patience, self-control, and a developed brain, and pugnacity and combativeness which, instead of being used up and wasted in world conflicts of futile destructiveness, will be, and are being, diverted into the steady stream of rationally-directed effort. The virile impulses become, not the tyrant and master, but the tool and servant of the controlling brain.
The conception of abstract imponderable forces by the human mind is a very slow process. All man's history reveals this. The theologian has always felt this difficulty. For thousands of years men could only conceive of evil as an animal with horns and a tail, going about the world devouring folk; abstract conceptions had to be made understandable by a crude anthropomorphism. Perhaps it is better that humanity should have some glimmering of the great facts of the universe, even though interpreted by legends of demons, and goblins, and fairies, and the rest; but we cannot overlook the truth that the facts are distorted in the process, and our advance in the conception of morals is marked largely by the extent to which we can form an abstract conception of the fact of evil—none the less a fact because unembodied—without having to translate it into a non-existent person or animal with a forked tail.
As our advance in the understanding of morality is marked by our dropping these crude physical conceptions, is it not likely that our advance in the understanding of those social problems, which so nearly affect our general well-being, will be marked in like manner?
Is it not somewhat childish and elementary to conceive of force only as the firing off of guns and the launching of Dreadnoughts, of struggle as the