, 185
France, Anatole, 268
Frederick the Great, 66
Free Trade, 90 n.
Freeman, E. A., 293
Friedens- und Kriegs-moral der

Heere, 71 n.
Future of England, The (Hon.

G. Peel), quoted, 12, 48,

62
Futurism, 243

Galton, Sir Francis, his applica-
tion of Darwinism to
society, 73-9

on mental inferiority of

uncivilized races, 104, 105,
no, in, 270-1, 289

Gauss, Christian, 162

German educational ideals,
130-6, 219

— mentality, change in, 107-9,

130

— theory of the State. 51, 53.

59.60-5,81
German War Book (trans, by

J. H. Morgan), 31, 32. 56,

60, 71, 72, 166
Gfrmany abov? All (Durkheim),

cited, 236 n.
Germany and the Next War

(Bernhardi), quoted, 51,

63, 67, 2 ion.
Germany, military textbooks

of, 31, 32,69

— development of Darwinism

in, 48, 53-62

— organization of power in.

under the influence of the

Social Ideal. 133-6, 166.

255-6

Ghosts (H. Ibsen), 268
Gissing. George, 217
Gladstone, W. E., eloquence of,

203

306

THE SCIENCE OF POWER

Goltz, Von der, 73

Greece, conception of the State

in, 80
Greek Art an effort to express

the child mind, 141
Green, T. H , 249

Haeckel, the exponent of
Darwinism in Germany,
10, 53, 54. 55, 56, 67, 72,
103

— on Christian ethics, $4>

— his ethical system a com-

promise, 56, 135

Hall, Stanley, '127

Hausrath, A.. 120 n., 297 n.

Healer, The (R. Herrick), cited,
217

Herbert Spencer. See Spencer

" Herd Morality," 58

Heredity, inborn, the alleged
basis of social science, 102-
3, 121 ; this assumption
unfounded, 105-6, in

slow influence of, 105-6,

263-4, 265

the basis of progress in

nature, 260-1

causes of variation in,

263

influence of, on litera-
ture, 267-8

Herrick, Robert, 216

Hibbert Journal, 95, 117, 124,
125

History as " universal homi-
cide," 12, 48, 121, 156

Hobson, J. A., 91 n.

Hueffer, F. M., 56, 60 n., 108,
242 n.

Huggins, Sir W., 44, 68

Huxley, 72, 94

Ibsen, H., 267

Ideal, emotion of. See

Emotion
Imperialism (J. A. Hobson),

opn.
Individual, claims of the, 38,

65, 67
— integration of the, 40

Individual, integration of the,
constitutes the science of
the West, 152

now felt to be a thing of

the past, 153-4, 192, 229,

255

transmission of, 190, 199

Individualism and After (B.
Kidd), 35, 1 30 n., 25 5 n.

Inheritance, social, distin-
guished from inborn, 113,
114

the true basis of civiliza-
tion, 115

power of, as exemplified

in Germany and Japan,
109, 112, 122, 128, 138,
255, 273

acquired from without,

261-2, 266

Integration, social, versus indi-
vidual, 40, 57,69, 117, 125,
126, 136, 153, 161-3, 178

law of, 185-8

transmission of, 191, 200,

211

inseparable iromsacri fia ,

49. 197
Intern* tionalExhibition( 185 1 ),

43

James, William, 71, 116, 125,

129, 150
on the ideal self, 227,

295

Japfin, rapid s<.*cial develop
rmnt of, 109, 112, 297

— import amxi of education in,

138,219
Johnstone, Dr. James, 259

Kant, 55

Kapital, Das (K. Marx), 169
Krtegsbrauch im Landftriege, 32,
56, 71, 75, 80, 94, 166, 170
Kulturpolttik, 132

Labour, demands of organized.
24,25,27,30-31

— its attitude towards capital,

35
Lamprecht, Professor, 134

INDEX

807

Lange, 116

Lankester, Sir E. Fay, 113, 115,
191 n.

l^y Sermons (J. H. Huxley),
94 n.

Lecky, W., quoted, 203

Lcith, Compton, 150

Lodge, Sir O., 116

Lombroso, 103, 269

London County Council An-
nual Report, 98 n.

Loti, Pierre, 217

Male of the West, a fighting

animal, 5, 7, 38, 95, 170,

177, 203-4, 208
hitherto the source of

power, 196, 230
incapable of sustained

ideals, 196, 201, 202, 212-

3. 235-6
his expression in Art,

240-3
Man and Woman (Have lock

Ellis), 127, 140
Mann, Tom, 29 n.
Mane, K., 156, 169, 170
Maurice, F. D., 45
Mazrini, 42, 133, 168. 294
McDougall, W.. 116, 193
MTaggart, S., 116
Mendelian doctrine, 84, 88, 260
Mental equality ot different

races, experiments on,

288-93

Militarism supported by Dar-
winian doctrines, 32, 47,
58. 61,64, 272

Mill, James and J. S., 46, 229

-J.S..2I4

Mind, 117

Mitchell, Dr. P. Chalmers, 276,
277. 278

Moltke's love letters, 2 1 3

Moral Science Tripos, 95

Morality of the soldier, 71

Morgan, Professor J. H., 31 n.,
32, 56, 60, 71, 72, 80,
i66n.

Murray, Gilbert, 150

Narrative of an Erflorer in

Ttopical South Africa (Sir

F. Gallon), cited, 76 n.,

104 n., 270. 271 n.
Nationality embodies emotion

of the ideal, 167
' Natural selection in civilized

society, 68-70
the first law of evolution,

186, 187, 259
Nature, 91 n., 92 n.
New Grub Street (G. Gissing),

cited, 217

New York World. 90 n.
New Zealand parrot, 281
Newton. Sir I., 184, 185 n., 186,

187

Nicoll, Sir W. R., 144
Nietzsche, paganism of, 10. 57,
.58. 59. 62

— his theory of the Superman,

64, 66, 69, 80

— ethics of, 135, 199

— on Power, 224

— not a Prussian, 293
Nineteenth Ceniury, 29 n.

Omar Khayyam, 10, 196
Origin of Species, influence of,

on Western thought, 43,

45.65

on mili tarism, 47, 70

on education, 265,

270

quoted, 286 n.

Origin of tlte Moral Instincts

(Dr. A. Sutherland), 117

Pagan spirit. 6, 10, 2}, 85, 88,

251

defined, 51-2

revival of, 1 1, 57, 63, 210

Parliamentary discussions, 37
Peace, an end in itself, 14,

143-6, 236

— dream of universal, 42-3

— Treitschke'fi view of, 60

— universal, how to secure,

147

— Christianity, the religion of,

157-9

Pearson, Karl, 78, 79, 80,
185 n.

308

THE SCIENCE OF POWER

Pearson, Karl, intolerance of,

8 1, 82, 92, 170
theories of heredity of,

105, 267
Peel, Hon. George, 12, 48,

62 n., 121
Physics and Politics (W. Bage-

hot), 48 n.
Physiological Esthetics (Grant

Allen), 240
Plato, 149

Post-Impressionism, 243
Poverty, 98
Power, science of, 184-91,

259, 262-3, 298

— relation of, to Truth, 182,

295

— stages of presentation, 184

— defined, 186

— conditions of, in future, 250,

256-7

— organization of, 225, 256
Pragmatism, 182
Pre-Raphaelism, 243
Principia (Newton), 184, 185 n.,

187

Principles of Western Civiliza-
tion (B. Kidd), cited,
1 88 n.

Probability, the Foundation of
Eugenics (Sir F. Galton),
73 n.

Problem of Genetics (W. Bate-
son), 264 n.

" Projected efficiency," 188,
226

Prolegomena to Ethics (T. II.
Green), quoted, 249

Proletariat, demands of, 20, 21,
2$, 28, 33, 35

Property, desire to accumulate,
85, 86, 91, 93

Prussia. See Germany.

Prussian. See Force.

Psychic emotion. See Emo-
tion of the ideal

Psychology, Textbook of (W.
James), 150, 226, 227,
295 n.

Public opinion, an instrument
of social science, 124, 232,
234

Ramanathan, P., 95

Ranke, L. von, 61

Reason, individual efficiency

founded on, 116, 117,

125

— inadequate as a basis for

social integration, 118,
125, 197

— denned as sum of self-

regarding emotions, 189
Religion. See Western
Renan, E., 72
Renunciation, the basis of all

true social science, 49, 51,

197, 250

Riches. See Wealth
Riddle of the Universe (Haeckel),

54, 55 n., 56 n.
Right, a universal principle,

50, 52, 81, 93
—based on Force, 51, 63, 88

— subordinated to State, 51,

59, 63, 89, 164
Rise of the Greek Epic (G.

Murray), i5on.
Romanes, G., 275
Rosebery, Lord, 96
Royal Society, 43
Ruskin, J., 45

Sacrifice, the true basis of
Western civilization, 55,
83-4, 116, 125, 144, 197

— in war, 128-9

— Christian sanction of, 157

— duty of, subordinate to the

State, 67

— meaningless to fighting

male, 196

— woman's power of, 205
Saxon revolution, 42, 59
Schiller, F. C. S., 116, 124
Schopenhauer, 10, 97

— his attack on woman,

206-10, 215, 231

— on aesthetic values, 243
Science of West described as

"ignorant knowledge," 77,

. 95

Science Progress, 259 n.
"Scientific breeding," 74, 75,
77, 266-7

INDEX

801)

Self, the ideal social, 146-7,
227-8

Self-interest, inadequate to
abolish war, 144

Sirenica (C. Leith), 150

Social emotion, rise of, 7, 39

poverof, 123

transmission of , 124, 191

Social Evolution (B. Kidd), 76,
86, 1 10, in, 113, 182,
191 n., 229 n.

Social inheritance. See Inherit-
ance

— integration. See Integra-

tion
Socialist State, Karl Pearson's,

8 1-2, 170

Sociological Society, 73, 77
Spencer. Herbert, 56, 65, 66-7,

103, 186, 229
Lecture, 37, 73, 84, 130,

255

State, above Right, 51, 59,63,
80, 81, 165

— duty of, to wage war, 59, 61,

88

— Darwinism embodied in, 61,

64,72

Statuary, art of, 241-2
Stephen, Leslie, 220, 296
Stnke, universal, 30
Subjection of Women (J. S.

Mill), 214
Superior races, 76, 103, 104,

in, 272, 289-94
Superman, Nietzsche's, 64, 69,

74,95

Superstate, 65
Sutherland, Dr. A, 1 17
Sybel, 73

Syndicalist programme, 30, 3 1
Synthetic Philosophy, II.

Spencer's, 65, 66

Tannhauser. 97
Tennyson, 42
Thompson. Francis, 147
Times, the, quoted, 28, 98,

123, 158, 173 n., 238
Tolstoy, L., 117

— on speech of German

Emperor, 135, 164, 170, 177

Tolstoy, L., on pagan character

of art, 240

Tower, Charles, 107 n.
Treitschke, on war, 60, 61, 81.

122

— on his duty to Prussia, 60

— on superior races, 103

— on power of ideals, 1 20

— on freedom, 296

— not a Prussian, 293
Treitschke, his Life and Works,

60 n., 120, 297
Trusts, 35, 96
Truth, relation of, to Power,

182-4

— search for, 124

Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche),

quoted, 58
Tyndall, 72

Uncivilized races, mental in-
feriority of. See Galton

Utilitarianism, systems of,
passing away, 229

Varieties of Religious Ex-
perience, The, 71, 125 n.,
129 n.
Vienna, Congress of, 42

Wagner, 10, 61

\Var, regarded as normal, 1 1-

17

— " biologically necessary,"

32,47

— Treitschke on, 60

— as first object of the State,

59-61,88
Ward, 1 16

Watkins, Charles, quoted, 20 n.
Weakest Link (H. Begbie),

38 n.
Wealth, concentration of, 34.

35

Weiniger, 10, 97, 207

Wells. H. G.. 151

Weltpolitik, 64

Western civilization, founded
on force, 4-8, 17, 42, 157 ;
on pagan ethics, 22, 39 ;
and on the counter-move-
ment of sacrifice, 83, 153

810

THE SCIENCE OF POWER

Western civilization, " glorified

savagery," 121
— religion, opposed to force,

5, 10, 22, 56, 67, 157-60

wars of, 79, 96

Westminster Gazette, 17 n., 37,

38, 63, 168

What is Art? (L. Tolstoy), 240
When Blood is iheir Argument

(F. M. Hueffer), 56 n.,

60 n., io8n., 242 n.
William II, Emperor, educa-
tional ideals of, 130, 131,

236, 254, 294
speeches of, 134-5, 161-5,

169
inconsistent views of,

162-5
Wilson, President Woodrow,

quoted, 1 56 n.

Winchester. See Bishop of
Woman, emotionally superior

to man, 198-9, 230-3,

212-4

Woman, capable of sustained
ideals, 200-5, 209-15, 231

— described by Schopenhauer,

97, 208-10, 218-19

— her influence dreaded, 207,

224

— Schopenhauer's condem-

nation her true glory,
210

— instinctively sides with

principle rather than with
interest, 214

— her figure in literature,

216-7, 244-6

— denied full expression, 218,

223

— expresses Emotion of the

Ideal, 230-1

— future centre of psychic

power, 233-4

Zarathusfra (Nietzsche \

quoted, 58, 210
Zulus, 203

r,\uted by

MORRISON »X (JIUB LlMlTBD
Edinburgh

<ET

University of

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