prestige, of ease and leisure, and the corresponding segregations of labour, privation, and poverty—depends upon an enormously elaborate system of rationalization, tradition, and morals, and upon almost innumerable indirect mechanisms ranging from the drugging of society with alcohol to the distortion of religious principle in the interests of the established order. To the biologist the whole immensely intricate system is a means for combating the slow, almost imperceptible, pressure of Nature in the direction of a true national homogeneity. That this must be attained if human progress is to continue is, and has long been, obvious. The further fact that it can be attained only by a radical change in the whole human attitude towards society is but barely emerging from obscurity.
The fact that even the immense external stimulus of a great war now fails to overcome the embattled forces of social segregation, and can bring about only a very partial kind of national homogeneity in a society where segregation is deeply ingrained, seems to show that simple gregariousness has run its course in man and has been defeated of its full maturity by the disruptive power of man’s capacity for varied reaction. No state of equilibrium can be reached in a gregarious society short of complete {139} homogeneity, so that, failing the emergence of some new resource of Nature, it might be suspected that man, as a species, has already begun to decline from his meridian. Such a new principle is the conscious direction of society by man, the refusal by him to submit indefinitely to the dissipation of his energies and the disappointment of his ideals in inco-ordination and confusion. Thus would appear a function for that individual mental capacity of man which has so far, when limited to local and personal ends, tended but to increase the social confusion.
A step of evolution such as this would have consequences as momentous as the first appearance of the multicellular or of the gregarious animal. Man, conscious as a species of his true status and destiny, realizing the direction of the path to which he is irrevocably committed by Nature, with a moral code