individual to the existence, presence, thought, and feelings of his fellow-members of the major unit; the power he possesses of reacting in an altruistic and social mode to stimuli which would necessarily evoke a merely egoistic response from a non-social animal—that is to say, the power to deflect and modify egoistic {159} impulses into a social form without emotional loss or dissatisfaction; the capacity to derive from the impulses of the herd a moral power in excess of any similar energy he may be able to develop from purely egoistic sources.
Intercommunication, the development of which of course depends upon herd-accessibility, enables the herd to act as a single creature whose power is greatly in excess of the sum of the powers of its individual members.
Intercommunication in the biological sense has, however, never been systematically cultivated by man, but has been allowed to develop haphazard and subject to all the hostile influences which must infest a society in which unregulated competition and selection are allowed to prevail. The extravagance of human life and labour, the indifference to