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THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029003114 
 
THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 BY 
 
 E. K. GARROD 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 
 NEW YORK AND BOMBAY 
 
 1 90S 
 
 T 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
A 2.0*4-7^. 
 
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CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. Introduction i 
 
 II. The Nature of the Unit of Strife . 7 
 
 III. The Nature of the Human Unit . . 25 
 
 IV. The Structure of Communities . . 41 
 
 V. The Binding Force in Human Com- 
 munities 63 
 
 VI. The Unit from the Standpoint of 
 
 History 101 
 
 VII. The Unit from the Standpoint of the 
 
 Individual 133 
 
 VIII. Moral Advance 155 
 
 IX. Summary and Conclusion . . . .173 
 
I 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 I 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 When man looks round about him on the in- 
 numerable living things which are demanding 
 existence under whatever form existence can 
 be best secured , and when he turns from those 
 forms beneath him, which have been arrived at 
 through the agency of this insistent struggle — 
 to himself, the highest outcome of the strife, he 
 can but feel perplexed as to the nature of the 
 gulf which has been placed between himself 
 and them. The change has been so momentous 
 that for many ages he failed to recognise his 
 ancestry ; to his own seeming he was cut off 
 from the forms from which he was derived. 
 He gladly believed in his affinity to the God 
 he had found, and ignored his relationship to 
 those other forms by which he saw himself 
 surrounded. 
 
 Moreover, the initial stages of the change, 
 which has placed him by so many strides in the 
 
 A 
 
2 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 forefront of creation, took place in that border- 
 land which lies, as it were, between sleeping and 
 waking, between unconscious and conscious life, 
 and the conclusions as to his own origin which 
 he arrived at in that dim twilight of the mind 
 have remained with him, to hinder and confuse 
 his further enlightenment. From time to time 
 he has revised his conclusions and enlarged 
 their scope ; but the bondage of his old cer- 
 tainties remains with him still. He is held 
 back from knowing more by the incubus of that 
 which he thinks he knows, by traditions with 
 which his thought is imbued, by conclusions so 
 closely bound up with forces which he accepts 
 as main factors in his progress, that it seems to 
 him as if in parting with them he would be 
 parting with the very agency which has effected 
 his deliverance. 
 
 Being stationed, moreover, in the midst of 
 the process of his own development, his percep- 
 tion of the lines on which it is being achieved is 
 still further hindered by the limitations of his 
 outlook. His physical sight is falsified at all 
 times by the exaggerated appearance of those 
 things which are near at hand in comparison 
 with things as great, or greater, which are 
 farther off ; and his mental outlook, which con- 
 tinually corrects the physical, is in the same 
 way circumscribed in its turn. In things of 
 time the present assumes undue preponderance, 
 while the events of past ages, like hills on the 
 
INTRODUCTION 3 
 
 horizon, are crowded into a space trifling in 
 comparison with the events of one individual 
 life. He finds it difficult to estimate rightly the 
 relative importance of to-day's events, to piece 
 them in with the laws which have fashioned 
 and stereotyped the innumerable forms under 
 which the struggle for existence has been main- 
 tained. Man's present stage of progress looms 
 so large in his own outlook that he tends to 
 regard it as a final manifestation of develop- 
 ment, and himself as the flower of all the ages, 
 rather than as a phase of a process which is 
 still being furthered, a momentary aspect of the 
 working of laws which are leading on towards 
 issues which he cannot yet foresee. 
 
 And although at the present time, in spite of 
 the limitations of his outlook, in spite of the 
 inheritance of knowledge true and false, which 
 has confused him, man has learnt to trace out 
 many of the laws which have fashioned the 
 forms of life which have preceded him, and to 
 recognise himself as the outcome from those 
 forms — although he has learnt to realise that 
 those laws are still at work in his own develop- 
 ment, there still remains a gap unbridged, a 
 point at which the laws for those forms and for 
 himself appear to be at variance, where the old 
 laws seem to falter in their action, and a law 
 new or undefined seems to assert itself and 
 modify the lines on which his development is 
 being achieved. 
 
4 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 It will be granted that development pro- 
 ceeds by means of natural selection working 
 through the survival of the fittest in the struggle 
 for existence ; but with man we witness the 
 fact that development is not stayed even though 
 the unfit of all kinds are carefully kept alive, 
 and this most effectually where civilisation and 
 progress have made the greatest strides. 
 
 It may be urged that with man mental fit- 
 ness has become the main factor in his pro- 
 gress, and that it is in consequence of his 
 superior mental fitness that he has become 
 pre-eminent and still continues to advance. 
 But the fact remains that with man the men- 
 tally feeble and unfit are as carefully kept 
 alive as the physically unfit, and, this also, 
 most effectually where civilisation is at its 
 highest point. 
 
 Again, in the struggle for life below man 
 each individual, with but few exceptions and 
 for a limited period, strives only in his own 
 interest ; consideration for the interests of 
 others would imply failure for those who 
 showed the consideration, and degeneration for 
 those to whom consideration was shown. 
 
 Whereas with man, consideration for the 
 needs of others, within certain limits, has be- 
 come an essential qualification for survival, and 
 the widest scope and highest quality of con- 
 sideration are found wherever human progress 
 is the most advanced. 
 
INTRODUCTION 5 
 
 It seems evident, if this is admitted, that 
 with man the quality of fitness to survive has 
 in some way become modified, that an agency 
 has come into play which had not asserted 
 itself on the same lines in the struggle for life 
 before the appearance of man, an agency which 
 would seem to be connected with man's ad- 
 vance to his present position, where he stands 
 emancipated from the struggle with those other 
 of life's forms which, with but few exceptions, 
 he has made the subjects of his will. 
 
 It is the aim of the following pages to suggest 
 the nature of this agency, to formulate a theory 
 which may be found to fit the facts of de- 
 velopment as yet understood, to suggest a read- 
 ing of the established law of life which may 
 enable it to include within its domain the facts 
 of human as of all other development. It is 
 an aspect of human progress which appears 
 to be in the air, an argument of which it 
 would seem the major premises are being 
 stated on every side, although the conclusions 
 which seem to the writer inevitable may not 
 yet have been accepted. And although a sense 
 of diffidence of necessity besets an individual 
 mind in attempting to deal with a subject which 
 embraces knowledge in so many of its branches, 
 the belief that it is only a statement of that which 
 many minds are on the brink of thinking gives 
 a boldness which might not obtain were the 
 lines new, the conclusions wholly unforeseen. 
 
6 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 It is in consideration of the extent of ground 
 which the subject covers that tolerance is asked 
 in the following pages for failures in method 
 of statement of the subject ; for repetitions 
 which have seemed inevitable ; for temerity 
 in touching on subjects without the sanction 
 of an intimate acquaintance with their details. 
 It is only the conviction that a truth of life 
 underlies the theory, which, though it may 
 need modification, will stand test, that induces 
 the writer to bring it to the light, notwithstand- 
 ing the defects of its presentment. 
 
II 
 
 THE NATURE OF THE UNIT 
 OF STRIFE 
 
II 
 
 THE NATURE OF THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 IN the struggle for life, which has been so in- 
 sistently pursued for untold ages, two necessities 
 appear to have been laid on every unit in the 
 strife ; the first being to secure the means of 
 existence as an individual, the second to grow 
 under whatever conditions growth can best be 
 secured. No race could survive in which these 
 instincts did not forcibly obtain, and in life's 
 lowest forms obedience is rendered to them in a 
 uniform and simple way. In the most primitive 
 organisms, those consisting of single cells, in 
 obedience to the first instinct, each individual 
 ministers to its own needs only, regardless of the 
 needs of all other individuals ; the unit of self- 
 seeking throughout life is the single self. The 
 instinct of growth in the meanwhile is met in 
 two ways. It is effected in the first place by an 
 increase in size in the individual itself ; but by 
 this means a point is inevitably arrived at where 
 a further increase would be incompatible with 
 successful existence. In order, therefore, that 
 growth may continue, this primitive method has 
 had to be modified, and success appears to have 
 
io THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 attended those forms in which at this point the 
 individual divided into two, by which means 
 the further existence of the organism was 
 facilitated and growth could proceed as before. 
 When the size most conducive to successful 
 existence had again been reached by the sepa- 
 rated parts a further subdivision was effected, 
 those portions which had divided off continuing 
 to grow and subdivide in the same way as the 
 original cell. By this means, in obedience to 
 the instinct to grow, the organism was multi- 
 plied to an indefinte extent. But the resulting 
 units had no further affinity. The interests of 
 the parts, which had been one, became as sepa- 
 rate as the substance of which they were com- 
 posed. The new cell was as independent of the 
 interests of the cell from which it sprang as of 
 those of any other unrelated cell with which it 
 came into competition in the struggle to exist. 
 The necessity to exist as an individual compelled 
 it to disregard the interests of all other indi- 
 viduals. 
 
 But a further and apparently a more success- 
 ful stage was entered upon when the primitive 
 units which were about to divide held together 
 temporarily for purposes of offence and defence, 
 and became tolerant of each other under stress 
 of a common interest. It is possible that im- 
 mediately after such division, while the resulting 
 cells were adapting themselves to the new con- 
 ditions, they were less competent for the moment 
 
NATURE OF THE UNIT OF STRIFE n 
 
 to survive in the struggle, and that by remain- 
 ing.temporarily attached the chances of survival 
 were increased. If this were so, and if those 
 forms succeeded best which temporarily retained 
 the adherence of their offspring most effec- 
 tively, then for the time being those adherent 
 cells became units in the struggle to exist ; while 
 on eventually separating to form new units they 
 were better able to survive than those set free 
 at an earlier stage of separate existence. 
 
 It would appear, moreover, that a still more 
 successful method was entered upon by those 
 forms in which the adherence between related 
 cells became continuous, and in which, thus 
 adherent, the cells continued to grow and sub- 
 divide ; whereupon, if those forms succeeded 
 best which retained the adherence of their off- 
 spring, and of their offspring's offspring, most 
 effectually and for the longest time, new forms 
 of being must gradually have been evolved, con- 
 sisting of communities of affiliated cells ; which 
 communities in their turn became units in the 
 struggle to exist. These composite units were 
 able to attain to a size much greater than that 
 of the simple unit, before the limit set by 
 the necessities of individual existence had been 
 reached. 
 
 The independence of the cell of the interests 
 of all other cells for purposes of existence was 
 thus brought into subjection to the wider law 
 of growth, which led to mutual toleration and 
 
12 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 co-operation within a very limited range — a co- 
 operation brought about by a community of 
 interest existing between, related parts. 
 
 When, however, these affiliated cells began 
 to hold together throughout life to form one 
 organism, a further development ensued, for 
 each individual cell was no longer occupied to 
 the same degree in securing nourishment and 
 defending itself against attack as when living an 
 independent life. As part of a larger organism, 
 while it pursued these ends as before, according 
 to its position in the unit, one or other of these 
 functions began to preponderate in its aims. If 
 its position were central, its functions were 
 specialised to distribute nourishment to the 
 different parts of the unit, if nearer the circum- 
 ference, to secure nourishment or to protect the 
 unit from attack. 
 
 As the cells within this more composite 
 organism continued to grow and subdivide, the 
 resultant cells became stereotyped in the same 
 direction of specialisation as the parent cell, and 
 helped to swell the bulk of the organism of 
 which they formed a part. But the power of 
 the organism to divide when the size most con- 
 ducive to successful life had thus been arrived 
 at was obviously curtailed by this specialisation, 
 since no part could any longer have been cap- 
 able of performing all the functions of existence, 
 each cell being suited only to exist as a com- 
 ponent part of a larger organism. When, 
 
NATURE OF THE UNIT OF STRIFE 13 
 
 therefore, by the growth and multiplication of 
 cells within itself, the larger organism began to 
 exceed the size conducive to successful existence, 
 the question of a further subdivision would 
 become complicated by the complex nature of 
 its parts if provision were not made for growth 
 as well as for the better method of individual 
 survival. The primitive method of division 
 would have resulted in parts incomplete in 
 themselves, some cells having been specialised 
 for the performance of one function, some of 
 another, and the greater the complexity of the 
 organism the greater the impossibility of divi- 
 sion on the primitive lines. 
 
 To meet this new demand, special cells were 
 set apart to carry on the work of growth, cells 
 specialised for this function as all the other 
 cells of the organism were becoming special- 
 ised for their several functions. These cells 
 contained within themselves undeveloped the 
 functions of all the specialised cells, and were 
 capable of multiplying by division and of dis- 
 tributing the different functions among the re- 
 sultant cells which were held into one organism 
 by their inability to perform, independently, all 
 the functions of existence. By the time, there- 
 fore, that the complex organism had achieved 
 the size best suited to its existence, it, in turn 
 having specialised cells of growth, could sepa- 
 rate them off to develop into reproductions of 
 the parent form. This new method of growth 
 
14 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 appears to have been achieved in the simplest 
 forms by a process slightly differing only from 
 division, but as the cells performing other func- 
 tions became more highly specialised, these 
 cells also followed on in the same course. 
 Eventually in the process of development two 
 separate and differing cells were specialised for 
 the needs of growth, and it became essential 
 for these cells to unite before the new organism 
 could come into being. These cells in the 
 earliest stages were produced by one individual, 
 but were localised in the higher forms in sepa- 
 rate individuals, and with these the necessity 
 of growth became an instinct in these two 
 diverse individuals to unite for the purposes of 
 reproduction — a process foreshadowed even 
 in unicellular organisms by the conjugation 
 of separated cells. 
 
 But as with the primitive cell which had 
 divided into two individuals, so with these more 
 complex organisms, there was no further affinity 
 between parent and offspring when once sepa- 
 ration had taken place. The new organism 
 became as indifferent to the interests of the 
 parent organism as to those of any other 
 organism with which it came into competition 
 in the strife for life. The duration of the period 
 during which the parent form retained these 
 cells of growth within itself before starting them 
 on their independent life tended always to in- 
 crease in the case of progressive forms ; but 
 
NATURE OF THE UNIT OF STRIFE 15 
 
 when separation had taken place the common 
 interest was at an end. The new organism as 
 well as the old had to obey the instinct to 
 exist as an individual, regardless of the needs of 
 all other individuals. 
 
 In the stress of this incessant struggle to 
 exist and grow, innumerable differently com- 
 posed communities of these specialised ceils 
 were gradually evolved and became to a cer- 
 tain extent stereotyped, some proving successful 
 through their adaptation to one element, some 
 to another ; some holding their own through 
 their power in attack, others in resisting or 
 escaping attack ; some succeeding by multi- 
 plying excessively, others by producing fewer 
 offspring more highly organised and so more 
 capable of surviving. 
 
 If we look back at the complex forms of life 
 which have survived, and at those which, failing 
 to survive, have been preserved to the observa- 
 tion of man, it seems evident that success in 
 life on progressive lines has been arrived at 
 only by a continued increase in size of the 
 individual which for the time being has consti- 
 tuted the unit of strife, together, at the same 
 time, with a faculty for further increase of the 
 individual. But it seems also evident that no 
 individual on the main line of advance has 
 successfully increased in size beyond a certain 
 point unless it has increased at the same time 
 in complexity of structure. 
 
1 6 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 Thus the primitive cell could exist as an in- 
 dividual only when its size was inconsiderable, 
 but a community of cells could exist as an in- 
 dividual and attain to proportions vastly greater 
 than those attainable by the individual cell. 
 A continual growth in size of the individual 
 may be traced through the invertebrate forms, 
 greater specialisation of the parts usually accom- 
 panying an increase in size. And when by this 
 process of specialisation a backbone had been 
 evolved, the possibilities of further growth in 
 size and complexity were still further increased. 
 It would seem, however, that here again a limit 
 of successful size was reached, and that the 
 Dinosaurs, Megalosaurs, and other giant pro- 
 ducts of evolution, by exceeding this point, were 
 doomed to extinction. They seem to have over- 
 stepped the limit at which further growth was 
 compatible with successful life on the existing 
 lines of increase in complexity of structure. 
 
 At this point a new form of complexity seems 
 to have been brought into play, and the growth 
 of these still more complex individuals could 
 proceed and eventually attain to proportions 
 greatly in excess of those previously attained to. 
 This new complexity of structure was achieved 
 on the same lines as the complexity of the 
 earliest composite organisms, namely, through 
 the establishment of a community of related 
 individuals which were held together by the 
 bonds of a common interest, and specialised to 
 
NATURE OF THE UNIT OF STRIFE 17 
 
 perform different functions in the larger unit. 
 These communities, as with the primitive com- 
 munities of cells, were at first only of temporary 
 duration, but their existence became more and 
 more prolonged, until eventually permanent 
 communities were formed, and these grew from 
 within, till they again exceeded the size most 
 conducive to successful life. 
 
 For when through the ages the different 
 functions of nutrition, defence, reproduction, 
 &c, had been divided up among the combined 
 cells a further point was reached at which the 
 young of the more complex individuals, when 
 about to separate off to an independent life, 
 were in their turn held to their parent by the 
 bond of a common interest. Success appears 
 at all times to have attended those forms in 
 which the duration of the period during which 
 the cells of growth were retained within the 
 parent organism tended to increase ; and, again, 
 it appears to have attended those forms in 
 which, after such separation, one parent at least 
 gained the instinct to protect them in their 
 helpless stage. Sometimes both parents sub- 
 ordinated their individual interests to those of 
 their young, securing by very various means 
 the safety of those which were to carry on the 
 work of growth until they were properly 
 equipped for the struggle themselves. Fewer 
 young were produced under these more ad- 
 vanced conditions, but a greater number of 
 
 B 
 
18 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 those which came to life came also to maturity, 
 while the maturity of these higher forms pos- 
 sessed greater possibilities than the maturity 
 more quickly attained to. During this period 
 of immaturity in the young the family became 
 the unit of strife. 
 
 In these cases no permanent union was 
 effected, for the offspring on reaching a given 
 age separated off, to become in their turn in- 
 dependent individuals. But a further stage was 
 reached when the family instinct, instead of 
 being temporary, became prolonged, and at 
 length survived throughout life, when units were 
 formed of a more permanent type, consisting 
 of the offspring of common parents. These com- 
 munities continued to grow from within by the 
 multiplication of individuals and families, until 
 the difficulty of supplying food to so many 
 mouths or other causes outweighed the advan- 
 tage of united action. When, therefore, this 
 more permanent unit in its turn exceeded the 
 size most conducive to successful life, individual 
 families were thrown off, which became separate 
 and individual units and started new commu- 
 nities. 
 
 Each individual of these communities, while 
 striving primarily for its own existence, ac- 
 quired also a wider instinct which compelled 
 it to modify its own interests so as to suit the 
 common interests of the whole flock, herd, or 
 swarm to which it belonged. If, as seems 
 
NATURE OF THE UNIT OF STRIFE 19 
 
 evident, those communities succeeded best in 
 which this instinct of subservience most effec- 
 tually obtained, then it became indirectly to 
 the interest of the individual to subordinate its 
 own interests to the interests of the community. 
 And the community of related individuals in 
 these forms became the unit of strife. 
 
 But between the parent community and the 
 families which were separated off for further 
 growth, no affinity remained. In the stress 
 of competition they were as intolerant of each 
 other as the primitive cell had been intolerant 
 of all other cells, even of the portion of itself 
 from which it had just separated. The necessity 
 of insuring individual existence in each stage is 
 stronger than the instinct of growth, until the new 
 and more complex unit has become firmly estab- 
 lished, and its parts sufficiently differentiated. 
 
 The communities found existing in the forms 
 of life below man are of very various struc- 
 ture and consistency, as are the less complex 
 individuals which form the component parts 
 of these. Several methods of growth are at- 
 tempted, tending to produce communities — 
 some loosely coherent and of rapid power of 
 increase, others more compact but less capable 
 of growth, and others again more capable of 
 coherence than the one form, more capable 
 of growth than the other, and thus on a medial 
 line securing progress and development. 1 
 
 1 See page 44. 
 
20 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 The individuals composing these communities 
 remain separate from each other in physical 
 structure throughout the term of their existence 
 apart from the parent form, but the new bonds 
 by which after birth they are held together, 
 although invisible to the eye, are as effectual 
 and binding as those which hold the cells 
 together to form these individual members 
 themselves. Each member of the community, 
 by reason of its specialisation for the perform- 
 ance of a particular function, becomes incapa- 
 citated to some degree for the performance 
 of the other functions of existence, and so in- 
 capable of existing apart from the community. 
 The more advanced the complexity of the unit, 
 the less adequate are its component parts to 
 separate existence. 
 
 It would be as impossible for an individual 
 forming part of a highly evolved community 
 to live and grow in independence of the com- 
 munity as it would be for a cell to survive 
 after separation from the organism of which 
 it formed a part. The more compact the 
 community the more impossible would such 
 separation become. In the invertebrate bee 
 or ant communities it would obviously be im- 
 possible for a worker attempting an inde- 
 pendent life to reproduce its kind, or for the 
 queen under the same circumstances to secure 
 nourishment and protection. And among the 
 physically less firmly consolidated vertebrate 
 
NATURE OF THE UNIT OF STRIFE 21 
 
 communities, the fact that individuals or pairs 
 of the community-forming kinds are not found 
 existing alone, seems to prove that existence 
 for such forms has become impossible apart 
 from the community. 
 
 If it be granted that in this way an increase 
 in complexity of structure is the tendency of 
 all development in life — by which increase in 
 complexity the individual which strives for 
 existence is enabled constantly to increase 
 also in size — the question arises as to how far 
 this view is in accordance with Darwin's great 
 fundamental law of life's development. If de- 
 velopment proceeds by means of natural selec- 
 tion working through the survival of the fittest 
 in the struggle for existence, how far will this 
 suggestion as to the nature of the fittest fulfil 
 its conditions ? 
 
 In the term " survival of the fittest " the 
 word individual is implied ; but if in place of 
 the word " individual " the word " unit " is 
 made use of, then development may be said 
 to proceed by means of the survival of the 
 fittest unit in the struggle for existence. Which 
 will be generally allowed. The word " in- 
 dividual " is thus left free to describe a com- 
 ponent part of a larger and more complex 
 unit. 
 
 The question follows as to the nature of 
 the fittest unit, and it is here suggested that 
 the fittest unit is the unit best adapted, not 
 
22 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 to existence only, but to such form of existence 
 as is compatible with further growth- This 
 unit is represented in the lowest forms by the 
 individual cell ; but as life proceeds, and these 
 cells, after dividing, hold together for purposes 
 of a common interest, then the fittest unit 
 ceases to be confined to the individual cell, 
 but becomes, first temporarily, then perma- 
 nently, that combination of cells in which the 
 component parts are becoming adapted to the 
 larger unit's needs. On these lines the unit 
 continues to grow as an individual and to 
 become more complex, retaining within itself 
 the cells which continue to grow and sub- 
 divide, its own further growth being achieved 
 by the separating off of cells which have been 
 differentiated for the purpose of growth ; and 
 the fittest unit at this stage is that largest 
 community of cells in which the component 
 parts are best adapted to the unit's needs. 
 
 When this process of growth and specialisa- 
 tion had continued for some of the millenniums 
 which are needed for the work of development, 
 especially in its early stages, a new element 
 of complexity came into play. These composite 
 units having reached the limit of complexity 
 permitted by their method of growth, began 
 further to hold together among themselves, 
 their related parts being united by the bonds 
 of a common interest, and in their turn be- 
 coming specialised in function. By such bonds 
 
NATURE OF THE UNIT OF STRIFE 23 
 
 the family was held together for a longer or 
 shorter time, and the family for this time be- 
 came the unit in the strife. And by such 
 bonds the larger family, the community, was 
 held together in a permanent way to form 
 the still larger unit of flock, herd, or swarm. 
 It is here maintained that when an aggregate 
 of individuals in competition with other in- 
 dividuals or aggregates acts as one unit, that 
 aggregate constitutes the unit in the struggle 
 to exist, whatever be the nature of its parts, 
 or of the bonds by which those parts are 
 united — the progressive efficiency of such unit 
 being decided by its size and complexity, to- 
 gether with the stability of the union which is 
 established between its related parts. The in- 
 dividual instinct survives in each member of 
 the larger units, but it is no longer of the 
 same simplicity : it is modified by the need of 
 co-operation, and its scope is curtailed. While, 
 therefore, under these conditions the fittest unit 
 is the largest and most cohesive community, 
 the fittest member of the community is the 
 member most capable of subordinating its in- 
 dividual interests to the interests of the com- 
 munity to which it belongs. 
 
 In this way the already composite units 
 having united among themselves, the resulting 
 communities continually expand and increase 
 in complexity and coherence, while the nervous 
 system in each contained individual as con- 
 
24 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 tinually becomes more highly evolved, so as 
 to serve the increasing demands of the more 
 extensive and cohesive communities. There 
 comes a point, however, in this process where 
 unconscious instinct finds its bounds, for while 
 communities of very various structure and ex- 
 tent are found below man, no community has 
 arisen on progressive lines more inclusive than 
 that which is formed of the more or less 
 immediate descendants of common parents. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE NATURE OF THE 
 HUMAN UNIT 
 
Ill 
 
 THE NATURE OF THE HUMAN UNIT 
 
 In tracing the uprising of the main stem 
 through the tree-like figure by which the de- 
 velopment of life's forms is best pictured, we 
 find that it rises always through those forms 
 in which growth in size and complexity is 
 attained to most effectually, and in which at 
 the same time most scope is allowed for the 
 attainment of further complexity and further 
 growth. Every possible means of success has 
 been put to proof, and branches have struck off 
 from the main stem representing those forms 
 which for the time being have succeeded in 
 the struggle, but which have proved successful 
 only by taking advantage of means which have 
 impeded their further advance. These forms 
 remain as blind alleys leading no whither. But 
 meanwhile the main stem has grown on. 
 
 It has left behind from the beginning the 
 great branch of the vegetable kingdom, without 
 which the animal kingdom could not have come 
 into being ; since animal life is incapable of 
 adapting inorganic matter to the uses of its own 
 
 nutrition. The nature of these vegetable forms 
 
 27 
 
28 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 allowed no scope for the growth of a nervous 
 system, and without a nervous system develop- 
 ment on higher lines appears to have been im- 
 possible. It may have been that since the 
 surface in plants is made use of for purposes 
 of nutrition, its employment as a means of re- 
 ceiving and transmitting impressions from with- 
 out was precluded. It is certain that the 
 further complexity to be arrived at by the 
 union of related units on progressive lines is 
 not found in the vegetable kingdom. Deaf, 
 dumb, blind, and without feeling for ever, these 
 growths serve to bring the inorganic elements 
 of nutrition into a condition which fits them to 
 sustain the life of beings of higher possibilities — 
 beings, moreover, free to roam in quest of food 
 — and the main stem of progress rises through 
 these other forms, which by a slower process 
 arrive at more complex conditions. 
 
 In the main ascending line those forms are 
 found in which the nervous system is best 
 protected, and in which most scope is allowed 
 for its further development, for the wider com- 
 plexity which arises with the family and social 
 instinct is accompanied always by considerable 
 nervous development. But here again many 
 forms which have achieved rapid ■ success have 
 been left behind in favour of those which, 
 possibly less successful for the time being, 
 have shown greater possibilities. Noticeably 
 those insects are left behind whose social com- 
 
NATURE OF THE HUMAN UNIT 29 
 
 munities remain to the wonder of man, for 
 beside the limitation in size necessitated by 
 the method of construction of their com- 
 munities, the individuals composing them have 
 moved on lines which have precluded the 
 possibility of securing the enclosure of their 
 nervous systems in a protecting case and leaving 
 the rest of the organism free. The ancestors 
 of the back-boned animals may have been 
 passing a sluggish individual existence in their 
 shallow waters while the ants and bees were 
 maturing complex social systems, but it was 
 through the slower growths, with their greater 
 possibilities of nervous development, that the 
 main line of progress lay. 
 
 Again, among the vertebrate forms, with their 
 circumscribed allowance of limbs, the main stem 
 in rising left behind as outlying branches all 
 those forms which kept to water as a means of 
 oxygenation, all those which, breathing in air, 
 took air too as their main medium for move- 
 ment, so limiting the possibilities of develop- 
 ment in their fore limbs, which had to be 
 especially adapted to the uses of flight. Again, 
 all hoofed forms were left behind for a similar 
 reason, and the main stem of progress remained 
 with those forms, possibly less advanced for the 
 time being, in which the tendency of develop- 
 ment in the upper extremities left them free 
 to arrive at functions other than locomotion. 
 When an erect posture had been acquired, 
 
30 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 and the fore limbs were at leisure to become 
 specialised as servants to the demands of a 
 more advanced nervous system, a new vista of 
 possibility was made manifest, and all that is 
 meant by the human race, all that is possible 
 to man, began to dawn upon the future of this 
 favoured species. 
 
 For it would seem, when the pictured tree 
 reaches the point where the human race is 
 represented, that the main direction of its 
 growth is modified. It appears as if at this 
 point one shoot struck out from the highest 
 branch and grew to proportions which over- 
 shadow all the rest, since one species here gains 
 an ascendency no other can dispute. Man, as 
 we see him now, has removed himself from com- 
 petition with the forms of life which have pre- 
 ceded him, 1 and the main issue of the struggle 
 has passed away from those other species, and 
 has become centred within the limits of the 
 ascendant species. 
 
 The method of his development, moreover, 
 has undergone a change. For since through- 
 out the animal kingdom new life arises only 
 out of the elements of old life, animal or vege- 
 table, below man, the necessities of existence 
 demand that each individual, impelled by its 
 desire to live and grow, shall find some other 
 forms to feed on, and shall at the same time 
 
 1 Except, perhaps, from those forms which by their invisibility 
 still outwit his vigilance and invade his organism. 
 
NATURE OF THE HUMAN UNIT 31 
 
 find means of escape, as long as may be, from 
 being fed on by yet other forms. The issue of 
 this stress and struggle to feed, and to escape 
 being fed on — whether pursued by an individual 
 or by a community — being the expression of an 
 ever-increasing size and complexity in the forms 
 which best succeed. The development which 
 inevitably ensues is arrived at only through 
 the unconscious agency of instincts which 
 are making for other ends. 
 
 But with man these conditions have gradually 
 been modified. While all other species are 
 engaged in the constant struggle to secure food, 
 and to escape those that would feed on them, 
 man has found the means of bringing the forms 
 he needs into his service, and of removing those 
 other forms which would assail him in their 
 turn. He preserves those he would from the 
 struggle to seek food and to escape their de- 
 vourers that they may be ready to his hand 
 when his need arises ; the rest he has ousted 
 from the regions where he congregates. Mail 
 alone is thus driven to the necessity of burying 
 his dead, and although even in the grave the 
 hurrying crowds of life find him out, it is, as 
 it were, by his own invitation that they are 
 permitted to operate. 
 
 Moreover, the nature of the struggle itself 
 has undergone a change as well as the ground 
 whereon the strife is being waged. The in- 
 dividual human being can no longer be said to 
 
32 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 strive for existence, since in the more advanced 
 civilisations the State takes his life in hand and 
 sees to it that he does not die of want or injury ; 
 the State provides him with food in his last 
 extremity, and the State safeguards him against 
 hurt at the hand of his brother man. The aim 
 of the individual is therefore modified ; it is no 
 longer for existence that he strives, but for 
 better conditions of existence during his term 
 of life. 
 
 Man, as an individual, has not only escaped 
 therefore from the stress of struggle and compe- 
 tition with all earlier forms of life — the struggle 
 in which those earlier forms are still engaged, 
 and by means of which he himself has been 
 evolved — but he has placed himself, as an in- 
 dividual, on a new footing with regard to the 
 nature of the strife itself. 
 
 Nevertheless, it is very evident that his de- 
 velopment has not ceased with his escape from 
 the process which has shaped him. His ascen- 
 dency is still maintained, his possibilities are 
 becoming always more apparent and of widening 
 scope. 
 
 What, then, is the secret of his progress ? 
 What is the new feature which has given so 
 great an impetus to his development that his 
 pre-eminence among all other forms is thus 
 assured and is thus being continually advanced ? 
 
 Is not the answer to this question to be found 
 in the fact that man has gained the power of 
 
NATURE OF THE HUMAN UNIT 33 
 
 uniting into larger and more complex units than 
 any of the forms of life which have gone 
 before, and that, by perpetually increasing in 
 cohesion and extent, these human communities 
 have reached such vast proportions that they 
 have passed the point when any other of life's 
 individuals or communities can attempt to com- 
 pete with them, until at last the main issue of 
 the struggle has passed away from all other 
 species, and has become centred among the 
 different communities, which on this view are 
 the individuals of the ascendant species ? 
 
 And is not the new feature which has given 
 this impulse to his progress the development of 
 an abstract consciousness, which has come into 
 existence with the greater development of his 
 nervous system ? A consciousness which has 
 revealed to him, dimly at first, but with growing 
 clearness, the existence of forces which play 
 about his being, forces which he can neither 
 resist nor control ; laws which he must either 
 obey, or not obeying, suffer the penalties of 
 disobedience ? A consciousness which has 
 made him realise his inherited instinct of single- 
 self-seeking as an instinct, which he must sub- 
 ordinate to the larger family instinct, and again 
 to the wider tribal and national claims, and 
 again to the claims of the whole human race ? 
 A consciousness which has made him resist 
 his instinct of narrow self-insistence as an 
 enemy to all that he can discern of law, of the 
 
 C 
 
34 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 universe, of God ? Like a child awakening, the 
 human race rubbed its eyes, and looking, began 
 to understand the vast realities which throng 
 round its existence, began to realise the need of 
 its own voluntary co-operation in the fulfilment 
 of the laws by which development is being 
 achieved. 
 
 At the time when the new light was turned 
 on primitive instinct, and man learnt the need 
 of himself endeavouring to restrain it in the 
 service of a higher obedience, he had eaten of 
 the tree of knowledge of good and evil — he 
 became a living Soul. He was brought into 
 touch with those eternal laws which operate 
 from beyond this world, and which include the 
 whole universe in their working ; he began to 
 apprehend the existence of a Source of infinite 
 purpose, of whose attributes his perceptions 
 still remain only nascent, but which his mind 
 is endeavouring continually to grasp. Con- 
 sciousness has revealed to him the vast region of 
 the Unknown, and, in spite of all his progress, 
 on its threshold he still remains in reverent 
 amazement. 
 
 With this new attitude towards the hidden 
 purposes of creation as revealed by law develop- 
 ment began to pass from that early phase in 
 which it was the inevitable outcome of instincts 
 which made for other ends, and it entered on 
 the present later phase of accelerated movement, 
 the phase in which gradually human instinct is 
 
NATURE OF THE HUMAN UNIT 35 
 
 being made to trend voluntarily in the direction 
 of eternal law, in which man has begun con- 
 sciously to fulfil that which he can grasp of its 
 demands. As to the attributes of the Source of 
 all law and the penalties incurred by disobedi- 
 ence, man's apprehension was at first as crude 
 as his powers of thought were immature, but 
 he has never failed to associate his obedience to 
 the acquired instinct of individual subordina- 
 tion to the larger good, with his sense of thus 
 consciously submitting to the controlling force 
 which shapes the issues of his life. 
 
 In that first dim twilight of the mind, when 
 the family or the tribe was the unit of strife, the 
 need of protecting the life of individuals within 
 the unit for the larger unit's good became mani- 
 fest. The human law against murder within 
 the family — that most primitive law stereotyped 
 for ever in the story of Cain and Abel — was 
 gradually enforced, with the consciousness that 
 it contained within it the reflection of an eternal 
 truth of life, the triumph of a greater over a 
 lesser instinct, a law sanctioned by all that man 
 was able to conceive of as God. So also other 
 laws tending to subdue antagonism within the 
 family or the tribe, and so to secure its cohesion 
 in competition with other tribes, were gradually 
 brought into action ; laws relating to his attitude 
 towards his fellows, to possessions which the 
 individual made his own by common consent, 
 rules for regulating the observances by which 
 
36 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 the Power or Powers which were discerned as 
 controlling human well-being should be wor- 
 shipped or propitiated. The laws made by man 
 from the most primitive times seem to have 
 represented those fractions of ultimate truth 
 which the farthest- seeing of the different units 
 could grasp and bring to bear upon the people. 
 And as a parent, to protect his child from the 
 disastrous results of actions the issues of which 
 he, though not the child, is able to foresee, 
 will make rules and enforce lesser punishments 
 to act as deterrents till the greater results can 
 be discerned by the child itself, so those who 
 had been specialised as leaders of the different 
 units enforced obedience to their human laws 
 by lesser penalties, to the end that the indi- 
 vidual might be deterred from action the evil 
 issues of which to the unit, he, though not the 
 perpetrator, might be able to grasp and under- 
 stand. The Ten Commandments represent the 
 laws which met the needs of the most religious 
 and the most cohesive of all tribes, the one 
 tribe which has been able to survive and partake, 
 as a tribe, of the civilisation of the larger com- 
 munities which eventually superseded those 
 bounded by tribal limitations. 
 
 For when the tribes were enabled to hold 
 their offspring, which were about to separate 
 off, in the bonds of a common interest with 
 themselves, and when these larger units appro- 
 priated certain tracts of earth to their own 
 
NATURE OF THE HUMAN UNIT 37 
 
 uses, the national unit came into existence, and 
 gradually the main line of progress passed 
 away from the lesser communities of tribe and 
 became centred among the larger and more 
 diversified units of nation. Among the fore- 
 most people of the earth at the present time, on 
 this assumption, it is the nation which is the 
 unit in the struggle for existence ; the nation is 
 the individual which fights for life, which, when 
 its interests are opposed to those of other 
 nations, is compelled, if possible, to kill the 
 weaker, to outwit the stronger. The individuals 
 within this larger organism are protected as 
 carefully as the cells within any animal organism 
 are protected in the interest of the organism 
 itself ; those individuals set apart for the office 
 of protection and aggression — the armies and 
 navies of nations, like the teeth and claws and 
 hide of the carnivora — leaving other individuals 
 free to become specialised in the service of the 
 system's other needs. As in the animal organism 
 the supply of nourishment to the cells of which 
 it is composed is conveyed by a system dif- 
 ferentiated for that purpose, while the organism 
 as a whole is employed in securing other 
 organisms as food, that the system itself may 
 be supplied and the necessary business of 
 existence and of growth proceed, so with the 
 organism of the human community. The supply 
 of nourishment to the individuals of which it 
 is composed is maintained by manufacture, 
 
38 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 agriculture, commerce, and trade manipulated 
 by individuals differentiated for those purposes, 
 while the community as a whole is employed 
 in securing and holding the means by which 
 the supply is guaranteed. The development of 
 mind, and of the activities born of mind, has 
 necessarily introduced a great diversity of need 
 into these communities, and many sources of 
 supply and varieties of trade are required to 
 meet these needs. 
 
 Like the cells in the animal organism, the 
 individuals in the human community are en- 
 gaged in the struggle to obtain each its share 
 of the supply ; but the struggle is on different 
 lines to the primal strife for existence, since it 
 is to the ultimate interest of the parts that the 
 need of all should be supplied, as it is the 
 business of certain parts to see that certain 
 others do not lack. It is the business mean- 
 while of the community as a whole to exist 
 and grow, and to escape being merged in the 
 existence of other communities, to which end 
 its defences are maintained, and its armies and 
 navies are equipped through the agency of the 
 governing system, while the governing eye 
 keeps a vigilant and wary outlook on com- 
 peting communities. And, as in the strife of 
 animal organisms, the victor devours its victim, 
 which becomes part of its very substance, in 
 a similar way with the strife of communities, 
 the victorious community absorbs into itself 
 
NATURE OF THE HUMAN UNIT 39 
 
 those, or portions of those, which it is able to 
 conquer, and they become part of the very 
 structure of its own organisation. 
 
 Moreover, with the nations themselves at the 
 present time a process of growth is taking place 
 similar to that which obtained with the cells 
 and larger individuals and families and tribes 
 which have gradually been built up into the 
 existing units of nations. For the nation which 
 overgrows the regions at its command sends 
 offshoots into the less peopled lands, where the 
 means of subsistence are still unappropriated, 
 or made use of by tribes which are quickly 
 overborne. And as with the earlier organisms, 
 intolerance at first arose among these separated 
 units, but gradually a more successful issue was 
 arrived at, when the parent organism was able 
 to hold its offspring to itself in the bonds of 
 a common interest, and parent and offspring at 
 length became one composite unit ; so this still 
 larger ideal is beginning to dawn upon the 
 nations of the world, and the greater imperial 
 possibilities are coming into view. 
 
 For while the units of intolerance have been 
 consolidating themselves in obedience to laws 
 which they have already made their own, wider 
 laws have always been rising above the horizon, 
 to which, in their turn, the progressive units 
 have learnt to expand their ideals. Thus while 
 at the present time the national ideal is the 
 unit of greatest tolerance, and the imperial ideal 
 
40 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 is being faced, there lies still on the horizon, 
 to be perceived across the boundaries of the 
 lesser limitations which still constrain mankind, 
 the great ultimate possibility of the universal 
 brotherhood of surviving man. 
 
IV 
 THE STRUCTURE OF COMMUNITIES 
 
IV 
 
 THE STRUCTURE OF COMMUNITIES 
 
 A great diversity of method is found to 
 exist in the formation of the larger composite 
 units out of individuals of simpler make ; but 
 throughout all communities, from the simplest 
 to the most highly complex, definite lines of 
 development appear to run round which the 
 different forms are grouped. A certain simi- 
 larity of method reappears again and again, 
 first in the communities of cells which result 
 in vegetable then in animal organisms ; again 
 among the communities into which the more 
 complex organisms unite themselves below 
 man ; and again among the communities of 
 men, which, on this assumption, are the only 
 true individuals of the human race. The actual 
 physical affinity which limits growth becomes 
 less and less essential as a binding agency, but 
 other affinities are matured which in action 
 become equally binding, while they permit the 
 organism to grow and again to increase in 
 capacity for further growth. In human com- 
 munities it is in the nature of these affinities that 
 the different methods of growth are manifested. 
 
44 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 The earliest and simplest lines on which 
 communities are formed lie through those loose 
 aggregates of individuals which achieve rapid 
 growth while differentiation of the component 
 parts is scarcely attempted. Size is thus quickly 
 attained to in the composite individual but at 
 the expense of cohesive power within the mass, 
 and disintegration can be brought about as 
 easily as growth. The advance made in this 
 way fails in one element essential to success 
 on progressive lines since, although the instinct 
 to grow is obeyed, the need of securing the 
 continued existence of the larger individual is 
 not taken into account. 
 
 The second plan works on lines diametrically 
 opposed to the first, for with organisms held 
 together by this method greater cohesion of 
 the composite individual is secured at the ex- 
 pense of the possibility of further expansion. 
 Especial stress is laid in these forms on defence 
 and the protection of the individual under attack, 
 and growth is of necessity hampered by the 
 cumbrous machinery necessary to protection. 
 
 The third and more successful method, that 
 through which the main line of progress and 
 development is always seen to run, strikes the 
 mean between the two necessities of continued 
 existence on the part of the composite in- 
 dividual in the form already attained to, and 
 its capacity for further growth, determined by 
 the methods through which cohesion is secured. 
 
STRUCTURE OF COMMUNITIES 45 
 
 The need ol protection and the defence of 
 the individual is made subordinate to the need 
 of freedom and the power to expand. This 
 process is more deliberate in its working, and 
 it may be that favourable conditions of isola- 
 tion and natural protection are essential to its 
 furtherance, but, assuming development to be 
 the object of life, it is the only sure process. 
 
 There is no definite line of demarcation be- 
 tween these different methods, they appear to 
 merge one into the other, but at the extremes of 
 the two first the strength and weakness of the 
 different modes of growth become very obvious, 
 as well as the need of a mean being struck 
 between them in order that development may 
 proceed. 
 
 These three methods are found to exist in the 
 vegetable kingdom, and the greatest ultimate 
 success is achieved, here as elsewhere, by those 
 organisms in which the third method obtains ; 
 but progress is arrested even in the highest of 
 these forms by the exclusion of a nervous system 
 from the vegetative scheme of life. The compo- 
 site unit may attain to considerable size, but the 
 further union of these composite units is pre- 
 cluded where there are no special organs of 
 control, where there is no sensitive surface, to 
 receive and transmit impressions from without. 
 
 The colonies of bacteria, many water-plants, 
 and all fungoid growths which uprise and 
 flourish, and decay with so great rapidity, may be 
 
46 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 taken to represent the first method. Differentia- 
 tion of function remains at a minimum in these 
 forms, and disintegration of the individual is 
 easily accomplished. Rapid growth is achieved 
 at the expense of the power of maintaining the 
 size which has been attained. 
 
 The second method is found among the 
 monocotyledonous plants in which the functions 
 are more highly specialised, but in which no 
 provision is made for the further growth in 
 circumference of the stem when once the cells 
 composing it have attained their full size, and in 
 which there is a hardening of the outside of 
 the stem to form a protective covering which 
 impedes further increase in circumference. 
 Organisms formed on these lines may attain 
 to a considerable size, as do the palms under 
 tropical conditions ; but the greater number 
 remain of lesser bulk, since they are unable by 
 their structure to develop stems of increasing 
 girth to support the growing superstructure. 
 
 The third and most successful method is 
 carried out by the dicotyledons, in which pro- 
 vision is made for the reproduction of tissue 
 from within, accompanied by the possibility of 
 a continuous expansion in the outer layers. 
 There being, however, no true nervous system 
 in these organisms, the development consequent 
 on the further union of composite units has no 
 province in the vegetable kingdom. 
 
 Turning next to the animal kingdom, we find 
 
STRUCTURE OF COMMUNITIES 47 
 
 that the first plan is apparently followed by all 
 those invertebrate forms in which differentia- 
 tion of function is of so little account that the 
 composite individuals may divide into two parts 
 or more, and each part remain capable of repro- 
 ducing the missing part or the entire organism. 
 It is difficult indeed with some of these forms to 
 decide the exact boundary between the indi- 
 vidual and the community, so capable are the 
 parts of existing separately or united into a 
 larger organism. 
 
 The second plan is followed by those inverte- 
 brate organisms which protect themselves in a 
 horny or calcareous case, so furthering the exist- 
 ence of the individual in the form attained to, but 
 limiting its capacity for further development ; 
 such are all crustaceans and insects, and many 
 molluscs. In these the nervous system gains 
 touch with the outer world, through complicated 
 organs of sight, hearing, and feeling ; but feeling, 
 as with the other senses, is limited to certain 
 organs differentiated for that purpose, the rest 
 of the body being incapacitated by its protec- 
 tive covering from receiving impressions from 
 without. The existence of the individual is 
 efficiently secured ; but growth and development 
 on the higher and freer vertebrate lines is ren- 
 dered impossible under these conditions. 
 
 The third method is followed by those verte- 
 brate forms which confine the hard protective 
 covering to the delicate central nervous system, 
 
48 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 and leave the rest of the organism free to grow 
 and expand, and to increase in sensitiveness to 
 impressions from without. Far greater scope 
 for the development of the nervous system is 
 permitted on this method, and it is through the 
 agencies brought into play by its development 
 that the formation of the still larger and more 
 complex units becomes possible. And although 
 with vertebrate organisms the tendency to revert 
 to the protective method asserts itself from 
 time to time, the organisms so protected are 
 never found among those on the main line of 
 advance. They may exist the better as indi- 
 viduals, but they cannot progress. 
 
 When now we shift our ground and consider 
 the communities into which these composite 
 individuals unite below man, we find similar 
 differences in the mode of their formation, 
 though the binding agency ceases to be physical. 
 The loosely formed units in which the parts are 
 but slightly, if at all, specialised are represented 
 by the swarms of insects which congregate and 
 move in groups, also by the shoals of herring, 
 mackerel, and other fishes, by which the sea is 
 sometimes crowded over an expanse of several 
 miles. These communities appear to owe their 
 origin to the propinquity of the innumerable 
 progeny of any given pair or pairs on emerging 
 from the egg. A common interest in holding 
 together appears to determine the existence of 
 these as of all communities, but no centralisa- 
 
STRUCTURE OF COMMUNITIES 49 
 
 tion of control, no sufficient differentiation of 
 function exists in these to secure permanence of 
 union beyond one generation, or any further 
 extension of the community. They achieve 
 considerable size, but by a process which leaves 
 them so incoherent that their disintegration can 
 be brought about as rapidly as their formation. 
 
 The second plan on which further growth 
 of the community is impeded by the very 
 conditions which render the unit compact, is 
 represented by the communities of the higher 
 insects. The method of growth in these com- 
 munities resembles that by which the communi- 
 ties of cells were consolidated. For with bees 
 and ants certain specialised members are told 
 off to secure and convey nourishment to the 
 unit, and others to protect it from attack; while 
 members corresponding to the cells of growth 
 are set apart for the work of reproduction, from 
 which the other members are relieved. When 
 further growth is necessitated, these reproductive 
 members are started off to form new communi- 
 ties by reproducing not only their kind, but indus- 
 trial members of the community as well. By this 
 method of growth the limits of the community 
 are of necessity circumscribed by the repro- 
 ductive power of the queen. A bond practically 
 physical in nature is thus introduced, since the 
 component parts of the whole unit are through- 
 out life interdependent on each other. The 
 formation of larger units depending for their 
 
 D 
 
50 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 peopling on more than one queen seems to have 
 been ruled out of court by the inherited and 
 insuperable hostility of each swarm towards the 
 members of all other swarms. 1 Possibly the 
 nervous system, in these forms, highly evolved 
 as it is, here reaches the limit of its power of 
 development on the given conditions of pro- 
 tection on which it works. 
 
 The last, and only, method on which com- 
 munities can grow progressively is found in 
 embryo among all pairs of animals which de- 
 vote personal care to their young and, during 
 the period of their immaturity, subordinate the 
 individual to the family instinct. 2 The develop- 
 ment of the nervous system in the vertebrate 
 forms being a lengthy process, the need of pro- 
 tecting the young individuals till the process of 
 formation is achieved becomes increasingly 
 essential. And since individuals possessing 
 parents capable of affording such protection 
 would best arrive at maturity, those arriving at 
 maturity and the power of carrying on the race 
 would be those inheriting such capacity to pro- 
 tect, in turn, their own offspring. Temporary 
 units are thus formed which are of great co- 
 hesive strength, and when, as this period of 
 protecting care becomes more and more pro- 
 longed, a moment is at last arrived at in which 
 
 i See Lubbock's "Ants, Bees, and Wasps," p. 119. 
 2 See "The Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct," by Alex- 
 ander Sutherland. 
 
STRUCTURE OF COMMUNITIES 51 
 
 the holding together of the family not only 
 survives the period of immaturity, but endures 
 through life, these family units remain as centres 
 of strength within the larger unit and help to 
 bind together the larger units of tribe which 
 grow out of the family unit. Such larger units 
 are found among those birds and quadrupeds 
 which group themselves into flocks and herds, 
 and several generations may be included in one 
 unit. Differentiation of function in these com- 
 munities, though greatly in advance of that 
 which is found in the communities of fishes, 
 is apparently less advanced than that attained to 
 by the more physically coherent insect com- 
 munities ; but by distributing the work of re- 
 production among all the members, and thus 
 ensuring growth from many centres, the possi- 
 bility of the further expansion of such com- 
 munities is vastly increased. 
 
 It is only, however, with the human race 
 that the further formation of communities has 
 assumed a continuously growing and highly 
 differentiated form. Many birds and many 
 quadrupeds continue to live independent lives, 
 the temporary family units being the limit of 
 their power of combination. But the existence 
 of any human individual who does not, through- 
 out life, form the component part of a larger 
 unit, is practically unknown. The physical 
 provision for the growth of communities remains 
 with man as it exists in the highest forms below 
 
52 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 man, but the new medium by means of which 
 further growth is achieved — the development of 
 consciousness and the dim apprehension by its 
 means of a universal law which man turns with 
 increasing knowledge on to the growth of the 
 human unit of strife — uplifts the whole process 
 to a higher plane. With man, not only has the 
 community become consolidated as the unit in 
 the struggle to exist, but with the more advanced 
 races these communities themselves are com- 
 posite, their component parts consisting of lesser 
 communities held together by bonds as effectual 
 as those which held together the primitive cell 
 units into one individual, the primitive composite 
 individuals into units of family or tribe. The 
 old methods of unconscious growth in these 
 complex communities are no longer the only 
 methods ; they play their part in determining 
 the issues of conflict between these larger units ; 
 but it is a subordinate part. The main factor 
 in human development, a factor whose dominion 
 is always gaining ground, is the new and more 
 elastic medium through which the development 
 of man is achieved : — the medium of sympathy 
 induced by the working of mind on instinct. 
 By this agency man has not only been brought 
 into touch with the infinite Source of all law, 
 and with the demands made by law on human 
 conduct, but from the moment of his primal 
 apprehension of that force he has been con- 
 strained consciously to modify the demands 
 
STRUCTURE OF COMMUNITIES 53 
 
 of instinct in conformity to its requirements ; 
 while those units of which the individuals best 
 modified their instincts of self-seeking have been 
 the units which have best succeeded. New 
 bonds of union between man and man have 
 been created by this necessity for cohesion 
 within the narrow limits of existing units how- 
 ever small, and sympathy — equivalent of the con- 
 nective tissue of physically united communities 
 — has come into play. Common aims, common 
 fears, quickened the sense of comradeship, and 
 tended to subdue the purely self-seeking instincts 
 of individuals gradually being incapacitated from 
 isolated action, even though the sense of sym- 
 pathy, as with the sense of the demands of law, 
 was in early times as crude as man's mind was 
 immature — is still as crude as man's mind is 
 still immature. 
 
 But in the development of these human com- 
 munities under the influence on conduct of an 
 apprehension of law, we find the same ten- 
 dencies at work as in the formation and de- 
 velopment of all other composite units which 
 have come into being, even though the medium 
 through which they operate is changed. With 
 the introduction of this new medium of mind 
 bringing consciousness of law, a new function 
 was necessitated, and certain individuals of the 
 community were specialised to exercise this 
 function. The mind and consciousness of the 
 many needed guidance and control, as the 
 
54 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 members of the animal body need the control 
 of the nervous system ; and as the component 
 individuals became themselves more highly 
 specialised for their several functions, they were 
 compelled to leave the function of apprehend- 
 ing law and turning it to account in the hands 
 of the few members who became their leaders 
 and their religious teachers, both functions in 
 the earlier communities having been frequently 
 united under one head. 
 
 It has been through the different methods 
 adopted by the leaders in exercising their 
 function of moral control that the different 
 plans of growth and development have been ex- 
 emplified. The affinity between the component 
 parts of the unit being no longer physical in 
 nature, the control of the related parts passes 
 also out of the physical stage, but this function 
 of control is very differently exercised. Two 
 of the three methods which have been traced 
 through the formation of vegetable and animal 
 organisms are very clearly to be discerned in 
 the formation of human communities, although 
 the first method, that of securing rapid growth 
 at the expense of coherence, may not find any 
 living representatives. It is possible that some 
 savage races may survive whose cohesion is 
 thus loosely compact, but it seems more pro- 
 bable that, if they have existed, they have 
 already given place to tribes more cohesive in 
 structure, as these in their turn are yielding to 
 
STRUCTURE OF COMMUNITIES 55 
 
 the advance of the larger and more composite 
 national units. 
 
 The second method, that by which the parts 
 are so compactly bound together that further 
 growth in size of the unit is precluded, is to be 
 seen wherever despotisms exist, whether in the 
 family, the tribal, or the national unit. The 
 despot maintains belief in, and obedience to, 
 himself by restraining the development of the 
 individuals he controls ; he thus secures great 
 cohesion in the unit over which he holds sway, 
 since the wills of the people lie, as it were, in 
 his own hands ; while they, conscious of their 
 incompetence to act without his guidance, are 
 willing to yield obedience to the force by means 
 of which they prosper. It being to the leader's 
 interest, and, as he believes, to the interest of 
 the unit, to subdue independence of thought or 
 action which might disintegrate the unit, other 
 centres of strength are not permitted ; the co- 
 hesion is, as it were, produced by bonds con- 
 verging from the people to the leader, while 
 everything interfering with that free convergence 
 is deprecated. It is evident that possibilities of 
 further expansion of the unit must be curtailed 
 on these lines, in much the same way that the 
 further expansion of the higher insect com- 
 munities is curtailed, since leader and people 
 being interdependent for existence on each 
 other, growth beyond the point at which the 
 mass can be wielded from one centre is pre- 
 
56 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 eluded. If another leader arises who cannot 
 be subdued continued cohesion becomes im- 
 possible, one or other leader must break off from 
 the existing community, and with those members 
 who will accept his rule must commence a new 
 community, antagonistic to the first under stress 
 of competition when once separation has finally 
 taken place and the common interest is at an 
 end. Provision is made for one obedient people 
 under sway of one leader ; if another leader 
 arises cleavage of the unit must ensue, since in 
 consequence of its method of growth more than 
 one centre of thought or rule cannot exist in a 
 community formed on despotic lines. In much 
 the same way no higher insect community can 
 exist in which there is more than one mature 
 queen. Beyond a certain point, therefore, the 
 growth from within of such communities is 
 precluded by the nature of their method of 
 growth ; the holding together of the parent 
 community and its offspring, on grounds of a 
 community of interest, being rendered impossible 
 after separation by the innate hostility generated 
 between the separated parts themselves. 
 
 But a despotism may nevertheless grow and 
 increase to considerable proportions on lines of 
 conquest and forceful subjugation of other com- 
 munities. The leader in these cases maintains 
 his supremacy and compels obedience to his 
 rule, holding the parts together by the same 
 despotic means as those by which the original 
 
STRUCTURE OF COMMUNITIES 57 
 
 community is coerced. But the cohesion at- 
 tained to in this way between conquering and 
 conquered peoples, is different in kind and 
 degree to that which arises between related 
 parts held together by the sense of a common 
 origin and a common interest. A despotic unit, 
 however large, contains within itself elements of 
 disintegration which weaken its resisting power 
 under the impact of even smaller units matured 
 on more progressive lines. 
 
 Success, for the time being, of the individual 
 is usually the outcome of this second mode 
 of growth, but it is temporary success at the 
 expense of further possibilities. Those com- 
 munities which take advantage of this method 
 and are unable to escape from its limitations are 
 found to have removed themselves from the 
 main line of advance, they have secured indi- 
 vidual existence under stress of competition to the 
 exclusion of the power to grow on lines which 
 secure the highest possibilities of growth. 
 
 In a constitutional or republican mode of 
 government, on the other hand — that which 
 represents the third method of construction in 
 human units — the leader or leaders in different 
 degrees aim at securing self-government of the 
 component parts in deference to the needs of 
 the whole unit. Secondary centres of strength 
 are permitted which among themselves produce 
 interlacing strands of sympathy and consequent 
 cohesion ; instead of being ousted from the 
 
58 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 community they remain to strengthen it. The 
 development of the mind of the people becomes 
 an essential aim, instead of constituting an 
 element of adverse strength to be kept in abey- 
 ance. Growth of the individual community is 
 able to proceed when the structure is built on 
 these lines. There remains a central source of 
 moral control, but the parts themselves take 
 their share in contributing to the number of 
 those who exercise this function. Cohesion is 
 thus achieved not only by bonds of interdepen- 
 dence between the rulers and the ruled, but by 
 interlacing strands of sympathy born of a com- 
 munity of common interest which emanate from 
 many centres. A structure of this kind may 
 obviously be of considerable resisting power, 
 and yet remain capable of further expansion. 
 Those competing leaders who arise are used 
 in contributing to the strength of the central 
 controlling force, or in their own province 
 remain to exercise lesser functions of control. 
 A primary connection exists between the main 
 centre of government and these lesser centres, 
 while all other connective agencies between the 
 component parts are allowed full play. 
 
 It has been on these lines that all the more 
 advanced communities have moved and still are 
 moving. Most of the European peoples were 
 compelled to adopt despotic methods through 
 the exigencies of the acute competition which their 
 position forced upon them at the breaking up 
 
STRUCTURE OF COMMUNITIES 59 
 
 of the Roman Empire. But an older and freer 
 spirit has remained, and it is gradually breaking 
 down the restraints of government by coercion, 
 while those despotisms which are incapable of 
 yielding to the pressure from within of their 
 more enlightened peoples suffer as all organisms 
 suffer which revert or adhere to the protective 
 mode of existence and advance. 
 
 Whether this view of human development be 
 accepted or not, it must be allowed that the 
 position of individual man has undergone a 
 vital change since the earliest dawn of conscious- 
 ness within him. He began free to follow 
 his own instincts, but with the passing of the 
 ages he has disowned this freedom, and the 
 security of his bondage increases as he rises in 
 the scale. The coercion exercised by the few 
 over the many, the strong over the weak, is 
 losing force at every turn, with the increase in 
 number of those permitted to be strong ; but 
 this freedom from coercive control is acquired 
 only in proportion as a more forceful bondage 
 comes into play, a bondage from within, which 
 constrains the individual's deeds and holds even 
 his thoughts in thrall. The despotic method 
 can be effectively relinquished only as the indi- 
 vidual constituents of a community acquire the 
 power of governing themselves, as they them- 
 selves forge the links which bind them to their 
 fellows, and compel them to find their own 
 good only in that which profits also those to 
 
60 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 whom they are bound. By means of the in- 
 visible strands of sympathy which entwine 
 around and control man as he thinks and 
 moves, the interests of each individual are 
 becoming inextricably united to those of his 
 family, his social, his national interests ; he is 
 becoming incapable of action which does not 
 regard those interests in different degrees, each 
 component part of the community being con- 
 verted, in this way, into a centre of cohesive 
 strength. Those individuals who have the mis- 
 fortune to be behindhand among their fellows 
 in realising the community of interest and in 
 developing the bonds of sympathy, find that 
 the compelling force of human opinion to a 
 considerable extent controls and circumscribes 
 their actions, while those whom neither sympathy 
 nor social opinion can restrain, find themselves 
 face to face with their country's law, which 
 with an iron hand forbids them to follow their 
 individual instincts uncontrolled. 
 
 But while the primal instincts of the indi- 
 vidual within the community are thus held 
 captive, the primal instincts of the community 
 itself remain free and unconstrained. The 
 nation is still compelled to demand the needs 
 of its own existence and its growth ; and an 
 instinct of antagonism towards all competing 
 communities which are making the same de- 
 mands remains an essential condition of sur- 
 vival and development. Under stress of conflict 
 
STRUCTURE OF COMMUNITIES 61 
 
 both sympathy within the unit and antagonism 
 towards those without are accentuated. Strife 
 electrifies, as it were, the sense of community 
 of interest, and without its agency such cohesion 
 as exists could never have been secured. 
 
 The actions of individual man being thus in- 
 extricably bound up with the actions of lesser 
 units within a larger unit, which in its turn 
 has to struggle for existence with other similar 
 units, it seems difficult to escape the conclu- 
 sion that these larger communities are now 
 the individuals which constitute the units of 
 strife ; and that each human being within the 
 unit is merely a component part in the act of 
 achieving the self-subservience which is essen- 
 tial to the existence of the unit as a whole. 
 
V 
 
 THE BINDING FORCE IN HUMAN 
 COMMUNITIES 
 
THE BINDING FORCE IN HUMAN 
 COMMUNITIES 
 
 If it be granted that growth which is arrived at 
 through an increase in complexity of structure 
 in the unit of strife, together with a faculty for 
 further increase, is the essential element in all 
 progress ; and if it be granted, moreover, that 
 the advance made by man which removes him 
 from strife with all other species is due to his 
 conscious, though immature, recognition of, and 
 attempt at co-operation in this law, then it must 
 follow that those communities which recognise 
 it most clearly and co-operate most effectually, 
 must be the units which best succeed. 
 
 But this wider law, which embraces the in- 
 terests of the family and the community and 
 works from those standpoints, is directly op- 
 posed to the inherited instinct of narrow self- 
 seeking and intolerance which has been essential 
 to the existence of the individual in all the 
 advancing stages of life's progress, and which 
 still survives in each member of the human as 
 of all other species. As the primitive cell, con- 
 strained by the need to exist as an individual, 
 
 6 s e 
 
66 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 was at first intolerant of all other cells opposed 
 to its own interests, even of the cell which a 
 moment before had formed part of its own 
 substance, so each of the composite units which 
 have been built up through the acquired need 
 of co - operation between certain related cells 
 is intolerant by instinct of all other such com- 
 posite individuals whose interests compete with 
 its own ; so each community of such composite 
 individuals is intolerant by instinct of all other 
 such competing communities. And although 
 in the species below man this instinct of in- 
 dividual intolerance has, in its turn, already 
 been modified in their communities, and with 
 man himself is in process of being broken down 
 far more effectually, the process even with the 
 human race is still in an early stage. The 
 subjection of the cell to the interests of the 
 larger organism in the animal body may be 
 said to have been already established ; * but 
 the subordination of the individual human being 
 to the good of the communities to which he 
 belongs is still in a period of transition. Man 
 finds himself consciously at enmity with an 
 inherited instinct within himself, which per- 
 petually prompts him to seek the needs of his 
 own existence only, regardless of the fact that 
 
 1 Unless certain morbid growths of tissue may be taken as 
 evidence of independent action on the part of cells insufficiently 
 brought into subjection to the welfare of the unit of which they 
 form a part. 
 
THE BINDING FORCE 67 
 
 as member of a community, or of communities, 
 his own existence can only profit as he seeks 
 the welfare of those larger communities them- 
 selves. He is not yet emancipated from the 
 demands of the old conditions although he 
 already suffers from the penalties of disobedi- 
 ence to the new. 
 
 For if it is essential to a successful unit that 
 it should continually increase in complexity and 
 extent, then only those component parts which 
 contribute to the cohesion and growth of the unit 
 can directly benefit the unit, and so, indirectly, 
 benefit themselves. The whole can succeed only 
 as the parts subordinate their individual interests 
 to the interest of the whole. And the parts can 
 succeed only as the whole succeeds. 
 
 In the forms of life which have preceded 
 man this subservience of the parts has been 
 wrought out slowly and unconsciously by means 
 of inexorable law working through the survival 
 of the fittest in the struggle for existence, the 
 fittest unit, at all times, being the most cohesive 
 and extensive unit ; and with man the same law 
 is still working on the same lines to produce 
 communities of individuals of more involved 
 and complicated type. But with man — it is 
 the endeavour of these pages to maintain — the 
 process is accelerated, and a higher develop- 
 ment is made possible by an appreciation of, 
 and co-operation with law on the part of the 
 component parts themselves. 
 
68 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 The new force thus initiated has shifted the 
 issues of development, and has separated off the 
 human from all other species, in which the 
 power of conscious obedience to law has not 
 been attained to. With man, development has 
 thus passed from the purely physical phase to 
 one in which moral cohesion is the triumphant 
 factor. But the development of this new force, 
 which came into play with the birth of con- 
 sciousness of law, introduced, as has been said, 
 the necessity for a new function in human com- 
 munities. As at the dividing line between 
 vegetable and animal life provision was made 
 in the latter for the new function which de- 
 veloped in the higher forms into a compli- 
 cated nervous system, a system controlling the 
 whole organism and bringing the individual 
 into touch, through its senses, with the world 
 about it ; so it would seem that at the dividing 
 line between pre-human and human communities 
 provision was made in the latter for the new 
 function which has developed into a complicated 
 system of moral coercion which controls the 
 larger organism, and brings the individuals 
 composing these human communities into touch 
 with universal law. For in these larger units, 
 consisting of tribe or nation, the specialisation 
 of the different members for their several 
 functions has left only the few free to appre- 
 hend the demands of law and to bring it to 
 bear on securing cohesion of the community. 
 
THE BINDING FORCE 69 
 
 The greater number have had to be content 
 at all times that their higher thinking should be 
 done vicariously. While some have been en- 
 gaged in securing the nutrition of the com- 
 munity, some in tending the young in their 
 helpless stage, some in defending the unit and 
 increasing its bounds, others have been special- 
 ised to apprehend the laws which control all 
 life, or to administer the law which has been 
 apprehended that it may conduce to the com- 
 munity's cohesion and its growth. 
 
 It has been as if each community, while en- 
 gaged in struggling through life's difficult ways, 
 had had to trust for guidance to those travellers 
 who, swifter of foot and of keener vision than 
 their fellows, have climbed to some higher 
 standpoint from whence a larger prospect has 
 opened on the view, disclosing wider horizons 
 on beyond. These Seers have peered through 
 the mist to see the lie of country and the distant 
 goal, and seeing, they have pointed out the way 
 to those below. But the obvious and easy way 
 dictated by the single-self-seeking instinct has 
 never been the right way to travel in, and the 
 Seers have been hard pressed to make clear to 
 the multitude the need of turning their steps in 
 the more difficult direction of acting for the 
 benefit, not of self only, but of the whole com- 
 munity, which from their heights they have seen 
 to be the only way. The religious teachers of 
 the world have been compelled to find means 
 
70 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 by which to convey the ideal which is still out 
 of sight to their hearers ; to find motives by 
 which to urge on their difficult way those whose 
 vision is still curtailed by the nearer features of 
 the country-side ; the vision of the Seers having 
 been in turn curtailed by the farthest horizon 
 which their heights revealed. The presence of 
 an irresistible Force demanding the restraint of 
 self-seeking for the purposes of union into small 
 units, albeit with little tolerance for other units, 
 was the prospect which disclosed itself to the 
 Seers in the earlier part of the journey ; a wider 
 need of self-restraint and an increase in sym- 
 pathy and tolerance which should permit the 
 growth of larger and still larger units, till the 
 unity of the whole human race should eventually 
 become a reality, was the prospect which dis- 
 closed itself at a later time. 
 
 This new function of guiding the conscious- 
 ness of the community, like all other functions, 
 has tended always towards further differentia- 
 tion. From almost imperceptible beginnings, 
 a religious system apprehending law and a 
 system of government administering it have 
 grown up side by side. And as communities 
 have advanced a deposit of human law, modelled 
 on those fractions of universal law which the 
 development of the time has brought within 
 reach of man's apprehension, has been left 
 behind with the shifting and renewing of the 
 generations. The main tendency of human law 
 
THE BINDING FORCE 71 
 
 has been at all times to restrain self-seeking 
 among the members of a community, and thus 
 to secure cohesion, so that in competition with 
 other communities it may have resisting or 
 aggressive power. But in progressive com- 
 munities the standard of self-restraint set by 
 the religious system has always been in ad- 
 vance of that demanded by the law of the 
 State ; and the records of history seem to 
 show that where the religious ideal has ceased 
 to advance the progress of the unit has begun 
 to be arrested. 
 
 Moreover, in human communities the need 
 of a force capable of restraining instinct be- 
 comes imperative to an increasing degree. For 
 the birth of that same consciousness which 
 awoke man's soul and brought him into touch 
 with Eternal Law, so immeasurably further- 
 ing his possibilities and singling him out for 
 pre-eminence among all other forms of life, 
 awakened, at the same time, his perceptions 
 to the possibility of ministering abnormally to 
 his instincts ; consciousness, which produces 
 obedience to law, and so welds together the 
 communities of men, promotes in its turn a 
 disease which may undermine those communi- 
 ties and endanger their very existence. 
 
 The instinct of self-preservation or of exist- 
 ence, and the instinct of race preservation 
 or growth, the two instincts which dominate 
 life throughout, when unconcerned with mind, 
 
72 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 work simply and sanely to their ends ; but 
 when thought is turned upon them they be- 
 come distorted and intensified. Instincts which, 
 when obeyed without consciousness, secure the 
 end at which they aim, become exaggerated by 
 mind, and their elaboration works injury alike 
 on their possessor and those about him. The 
 instincts of self-importance and self-gratification 
 feed and fatten on thought and grow to hideous 
 proportions. Cruelties and lusts come into 
 being which, with agile minds to conceive them 
 and sensitive minds to suffer them, degrade 
 man far below the level from which he began 
 his upward course, and compel the imagination 
 to conceive of hells, peopled by similar de- 
 graded beings, where punishments suitable to 
 such offences may hereafter be enforced. 
 
 Moreover, apart from these extremes, the 
 evil influence of mind on conduct is every- 
 where perceptible. Consciousness introduces 
 a new medium in which self-interest can work 
 and calls into existence all the evils which 
 lie in thought beyond those evils which lie 
 in action ; while among those who are en- 
 deavouring after self-restraint, others who are 
 elaborating and accentuating self-interest can 
 make the better way. Cunning, deceit, false- 
 hood arise out of the action of mind on self- 
 interest, and for the moment may win their 
 ends. Anger, the antagonism of mind, gains 
 the vehicle of words wherewith to wound and 
 
THE BINDING FORCE 73 
 
 injure, and in the hands of the more forceful 
 can work great havoc, driving the weaker to 
 practise the methods of lying, hypocrisy, and 
 feigned subservience. The exaggeration of the 
 individual instinct causes self to swell in its 
 own estimation and to demand the same ex- 
 aggerated estimate from others. Hence pride, 
 conceit, self - satisfaction, self - opinionatedness, 
 overflowing towards those around in the form 
 of scorn, contempt, presumption, oppression, 
 cruelty. The exaggeration of the instinct of 
 growth draws a veil of uncleanness across the 
 mental vision, and while it enervates the mind 
 corrupts the individual's outlook on the world. 
 
 With beings, therefore, who are endowed with 
 mind and consciousness, the functions of con- 
 trol are extended to embrace a larger need, 
 for they have to hold in check not only the 
 normal manifestations of instinct, but also those 
 abnormal manifestations which are fostered by 
 the action of consciousness. 
 
 If, therefore, it be granted that an increase 
 in the size and cohesion of the different com- 
 munities is essential to human progress, and 
 if man, together with all that lives, is pos- 
 sessed by an instinct or instincts deterrent to 
 cohesion, instincts, moreover, which conscious- 
 ness magnifies and reinforces, then it must 
 follow that those communities provided for 
 the time being with motives which are most 
 effectual in securing the restraint of instinct 
 
74 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 and its deflection into wider channels must 
 be the communities which are best fitted to 
 succeed. 
 
 In his "History of European Morals" 1 Mr. 
 Lecky has shown that there have been two 
 main motives which have been made use of at 
 different times and under different forms to 
 deter from vice or to assist moral endeavour. 
 
 The first of these motives assumes that the 
 good of the individual is the one and sufficient 
 aim of man, and showing that a due regard 
 to the good of others is essential to the welfare 
 of each individual, it urges that an enlightened 
 selfishness, acting on this necessity, is a suffi- 
 cient incentive to virtue, and it claims that no 
 further motive is needed, or could indeed be 
 effectual. Man's selfishness is to make him 
 unselfish ; his own interests are to make him 
 good. This motive is the groundwork of the 
 Philosophy of the Epicurean and Utilitarian 
 Schools. 
 
 The second motive takes a wider range. It 
 assumes that right action has an intrinsic value 
 apart from the gratification it may produce to 
 the individual, and it urges man to seek the 
 good of others because a Higher Power which 
 he can neither control nor gainsay demands 
 it of him. Man's higher sense is to make him 
 unselfish ; his belief in a Power beyond himself 
 which demands goodness is to make him good. 
 1 Chap. i. pp. 5, 69, 70. 
 
THE BINDING FORCE 75 
 
 On this motive the Stoical and Intuitive Schools, 
 including all religious systems, take their stand. 
 There can be no doubt that in employing 
 the individual instinct as an agency in securing 
 consideration for others the Utilitarian Schools 
 avail themselves of a motive force which is 
 powerful and effective when once it can be 
 shown, as it can be shown, that consideration 
 for the welfare of others is conducive to the 
 welfare of the individual himself. Its agency 
 is direct, no lesser inducements are needed to 
 link it on to higher issues, since higher issues 
 are not involved. And there can be no doubt 
 that self-interest so enlightened lies at the root 
 of right action throughout life with many, and 
 that it operates at times with all. But the 
 Utilitarian assumption that the good of the 
 individual is the one and sufficient aim of man 
 seems to be disproved by human history. His- 
 tory shows that again and again the individual 
 human being has been content to sacrifice his 
 well-being and his life when by such sacrifice 
 others might be profited, whereas self-interest 
 of the widest kind can only carry a man as far 
 as the conception of self-restraint in the interest 
 of others. If, moreover, as on the view here 
 maintained, the community, and not the indi- 
 vidual human being, is the unit in the human 
 struggle to exist, it would seem impossible that 
 the Utilitarian motive acting alone should be 
 sufficient to account for the cohesion and growth 
 
76 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 which have been achieved by the human unit. 
 By the individual motive, action is made to 
 centre in each component part of the unit, the 
 individual is held a voluntary prisoner to self, 
 whereas on this view it has been essential to 
 the growth of communities that the centre of 
 individual action should be shifted from time 
 to time to the centre of the larger community, 
 from whence the welfare of the whole com- 
 munity has been embraced in aim, and under 
 such necessity the individual has had constantly 
 to aim at action only indirectly, if at all, bene- 
 ficial to himself, at action which at times has 
 included self-renunciation and self-sacrifice in 
 its demands. 
 
 Even in the species below man an instinct 
 which goes beyond the self-interest of the indi- 
 vidual is unconsciously obeyed, as, for instance, 
 when the mother-bird decoys the destroyer 
 from her nest at the risk of her own life. For 
 the time being the individual instinct of the 
 mother-bird is merged in the instinct to secure 
 the existence of the family ; those families in 
 which the mother-bird best subordinates the 
 individual to the family interest during the 
 nesting season being the families which best 
 survive, even though the individual life of the 
 mother-bird be sacrificed in the family interest. 
 It is such an instinct which goes beyond self- 
 interest, and which, with man, is capable of 
 being fostered and reinforced by consciousness, 
 
THE BINDING FORCE 77 
 
 that man obeys when he sacrifices his life, or in- 
 dividual welfare, to his family, tribal, or national 
 needs. Those human communities in which 
 the wider interests are most effectually fostered 
 and strengthened being the communities which 
 best survive in strife with other communities. 
 
 A community, therefore, in which even dis- 
 interested action centres in the subsequent gain 
 to the individual must inevitably be less cohe- 
 sive, and so less capable of existing in strife 
 with other communities, than one in which 
 each component part shifts the centre of its 
 action towards the centre of the larger com- 
 munity itself. And a community possessed of 
 a motive force which brings itself to rest in 
 any existing unit, and is not capable of pro- 
 jecting itself towards the centre of larger units 
 yet to be attained, must fail in achieving further 
 growth essential to further progress. 
 
 But beyond the inability of the Utilitarian 
 motive working alone to account for the higher 
 limits of human attainment, it would seem again 
 that unless reinforced from some other source 
 it must, by its very method of action, tend to 
 neutralise its own efficiency. It would seem 
 inevitable that by the employment of the indi- 
 vidual instinct as an agent in modifying its own 
 action, its own action must in time become 
 weakened in the process ; that by continually 
 making use of self-interest as a motive force in 
 inducing consideration for the interests of others, 
 
78 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 self-interest must in time lose some of its insist- 
 ence. If others have to be considered, self can 
 only take its share in the amount of consider- 
 ation shown, and if self only has a share in 
 the amount of its own consideration, the force 
 of its own self-insistence must be lessened. 
 Thus, while the finding of self's benefit through 
 disregard of self may be a matter of daily 
 experience, the seeking of self's benefit through 
 disregard of self must, it would seem, tend even- 
 tually to defeat its own ends. 
 
 If, therefore, it be granted that the enlightened 
 individual instinct, while it will account for self- 
 restraint, will not account for self-sacrifice, if 
 although it might secure the existence, it would 
 prevent the expansion of the unit, and if, by 
 its method of working, this instinct tends to 
 neutralise its own efficiency, an unknown quan- 
 tity remains in human progress, since self- 
 sacrifice exists among men, and since human 
 communities are constantly increasing in cohe- 
 sion and the power further to expand. The 
 leverage of a more far-reaching motive must be 
 sought which will account for action in which 
 self-interest is for the time forgotten ; for deeds 
 of self-sacrifice which stir the pulses of all who 
 hear the story of them told ; for the willing 
 acceptance by many, of life's sorrow and its 
 suffering as instruments, in subduing the instinct 
 of individual self-insistence which continually 
 molests them. Since no instinct from within 
 
THE BINDING FORCE 79 
 
 man can be found, which is capable of working 
 these effects, the strongest agency of all, the 
 individual instinct, though effective up to a 
 certain point, being insufficient to account for 
 action which strikes a higher level, a force must 
 be conceived of which works from without man, 
 a force which must be capable of producing 
 effects which no human agency will explain. 
 
 And this motive force has been found by the 
 Intuitive School in the assumption, which it 
 has accepted without proof, that there exists a 
 Higher Power which makes demands on human 
 conduct, irrespective of the benefit which can 
 be proved to accrue to the individual himself 
 through obedience, and it asserts that belief in 
 the working of this power can induce a con- 
 dition of mind and consequent action which no 
 instinct from within man can effect. And if, 
 as on this view, the process of development 
 works through the survival of the largest and 
 most cohesive communities, then a force making 
 for the cohesion and growth of communities is 
 shown to exist. And if the development of 
 human communities has been furthered on the 
 part of their members by an apprehension of, 
 and attempt at co-operation in laws which make 
 for cohesion and growth, then man's faith in the 
 existence of a force which works through law, 
 and his consequent attempt at obedience to law, 
 are shown to have been essential factors in the 
 development of his communities. An agency is 
 
80 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 brought to bear on conduct which goes beyond 
 a consideration of the profit to be derived by the 
 individual from his own action, an agency the 
 operation of which necessitates a belief in that 
 which man cannot rightly formulate, an obedi- 
 ence, the issues of which he cannot pretend to 
 foresee. He conceives of the nature of that 
 force, of those laws, as his ignorance best per- 
 mits at any given time, and under this best con- 
 ception he worships the still unknown God. 
 
 Moreover, in every experience of his life man 
 comes into touch with this unknown Agency, 
 sometimes through laws which he cannot 
 grasp, but to which, willy-nilly, he conforms ; 
 sometimes through laws whose provisions he has 
 vaguely or more clearly grown to understand ; 
 laws which clash with the individual instinct, and 
 which, in consequence, he may fight or try to 
 evade ; or to which submitting, he may endeavour 
 to adjust his purposes and will. By being led on 
 constantly to realise the need of submission and 
 obedience to such law as he can grasp, he 
 reaches a belief in the existence of a purpose 
 which he cannot understand, carried out by a 
 hand whose working he can only dimly discern, 
 and this faith exercises a function in the control 
 of conduct which the motive of self-interest 
 is unable at any time to assume. Knowledge 
 as it advances seems to justify this faith, although 
 it is compelled to wage war continually against 
 the exact definitions which harden round the 
 
THE BINDING FORCE 81 
 
 conceptions formed of that unknown power, 
 and which prevent those conceptions from ex- 
 panding. 
 
 For it has been impossible to bring the 
 leverage of the controlling Force to bear on 
 the conduct of men in an abstract form, and 
 it has been essential to conceive of and define 
 the nature of this Force and to represent it 
 to the understanding of communities in forms 
 sufficiently concrete to make it operative on 
 the conduct of their members. The exact de- 
 finitions of the Deity which enter into all re- 
 ligious systems have been the result of this 
 necessity. It has been essential, moreover, that 
 the individual instinct should be turned to ac- 
 count, and that through its agency the higher 
 motive Force should be brought to bear on 
 human consciousness. In the hands of the 
 world's religious teachers the eventual results 
 to the individual of right or wrong action have 
 been removed to some extent from considera- 
 tions of tangible profit or loss in this world, 
 at the present time, to another world to be 
 entered upon after this life is over. The arm 
 of the lever is thus extended to meet the in- 
 dividual instinct, and an infinite Force is brought 
 to bear, working from a region unknown and 
 beyond the scope of human apprehension. The 
 individual instinct is employed, but its action 
 thus reinforced is made to extend over a wider 
 field, and self-sacrifice becomes desirable, since 
 
 F 
 
82 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 the advantage to be gained in another life is 
 conceived of as making good the apparent loss 
 in this. 
 
 There are Utilitarians who claim that this 
 employment of the individual instinct leaves 
 consequent action within the province of their 
 philosophy. 1 But when once the existence of 
 a Higher Power is conceived of as ordering 
 the after consequences of human conduct in a 
 world, the existence of which cannot be proved, 
 the solid ground of proved individual self-interest 
 on which Utilitarians take their stand is partly 
 forsaken, and motives are employed which have 
 become entangled with the things of faith. 
 
 How far the individual motive working alone 
 could have secured the cohesion and growth of 
 existing communities it is impossible to prove, 
 since no human community has come into being 
 without the Intuitive Motive worked into a 
 system of belief as an integral part of its struc- 
 ture. The conclusion is therefore justified that 
 the Intuitive Motive so employed has been an 
 essential factor in the existence and growth of 
 such communities. But all religious systems 
 have been compelled to employ the individual 
 instinct to bring the wider motive into touch 
 with human consciousness ; and the conclusion 
 that the individual motive is an essential factor 
 in human progress is thereby also justified. 
 The two motives have been interdependent, 
 
 1 " History of European Morals," vol. i. pp. 14, 15, 16. 
 
THE BINDING FORCE 83 
 
 neither alone having been able to bring about 
 that which has been effected. But if it be 
 granted that the great stride made by man has 
 been the direct outcome of his power of recog- 
 nising and co-operating with the demands made 
 on conduct by an Agency which operates from 
 beyond man himself, it must follow that those 
 communities the individual members of which 
 are most strongly actuated by the wider motive 
 must be the communities which best succeed ; 
 and since the operation of this Agency is in the 
 direction of subduing or deflecting the individual 
 instinct, it must follow that while the Intuitive 
 motive gains in force and efficiency the individual 
 motive must lose in the same degree. While 
 the scope of the one widens, the scope of the 
 other must decrease. The hope of heaven and 
 the fear of hell which appeal to the individual 
 instinct, and which are employed as incen- 
 tives to right action, are in no sense integral 
 parts of the motive of the Intuitive School, 
 which takes its stand on a wider basis. They 
 are but makeshift concessions to human limita- 
 tions ; they might atrophy and fall away, but the 
 ultimate need of submission and obedience to 
 the Power which transcends man's understand- 
 ing would remain. 
 
 When the progressive human being shifts the 
 centre of his aim towards the centre of the 
 lesser and again of the larger units to which he 
 belongs, and again towards those still larger 
 
84 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 units towards which he is impelled to make way 
 — the eventual profit to himself is a subsidiary, 
 not a primary motive in his action. He moves 
 in conscious obedience to greater laws whose 
 existence he realises as integral parts of a larger 
 purpose which he cannot understand. He may 
 have formulated his ideal of God — the Power at 
 the back of law — in a narrow or extensive way, 
 he may have been actuated by inducements of 
 a more or less disinterested kind, but a motive 
 force which has gone beyond the individual 
 self-seeking instinct has evidently been at work 
 in all human communities, even though the 
 individuals have felt after it only by means of 
 the individual instinct itself. And although the 
 concrete conceptions of God and Duty which 
 represent that unknown Power to man's mind 
 may be crude and feeble, in so far as a mental 
 apprehension of that outside Force is essential, 
 the best representation which at the given place 
 and time can be grasped, however far it fall behind 
 the reality, is essential too, since higher concep- 
 tions which he could not grasp would avail him 
 nothing. Man has to be content, as it were,to walk 
 by the light of a small lamp which shows some- 
 thing of the road, since the full light would blind 
 his eyes, and the way would be henceforth hidden. 
 If this be granted, and if it can be shown 
 that it has been the aim of the religious systems 
 of the world to represent the need of self- 
 restraint in obedience to the decrees of a Higher 
 
THE BINDING FORCE 85 
 
 Power in such a form as shall make it operative 
 on the general mind, then it must follow that 
 those communities possessed of the religious 
 systems most conducive to this end must be the 
 communities which best succeed. 
 
 Reviewing the religious systems of the world 
 with a view to ascertaining the main ends which 
 they have in view, it would seem that there are 
 two constituents which are common to them 
 all ; the first being an apprehension, however 
 crude, as to the Source of those forces which 
 control all being, forces which man realises but 
 cannot gainsay, and towards which no attitude 
 is tenable but one of submission ; the second 
 being a recognition, however imperfect, of a 
 prompting from within man which is at enmity 
 with the demands of the Power which controls 
 all life, and which must be restrained by the 
 individual if he would merit the favour and 
 assistance of that Power. An attitude of sub- 
 mission to the Deity, under the best ideal the 
 time can produce, is the first demand of all 
 religious systems ; an attitude of opposition to 
 the adverse force, and so of conscious endeavour 
 after obedience to the will of the Deity, as man 
 at the time can best decipher that will, is the 
 second demand. 
 
 If these two elements are the elements 
 common to all religions from the crudest to the 
 most mature, then it would seem to follow that 
 they are the essential elements of all religions ; 
 
86 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 while the exact definitions of the nature of the 
 Deity (an apprehension of whose attributes is 
 always expanding and becoming more spiritual 
 with man's mental and moral growth), together 
 with the motives which are urged to induce 
 obedience in those with whom the main motive 
 is out of sight — these must be non-essential 
 elements, since they are passing phases and fade 
 and change with place and time. The ultimate 
 leverage of inexorable law which centres out- 
 side this universe, and shapes the issues of 
 all being, remains always the same ; the de- 
 finitions and motives used to explain and enforce 
 that which is still beyond the grasp of man are 
 like connecting cranks and pulleys, which bring 
 him into touch with that Eternal Force, and 
 which must be made use of till the greater 
 leverage can be directly brought to bear. To 
 deny the existence of the Eternal Force because 
 man's efforts at conception are stultified by 
 human limitations, would appear to be as futile 
 as it would be for a child to deny the existence 
 of its country's government because its mind 
 cannot understand its constitution or grasp the 
 methods of its administration. While for a 
 community to act without reference to Divine 
 coercion when in conflict with communities 
 which are acting under its consolidating influ- 
 ence is inevitably to court disaster, as well for 
 the community as for the individuals of which 
 it is composed. 
 
THE BINDING FORCE 87 
 
 The forms under which man apprehended 
 the Deity in the earliest times of enlightenment 
 were of necessity as crude as the powers of his 
 mind were immature. As consciousness dawned 
 upon him, and he awoke by its means to a 
 sense of the great unseen forces which control 
 all being, forces of which, then as now, he was 
 compelled to give himself an account, he con- 
 tented himself with explanations which to minds 
 more adult seem strangely inadequate. He 
 could only localise on earth, or, as it were, pro- 
 ject upon the clouds some ideal, crude but 
 aspiring, of the Source of the forces from which 
 he found no escape. Images in wood or stone 
 were sufficient sometimes to embody his con- 
 ceptions, and he shaped and worshipped such 
 semblances as he could conceive of the un- 
 known Power through them. Sometimes it 
 seemed as if those highest of his kind who had 
 passed from earth embodied them. Sometimes 
 the sun, moon, or stars, sometimes the living 
 people who possessed the greatest might in 
 leadership and conquest were idealised by him 
 and became his Gods. The conceptions were 
 many, for each unit found its own and passed 
 it on, and so gradually many Gods began to 
 people Heaven and even Earth. 
 
 But the ideal of the Deity grew always in 
 spirituality with man's mental and moral ad- 
 vance ; each new conception of God, wherever 
 formulated, was on higher lines than that which 
 
88 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 went before in the same place. In Egypt, 
 which as a nation assimilated in the process of 
 growth many diverse peoples, and with the 
 peoples their religious conceptions, the gulf 
 between the rulers and the ruled became so 
 vast, that the conceptions possible to the one 
 were beyond the mental grasp of the other. 
 Here, therefore, while the ideal of the Deity 
 grew and became spiritualised among the learned, 
 the old polytheistic conceptions, many of which 
 were not even human in semblance, were left to 
 the unlettered multitude. The priests conceived 
 of, and initiated their followers into a high 
 monotheistic ideal, and it was possible in Egypt 
 for two religious conceptions to run side by 
 side, higher or lower, according to the mental 
 and moral grasp of the worshipper. But that 
 the want of unity of ideal in their case as in 
 others constituted an element of weakness there 
 can be but little doubt. 
 
 With the Hebrew race, which grew on tribal 
 lines, the case was different. The Israelites, 
 even when they had annexed a soil and grown 
 into a nation, remained but a single tribe, the 
 offspring of one recognised progenitor ; and the 
 ideal of the Deity, like the tribe itself, remained 
 but one. But this ideal with them, as with all 
 other peoples, increased in spirituality and lost 
 much of its merely human semblance. The 
 God who walked in the Garden of Eden in the 
 cool of the day and convinced Adam and Eve 
 
THE BINDING FORCE 89 
 
 of disobedience, to the mind of the great Hebrew 
 Lawgiver was apprehended as the Eternal self- 
 existent Force, Jehovah, the great " I AM." 
 The influence on the minds of the Israelites of 
 the many-visaged representations of the Gods of 
 Egypt drove Moses to reconsider and reform a 
 conception of the Deity suited to a race capable 
 of grasping a religious ideal far beyond that of 
 any other race at the same time, and higher 
 than that of many advanced races which even 
 now hold sway. No visible representation of 
 the Divine form was permitted, or, except in 
 individual cases, desired by the people. They 
 were content with a visible representation of 
 the dwelling-place of the Deity on Earth, the 
 Holy of Holies, and they there worshipped the 
 Presence of which, as they realised, no human 
 power could rightly conceive. By its unity and 
 purity of ideal the Hebrew religion thus con- 
 solidated the tribe into a unit of such intense 
 cohesive force that it exists at the present day, 
 still held together by its religious conception, 
 though its component parts are scattered all 
 over the world ; a tribe which, though unable 
 to retain its soil, and unable to grow, can hold 
 its own by the intensity of its religious cohesion, 
 in the midst of the larger national units, feeding 
 as it were on their life, and resented by many 
 nations as a parasitic growth is resented. 
 
 But while the conception of the Supreme 
 Force advances in spirituality with the mental 
 
90 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 and moral grasp of those who form the con- 
 ception, and while the conceived bounds of 
 the favour of the Deity extend as the concep- 
 tion of the Supreme Force advances, that con- 
 ception has to be brought within reach of 
 the lower as well as the higher intellects of 
 the community, and the tendency of the multi- 
 tude is always towards a lowering of the ideal 
 conceived of by those who are able to see 
 farther than the rest, and towards a limiting 
 of the extension of the Almighty favour. The 
 mind of a community has thus a refractive 
 influence on abstract truth, since it cannot pass 
 it on in the same state in which it is received. 
 It is compelled, moreover, to make use of 
 concrete methods of expression and definition, 
 and these gradually enclose the ideal so that 
 it can no longer expand. Thus to the Israelites, 
 while they retained their lofty monotheistic con- 
 ception, Jehovah became the Deity exclusively 
 of their own race. He was the Lord of Hosts 
 who warred always on their side against their 
 enemies. And gradually the rituals, and cere- 
 monial observances which grew up around 
 their worship, cased in the great ideal to their 
 minds and limited their power of apprehension. 
 The methods of worshipping were laid stress 
 on at the expense of obedience to the will of 
 the Deity who was worshipped. It would seem 
 that at all times in human history the growth 
 and solidification of the means of expressing 
 
THE BINDING FORCE 91 
 
 submission to the Divine Force, under what- 
 ever form it is apprehended, is the test of an 
 arrest of growth in the ideal which is thus 
 circumscribed, of a narrowing down of the 
 belief in the extension of the Divine favour, 
 which it is the aim of all advance in spirituality 
 to extend. 
 
 When from the Jewish people, unique in 
 their ideal of religious governance, though at 
 a time when the ideal was contracting and 
 its limits had become fossilised, that Teacher 
 arose whose vision penetrated to a point which 
 still lies veiled even from the Aryan mind, it 
 was inevitable that his doctrine should be re- 
 jected by the people to whom he spoke. The 
 Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven, that far- 
 reaching unit whose confines should eventually 
 embrace all mankind in its brotherhood of love, 
 was a conception impossible to a people whose 
 existence was the outcome of their narrow in- 
 tensity. That the favour of their God should 
 be shared by the nations lying in darkness 
 around them, was an ideal beyond their power 
 of thought. But it was an ideal acceptable 
 to the more tolerant Aryan mind, whose co- 
 hesion, less intensive, had been arrived at on 
 other lines, and it spread in Europe with as- 
 tounding rapidity when once its principles had 
 taken root. But again, like all ideals, in the 
 process of assimilation by the many minds it 
 underwent a change. The great tolerance it 
 
92 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 preached was circumscribed, the love it strove 
 to infuse — that lpve which is the binding tissue 
 of all communities — was limited in scope. 
 The religious history of Europe is the history 
 of how time after time the more enlightened 
 and progressive peoples have tried to throw 
 off the incubus of the accretions which have 
 grown over the simplicity of the Christian ideal 
 of God ; and to extend the conceived limits of 
 the favour of God which the narrowing in- 
 fluence of human instinct inevitably tends to 
 curtail. 
 
 Mahomedanism in its turn, though on a lower 
 plane than Christianity, was an advance on the 
 star and angel worship of the Arabs. It made 
 little or no way with the Aryan peoples, but it 
 carried its advanced ideal through Northern 
 Africa and parts of Asia, and it nurtured on 
 its way a great civilisation. 
 
 In Asia many civilisations rose and cul- 
 minated and declined while Europe lay with 
 its possibilities maturing, but still undeveloped. 
 Their day seems to have come and gone earlier 
 than that of the Western peoples. The vast 
 populations of those Eastern nations are held 
 together by cohesive forces which have the 
 appearance of being survivals from the past 
 rather than living and growing impulses which 
 lead on to new developments and fresh pro- 
 gress. If it be true that an effective and 
 progressive religious ideal is essential to the 
 
THE BINDING FORCE 93 
 
 growth of a human community, then it would 
 seem that the Eastern nations must inevitably 
 be declining in force and progressive power, 
 since their religious ideals (and the East has 
 been the birthplace of practically all religious 
 ideals) appear to be losing rather than gaining 
 in spirituality and enlightenment. The early 
 history of Asia lies behind a veil denser than 
 that which obscures the beginnings of the 
 Western nationalities ; but in the earliest re- 
 ligious records of the East, which are the 
 earliest religious records of the world, a pure 
 and childlike conception of the forces of nature, 
 as embodying the Divine Force, is revealed 
 which grew into the more adult conceptions 
 of the Upanishads. In modern Hinduism this 
 ideal of the Deity and the demand of the 
 Deity on human conduct is almost obscured 
 behind the dogmas and ritual forms which 
 have grown up around it. Conduct has sunk 
 to a lower place and tolerance has waned, 
 as always happens when forms of obser- 
 vance assume an undue prominence. Buddhism, 
 which threw off many of these overgrowths 
 for a purer conception of conduct in obedi- 
 ence to a force which to the Buddha's mind 
 assumed no concrete form, has in its turn be- 
 come overgrown and degraded. Zoroastrianism, 
 Confucianism, and other Eastern religions are 
 in like manner declining in vitality ; though it 
 remains to be proved whether life enough exists 
 
94 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 in any of these Eastern civilisations to enable 
 them to shake off the accretions of ritual and 
 dogma which hold in their ideals, and to re- 
 form a conception of God and Duty which in 
 a living and operative form appears to be 
 essential to the growth of a human community. 
 But while his conception of God grows 
 clearer as man himself advances in spirituality 
 and intellectual apprehension, at the same time 
 his conception of the adverse force which per- 
 petually hinders his progress grows clearer 
 too. The human mind being compelled in its 
 early stages to embody all abstract apprehen- 
 sions in a concrete form, man was compelled 
 to conceive of this adverse force as concrete ; 
 he conceived of it as a being external to himself, 
 as an opponent to the Deity, a fallen servant 
 of the Higher Power, or as a spirit of evil at 
 war with the spirit of good. The great diffi- 
 culty in explaining how the all-powerful Deity 
 has remained incapable of subjecting this ad- 
 verse force has been met by many assumptions ; 
 but it is only as the embodied form of the 
 tempter is fading, as a shadow on the wall 
 fades at the bringing in of a brighter light, 
 that the force adverse to man is becoming 
 localised within man's own nature as an in- 
 stinct implanted in all beings endowed with 
 life, as part of the very machinery of develop- 
 ment devised by a Wisdom, to whose counsels 
 man submits though he fails to understand their 
 
THE BINDING FORCE 95 
 
 issues. He begins to recognise it as a force 
 which is inimical to him when unrestrained, but 
 whose existence when restrained is essential to 
 his progress, under the scheme on which it has 
 been ordained that development should proceed. 
 Man's greater knowledge as to the nature of 
 good and evil leaves him still but little less 
 ignorant, but it relieves him of the incubus of 
 erroneous certainty. He is still compelled, as 
 ever, to submit to the will of the Maker of 
 worlds and of men ; he finds himself still at 
 war, as ever, with that which impels him to 
 act against the methods by which that will has 
 ordained that he shall progress. But he has 
 risen higher and has a wider outlook ; he sees 
 more distinctly the end which he is making for ; 
 the final need of obedience to God — the Source 
 of all power and purpose — grows clearer to his 
 eyes. The obligation to repress his instinct of 
 narrow self-seeking in favour of the wider aim 
 grows more insistent. 
 
 Nor would this attitude of willing submission 
 ^nd obedience be changed were the mind of 
 man to outgrow the mental and moral limita- 
 tions which have compelled him to narrow his 
 conceptions of the Deity to his own human 
 and shifting standards. Being himself the 
 highest result of creation that he knows of, he 
 has, as yet, none but human lines on which to 
 think out an ideal of God, no language that is 
 not human, and so bounded by terms of sex 
 
96 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 and other limitations, in which to express the 
 ideal he is able to conceive. But since this 
 ideal has hitherto been growing with his mental 
 and moral growth, and since the human sem- 
 blance has been fading from the Deity as man 
 himself has advanced in humanity, it seems 
 inevitable that a further growth in knowledge 
 and in righteousness should still further free 
 his mind from the human disabilities which 
 clog the rising of his thought towards the un- 
 searched mysteries of God. Since in his days 
 of cultivated licentiousness, and unrestrained 
 cruelty, the only conception he could form of 
 God was of a Deity or Deities of like passions 
 with himself ; and since this conception has 
 changed with his own mental and moral change 
 to the ideal of a loving Father, of an all-power- 
 ful God whom only the pure in heart can rightly 
 apprehend, it would seem that his past growth 
 in purity and love, which has run side by side 
 with his growth in wisdom, may be taken as a 
 guarantee that a wider knowledge and a larger 
 love will enable him to form a still higher ideal 
 of God, and yet a higher and a higher, till the 
 very truth of God and man's ideal of God ap- 
 proach more nearly one same and actual truth. 
 And it seems inevitable also that towards this 
 higher conception of the Deity and law man's 
 attitude should grow more reverent, that he 
 should become more religious as he grows 
 more wise. If he can neither resist nor ignore 
 
THE BINDING FORCE 97 
 
 the mighty forces which play about his being, 
 forces producing in himself the seeming miracles 
 of birth and death, and all the details of happi- 
 ness and misery which lie between ; and since 
 with growing intelligence he must set the 
 direction of his actions either with or against 
 those forces ; it seems inevitable that a better 
 realisation of their vastness and immanence, 
 and the wisdom which, as he perceives, lies at 
 the root of those which he can understand, 
 should increase his faith in, and the willingness 
 of his submission to, those vaster forces which 
 lie beyond his mental grasp, and which work 
 on lines which baffle and confuse his finite 
 judgments. Moreover, although he is unable 
 to dream even of the great outline of Creation's 
 scheme, if he can clearly trace a purpose as 
 regards himself running through the little frac- 
 tion with which he has to do, of which purpose 
 his growth in the restraint of single-self seeking 
 seems on this earth to be the present passing 
 phase — then it would seem also inevitable that 
 as he more clearly discerns that purpose, he 
 should more earnestly desire to struggle on to 
 its fulfilment, his own mind testifying to the 
 wisdom of the great decrees, his own will co- 
 operating with the will of God. 
 
 If, however, it is essential to the existence of 
 a human community that it should be possessed 
 of a religious system capable of inducing sub- 
 mission and obedience to law, it is at the same 
 
 G 
 
98 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 time essential to the growth of a community 
 that its religious system should be capable of 
 expansion with the expansion of the community 
 itself. For whereas, to be effectual, those who 
 administer law must have their eyes turned on 
 to the community and its interests in relation 
 to other communities, those who guide the 
 abstract consciousness of the people — their re- 
 ligious teachers — to be effectual, must have their 
 eyes turned on to the unknown, and man's 
 relation to that which he is able to apprehend 
 of the unknown. These are like watchmen 
 straining their eyes to see what the glimmering 
 dawn reveals, and while they are seeking wider 
 revelation the progress of the unit is assured. 
 But when they turn away content with that 
 which is already seen, with mistaken certainties 
 seemingly assured — for in the twilight many of 
 the appearances of things have a tendency to 
 mislead — they act as deterrents to the pro- 
 gress of the community which rests upon their 
 guidance. The experience of all communities 
 in this respect has been the same. The know- 
 ledge which has been apprehended by the more 
 far-sighted has gradually assumed a stereotyped 
 form. Intolerance, essential to the cohesion of 
 a unit in process of formation, has emphasised 
 the boundaries of the religious apprehension of 
 the community in contradistinction to the re- 
 ligious apprehension of other communities ; the 
 conception of the attributes of the Deity and 
 
THE BINDING FORCE 99 
 
 the demands made on human conduct have 
 been formulated, and through constant repeti- 
 tion have, as it were, solidified around the 
 religious ideal cramping its growth. Grad- 
 ually the religious system which demanded 
 submission to the decrees of the Deity and 
 obedience to His law, and so consolidated the 
 unity of the tribe or nation, has of itself usurped 
 the reverence of the worshippers, who have 
 confused the system with that which it strove 
 to reveal. The people have clung to that 
 which helped to unite them into the com- 
 munity which has been achieved, ignoring the 
 larger law of growth, which is always at work 
 side by side with the law of existence, and 
 which must be regarded if the unit is to pro- 
 gress. The treatment meted out to those re- 
 ligious teachers who have discerned the larger 
 law, and have sought to bring it within sight of 
 the community, may be taken as a measure of 
 the intolerance which has been needed to create 
 cohesion within the community itself. 
 
 There has also been another source of disaster 
 to the community as to the individual arising 
 out of the evil action of mind. For it has 
 befallen again and again when the religious 
 ideal, cramped and unable to grasp new law, 
 has ceased to progress, that intellect has usurped 
 the post of watchman, ignoring the sleeping re- 
 ligious faculty, and human intellect thus stand- 
 ing alone in high places has played into the 
 
ioo THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 hands of instinct. The knowledge gained has 
 been turned to another employment than the 
 fostering of obedience to law : it has been made 
 use of in ministering to the self-interest and 
 self-aggrandisement of its possessors, and the 
 community, thus misguided, has not only been 
 led away from the direction of progress but 
 it has been hurried towards disintegration and 
 disaster. The history of Greece, of the Roman 
 Empire, of all communities undermined by 
 luxury and vice, shows that knowledge can only 
 advance effectively as it allies itself with that 
 which tends to strengthen and ensure the 
 character of a people, while religion, on the 
 other hand, can only ensure the character of 
 a people as it allies itself with all that the mind 
 can gather of new knowledge and new law. 
 Man's ideal of the Deity and of His will must 
 grow that he may grow himself ; man's know- 
 ledge must grow that his ideal of the Deity and 
 of law may grow. 
 
VI 
 
 THE UNIT FROiM THE STANDPOINT 
 OF HISTORY 
 
VI 
 
 THE UNIT FROM THE STANDPOINT OF 
 HISTORY 
 
 When we turn to the records of history to 
 ascertain whether in their light this view of 
 human communities as the ascendant units in 
 the great struggle for existence will find confir- 
 mation, there seems to be evidence in its favour 
 standing out on all sides. When history begins, 
 the human being, in matters of defence and 
 offence, has already ceased to act alone. The 
 struggle is no longer a struggle between one 
 human being and another human being, but 
 between one tribe or nation and another tribe or 
 nation, within all of which antagonism between 
 the contained members is condemned. It is 
 with these larger communities, already to some 
 extent organised, that history has to do. It 
 treats of the component human beings only as 
 their actions are related to the welfare and pro- 
 gress of the larger organisms themselves. 
 
 At the dawn of western history we find those 
 nations already in existence which, on despotic 
 lines, uprose and flourished and declined in the 
 
 region of the Nile and the Euphrates. Each 
 
 103 
 
io 4 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 was possessed of its system for apprehending 
 and bringing to bear on the general mind the 
 best available conception of the Divine Force 
 which demanded cohesion within the com- 
 munity, and an attitude of defence or offence 
 towards all other competing communities. No 
 tribe, no nation, has come into being without 
 such an apprehension, and we seem to be justi- 
 fied therefore in concluding that a sense of 
 governance from a Source beyond man's con- 
 trol, which shapes his destiny, and demands 
 his compliance with its dictates, is an essential 
 factor in the growth of a tribe or nation. It 
 is true that when we consider the remains of 
 some of these religious systems after the ideal 
 with which they were infused has been warped 
 and degraded by the action of human instinct 
 accentuated by thought and consciousness, they 
 appear to be little capable of binding a people 
 together or of raising its standard of conduct. 
 But when the religious system is thus degraded 
 it will be seen that the community is on its 
 decline ; while the growing religious apprehen- 
 sion of a growing people is never without a 
 simple force and sincerity, the efficiency of 
 which in securing submission and obedience to 
 the great Force which dominates the universe 
 it is not difficult to realise. 
 
 Of the tribal stage of human existence history 
 has left but scanty records, since in but few 
 instances, if, indeed, in more than one instance — 
 
STANDPOINT OF HISTORY 105 
 
 and that an exceptional one — has the mental 
 advance of tribes been sufficient to allow of the 
 making or preserving of history. But the story 
 of this stage may be traced to some extent in 
 the existing conditions of such savage races as 
 survive. With these primitive races we find 
 that the single human being has become merged 
 to a considerable extent in the community. He 
 has already become part of a larger whole, and 
 the question is no longer a question only as 
 to who best holds his own against his fellows ; 
 but as to who, at the same time, best conduces 
 to the force of the larger unit, by so restraining 
 his individual antagonisms, that the larger unit 
 itself may best hold its own. Fitness to sur- 
 vive has already to a great extent changed its 
 character, self-seeking has acquired a wider, 
 though still narrow basis, and within the tribe, 
 law in its most primitive form has begun to be 
 enforced. Development in this stage is still 
 achieved in the main, unconsciously, as it is 
 achieved wholly in the lower forms of life, 
 where consciousness is undeveloped, and as it is 
 achieved in part throughout all life up to the 
 highest point that has yet been attained to by 
 man. But even within the lowest existing tribes 
 abstract consciousness has begun to dawn, and 
 some crude conception of a Power beyond him- 
 self has been conceived of by savage man as the 
 ultimate Source of his primitive laws, while the 
 obligation which he owes to his brother man 
 
106 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 within the tribe, as crudely conceived, is con- 
 nected with his perception of that Power. He 
 is already feebly conscious of being worked upon 
 by the leverage of a Force beyond his control, 
 a force made manifest to him through thunder, 
 pestilence, and defeat ; through sunshine, health, 
 and prosperity ; through the antagonism of his 
 brother man, and through his good will. It 
 seems probable that the degenerate religious 
 beliefs of some of the lowest surviving tribes 
 may be regarded as degraded survivals of purer 
 conceptions of the same peoples when they were 
 achieving such cohesion as they can be said to 
 have attained. 
 
 But beyond this tribal stage the development 
 of these forms has been arrested ; they have 
 been hemmed in from further opportunity, and 
 left behind as outlying branches, while tribes 
 more capable of increase in size and complexity 
 of structure have moved on in the main line 
 and have arrived at conditions more advanced. 
 And in the case of tribes this development has 
 apparently been arrived at by methods similar 
 to those by which the development of all life's 
 forms has been achieved. 
 
 The growth of the tribe was of necessity 
 affected by the considerable area necessary to 
 sustain the life of the members of the tribe 
 during what may be called the fluid period of 
 man's existence, in which the ground remaining 
 uncultivated, he had to move from place to 
 
STANDPOINT OF HISTORY 107 
 
 place in search of food, and having exhausted 
 the provision of one area, was driven on to 
 another. When, therefore, the individual tribe 
 had exceeded the size conducive to the most 
 successful existence, family groups were sepa- 
 rated off to proceed in search of the means of 
 existence in less peopled spaces, and these in 
 their turn became individual, self-seeking units. 
 
 It seems probable that the geographical posi- 
 tion of these tribes determined to some extent 
 the method on which their cohesion should be 
 secured. The rapidly increasing tribes whose 
 position made difficult their extension over a 
 wide area would find competition acute, and 
 where competition is acute development tends 
 to be rapid. But development achieved in this 
 way under stress of antagonism is compelled to 
 forego the provision for further opportunities of 
 growth in favour of the means of ensuring 
 present existence. The unit thus consolidated 
 secures cohesion at any cost, and is compelled 
 to resort to methods in which defence and self- 
 preservation are the essential aims. 
 
 The first need, therefore, of a growing tribe, 
 in a contracted area, would be to specialise a 
 leader who could dominate its members and 
 secure their co-operation in the inevitable con- 
 flicts which would arise with other growing 
 tribes where competition was severe. The 
 necessity of securing food for the many mouths 
 would lie with the many individuals themselves ; 
 
108 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 but in conflict, organised action of the whole 
 unit would be essential, and this could only be 
 arrived at through the agency of a central 
 control. The tribe most capable of acting as 
 one body under a competent leader would of 
 necessity be the most successful in the struggle, 
 and the consequent confidence accorded to the 
 successful leader by his people would tend to 
 make his sway more absolute. In the relation 
 which would thus arise between the ruler and 
 the ruled would be found the nucleus of a 
 despotic governance. When tribes thus consoli- 
 dated into one unit learnt to improve the pro- 
 ductive power of the soil by artificial means, 
 ,and so secured to it the possibility of sustaining 
 a greater number of its members on a smaller 
 area, the soil not only gained an added value, 
 but it began to hold the people bound to it ; 
 they made it their own and fought for its pos- 
 session. When once this bond of union had 
 been consolidated between soil and people, the 
 temporary sheltering places sufficient to sparse 
 tribes on the move were abandoned in favour 
 of more permanent structures by which the 
 population could be housed ; temples or other 
 edifices were set up, where the best conception 
 a given people could form of its favouring 
 Deity or Deities could be worshipped or en- 
 shrined, and all these were enclosed in defen- 
 sive walls. The arduous work of producing 
 or transporting the materials needed for these 
 
STANDPOINT OF HISTORY 109 
 
 purposes was laid upon the members of con- 
 quered or incorporated tribes, who were held 
 to their toil by the coercion of the lash. 
 
 These conjectures as to the method of growth 
 of communities under despotic rule, in so far as 
 they are conjectures and not fragments of ascer- 
 tained facts, are met, as has been said, by the 
 actual records of history itself at the time when 
 the Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, and other 
 peoples had established themselves, and had made 
 intellectual advance sufficient to admit of their 
 recording their own progress. The develop- 
 ment of these peoples was notable, and com- 
 paratively rapidly achieved ; but in the same 
 way in which the earlier organisms below man 
 were compelled, under stress of competition, to 
 make provision for individual self-defence at the 
 expense of provision for further growth, so these 
 earlier kingdoms, apparently also under stress 
 of competition, were compelled to resort to 
 methods of growth which precluded further 
 development. 
 
 It is interesting to note that they not only 
 adopted the methods of cohesion peculiar to des- 
 potisms, but, like the crustaceans, they secured 
 the protection of the unit under attack by pro- 
 viding external defences. The walls of Babylon 
 had an outer circumference of from forty-five to 
 sixty miles, and could shelter the whole popu- 
 lation of Babylonia in time of siege. Some- 
 times the security of the whole unit was thus 
 
no THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 attempted, sometimes that of its constituent parts, 
 as the fortifications of ancient towns will show, 
 also castles for the protection of families and 
 clans, armour for the protection of the single 
 human being. It is only at a more progressive 
 stage of growth that protection of this cumber- 
 some kind is abandoned in favour of freely 
 moving masses depending for their success 
 on their offensive rather than their defensive 
 possibilities, in the same way as the vertebrate 
 organisms have, with few exceptions, abandoned 
 the methods of crustaceans and insects by which 
 they enclose their bodies in a bony or horny 
 case. 
 
 Among the tribes which competed with the 
 early civilisations, and which were in progress of 
 growth into the more consolidated condition of 
 nations, some, which began without the limita- 
 tions of despotic rule, were compelled in self- 
 defence to adopt it, and in adopting it to 
 achieve temporary survival and success. But 
 the more effectively despotic rule asserted itself, 
 the more certainly was development beyond a 
 certain point arrested. For despotisms suffer 
 not only from the simplicity of their structure, 
 which, by its nature, forbids increase in com- 
 plexity, and so precludes growth of a continu- 
 ously progressive kind, but they suffer also 
 from the fact that the position in which the 
 successful despot is placed is one which plays 
 into the hand of instinct. His capacity to act 
 
STANDPOINT OF HISTORY in 
 
 for the community's good is undermined by the 
 exaggerated sense of self-importance, and the 
 need of self-gratification fostered by his people ; 
 and again by the rebellion of the same people 
 at his tyrannies, when mind has done its work 
 on human instinct. The ruler who led his 
 armies to battle, infused with a high ideal and 
 the conviction that their special Deity favoured 
 their cause alone, fostered by his action the 
 cohesion of his people, and while the sense 
 of common interest drew the tribe or nation 
 together, unity was intensified. But when this 
 tension was relieved by victory, and the apparent 
 need of strenuousness waned, the ruler too often 
 fell a victim to his own greatness. Inordinate 
 consciousness of his achievements pandered to 
 by his grateful people overwhelmed his sense of 
 proportion with regard to self. He became 
 steeped in vices generated by the action of con- 
 sciousness on instincts of all kinds, and the 
 vicious influence filtered down from the ruler to 
 the ruled. Thus undermined by the diseases of 
 morbid self-interest, the organism became an 
 easy prey to others still in the strenuous stage 
 of growth and progress. If new danger from 
 without could again force unity of ideal and 
 aim on the ruler and his people, the diseases of 
 success and luxury might be combated, but 
 if these diseases were left to grow the com- 
 munity was doomed. When Solomon in all 
 his glory and confidence of wisdom lost sight 
 
ii2 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 of his higher aims in self-indulgence and pro- 
 fuseness of luxury, the kingdom was on the 
 brink of division into two parts, never again to 
 be united. When Nebuchadnezzar, after raising 
 Babylon to its highest pitch of prosperity, went 
 mad with his own magnificence, the nation's 
 end drew on. Less than twenty years later 
 Cyrus was at the gates of Babylon, and Baby- 
 lonia became a province of Persia. 
 
 But while these Semetic, Hamitic, and Mon- 
 golian peoples were measuring strength and 
 attaining to a high level of civilisation in that 
 nursery of despotisms South and East of the 
 Mediterranean Sea, another more laggard people 
 was slowly maturing on other lines in an un- 
 known cradle-land — a people of larger make, 
 though still in intellectual infancy, a people who 
 remained perhaps for centuries of centuries in 
 obscurity, but who meanwhile were maturing 
 possibilities of a wider development on a basis 
 of greater stability. 
 
 It seems probable that the geographical 
 position of the Aryan people favoured the 
 expansion of tribes without calling into play the 
 acute competition which conduced to the sur- 
 vival, and hastened the development of the 
 earlier civilisations. Offshoots from the parent 
 tribe could remain in touch with its interests 
 while removing themselves from its immediate 
 neighbourhood in search of food and pasture. 
 The spirit of acute antagonism between tribes 
 
STANDPOINT OF HISTORY 113 
 
 and their separated offshoots would thus remain 
 in abeyance, and at the same time cohesion 
 throughout the whole resultant unit would be 
 effected at a slower pace. The cohesion of a 
 community growing on these larger lines would 
 be of a different quality from that nurtured 
 under despotic rule ; it would be less intense 
 and concentrated, but it would be able to co- 
 exist with a spirit of wider tolerance. No single 
 dominant source of control, producing a com- 
 pact cohesion, would be called into play where 
 a compact cohesion was not needed. With the 
 Aryan people the control appears to have been 
 distributed among the heads of families or 
 tribes who, in counsel together, took measures 
 on behalf of the whole community. 
 
 It would seem likely, moreover, that while 
 abundant room for growth was allowed to these 
 people, they were at the same time protected 
 geographically from the inroads of alien tribes, 
 and that rivers or mountains, at any rate 
 partially, defended their borders. If, however, 
 aggressive peoples succeeded in making an 
 advance, they would have found the whole com- 
 munity of affiliated tribes acting as one unit, 
 and by its mass constituting a source of strength 
 capable of immense resisting power, even though 
 the cohesion within the mass were not of the 
 most concentrated kind. 
 
 When in its turn this wide and sheltered area 
 became overgrown so that the soil could no 
 
 H 
 
ii4 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 longer provide food for the growing tribes, nor 
 pasture for their flocks, the pressure of necessity 
 was relieved by migrations which took place on 
 a large scale. 1 This separation by the pushing 
 off of members from an overcrowded area 
 was very different in kind from the separation 
 of offshoots from communities organised on 
 despotic lines. With those the nature of their 
 governance precluded more than one central 
 source of control, and separation, if it took 
 place, was an act of disruption leaving parent 
 and offspring mutually antagonistic. With 
 these, the migration was apparently peaceful, 
 a necessity agreed upon between the tribes as 
 want of food and space was forced" upon the 
 general mind. Provision was made for depart- 
 ing tribes at the most suitable moment of the 
 year for starting new ventures, and although 
 these tribes in the midst of new environments 
 in time lost sight of the root from which they 
 grew, and though, by intermixture with other 
 races, many of their more salient characteristics 
 were modified, the tolerance which resulted from 
 this method of growth was apparent throughout 
 their subsequent history. 
 
 We see evidence of their influence first when 
 the Median and Persian empires came to the 
 front, Cyrus, and more especially Darius, bring- 
 ing new ideals of tolerance to their conquests 
 
 1 See "The Evolution of the Aryan,'' from the German of 
 N. Ihering, trans, by A. Drucker, M.P. 
 
STANDPOINT OF HISTORY 115 
 
 and their internal government. When Babylon 
 was taken the Jews were sent home to their 
 own country and their own religion. Babylon, 
 though annexed to Persia, was permitted to 
 retain its own religion, and in the vast domains 
 which came under the rule of Darius the same 
 tolerance of religious, and hence of racial differ- 
 ences, was everywhere observed. The internal 
 rule of Darius aimed, moreover, at promoting 
 union among the people themselves rather than 
 at holding them together by bonds, which rulers 
 less enlightened endeavoured to retain in their 
 own keeping. 
 
 When Persia yielded it was only to races 
 more purely Aryan, and these Aryan peoples 
 became, as they have remained, in different 
 degrees the dominant peoples of the world. As 
 in Asia so in Europe offshoots from the Aryan 
 people had made way before their recorded 
 history began, pressing on in the directions of 
 least resistance, and perhaps conquering and 
 driving on peoples of other races by whom they 
 found the land already occupied. It seems 
 probable that there were races already in 
 Europe whose advance had been made on the 
 simplest lines, and whose communities were of 
 the loosely-knit kind which grew out of mere 
 propinquity of parent and offshoots, uncon- 
 solidated by any of the outside influences which 
 drove other peoples into closer union for the 
 common good. These would have been pushed 
 
n6 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 on, or rapidly overborne by the advancing 
 people and perhaps absorbed into their mass, 
 while the cohesion among the migrating Aryans 
 would be further consolidated as competition 
 with those who obstructed their way became 
 an "essential factor in their onward movement. 
 Those branches of the race — the ancestors of 
 the Greeks and Romans — which came down 
 upon the borders of the Mediterranean Sea and 
 gradually took possession of the out-jutting 
 peninsulas may have found still earlier offshoots 
 of their own race in possession together with 
 races of other origins. There can be no doubt 
 but that as the sea-board was reached they 
 were quickly brought into touch with nations of 
 a high degree of civilisation whose mental stores 
 they were able, before long, to make their own, 
 the sea being at all times a friendly province to 
 those who can fit themselves to the demands 
 of the winds, since it offers a ready-made high- 
 road to trade and culture, while to hostile 
 peoples it opposes a neutral territory. With 
 the advantage of an extensive sea-board and the 
 near neighbourhood of highly civilised nations, 
 the peoples who came into Greece, bringing 
 with them that wider ideal of tolerance which 
 is the keynote of the Aryan character, were able 
 to crystallise out achievements in many branches 
 of art and science which remain for the ad- 
 miration of the world. Their premature intellec- 
 tual development, and especially that of Athens, 
 
STANDPOINT OF HISTORY 117 
 
 may have been due to some happy mingling 
 of racial proclivities and fortunate opportunities 
 acted upon by the tolerance of a government 
 which left a wide scope to its citizens for pro- 
 fiting by the intellectual possibilities of the time ; 
 or it may have been due to yet unknown 
 causes. The tolerance, however, appears to 
 have been premature — as was its intellectual 
 development. While the Greek states grew up 
 side by side, united in religion and in speech, 
 but self-governed and self-contained, the nation 
 was forming no backbone, no common centre 
 from which it could expand ; and gradually the 
 methods of government of the more civilised 
 nations about them crept into their organisation. 
 Despots began to assume sway, not over the 
 whole people but over the individual states, and 
 antagonism, the handmaid of despotism, began 
 to outgrow the cohesion which existed between 
 the states themselves. The nation expanded 
 from many centres, and the strife for supremacy 
 between these centres eventually sapped its 
 strength. The Hellenic States apparently 
 suffered from being tolerant before they were 
 efficiently cohesive. Their greatest foe, namely, 
 Persia, became from this cause their greatest 
 friend, for, in self-defence against this power, 
 their nearest approach to national unity was 
 brought about. It was the victorious Greece 
 divided again within herself and at war from 
 within which had to succumb to Rome. 
 
n8 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 Of the vitality of the early religious motives 
 which held each State in one, and again united 
 many of the States among themselves, there 
 can be no doubt. Worship of the Supreme 
 Power under such manifestations as the mind 
 of man could then conceive was an essential 
 factor in Greek life, and animated its family 
 and patriotic ideals ; allegiance to these larger 
 units of family and state, involving self-suppres- 
 sion in the members of those units, was realised 
 as a duty involved in allegiance to the Gods 
 themselves. When, with the development of 
 mind, the immature religious system was out- 
 grown, when the dogmas and rituals which at 
 first had been elastic and pliant to the nation's 
 growth became consolidated and stereotyped, 
 schools of philosophic thought were formed 
 which supplied motives of action, divergent in 
 source, but some at least inspired by the belief 
 in a wise and beneficent Deity, and in a great 
 ordering of the world which transcended man's 
 control. 
 
 The inadequacy of intellectual achievement 
 alone in securing the life of a community com- 
 pared with the function of unity of purpose 
 actuated by a sense of the Divine Sanction 
 is well illustrated, as Mr. Benjamin Kidd has 
 shown, 1 in the history of Greece, whose pass- 
 ing from supremacy was coincident with her 
 period of highest intellectual culture. For at 
 1 "Social Evolution," p. 254. 
 
STANDPOINT OF HISTORY 119 
 
 this time the motives which could keep the 
 disintegrating action of mind efficiently in check 
 were failing, the conceptions of the Gods were 
 losing their vitality, while the philosophic 
 schools of thought were too abstract in their 
 teaching to compass the needs of any but the 
 higher thinkers. 
 
 Rome meanwhile was more slowly maturing 
 on more enduring lines. Her unity emanated 
 from a single centre which remained supreme, 
 retaining the allegiance, religious in its patriot- 
 ism, of the whole ever-increasing empire. Duty 
 to the state was the ruling ideal of the indivi- 
 dual, and allegiance to this ideal was implied 
 in allegiance to the gods. In conflict with 
 Greece, Rome, thus compact, of necessity gained 
 the ascendency, as in conflict with Carthage 
 she had already proved her might. Her toler- 
 ance in comparison with the standard of toler- 
 ance of the age, was as great as her cohesive 
 power, and her domain pushed on through the 
 world then known with unrivalled force and 
 persistence. 
 
 But Rome, like the Grecian States, came 
 under the influence of the nations about her, 
 and gradually her tolerant Aryan mode of 
 governance gave place to the despotic method. 
 As her sway extended and vast territories came 
 under her rule, it may have been that the 
 despotic method was essential to enable her 
 to hold her conquests under one head ; but 
 
120 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 while this mode of government may have tem- 
 porarily compassed her greatness, in resorting 
 to it she apparently took the first step away 
 from the possibility of establishing an enduring 
 Empire. Her Empire grew, not by the con- 
 solidation of parent and offspring into one 
 forceful and compact community of common 
 interest, but by the assimilation of adverse 
 elements which could be held in one only on 
 despotic lines, and whose cohesion had no 
 existence except as it related to its enforced 
 allegiance to one dominating source of control. 
 
 And as with the advance of thought the 
 stereotyped conceptions of the Gods became 
 inadequate to command worship, and as the 
 motives of allegiance to them began to wane, 
 the inevitable influence on mind of self-seeking 
 ineffectually restrained began to make way. 
 The diseases of mind began to penetrate the 
 tissues of the mighty organism, and decline 
 became inevitable, though the progress of decay 
 and disintegration were as slow as the growth 
 of the empire had been steady and deliberate. 
 
 The actual duration of a nation's eminence 
 depends, of necessity, on many factors beyond 
 its powers of cohesion and extension. It de- 
 pends on the size and cohesion of the nations 
 round it, on its position with regard to those 
 units, and on the extent to which its interests 
 clash with theirs. Its vitality may be dying 
 out, and only the bare husk of force may 
 
STANDPOINT OF HISTORY 121 
 
 remain standing for centuries, if no stronger 
 force falls foul of it and wrecks the appearance 
 of strength. 
 
 The vitality had so far died out of the Roman 
 Empire before its fall that no mighty compet- 
 ing force on the same level of advance was 
 needed to prove its vulnerability. Its con- 
 querors were barbarian tribes more purely 
 Aryan in source and still untainted with those 
 vices of the mind which are generated by des- 
 potic rule ; and these peoples invaded its 
 borderland, and forced themselves gradually 
 into the very heart of the Empire. They 
 learnt of the people whom they conquered as 
 they made their way, and in return they in- 
 fused among them some of their unimpaired 
 vitality, and their wider ideals. 
 
 It might have been expected that the intro- 
 duction of Christianity would have re-vivified 
 the decaying force of the Roman Empire ; 
 but Christianity came to it at too late a date in 
 its history. It was in no way connected with 
 the growth and uprising of the State ; in no 
 sense an integral part of its cohesion. Cleavage 
 of the great unit had already set in before 
 Christianity entered, and the new religion in- 
 troduced new divisions, and so new elements 
 of instability. Its wide tolerance, its gospel of 
 universal brotherhood, and the doctrine of the 
 extension of the favour of God to all mankind, 
 made it rapidly acceptable to the Aryan peoples, 
 
122 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 who welcomed it when it came, partly by reason 
 of the very principles of tolerance which made 
 it so impossible of assimilation to the Jews. 
 The Hebrew race, hemmed in by narrow tradi- 
 tions and by racial exclusiveness, was com- 
 pelled to reject it, but to the Aryan spirit it 
 brought the needful ideal and enlightenment, 
 and its principles actuated the cohesion of the 
 different nations which grew out of, and around 
 the Roman Empire. 
 
 But although the Western world was tolerant 
 enough to welcome the principles of tolerance, 
 it was still far too intolerant to retain them 
 unimpaired. Differences of nationality made 
 themselves felt in emphasising differences of 
 intellectual and moral attitude, and the issues 
 of the Christian ideal were narrowed down 
 and adapted to the possibilities of the minds 
 of those who accepted it. National, as well as 
 individual, self-interest worked adversely on the 
 new faith, excrescences were foisted on it by 
 its votaries and the original teaching became 
 obscured by the growths which gradually over- 
 laid its purity. 
 
 When it is remembered that the minds of 
 those who accepted Christianity had only been 
 released by its agency from a degraded form of 
 polytheism, it is no matter for wonder that its 
 main principles should have undergone modifi- 
 cation under the action of minds whose concep- 
 tions of the Deity had been so primitive. And 
 
STANDPOINT OF HISTORY 123 
 
 although at the time when Christianity was ac- 
 cepted the bondage to the old beliefs was merely 
 nominal among the educated classes, still, it 
 had been by the light of those beliefs that the 
 Roman State had achieved her cohesion, the 
 motives inspired by those beliefs had exercised 
 the needful leverage in suppressing individual 
 self-interest in the interests of the State ; and 
 the sway of its ideals had established itself in 
 the popular mind. During that period of tran- 
 sition also it was inevitable that human intellect 
 should be brought into play in exactly defining 
 the scope and nature of the new divine manifes- 
 tation which was felt to be final — that it might 
 be brought within reach of all minds. And 
 as national temperament created differences of 
 outlook, and as national intolerance accentuated 
 those differences, divisions inevitably crept into 
 the teaching of the Gospel of unity, hatreds into 
 the promulgation of the Gospel of love. 
 
 But in spite of these differences, European 
 history presented this new feature after the 
 decline of the Roman Empire, namely, that of 
 many nations, separated politically, but all 
 actuated by a religious conception derived from 
 one source. There was a community of re- 
 ligious ideal among peoples who were intolerant 
 of each other, with the intolerance which must 
 exist between units which, for the time being, 
 represent the units of highest complexity. 
 
 In earlier communities the apparent boun- 
 
124 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 daries of the religious and national communities 
 had been identical. Each nation had a con- 
 ception of its direct relation to the Deity, but 
 was unable to extend that view. To the national 
 eye which saw the light the rest of the world 
 lay in darkness. But the tendency of thought 
 has always been towards a freeing of the re- 
 ligious from the national boundary, towards a 
 wider conception of the extension of the King- 
 dom of Heaven, and a great stride was made 
 when the European nations, politically divided, 
 thus found themselves united by a common 
 faith. The religious unit now embraced many 
 national units, and while the political Roman 
 Empire was accomplishing its decline a new 
 spiritual dominion was gradually being estab- 
 lished over a corresponding area, with its centre 
 in Rome, and its administration under the sway 
 of a priestly potentate. 
 
 But the Roman Church, in attempting to 
 found a spiritual supremacy on the lines of 
 a secular Empire, in attempting to hold down 
 and centralise religious authority on to this 
 earth, though it may have accomplished a task 
 which, at the time, no agency more advanced 
 could have effected, of necessity circumscribed 
 its limits by the lines on which it achieved re- 
 ligious cohesion. The Church reverted in its 
 organisation to the principles of growth on 
 which the earlier nationalities uprose. The 
 Pope, as the mouthpiece of a final revelation, 
 
STANDPOINT OF HISTORY 125 
 
 assumed, in matters of faith, the absolute 
 authority of a despot, he sedulously repressed 
 the independence of all who would have 
 strengthened themselves on their own lines of 
 thought, and no development of any kind 
 was permitted except on his initiative. 1 The 
 knowledge gained of universal law could find 
 no admittance into such a system, and, as 
 a result of its very nature, growth beyond 
 a certain point became impossible. As the 
 dogmas and rituals of the Church gradually 
 assumed a stereotyped and solid shape, the 
 living mind of man outgrew the shell in which 
 it found itself encased. Two courses opened 
 out before it : either it must cease to grow, or 
 it must escape from the conditions by which it 
 found itself constrained, and, speaking broadly, 
 the Latin races may be said to have chosen 
 the former course, the Teutonic peoples the 
 latter. The new bottle had grown stiff and 
 inexpansive in its turn and the wine burst 
 the bottle and escaped. 
 
 In the effort of a human community to 
 expand, it is continually hampered by the in- 
 cubus of the political or religious growths 
 which have enabled it to achieve sufficient 
 cohesion to exist. On his way towards a 
 larger knowledge, man has been hindered by 
 the very fabrics by which he has sought to 
 
 1 The Roman Church still nominally holds the belief that the 
 Sun goes round the Earth. 
 
126 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 bring himself into touch with the unknown. 
 Those who hold the seats of authority in re- 
 ligious matters, fearful lest mind should ex- 
 pand beyond their control, have insisted on 
 the enduring and final nature of these fabrics, 
 and it is therefore only in so far as mind 
 can free itself from authority that its capacity 
 lies for progress and for growth. 
 
 The essence of the Protestant spirit seems 
 to have lain in its resistance to human authority 
 in matters in which the higher allegiance was 
 involved, its perception of the fact that a 
 spiritual kingdom, as a result of its very nature 
 and the derivation of its laws, can own no 
 final authority in this world. Other issues 
 were involved in the great conflict of ideals 
 at the Reformation, but they seem all to have 
 been subsidiary to this. And although, since 
 their severance from the dominion of Rome, 
 the administration of the affairs of the Pro- 
 testant Churches has centred in one or other 
 State for the convenience of that State, they 
 have owned no final court of appeal but the 
 Word of God, to which they have all given 
 their allegiance. 
 
 But while the Protestant Churches yield 
 obedience to no final human authority, many 
 of the individuals who compose them are still 
 held in bondage by their own limitations, they 
 are constrained by a home-made intolerance 
 which only differs in degree from that of the 
 
STANDPOINT OF HISTORY 127 
 
 older Church. They are at one in their re- 
 sistance to Rome, and their common allegiance 
 to the Word of God, to which they turn for 
 guidance, but the many interpretations which 
 can be given to the Word are employed by 
 the intolerant spirit to sanction its own limita- 
 tions. Different sections of the Protestant 
 Churches ground their title to the favour of 
 God on the especial clearness of their appre- 
 hension of the Divine Will, and the wider 
 outlook is obscured by narrow intellectual self- 
 insistence, the limit of God's favour is cramped 
 to fit a human power of conceiving of its 
 extent. There remains, however, this differ- 
 ence in the nature of the intolerance of the 
 Roman and the Protestant communities : — 
 that the intolerance of the Roman Church is 
 authorised, and is an essential feature of its 
 structure and method of development ; while 
 the intolerance existing between the Protestant 
 sects themselves has no sanction except in the 
 mental limitations of the individuals composing 
 them. 
 
 The question arises as to why the Latin 
 races which were Aryan in origin, and whose 
 supremacy had grown on Aryan lines, should 
 have proved less tolerant than the other 
 branches of the same stock which have since 
 asserted their strength. An answer may, per- 
 haps, be found in the fact that other races 
 driven before the Aryans to the sea-board were 
 
128 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 absorbed into the populations of Greece and 
 of the Roman Empire and gradually reacted 
 on those populations. There are laws in con- 
 nection with climate and environment not yet 
 fully understood, which may have decided the 
 gradual recrudescence of the earlier type of 
 race in the South of Europe. Or it may have 
 been that the Teutonic peoples having been 
 left for more centuries in their primitive con- 
 ditions, conditions which seem to have made 
 for the more tolerant outlook, had, in their 
 slower development, achieved a still more 
 tolerant spirit than was possible with the earlier 
 offshoots. There can be but little doubt that 
 when these Teutonic peoples penetrated into 
 the Roman Empire, although they threw back 
 the civilisation of Europe, as if they had been 
 children asserting themselves over the counsels 
 of their elders — they had in them the germs 
 of wider ideals and greater possibilities, and 
 as, in their turn, they are growing up, their 
 counsels are possessed of a more far-seeing 
 and progressive wisdom, the civilisation of 
 which they are capable is on a larger scale. 
 It is from among the Teutonic peoples that 
 the new and wider ideal of Empire is uprising, 
 the ideal of a unit of greater comprehensiveness 
 than any which has yet existed, of greater co- 
 hesive power than any which has yet been 
 conceived. This Teutonic conception of Empire 
 is of a growth on lines differing widely from 
 
STANDPOINT OF HISTORY 129 
 
 those on which the Roman Empire uprose. 
 That grew by force of conquest and the en- 
 deavour to assimilate all peoples which came 
 within its reach. The effort was a prodigious 
 one, and it was crowned with unprecedented 
 success. But a time came when this huge 
 organism exceeded the size conducive to suc- 
 cessful life on the given method of its structure, 
 and, like the giant products of evolution, it 
 passed away. Or perhaps its disintegration may 
 be better compared to that of the primitive 
 cell, which, having exceeded the size conducive 
 to successful life under the given complexity of 
 its structure, is forced to divide into two parts 
 or more, each part striking out on independent 
 lines, some to exist and grow as separate units, 
 some to become absorbed in the existence of 
 other organisms. 
 
 It was not from among these separated parts 
 that the new ideal of Empire uprose, but from 
 among those more backward and less highly 
 organised communities the shock of whose 
 impact had caused the disintegration of the 
 older Empire. These later offshoots of the 
 Aryan stock had remained free from many of 
 the conscious vices as well as from the civilisa- 
 tion of the early despotisms. As they amalga- 
 mated with some of the conquered peoples, or 
 themselves assimilated others, appropriating all 
 the territory they could command, new units 
 were gradually shaped out, each forming a 
 
 I 
 
130 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 centre of strife and each aiming at securing 
 the means to itself, first of existence, then of 
 growth. During that seething time of com- 
 munities which followed the disintegration of 
 the Roman Empire, when the surrounding 
 peoples, like wolves, bore down on that great 
 organism and preyed on its outlying parts, the 
 boundaries of the different European nation- 
 alities were continually shifting and changing. 
 When, after some centuries, they had begun 
 to take form, a quieter period followed among 
 the growing units. But as they grew and the 
 necessity of expansion again beset them, with 
 the tendency of all growth to proceed in the 
 direction of least resistance, they turned from 
 Europe to less peopled lands. The small or 
 loosely compact tribes which occupied these 
 more distant territories were easily driven off 
 or absorbed, and their place was taken by 
 offshoots from the more highly complex com- 
 munities. 
 
 The earliest offshoots of the Aryan stock 
 which had separated off to individual life before 
 history began lost sight, as time went on, of 
 the root from which they grew. Though this 
 separation was apparently effected in a friendly 
 spirit, and took place only from the recognition 
 of the need of securing the means of existence 
 for the growing numbers, their further pro- 
 cedure was so greatly modified by their new 
 environment, and the distance to which they 
 
STANDPOINT OF HISTORY 131 
 
 found themselves removed was in some cases 
 so great, that the affinity between parent and 
 offspring could no longer be recognised. But 
 when among these separated offshoots at a 
 later time the needs of growth again necessi- 
 tated further migrations, these were effected on 
 different lines, and the improved means of com- 
 munication kept the offspring in mind of their 
 affinities. Some have broken off to independent 
 life ; but some, when cleavage seemed imminent, 
 remain voluntarily adherent to the parent stock 
 and are apparently in the process of formation, 
 through bonds of a common interest, into the 
 larger Imperial unit of which the possibility is 
 coming into being. 
 
 If this method of growth can be traced 
 through the earlier forms into which life has 
 successfully developed — namely, the method 
 which proceeds by the shifting from time to 
 time of the individual centre so as to admit 
 several related centres within the compass of 
 one unit, from the centre of which further 
 growth proceeds — it seems probable that by 
 the same method the units of nation will achieve 
 their further development, since only by such 
 increase in complexity has cohesion been made 
 to keep pace with increase in size. 
 
 It remains for the future to show whether 
 there may not be a further harking back among 
 related individuals of nation, whether the Teu- 
 tonic peoples may not yet reunite under the 
 
132 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 impulse of a sense of common parentage, and 
 the affinity produced by common methods of 
 tolerant control. Whether even all Aryans 
 may not eventually be led to realise their 
 affinities as tolerance becomes more audibly 
 the keynote to which the harmonies of human 
 development are being set in tune. 
 
VII 
 
 THE UNIT FROM THE STANDPOINT 
 OF THE INDIVIDUAL 
 
VII 
 
 THE UNIT FROM THE STANDPOINT OF 
 THE INDIVIDUAL 
 
 To the individual to be born is, as it were, to 
 be sent to prison ; each living thing is con- 
 demned throughout life to submit to the bond- 
 age of its own personality ; its eyes are but as 
 prison bars through which it looks upon the 
 features of the world. And although it is given 
 to man to rise, on the wings of mind, above the 
 limitations of his individual outlook, and al- 
 though from the bird's-eye point of view which 
 his thought can thus command he has an ever- 
 widening survey of the world, his very thoughts 
 themselves are captive, and are held in bondage 
 by the limitations of the personality from which 
 they emanate. 
 
 Man's vision having been so circumscribed, 
 the appearances of things have tended continu- 
 ally to mislead him. He had studied the heavens 
 for more than thirty centuries before the con- 
 ception began to dawn upon his mind that his 
 world's place in the universe was not at the 
 centre of everything, that the seeming daily 
 movement round him of the sun, moon, and 
 
 135 
 
136 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 stars was only an appearance, and the lesson of 
 his individual significance is one which each one 
 for himself is slow to learn as well. The ABC 
 may be taught him quickly and sharply, at a cost 
 of tears ; but the after chapters are neglected 
 or studied with but half a heart. The conditions 
 of his physical sight, moreover, tend to foster 
 his delusions, since to the physical eye near 
 things assume undue proportions, and hide 
 things as great or greater which are farther off. 
 To each individual the things which are round 
 himself appear to enclose him as with a bound- 
 ary wall, while things beyond, in their turn 
 surrounding others, appear to dwindle in pro- 
 portion according to their distance. A row of 
 trees or houses near at hand will wipe out the 
 features of the country-side for miles, a near hill 
 will hide more distant mountains, and these far 
 ranges on beyond. In infancy the eye can be 
 sensible of the things around it only under the 
 aspect in which perspective falsifies their ap- 
 parent size, and their apparent relations. They 
 must seem to it flat as though pictured on a 
 wall. And although with the dawn of con- 
 sciousness the vision of the mind gradually 
 corrects the distorted impressions of the physical 
 eye, so that the child finds it can move in and 
 out among the things about it and realise their 
 actual relations to himself and to each other — 
 still the mind's eye again, in its turn, is subject 
 to conditions which falsify its outlook. To each 
 
STANDPOINT OF INDIVIDUAL 137 
 
 individual the circumstances and events of his 
 own experience assume proportions of a delusive 
 size, they stand round and block out from con- 
 sideration the circumstances and events which 
 affect those about him ; the more remote those 
 circumstances and events from his own experi- 
 ence the less the consideration he accords them. 
 It is only by continually rising in thought above 
 the boundary walls which enclose the mind, 
 that the real proportions of the things of self 
 and the things of others is made evident to 
 human consciousness. And thought can thus 
 take wing only against a force of insistent in- 
 stinct as imperative in its action as the force of 
 gravitation. 
 
 The same individual instinct tends to obscure 
 the relation between cause and effect in human 
 conduct. The man who, being only part of a 
 larger whole, seeks his own good alone is led by 
 instinct in a direction where it cannot be found. 
 Instinct indicates the road by which he may 
 travel easily to his goal, and blurs the reading 
 of the words which would show him that the 
 road leads where he does not want to go. To 
 the individual instinct, for instance, it seems 
 evident that in the endeavour to secure his own 
 well-being he would succeed best who directly 
 sought his own. And if the human being con- 
 stituted the ultimate human individual, each one 
 would best find his own good by directly seeking 
 it. But if, as here maintained, the individual 
 
138 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 with man is the larger community, of which 
 human beings form only the component parts, 
 then good can be found by each human being 
 only indirectly, as in different degrees he seeks 
 the good of all within the community to whom 
 he is affiliated and over whom his influence 
 extends. By acting in pursuit of his own wel- 
 fare alone he puts a strain upon the bonds by 
 which he is held to all members of the com- 
 munity, and upon the bonds by which they are 
 held to him. He thus puts a strain upon the 
 cohesion of the community itself. But since 
 cohesion is essential to the existence of a com- 
 munity, the action of the individual who pursues 
 his own interests alone is injurious to the 
 interests of the community, and so ultimately 
 to himself as one of its component parts. 
 Human welfare has thus become largely con- 
 tingent on the relationship which is maintained 
 between the human being and his fellows, since 
 only when the relation is rightly maintained 
 can cohesion, which is essential to the existence 
 of the community, and so to the well-being of 
 its individual members, be furthered. If this 
 be granted, then that which man most needs in 
 life is a condition of right adjustment to the 
 requirements of the different individuals within 
 the community to which he is affiliated. If he 
 can attain to conditions of specialisation to the 
 highest uses, maintaining at the same time this 
 right adjustment, he may be said, pre-eminently, 
 
STANDPOINT OF INDIVIDUAL 139 
 
 to succeed ; but if he aims mainly at the grati- 
 fication of his individual instincts at the expense 
 of this right adjustment, even if he attains his 
 end, even if he is lifted to wealth or high position 
 by his endeavour — in the progressive human 
 sense, as the component part of a community, 
 he can only be said to have failed. He may 
 find that which he seeks, but not that which as 
 a human being he needs. On the other hand, 
 if he maintains the right adjustment, without 
 attaining to a high place or the gratification of 
 primal instinct, he has succeeded in the most 
 essential requirement of a member of a commu- 
 nity. He has secured the good will and fellow- 
 ship of those to whom, in different degrees, he 
 is affiliated, without which other gains fail to 
 satisfy him. 
 
 Broad divisions, however, between right and 
 wrong doing in human conduct are the excep- 
 tions, the adjustment is more often true with 
 regard to one relationship and faulty with regard 
 to another. Or the intention may be true, while 
 the intellect may be misguided as to the direc- 
 tion in which progress lies. 
 
 The individual instinct has thus continually 
 to undergo modification and correction at the 
 hands of experience. And although the human 
 race, as such, has made some way in the study 
 of the larger requirement, by each child on his 
 entrance into life the whole lesson is to learn. 
 He is born to his own seeming, free, like his 
 
140 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 primitive ancestors, to follow his own instincts. 
 As, during the pre-natal period of his existence, 
 the cells of his physical organism recapitulate 
 rapidly and unconsciously the different stages 
 of their development, in much the same way, 
 on his entrance into separate life as a distinct, 
 but still component, part of that still more 
 complex organism, the human community, he 
 has to recapitulate rapidly, through the medium 
 of his consciousness, the different stages of 
 moral development through which those organ- 
 isms have passed. Physically, before birth, the 
 cells within him have been hurried through the 
 successive stages of differentiation from the 
 single cell which performs all functions up to 
 the highly specialised condition required by an 
 organism, in which the nutritive, reproductive, 
 nervous, and other systems are developed to 
 their highest existing capacity ; and morally on 
 his entrance on separate life he has to pass 
 through the successive stages of development 
 from the member of the family unit, which 
 performs all functions, up to the specialised 
 condition required by the unit of nation, in 
 which systems of supply, of growth, of religious 
 and civil government, are specialised to the point 
 at which the given era finds them specialised. 
 
 The new and finer tissue by which human 
 communities are united within themselves, the 
 medium of sympathetic feeling born of con- 
 sciousness of law, has to be worked into a 
 
STANDPOINT OF INDIVIDUAL 141 
 
 binding texture which shall hold him by its 
 invisible strands in close union with those 
 members of the community with whom he is 
 affiliated ; and again in a lesser degree with the 
 members of the larger systems of occupation 
 within the community for which he has to be- 
 come differentiated ; and again with the unit of 
 tribe or nation or Empire into which he has 
 been born. From the sense of a freedom 
 which is unreal though it seems to be his, he 
 has to be brought under a bondage which is 
 real, even if never fully recognised. 
 
 In infancy and early childhood he belongs 
 to the family stage, his position as member of 
 society and of the State is not yet recognised. 
 He is protected from the results of his own 
 evil actions where his country's laws are con- 
 cerned, but he is coerced and moulded into 
 shape on more or less despotic lines by parental 
 or educational authority, and suffers the minor, 
 home-made penalties of disobedience. 
 
 In normal individuals only the primitive in- 
 stincts have to be restrained at this stage ; the 
 evils arising from the morbid action of con- 
 sciousness on instinct are, as a rule, the develop- 
 ment of later years. 
 
 Through this early stage of moral develop- 
 ment he is hurried by those about him, a few 
 years working a change in the individual which 
 it has taken untold ages to effect in the human 
 race. The initial stages of sympathetic feeling 
 
142 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 are evolved in him through sufferings in his 
 own person, the need of consideration for the 
 feelings of others is instilled into him by en- 
 lightenment as to his own feelings, he learns 
 what pain is by being pained. He is taught 
 to restrain his own individual instincts in the 
 interest of others, whose interests in reality are 
 his ; but where the demands of this wider law 
 are not evident, the leverage of the motives for 
 self-restraint employed by the religious system 
 of the State to which he belongs is brought 
 to bear in shaping him to the service of the 
 community. Meanwhile, such knowledge as 
 the mind of man at the time has been able 
 to accumulate, and as the capacity of the in- 
 dividual enables him to receive, is conveyed to 
 his mind in forms as easy as may be of mental 
 digestion. 
 
 At a later period the despotic gives way to 
 the more constitutional method of control, and 
 eventually, having been differentiated for one or 
 other function in the community, family protec- 
 tion is removed, the individual has to come face 
 to face with the results of his own actions and 
 himself suffers the legal penalties of disobedi- 
 ence if he runs counter to his country's laws. 
 He becomes a component part of the State to 
 which his allegiance is required, as his allegi- 
 ance to the family interest, retrospective and 
 prospective, is required throughout life. 
 
 He comes also into more immediate and 
 
STANDPOINT OF INDIVIDUAL 143 
 
 conscious contact with the great unworded law 
 of social opinion which tends to hold him in his 
 place, in much the same way as a given cell in 
 his physical organism is held in place by the 
 pressure of neighbouring cells. The standard 
 of this law is usually on a higher plane than the 
 standard of the existing law of the State which 
 it is always manipulating and raising, although 
 in a progressive state it lags behind that set by 
 the religious ideal which dominates the State 
 ideal. 
 
 The more happily placed in an advanced 
 community, when freed from parental control, 
 find themselves but little shackled by the penal 
 laws of the state to which they belong. These 
 are not deterred from murder, theft, or fraud 
 by fear of human punishment, for, through 
 cultivation of sympathetic feeling which the 
 higher religious law demands, possibly also 
 through an inherited instinct of self-restraint, 
 they have become incapable of disregarding the 
 interests of their fellows to the extent which 
 killing, stealing, or fraudulent procedure would 
 imply. And although a wide range of capacity 
 to disregard the interests of his fellow-men re- 
 mains with men, this limit of capacity is grad- 
 ually being narrowed down, and the tendency is 
 always in the direction of further shrinkage. 
 Moreover, new instincts are arising side by side 
 with, though at the expense of, the individual 
 instinct ; and become, in turn, inherited ; in- 
 
144 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 stincts which centre in the larger units and. 
 work from thence. The family instinct has 
 already become an inheritance which law rein- 
 forces but does not create, and wider social and 
 national instincts are realised by the individual 
 and become essential factors in controlling 
 thought and conduct. The demand of the 
 greater over the lesser instincts assumes to man's 
 mind the semblance of an echo within himself 
 of a voice speaking from a tribunal whose de- 
 grees transcend his understanding, and he does 
 not question, though he may disregard, the 
 higher claim of this inner voice over the in- 
 stinct which impels him to regard his own ends 
 only. 
 
 But the voice of conscience, representing the 
 higher ideals of religious systems, the pressure 
 of social opinion, the State laws, the family rule 
 in childhood, appear all to be in their different 
 degrees but fragmentary reflections of the great 
 Eternal laws of progress as applied to the de- 
 velopment of the given unit ; of those laws 
 which rule the motions of suns and worlds and 
 ensure their bondage into systems, and again 
 into systems of systems ; of the working of the 
 same laws in the development of life's forms 
 by means of the bondage of cells into larger 
 organisms, and again of these larger organisms 
 into units of family, tribe, nation. The great 
 agency works on uniformly and inexorably, 
 moulding suns and worlds and all existences 
 
STANDPOINT OF INDIVIDUAL 145 
 
 into the forms which it demands, proceeding, as 
 it would appear to the finite understanding, on 
 lines of recklessness and waste, but without 
 change and without comment moving on to 
 its. unsearchable ends. Unable to resist or to 
 adjust themselves, the forms of life which pre- 
 ceded man unconsciously worked in with, or 
 drifted away from, the main line of development, 
 till the progressive forms were brought to a 
 stage where consciousness began to reveal to 
 them the near features of the machinery of law 
 which fashions all things ; till upon nascent 
 man began to dawn the possibility of consciously 
 adjusting his being to the great onward move- 
 ment — to the will of God — or of resisting in 
 pursuit of that which instinct represented as his 
 individual good. And henceforward the pro- 
 portion to which he adjusted himself became the 
 main factor in deciding the further possibilities 
 of the larger units which by this means were 
 being evolved, and whose cohesion and growth 
 he thus hindered or promoted. 
 
 And each individual of the human race, as he 
 arrives at independent consciousness, has to face 
 anew this great question of adjustment. He 
 has to recapitulate within himself the experience 
 of the race on being brought into touch with 
 the realities of the unseen, and to decide, on 
 such data as he can command, whether he shall 
 resist, and, obeying an inherited instinct, make 
 for what seems to be his individual good ; or 
 
 K 
 
146 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 whether he shall submit to the great ordering 
 of the universe, and, in obedience to that which 
 he can discern of its demands, shape his actions 
 to its dictates. These may not be the terms 
 in which he represents to himself his attitude of 
 resistance or submission, but, in substance, this 
 seems to be the open question which underlies 
 man's choice. He may be sufficiently far on 
 his way morally when the question arises to be 
 obedient by instinct and of choice to the claims 
 of his country, or of social law ; but there re- 
 mains always the higher demand on conduct of 
 his religious system, and the question as to re- 
 sistance or surrender remains in connection with 
 the higher ideal. 
 
 There are many who, on facing the need of 
 decision, turn away and drift on with the tide, 
 submitting here, resisting there, carried on in 
 the progressive way, perhaps, by the family or 
 the social or even the religious instinct, and 
 succeeding or failing, since so they help the 
 unit to succeed or fail only in so far as they are 
 carried with, or, as instinct impels them, against 
 the current of the wider aims. But to others 
 the moment of decision comes as a great crisis 
 accentuated and reinforced by stress of the 
 emotions — those mighty winds which have 
 wrecked so many a sturdy ship, while they have 
 filled the sails of thousands. ' These are the 
 more forceful beings who cannot drift, who 
 bring all their energies to bear on resistance, 
 
STANDPOINT OF INDIVIDUAL 147 
 
 and again, turning round, employ the glad 
 energies let loose by surrender in an eager and 
 strenuous obedience. 1 
 
 Again, with others the process of conscious 
 adjustment or of conversion is gradually achieved, 
 the crisis is broken up into fragments and 
 scattered throughout a lifetime. The movement 
 may be steadily progressive, but it would be 
 difficult to them to recognise any moment of 
 life as the decisive moment when the conscious 
 process of adjustment was initiated. It is with 
 these as if they had been unconsciously carried 
 past the time of crisis and set on the progressive 
 way unawares. In many, if not most, religious 
 systems provision is made for bringing to bear 
 on the advancing consciousness of the members 
 of communities at a given period of develop- 
 ment this need of self-conscious adjustment of 
 the individual to the Eternal laws of life. 
 
 The great ultimate laws are of necessity but 
 imperfectly represented by the religious systems 
 which embody them, the systems may, more- 
 over, be distorted by false assumptions, may 
 lead on to deceptive issues, they may even 
 possess features adverse to their own main 
 tendencies. But a religious system, however 
 feeble the conception it may embody, appears 
 to be an essential feature in the formation of 
 communities. In the absence of the power 
 
 1 See " Varieties of Religious Experience," Prof. William James, 
 Lecture IX. 
 
148 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 rightly to realise the great ultimate laws, a 
 tangible creed, adequate to bring them within 
 touch of the community, however inadequate 
 rightly to represent their demands, cannot be 
 dispensed with. This conclusion seems to be 
 justified by the fact that no community is 
 found existing without such a creed. Abstract 
 thought demands a concrete medium by which 
 it can be borne from mind to mind — as a fluid 
 can only be carried in a vessel that is solid — 
 and it takes a tangible creed to convey to the 
 human community as a whole some efficient 
 conception of the realities of the unseen Infinite 
 and of the demands made on conduct by the 
 Force which transcends man's control. The 
 creed stands for the vessel which conveys so 
 much of the unknown Source of all power 
 and purpose as the community can make its 
 own. But since progressive communities are, 
 of necessity, expanding organisms, and since 
 the human power of conception grows with 
 their growth, the creed to be adequate must, 
 of necessity, be able to expand with the expan- 
 sion of the organism itself. When once the 
 creed has become stereotyped as itself an object 
 of reverence, in place of that which it strives 
 to reveal, its power to grow ceases and de- 
 generation sets in. 
 
 The substantive conceptions of the Deity 
 which could be pictured in wood or stone, or 
 embodied in living human beings, or the remote 
 
STANDPOINT OF INDIVIDUAL 149 
 
 and vivifying sun, have passed away ; but the 
 ideals which remain have still to be shaped out 
 in dogmas and exact definitions of descriptive 
 words, which, in their turn, become fossilised 
 and inadequate as final representations of that 
 which no human mind can presume to have 
 rightly apprehended. And it would seem that 
 those stereotyped dogmas of human make, 
 which have usurped the reverence and worship 
 of the communities, may, in their turn, have 
 to pass away with the more tangible idols to 
 make room for wider conceptions. 
 
 But words in their free state constitute an 
 elastic medium, being capable themselves of 
 growth and development. They themselves 
 are able to expand so as to convey larger and 
 wider conceptions of all that lies in the vast 
 region of the yet unknown. And if fossilised 
 dogmas become inadequate, living words still 
 remain to grow with the growth of man's 
 power of conceiving new truths in connection 
 with the eternal Verities which endure un- 
 changed while man's apprehension of them is 
 shifting and enlarging. 
 
 When, in the past, the more advanced minds 
 within a community, on being brought face to 
 face with the question of adjustment, have 
 found their creed inadequate to represent to 
 them any efficient conception of the unseen 
 Force which controls the universe, some have 
 been tempted to cast it aside, and have imagined 
 
150 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 themselves to be in revolt against God and law, 
 whereas, in reality, they have been in revolt 
 only against the narrow conception of God and 
 law which their creed has imposed. If such 
 spirit of revolt gains ground and spreads, it 
 leads inevitably to disaster for the community. 
 The impetus of the forsaken faith may be suf- 
 ficient for the adult life to carry it on, but the 
 children inevitably suffer during the seeding 
 time of impressions, and the growth of char- 
 acter from lack of the implanting of motives 
 suitable to their mental stature and capable of 
 enforcing restraint and of moulding the ex- 
 panding consciousness. If, as it would appear, 
 the coercive force of a religious control is as 
 essential to the formation of communities as 
 the coercive force of a nervous system is to 
 the animal organism, then the sense of sever- 
 ance from that force in the adult minds which 
 willy-nilly are moulding the young minds into 
 shape, must weaken their educative power ; and 
 a renewed insistence of the individual instinct 
 must arise in individuals whose consciousness 
 is freed from efficient motives for its restraint. 
 
 But many thinkers, their creed disowned, 
 have recognised that God and law lie behind 
 all creeds, and facing the position anew, they 
 have reformed a conception which could be 
 brought to bear on the general consciousness. 
 But even then a period of disruption has 
 ensued. Elements of antagonism between the 
 
STANDPOINT OF INDIVIDUAL 151 
 
 holders of the old faith and the new have 
 become accentuated, and have led on to further 
 disruption. Or perhaps the creed so reformed 
 has been beyond the mental grasp of the com- 
 munity within which it has been formulated, 
 and has passed away to more progressive com- 
 munities, taking in its train those wider minds 
 whose influence tended to promote the com- 
 munity's expansion. This was the case with 
 Christianity, this was the case, to a great extent, 
 with Buddhism. 
 
 Growth on the method of compactness in 
 religious apprehension thus reaches a point 
 where further growth becomes impossible with- 
 out disruption. And when the creed has 
 become finally stereotyped, or when human 
 authority which assumes a Divine Sanction puts 
 its veto on intellectual advance, such a result 
 appears to have been inevitable. The religious 
 system which ensured existence, like the en- 
 closing shell of the invertebrates, becomes a 
 bar to further growth. But human authority 
 in the spiritual domain is becoming more and 
 more remotely assertive with the passing of 
 the years, and since the medium used in 
 conveying the best attainable conception of 
 the Deity and of His Will is itself capable of 
 expansion and yields to the advance of thought, 
 it would seem possible that in matters of faith 
 growth might eventually proceed on the wider 
 and freer vertebrate lines, where no protective 
 
152 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 shell has to be shed from time to time in order 
 that the organism may expand. It would seem 
 possible that the two agencies by means of 
 which mankind looks out into the unknown — 
 the scientific and the religious faculties, which 
 in their origin are one — might eventually realise 
 their common aim and their common interest ; 
 that the religious faculty might turn to science 
 for new knowledge of existing law ; and that 
 science, recognising the need of bringing the 
 leverage of law to bear on the hearts of men, 
 might work together with the religious faculty 
 in moulding it to a form in which it should be 
 most effectively operative. 
 
 When, therefore, in presence of the question 
 of adjustment at the present time the individual 
 finds himself circumscribed by the intellectual 
 limits of the religious system, by means of 
 which the existence of his community has been 
 secured — he is met by new uncertainties, even 
 when he accepts the attitude of surrender to 
 the Eternal Will. If his religious system is 
 finally stereotyped by human authority, and 
 so incapable of expansion, he can have no 
 choice but to break away. But the question 
 arises as to whether the wider existing systems 
 are not capable of further expansion, the con- 
 fining walls being merely superficial, and 
 whether, from the point of view of the com- 
 munity, the individual may not best help its 
 growth by remaining allied to its religious 
 
STANDPOINT OF INDIVIDUAL 153 
 
 system, and so holding within its confines the 
 elements of enlargement which the wider con- 
 ception implies. May not the system in the 
 process of superficial hardening become dis- 
 integrated by the strain from within of the 
 wider ideals, and so gradually enlarge its 
 boundaries to keep pace with the growth of the 
 community itself ? From the point of view 
 of the individual, it would seem that his isolation 
 from a common ideal must prove a deterrent 
 to his moral advance, since he is but the com- 
 ponent part of a larger whole, the force of 
 which as it moves increases with the gathered 
 energy which accrues from a common impulse 
 in any one direction. By separating himself 
 from his religious system he separates himself 
 from the impetus of the common impulse. 
 
 The question of sincerity to the intellectual 
 attitude of his community's religious system 
 may give him pause. But if it be granted that 
 the intellectual attitude of man to God and 
 law of necessity changes with his advance in 
 power of apprehension, it must be granted that 
 the intellectual attitude of man's mind at a 
 given time is a non-essential factor of his re- 
 ligious system, however essential it may seem 
 to some of its members ; whereas the effort 
 after the adjustment of his will to the Divine 
 demands is the essential factor, and the common 
 ground for the existence of all systems. It 
 must follow, therefore, that the position which 
 
154 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 best helps the individual to adjust his will to 
 the higher demands, must be the position in 
 which he best helps the well-being of the com- 
 munity, and so, ultimately and indirectly, his 
 own well-being. Many questions of right and 
 wrong doing take on new aspects when the 
 welfare of the whole community is recognised 
 as the main point at issue, rather than the atti- 
 tude of the individual towards intellectual appre- 
 hensions which can never be final, and so never 
 of essential importance. 
 
VIII 
 MORAL ADVANCE 
 
VIII 
 MORAL ADVANCE 
 
 But beyond the question as to the attitude of 
 the individual towards the intellectual demands 
 of the creed or religious system to which he 
 belongs, there remains a question of morals 
 which recurs again and again in forms new and 
 old, to which no final answer can be forth- 
 coming, since the limits within which the answer 
 is to be found are continually shifting and 
 enlarging their ground. 
 
 This question has to do with the exact degree 
 to which the individual should restrain the 
 individual instinct which has been implanted 
 within him as an inheritance from the ages, in 
 favour of the larger units which have grown 
 out of the lesser. For, on the view which is 
 here suggested, the increase in size of the unit 
 of strife which has proceeded from age to age, 
 and is still proceeding, has been effected, not 
 by a uniformly continuous growth of the indi- 
 vidual from a single centre, but by a slow 
 shifting from time to time of the individual 
 centre so as to enable it to include several re- 
 lated individuals within the compass of one unit. 
 
158 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 Further growth has been achieved by growth 
 of the contained individuals, but their indi- 
 vidual existence has become merged in the 
 existence of the new unit. By thus ensuring 
 growth from many contained centres, the in- 
 terest of each of which has become subservient 
 to the interest of the newly found centre of 
 them all, a new complexity has been intro- 
 duced together with an increased possibility 
 of enlargement. 
 
 The centre of the unit of strife was so shifted 
 in the first place when the simple cell, having 
 achieved its highest possibility of differentiation 
 and of growth as a single cell, united with its 
 offspring, first temporarily, then permanently, 
 to form a larger individual. It shifted again 
 when the most highly differentiated of the re- 
 sultant individuals, having attained to the most 
 effectual size as single complex individuals, 
 united with their offspring to form the larger 
 units of family and community. It shifted 
 again when, with the human race, the develop- 
 ment of the nervous system having brought 
 man into touch with universal law, he became 
 consciously the subject of its demands. Co- 
 hesion being consciously fostered within com- 
 munities, it became possible for tribes, which 
 would otherwise have lost sight of their common 
 ancestry under stress of competition, to remain 
 in touch with each, other, and gradually the 
 governing centre, which had included only the 
 
MORAL ADVANCE 159 
 
 tribe, was shifted so as to enable many affiliated 
 tribes to remain under one sway, and the new 
 unit of nation was the result. 
 
 But each incorporated unit as the centre 
 shifts remains as such unit, within the larger in- 
 dividual. The cells remain as cells, within the 
 highly differentiated community which, under 
 control of the nervous system, constitutes the 
 human individual. In this physical welding 
 together of cells consciousness had no part, and 
 the physical process continues to be pursued in 
 man, as in all animal organisms, independently 
 of his option or control. He cannot by taking 
 thought add one cubit to his stature. He 
 cannot coerce the cells of which he is com- 
 posed into co-operating towards his well-being ; 
 he can only endeavour to provide the environ- 
 ment which is best suited to their beneficial 
 working. 
 
 Again, the individual unit, as such, remains 
 within the family unit, and both individual and 
 family unit remain within the tribal, and all three 
 within the unit of nation. With the shifting 
 of the centre, however, in human communities 
 the change has been one of degree rather than 
 of kind, there has been no great change in the 
 conditions of cohesion, such as that which 
 obtained when the cell united with its allied 
 cells to form the larger individual, or when the 
 physically bound community shifted its centre 
 towards the centre of the morally bound family 
 
160 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 unit. The vast size of human communities has 
 been attained to through a continuous increase 
 of moral cohesion, of which each component 
 individual has become consciously a centre of 
 growth. 
 
 But since each unit within the national unit 
 has, in its turn, passed through the stage of 
 being an independent individual, as such it 
 retains the instinct to act for. its own interest 
 and its own advancement. It was clearly 
 essential to the individual before the dawn of 
 consciousness to act in his own interest alone 
 while he was the most complex unit in existence, 
 since to have subordinated his interests to those 
 of any other individual (except those of his 
 offspring during their helpless stage) would 
 have implied failure to exist for himself and 
 degeneration for the individual to whom those 
 interests were sacrificed. But as the family 
 unit became more and more permanent it was 
 clearly essential that the parents should still 
 further subordinate their interests to those of 
 their young, since only those families in which 
 the parents subordinated their individual in- 
 stincts could have survived when the stage was 
 reached at which the increase of individual size 
 on the given lines of complexity was no longer 
 a guarantee of success. This permanent de- 
 flection of the individual aim in the family 
 interest survives in all subsequent communities, 
 whatever may be the size to which they attain. 
 
MORAL ADVANCE - 161 
 
 In a similar way it could no longer profit the 
 unit of family when the unit of strife had 
 reached the tribal stage, to act only in the 
 family interest, since tribes in which the im- 
 mediate family claims were not subordinated in 
 times of stress to the tribal demands would 
 have failed in competition with other tribes 
 whose component parts were more united in 
 aim. A temporary advantage might always 
 have been derived from selfish individual or 
 family action, but the ultimate loss must have 
 been inevitable. 
 
 So again with the unit of tribe, when the 
 unit of nation had been arrived at. That nation 
 would have been the most successful in which, 
 other things being equal, the greatest cohesion 
 existed among the component tribes. The 
 tribal feeling in advanced nations, however, has 
 merged itself to a great extent in other relation- 
 ships of mind and occupation, in affinities 
 which grow up between members of a common 
 social grade, or a common profession, trade, or 
 calling. But in each individual member of a 
 nation there is at least a treble deflection of 
 instinct, each instinct in its narrow, undeflected 
 form having been essential in its turn to the 
 preservation of the more and more complex 
 communities, and each having had to be ex- 
 tended in the process of time, so as to be made 
 more inclusive. Those units in which the law 
 of self-preservation has been unable to give 
 
1 62 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 place in its time to the law of growth, having 
 been driven to one side, leaving the more ex- 
 pansive to pass on. 
 
 Thus the eternal question of all morals, 
 namely, the exact point at which the claims of 
 the lesser unit must give place before the 
 greater, the need of existence to the need of 
 growth, has arisen again and again to confront 
 mankind. It confronts the unit as a whole in 
 times of political crisis, and it confronts each 
 individual of the unit from day to day, as he 
 adjusts his action to the needs of the lesser 
 units which survive within the greater, the 
 interests of which, in different degrees, he is 
 compelled to make his own. 
 
 His action, moreover, has to be ruled on 
 different levels of moral advancement according 
 to the position which he holds within the com- 
 munity, and in proportion as he is taking 
 action for the unit as a whole, or for himself 
 as a component part of the community. His 
 action as one who controls in any degree the 
 State, when he is acting in the interests of the 
 State, must be on a lower level than his action 
 as one of its individual members. The morality 
 of the nation, like the morality of each indi- 
 vidual of highest existing complexity, is that of 
 the primitive cell which grasps and holds that 
 it may live and grow. Like the primitive cell 
 in conflict with other cells, it is compelled, as a 
 nation, to act on lines of single self-interest 
 
MORAL ADVANCE 163 
 
 when in conflict with other nations. Political 
 morality is therefore of necessity on a lower 
 level than individual morality, although this, in 
 its turn, in rising is always uplifting the ideal of 
 the greater body politic. The individual who 
 takes any considerable share in the function of 
 national control, while he rules his own aims on 
 the highest lines within his capacity, has to rule 
 his political aims on the lower plane demanded 
 of the unit of strife of highest existing com- 
 plexity. This remains, as it has always been, 
 the primitive pursuit of single self-interest. If 
 he endeavours, prematurely, to bring the higher 
 moral ideals which rule his individual aims into 
 his political code, he endangers the very exist- 
 ence of the unit which he seeks to benefit. 
 
 But the softening of antagonism between the 
 individuals which compose the units of nation 
 inevitably tends to soften the antagonism which 
 has been needful to the consolidation of the 
 units of nation themselves. Travel and inter- 
 change of thought and opinion in times of 
 peace, when common essential interests are not 
 at stake, lead on to a wider understanding and 
 sympathy among the progressive peoples, who 
 gain in tolerance towards each other as the 
 individuals composing them gain in tolerance 
 among themselves. The instinct of the primi- 
 tive struggle to exist and grow remains ; but the 
 sense of the ultimate brotherhood of man has a 
 softening influence which makes itself felt to 
 
1 64 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 some degree, even in moments when the clash 
 of interests is paramount. The destruction of 
 individuals, which, on prescribed lines, is still 
 an essential condition of the strife of units, is 
 being carried on in a manner more and more 
 humane. A horror of war is filtering through 
 the substance of which the human unit is com- 
 posed, the last to give evidence of it being of 
 necessity those individuals who are specialised 
 to defend and extend the limits of the com- 
 munity. There are evidences, moreover, of a 
 growing tendency to decide national differences 
 by means of temporarily created courts of arbi- 
 tration, which assume for the moment the func- 
 tion of courts for the administration of justice 
 within the existing communities themselves. 
 And although international law can hardly be 
 said to have a substantial existence until a 
 generally accepted court of appeal can be 
 created and recognised, such law has already 
 assumed the form of a defined branch of study, 
 and in times of peace its provisions are being 
 developed and maintained. 
 
 Under the influence of this wider extension 
 of sympathetic relationship, a further shifting 
 of the centre of the national unit is coming 
 into view, since the offshoots of nations show 
 a tendency to remain in touch with the nation 
 from which they sprang. Instead of the in- 
 stinctive antagonism between parent and off- 
 spring which tends to arise when stress of 
 
MORAL ADVANCE 165 
 
 competition puts a strain on the sense of 
 common interest, a new and wider feeling 
 seems to be gaining ground, a sense of more 
 permanent community of aim and interest, 
 which brings into view the formation of a yet 
 larger and more efficient unit in the struggle 
 for existence. It remains for each nation to 
 decide whether the time has come when such 
 an extension of the unit is possible under the 
 given conditions of cohesion on which it exists ; 
 to decide whether it is able to withstand the 
 strain on its component parts involved in a 
 further subordination of their interests to the 
 interests of the greater Imperial unit. 
 
 But while the action of the individual, in 
 so far as it regards the State in its relation 
 to other States, has thus to be ruled on the 
 intolerant lines of the unit of highest com- 
 plexity — until the moment when further growth 
 demands the suppression of intolerance with 
 regard to its own offspring — the actions of 
 the individual, on the other hand, as component 
 part of the State in his relation to its other 
 component parts has to be ruled on lines 
 of tolerance of ever-increasing force and ex- 
 tension. Since the success of the nation is 
 dependent on the cohesion thus created within 
 itself, it is as essential that the component in- 
 dividuals should cultivate tolerance and sym- 
 pathy among themselves, as it is essential that 
 the unit to which they belong should regard 
 
166 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 its own interests alone in its strife with com- 
 peting units. 
 
 But the instinct of strife remains though the 
 nature of the struggle has undergone a change. 
 Each component individual, though he no 
 longer strives for life, still strives for better 
 conditions of existence during his term of life ; 
 by which strife the condition of the whole 
 unit is continually being advanced. But since 
 he is allied to all the individuals within the 
 nation by the sense of a common interest in 
 the success of the nation ; and to all who are 
 differentiated for exercise of a common function 
 by the endeavour to procure the more efficient 
 performance of that function ; and while to his 
 family he is held by bonds still more essential 
 and secure, it is evident that, in striving for 
 better conditions, he is incapable of acting on 
 the old free lines of primitive self-seeking. If 
 he acts in his own interests alone his action 
 is injurious, in different degrees, to all the 
 units to which he is allied, and being himself 
 a part of those units, he suffers with them from 
 the injuries which he inflicts. " That which 
 is not good for the swarm, neither is it good 
 for the bee," truly said Marcus Aurelius. 
 
 While, therefore, the instinct of antagonism 
 is relegated to the State as the most highly 
 complex unit, the energies set free by exemp- 
 tion from this primal strife are employed by 
 man in breaking down the inherited instincts 
 
MORAL ADVANCE 167 
 
 of antagonism within itself, which have been 
 essential in their time and degree to the exist- 
 ence of the contained units, but which are 
 no longer needed in the same degree when 
 the interests of all are recognised as being at 
 one with his own. It is only when these 
 antagonisms break down that way is made for 
 the to and fro passage of cohesive sympathy 
 which is born out of the sense of a common 
 interest. 
 
 But since the process of welding the unit 
 is being accomplished by means of multiplied 
 centres of cohesion, each of which conduces 
 to the formation of bonds of sympathy which 
 lessen in intensity as they increase in extension 
 — each individual, as such centre, in the en- 
 deavour to further the process, has to decide 
 as to the exact degree to which his regard 
 for the nearer interests is to be relaxed in 
 relation to those more remote. In the conflict 
 of instincts it will generally be allowed that 
 he would show most moral advancement who 
 chose the widest interest for his allegiance ; 
 while, on the other hand, as with the political 
 unit, he who acted on a code of disinterested- 
 ness in advance of his time would endanger 
 the very unit he sought to benefit ; the highest 
 goodness, at all times, being thus a question 
 of the head as well as of the heart, of the 
 judgment as well as of the intentions. If he 
 neglected the lesser and more constraining unit 
 
168 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 in favour of the larger, to which a lesser degree 
 of allegiance is required, his action, though it 
 might be disinterested, would fail to achieve 
 the end at which it aimed. If, for instance, 
 the bread-winner of a family worked for its 
 benefit regardless of his own health, or if a 
 mother in a similar way ignored her personal 
 well-being in care for her children, such action 
 would eventually prove injurious to the family 
 and would lack in the intellectual element of 
 moral advance. Or again, if the father or 
 mother were to neglect the well-being of the 
 family in furtherance of schemes for benefiting 
 a larger social circle, or the nation, or mankind 
 in general, such action would eventually be 
 injurious to the nation, since it would risk 
 failure in securing the efficiency of the family 
 as one of its component parts. To one who 
 held himself aloof from forming family re- 
 sponsibilities this, of course, would not apply 
 in the same degree ; such an one would be 
 more free to risk his life for the benefit of 
 others or to devote himself to the larger welfare, 
 since, by such action, no nearer claims would 
 be neglected. Thus with the family and social, 
 as with the political unit, the individual has 
 to act on different levels of disinterestedness 
 in proportion as to whether he acts as its 
 leader, or as one of its component parts. 
 
 The continual trend of moral advance in the 
 direction of enabling the individual to regard 
 
MORAL ADVANCE 169 
 
 in his action units of wider and wider extent 
 is made evident by the inclusion of increasing 
 numbers in the function of control of the unit. 
 The part taken may be great or small, but the 
 tendency of progress is in the direction of per- 
 mitting each individual to take action which 
 regards the welfare of the unit as a whole, as 
 well as the welfare of the lesser component 
 units. By this extension of the scope of in- 
 dividual interest the instinct of self-seeking is 
 continually being enlarged, and the possibility 
 of acting in the interest of the single self as 
 continually restricted. The movement of ad- 
 vance is also testified to by the fact that pro- 
 vision at times is made, as by the endowment 
 of research, for freeing given members of the 
 community from the pressure of claims which 
 might hinder them from pursuing the wider 
 aims which it is felt they are capable of further- 
 ing. And although such procedure may as yet 
 be rare, it is suggestive, in so far as it exists, 
 of greater possibilities of a similar kind. More- 
 over, the fact that many members of the com- 
 munity specialise themselves to regard the 
 interests of others less fortunate than them- 
 selves, serves to minimise the evil effects arising 
 from action both well and ill meaning, as well 
 as from the results of disaster which neither 
 good nor evil intention is able to control. 
 
 But beyond the need of restraining instinct 
 among the component parts of a unit, which, 
 
170 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 to progress, must always be extending and 
 increasing in cohesion ; and beyond the moral 
 considerations involved in fixing the pace at 
 which the widening of interests to this end 
 can safely proceed, further complications exist 
 within human communities, produced by the 
 morbid action of mind on instinct and the 
 difficulties involved when the instinct, rein- 
 forced by mind, works in an organism whose 
 cohesion is secured by the restraint of self- 
 interest. Simple questions of morals become 
 obscured by the institution of unembodied 
 codes on different levels of retrogression, as, 
 for instance, in the case of the commercial 
 code, which is not only fixed on a lower level 
 of consideration for others than the individual 
 code, but in the lower provisions of which an 
 ability to take advantage of the ignorance or 
 undue confidence of others is frequently a 
 feature of success. Such a code can exist only 
 by preying on the helplessness of the less com- 
 petent, and though, within certain limits, its 
 provisions may be socially condoned under 
 the present conditions of moral achievement, 
 it seems evident that it is of the nature of a 
 morbid growth, and must gradually give place, 
 in a progressive community, before the advance 
 of wider ideals of action for the welfare of the 
 unit as a whole. While such codes exist they 
 complicate decisions as to right action in the 
 minds of some who would desire conscien- 
 
MORAL ADVANCE 171 
 
 tiously to adjust themselves to the demands of 
 Eternal Law. The bread-winner of a family, 
 for instance, may feel himself compelled to 
 conform to the lower conditions of the un- 
 worded commercial code on occasions when, 
 by so doing, he enables his family to live, or 
 to be better equipped for life. It is a difficult 
 point at times to decide as to the degree to 
 which conformity to such a code is demanded 
 by the individual or family well-being, while 
 such a code is within the requirements of law 
 and is admitted by human opinion ; although, 
 on broad lines, it seems evident that while 
 allegiance to a code less advanced than the 
 individual code is essential at given times to 
 given communities, allegiance to a code which 
 is based in any degree on accentuation of the 
 individual instinct must, by its very nature, be 
 detrimental to the community, and so, ulti- 
 mately, to the individuals who compose it. 
 
 If the view here taken of the nature and 
 need of control of inherited instinct be ac- 
 cepted, the individual who would adjust his 
 being to the working of laws, the trend of which 
 he dimly discerns, has no lack of employment 
 for his instinct of struggle, though the current 
 of his energies may be diverted from the older 
 channels. The instinct of strife remains, its 
 primal form being but slightly modified, in so 
 far as his action regards his nation as such ; 
 the instinct, in no sense free or primal but con- 
 
172 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 strained within given limits, actuates him in his- 
 endeavour after better conditions of life for his 
 social grade or system of occupation and his 
 family. But the operation of instinct in all 
 these different degrees is shared by all who go 
 to make up the lesser units existing within the 
 greater, and the energy thus set free has to be 
 turned by the individual on to the task of modi- 
 fying within himself the normal and abnormal 
 action of the two instincts of existence and of 
 growth, and of so restraining and deflecting 
 their activities that they may conduce to the 
 existence and growth of the communities of 
 which he forms a part. 
 
IX 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 
 
IX 
 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 
 
 On the lines suggested in these pages a steady 
 progress of growth may be traced from the 
 smallest living organism which the human eye 
 by the aid of lenses can detect, through com- 
 munities of these organisms, and again through 
 communities of these communities, and again 
 through communities of these — until the Im- 
 perial ideal itself is arrived at. The process on 
 this view has been continuous, for although with 
 the progressive units the centre of strife has 
 from time to time been shifted from the indi- 
 vidual centre to the centre of the community of 
 related individuals, and although the nature of 
 the binding agency employed to weld the related 
 individuals into the new and larger unit has in 
 each case been different, this recurrent process 
 of shifting and of change has itself been con- 
 tinuous. When a given complexity of structure 
 has been arrived at on given lines, a new com- 
 plexity of structure has been necessitated by 
 the need of further growth, and those forms 
 which have moved on lines which ensured this 
 needful increase in complexity have remained 
 
 175 
 
176 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 on the main line of advance, leaving behind as 
 outlying branches those forms in which a further 
 shifting of the centre has been rendered im- 
 possible by the means taken by the individual 
 organism to ensure separate existence. 
 
 Apparently, however, the outlying branches 
 have been as essential to the furtherance of de- 
 velopment as the main stem of growth itself; 
 since with an increase in complexity of structure 
 of a given organism an increase in complexity 
 of that by means of which its existence and 
 growth can be sustained becomes essential too. 
 As the feeders become more complex they need 
 more complex food, and the more complex 
 feeders in their turn become the food of feeders 
 more complex still. 
 
 The simplest and earliest form of organic 
 existence grew, as these forms still grow, by 
 assimilating inorganic matter, it built up a less 
 stable structure out of simpler and more stable 
 chemical elements or compounds. Those or- 
 ganic forms which branched out into the vege- 
 table kingdom probably achieved a compara- 
 tively easy success in consequence of the facility 
 with which these inorganic foods could be ob- 
 tained ; while animal organisms, which struck 
 out on the higher lines of assimilating forms 
 already organised, were met by the greater diffi- 
 culty of securing such organisms to their need ; 
 those organisms having always succeeded best 
 which for the longest time escaped being fed on. 
 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 177 
 
 The further development which led to the use 
 as food of animal as well as of vegetable life 
 appears to have secured still further possibilities 
 of advance, but with the forms capable of the 
 highest development the need of vegetable food 
 was established as a permanent requirement 
 before the possibility of assimilating animal food 
 was arrived at. Forms whose structure compels 
 them to feed exclusively on animal food are not 
 found in the main line of advance. This in its 
 highest pre-human stage passed through forms 
 of which the organised diet was wholly on 
 vegetarian lines. When, however, this neces- 
 sity had become firmly established, the further 
 power of assimilating animal food as well, ap- 
 pears to have conduced to further progress. 
 With the most progressive races, namely, the 
 Western nations, both the higher and lower 
 forms of organised existence are assimilated, 
 while the more exclusively animal feeders (as 
 the Esquimaux and others) and the more ex- 
 clusively vegetarian (as many Asiatic races) 
 have fallen behind in the struggle. 
 
 The need, however, of organised vegetable 
 and animal food, when once established, did 
 not do away with, but was, as it were, super- 
 imposed on the need of the inorganic elements 
 or compounds. Oxygen, water, and certain 
 salts continued to be essential to the life of the 
 cell in the more complex organisms, and systems 
 for taking in these foods and for distributing 
 
 M 
 
178 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 them to all the cells which composed the larger 
 organism came into being together with systems 
 for taking in and distributing the more complex 
 foods. 
 
 With the evolution of the human race still 
 more complex physical needs arose and had to 
 be supplied. As the new and growing organism, 
 the human community, began to arrive at pro- 
 portions with which no pre-human individual or 
 community could attempt to compete, the main 
 line of progress passed away from all those 
 other forms, as it had passed away in turn from 
 the unicellular, from vegetable, and from in- 
 vertebrate forms, and the human race alone re- 
 mained to represent the main stem of progress 
 through which further development could be 
 achieved. The earlier offshoots continued to 
 exist and grow and develop on their own lines, 
 providing food one for the other and for the 
 individuals of human communities ; but the 
 ultimate struggle was removed from those earlier 
 forms over which man graduallygained dominion, 
 and progressive strife on the main line of ad- 
 vance became centred among the human com- 
 munities themselves. Henceforward it lay with 
 the greater organism, the community, to secure 
 and supply the means of existence to all its 
 component parts, and the possession of territory 
 yielding the many requirements of progressive 
 human life became an essential factor in the 
 community's advance. As the growing tribes 
 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 179 
 
 and nations appropriated to their own uses the 
 soil on which they lived, their further growth 
 had to be determined by conflict with peoples 
 already in possession, the conquering commu- 
 nity absorbing into itself the earlier possessors 
 together with their territory itself. In this way 
 smaller or less cohesive communities became 
 the food of those greater or more complex in 
 structure, and intermarriage between the con- 
 querors and the conquered infused new elements 
 into the growing organism. 
 
 But again with the human unit, the com- 
 munity, the need of all the simpler forms of 
 sustenance remains. Oxygen is needed by and 
 supplied to all the individual cells of the human 
 body by a system of breathing with which 
 consciousness is unconcerned. Water, salts, 
 vegetable and animal food are conveyed by 
 means of other systems, with which conscious- 
 ness is little concerned, though it is employed 
 by each individual human being in his endeav- 
 our to secure a share of the supply. While the 
 community as a whole, through the agency of 
 its governing part, uses its force and vigilance 
 in securing to itself, and extending the limits 
 of, the territory which yields the simpler foods 
 needed by the more complex food and feeders, 
 which foods are conveyed to the individual 
 members by systems of supply differentiated 
 for those purposes. 
 
 But beyond these physical needs of human 
 
180 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 communities, as a preliminary indeed to their 
 power to expand, other needs had come into 
 existence. With pre-human communities in- 
 stinct, worked upon by natural selection, achieved 
 their formation. Consciousness of its concrete 
 surroundings in each member of the unit was 
 a factor in its development, but abstract con- 
 sciousness had not come into play. 
 
 It has been the aim of these pages to suggest, 
 and as far as possible to support the suggestion, 
 that it was the development of this abstract 
 consciousness, which, by bringing man into 
 relation with the greater unseen forces, led on 
 to his unprecedented advance. The law by 
 means of which the Universe had been evolved 
 brought progressive existence to the point at 
 which it became capable of recognising law. 
 Man became dimly aware of a force working 
 from beyond himself, which controlled his 
 destiny, as well as of an instinct from within 
 himself which seemed to be opposed to the 
 action of the greater force. In so far, there- 
 fore, as he would merit the favour of the greater 
 Force the lesser and opposing force, had to be 
 met with resistance at his hands. With these 
 nascent perceptions, and with the conclusions 
 which arose out of them, inadequate and mis- 
 directed as they may have been, the religious 
 sense took birth within man. He submitted 
 no longer blindly to the action of law, but in 
 so far as he could perceive its drift, he set 
 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 181 
 
 himself into line with its requirements. And 
 although he could only conceive of the Supreme 
 Force, in a concrete way under the cramped 
 and distorted similitudes which a dawning per- 
 ception of the things about him presented to 
 his mind ; and although the individual instinct, 
 under a guise no less concrete, appealed to his 
 understanding only as a personality adverse to 
 the Supreme Force — yet, that he might pro- 
 gress, the best conceptions which at the time he 
 could command became factors essential to his 
 development. 
 
 For if it be granted that the main line of 
 progress passes through the units capable of 
 achieving the greatest size and structural com- 
 plexity ; and if, with life's highest achievement 
 — the human race — this unit at the present 
 time is represented by the political community, 
 it follows that the largest and most complex 
 political community is the unit through which 
 development is proceeding. If it be granted, 
 moreover, that the great unseen Force, through 
 whose agency all development has been effected, 
 though unperceived by the earlier of life's forms, 
 is recognised by human communities, and if 
 each community by its attempt to apprehend 
 and conform to the provisions of that Force 
 increases its power to exist and to expand, 
 it must follow that those communities whose 
 apprehension is most clear, and whose obedience 
 is most effectual, must be the communities 
 
1 82 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 whose survival and development are best 
 assured. 
 
 But the finite apprehension of the community 
 remains, and must remain, inadequate to con- 
 ceive of that which is infinite. Since, however, 
 an apprehension of law and the realisation of a 
 supreme motive which shall make law effectual 
 in restraining the individual instinct of its 
 members is essential to the existence of the 
 human community, the best ideals which can be 
 formulated at a given time and place become 
 essential factors in development at that time 
 and at that place. To disregard the need of 
 bringing the best available conception to bear 
 on the conduct of the community would be for 
 the community to cease to exist, to disregard 
 the need of seeking after a better conception 
 would be for the community to cease to pro- 
 gress. 
 
 A knowledge of law becomes, therefore, the 
 needful food of man's mind and character. 
 The physical needs of his being stand no longer 
 alone. They remain and are essential to his 
 existence. But the individuals of human com- 
 munities having developed the new function of 
 mind and abstract consciousness, a new mental 
 and spiritual hunger has arisen, and new foods 
 are needed that this function may be effectually 
 maintained. " Man doth not live by bread 
 alone, but by every word that proceedeth out 
 of the mouth of God doth man live." 
 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 183 
 
 The minarets and domes, the towers and 
 spires which, the round world over, rise above 
 the dwellings of men and point away to the 
 outside infinite, testify to the sense of need 
 which impels man to acknowledge the existence 
 of a Force beyond himself which shapes his 
 destiny, and to his sense of dependence on that 
 Force that the life of his spiritual and moral as 
 well as his physical nature may be sustained. 
 
 But the apprehension and assimilation of 
 law is not concerned alone in nourishing the 
 religious sense of man, in administering to his 
 submission and obedience to its moral require- 
 ments, it has to be grasped and applied as well 
 to the innumerable needs of his growing physical 
 and mental development. It has to be applied 
 to securing the largest available yield from the 
 soil of territories in the possession of the com- 
 munity ; to dealing with the mineral yield of 
 the earth beneath the soil, and the fashioning of 
 its produce into implements of use on the soil 
 itself — of use in strife with competing commu- 
 nities, of use in extending and diffusing the 
 accumulated learning of the community ; to 
 the many purposes of peaceful and warlike 
 intent which promote the cohesion of the com- 
 munity and its power to expand. 
 
 The human race in its infancy had slowly to 
 realise the causes which led to given effects, 
 and to employ its dawning intelligence in using 
 these realisations in ministering to its own 
 
1 84 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 needs. It was sent to the school of experience 
 to get its learning, and under that slow tuition 
 it began to accumulate to itself stores of gathered 
 knowledge. As the stores increased, the minds 
 of the young of the community were nourished 
 from those stores, and only the unlearnt know- 
 ledge was sought in the school of experience. 
 So the young are still taught ; so the adult 
 intelligences still go to school. 
 
 Into that dark region of the Unknown which 
 it is impelled to invade human consciousness 
 is still feeling its way. Man endeavours " by 
 searching to find out God." With the hand of 
 faith outheld, as well as the hand of reason, he 
 lays hold on all that he may. If he had not 
 faith that there was something needful to his 
 existence to be found he would not venture, if 
 he had not reason wherewith to sift his findings 
 the unessential which he brings away with the 
 essential would overburden him, and impede 
 his further progress. He is still so burdened 
 and so impeded, for the sieves of one age prove 
 too coarse for the uses of another, and his 
 reason needs correction at the hands of further 
 reason. He has not only to sift his findings, 
 new and old, but from time to time he has to 
 sift the very sieves themselves. He has to test, 
 not only his conclusions, but the means by 
 which those conclusions have been arrived at. 
 
 It has followed of necessity that as the 
 scientific faculty wrested from their obscurity 
 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 185 
 
 the secrets of the unknown, and applied the 
 laws so mastered to the development of the 
 unit ; as it fought inch by inch for portions 
 of the unknown territory which it could conquer 
 and annex to the solid grounds of facts which 
 could be proved, it has tended to scorn the 
 bridge of faith by which the religious faculty 
 has spanned this void between. The scientific 
 faculty has worked by observation, throwing 
 out hypotheses from time to time, and retaining 
 or rejecting them as they have proved to be 
 capable or incapable of bearing the weight of 
 evidence. The religious faculty once for all 
 threw out the great hypothesis that there exists 
 a Force beyond man's knowledge, which 
 " makes for righteousness," and it has persis- 
 tently acted as though the hypothesis had been 
 established, since no facts that have been 
 brought to bear have sufficed to disprove it, 
 or to render it unavailable for the traffic of 
 mankind. But the religious faculty has gone 
 farther than this. It has insisted on defining 
 the exact nature of that Force and has stood 
 by the final and essential nature of the defini- 
 tions. It has attempted, as it were, to underpin 
 the bridge by supports which by their very 
 nature were unstable, and against these fictitious 
 supports science has continually directed its 
 blows. As proof of their instability has arisen 
 the scientific faculty has assumed the instability 
 of the whole fabric itself. 
 
186 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 If, however, it be granted that the communi- 
 ties most effectively cognisant of, and obedient 
 to law constitute the largest and most cohesive 
 communities, and if righteousness consists in 
 such knowledge of and obedience to law, then 
 the most righteous are the largest and most 
 cohesive communities. If, moreover, it be 
 granted that the largest and most cohesive 
 communities are those which best survive in 
 competition with other communities, then the 
 most righteous communities are those which 
 best survive, and the existence of a Force 
 making for righteousness is proved. The hypo- 
 thesis is found to rest on solid ground for at 
 least a part of its length. 
 
 If, moreover, without such an hypothesis, 
 the existing state of human development could 
 not have been arrived at, then the scaffolding 
 and underpinning which to the religious faculty 
 have proved the security of the hypothesis have, 
 for the time being, been essential to the human 
 race, that it might avail itself of its uses. The 
 differences which have arisen have resulted from 
 misconceptions on both sides ; but if man's 
 reason can accept the need of the motive forces 
 by which the soul of man has been impelled, 
 and if the religious sense of man can accept 
 the aid of reason in freeing his soul from 
 trammels of which the uses are passing away, 
 it would seem that the two might come to 
 terms. And since it is the same end that both 
 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 187 
 
 are making for, their progress would assuredly 
 be hastened by concord on the way. 
 
 In the present stage of man's ignorance that 
 which still remains to be known is so vast that 
 the human mind may well pause on the brink 
 of all negative certainties, except the most sure. 
 The dogmatism which declared the non-exist- 
 ence of possibilities which have assumed reality 
 to man's intuition may prove foolish as does 
 the dogmatism of unreasoning ignorance. Those 
 intuitions of law the fragments of which — to 
 use a metaphor — will not fit into the curve of 
 any known circle, may be found to fit into the 
 curve of a larger circle which may yet become 
 manifest. The belief in immortality which may, 
 it would seem, prove to be part of the narrow 
 self-insistence which it is man's business to 
 merge and subdue, in the light of greater laws 
 which still lie hidden, may reveal itself as the 
 intuition of an incommunicable truth of con- 
 sciousness, a conception crude as man's earliest 
 conceptions of the Deity were crude, but pos- 
 sibly destined, like them, to prove the intuition 
 of a still unfathomable truth, one which may 
 grow clearer as man's vision clears. 1 
 
 If we assume the process of life's development 
 to have proceeded on the lines here suggested, 
 the temptation is great to follow them on, where 
 they lead into the domains of pure conjecture. 
 Tracing them backwards beyond the range 
 1 See " Human Immortality," Professor William James. 
 
188 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 where organic life began, they lead on to the 
 conception of a similar process of growth in 
 size and complexity as having been at work 
 among the elements and compounds chemically 
 united to form the ground substance of life 
 itself. On this view the stuff of life, like the 
 stuff of matter, in Dalton's sense is "grained," 
 each larger organic unit being an aggregate of 
 smaller units, each of which in its turn is an 
 aggregate of units smaller still. Since with in- 
 organic matter, to explain known facts of 
 chemistry, it had to be assumed that similar 
 units exist consisting of aggregates of smaller 
 units, which in their turn are aggregates of 
 units smaller still — it seems reasonable to con- 
 jecture that these inorganic units have been 
 arrived at by the action of the same laws of 
 growth which have ruled the increase in size and 
 complexity of organic units. It seems reason- 
 able to conjecture that by the same laws the 
 bondage of the particles of atoms into the 
 atoms themselves, of atoms into molecules, of 
 molecules into molecular groups which con- 
 stitute the masses of the elements, and of these 
 into compounds of less and greater complexity, 
 may have been effected. A great uniformity 
 of plan would thus be shown to obtain in the 
 evolution of all existences, inorganic and organic. 
 It has not been possible to penetrate to the 
 nature of the change which took place when, 
 as on this view, at the introduction of life, the 
 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 189 
 
 most highly complex and unstable compounds 
 were transformed into the primordial vegetable 
 cell ; * but such change seems hardly more 
 marvellous than that which was initiated at 
 the meeting - place between existences which 
 were evolved in unconsciousness of the law 
 which fashioned them, and those greater units 
 of which the component parts recognising a 
 Supreme Force surrendered themselves to, and 
 co-operated in, the action of that Force. The 
 change from electrical to chemical, and from 
 chemical to physical affinity, seems hardly so 
 great as the change from physical to moral 
 affinity ; the change by which individuals, each 
 a community of highly differentiated cells phy- 
 sically united, entered into further union among 
 themselves ; consciously strengthening, as best 
 they might, the links of common interest and 
 sympathy by which the units of family, tribe, 
 nation are being held together. At the one 
 point physical life originated, at the other 
 spiritual and moral life. From the one point 
 further progress on the main line of advance 
 
 1 As Professor Weismann points out in " The Evolution Theory," 
 vol. i. 368, "No inorganic molecule can be shown either to as- 
 similate, or grow, or multiply." But in his lectures on "Elec- 
 tricity and Matter," Professor J. J. Thompson conceives of the 
 Evolution of the atoms of the different elements through the agency 
 of electrical attraction on lines of increasing structural complexity. 
 His conception does not appear to preclude the possibility of their 
 development having moved on the lines here suggested as ruling 
 the growth of living organisms. 
 
190 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 led on to the development of a consciousness 
 of concrete existences ; from the other to con- 
 sciousness of abstract and unseen causes, to 
 the threshold of a Presence of which man can- 
 not even rightly conceive, to the foot of a 
 throne before which he bows the knee but to 
 which he cannot lift his eyes. 
 
 But conjecture which takes the mind back- 
 wards to the origin of life, and which conceives 
 of the possibility of its evolution by means of 
 the same unchanging law which has carried life 
 through all its manifestations up to man himself, 
 meets voids by the way over which it cannot 
 venture safely. And if in looking backwards 
 conjecture is waylaid by uncertainties, in look- 
 ing forward to dream of the ultimate destiny of 
 worlds and of man it is still more speedily 
 arrested. If, however, the lines on which it is 
 here suggested that development has proceeded 
 in the past, be produced onwards into the im- 
 mediate future, they point to a further increase 
 in size of the communities which constitute the 
 units of progressive strife, and to a consequent 
 decrease in the number of the individuals which 
 strive. They point to a growth of existing 
 units brought about by a further holding to- 
 gether between parent communities and their 
 offshoots, when the structure of those com- 
 munities has been arrived at on lines of toler- 
 ance and sympathy permitting such further 
 union. By such growth units of vast size and 
 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 191 
 
 cohesive power would be arrived at, and the 
 incorporation, through conquest, of lesser com- 
 munities into the very structure of the greater 
 would continue and help such growth. It 
 seems possible also that there should be a 
 further union between related units which have 
 broken off into independent existence, but in 
 which the sense of affinity remains underneath 
 the fact of political separation. 
 
 The Western nations — through which the line 
 of progress obviously runs at the present moment, 
 and through which, if that which is here assumed 
 to be essential to the structure of a growing 
 community be accepted, it must continue to run 
 — are united by the bond not only of a common 
 Aryan origin, but of a common religious faith, 
 a faith of which the mainspring is a tolerance 
 which transcends political boundaries, and a 
 sense of brotherhood which induces a cohesion 
 capable of co-existence with such tolerance. A 
 further reunion seems possible between related 
 individuals whose cohesion is based on a faith 
 which is thus inclusive, and most possible 
 between communities in which that faith is 
 retained in its simplest and most elastic forms. 
 
 But in the process of expansion new diffi- 
 culties are arising to confront the progressive 
 peoples, since those tracts of the earth which 
 are peopled by tribes of small size and slightly 
 organised cohesive power are falling rapidly into 
 the possession of the nations of the West. There 
 
192 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 remain few, if any, unknown quantities among 
 the peoples of the world such as existed when 
 the Roman Empire was so easily supreme, and 
 expansion on all sides is being restricted by the 
 resistance to be met with from possessors al- 
 ready highly organised. Those venerable civili- 
 sations which existed in the East while the 
 nations of Europe were unborn, remain to be 
 tested. It remains to be proved whether they 
 are united by a cohesion which shall render 
 them capable of resistance under impact from 
 the more cohesive forces of the Western world, 
 or whether, like some structure which holds to- 
 gether simply because no well-directed blow has 
 revealed its lines of cleavage, they are destined 
 to break up under assaults from the younger 
 powers. 1 If success lies with those units which 
 are possessed at once of the most firm cohesive 
 power and the greatest capacity for growth, 
 then it would appear that the East is destined 
 to succumb to the West as the West still further 
 outgrows its confines, and having exhausted the 
 regions of least resistance, is compelled to ex- 
 pand in the direction of the greater. 
 
 Carrying on the idea of the growth of the 
 units of progressive strife and their absorption 
 of the lesser units away into the far future, the 
 question arises as to what must follow when 
 the last barrier between the last conflicting units 
 
 1 A question which Japan, for its own part, appears to be 
 answering in the negative. 
 
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION 193 
 
 is broken down. If the prophet's dream of 
 peace were fulfilled, and if all mankind were 
 united into one vast unit, by what means would 
 further development be effected ? Is it conceiv- 
 able that in some far time man's apprehension 
 of Eternal Law may be so greatly quickened 
 that the inner prompting to obey that law will 
 be sufficient without the stimulus of strife, that 
 the sense of personal self-insistence may be so 
 modified and deflected that progress may still 
 obtain by means of some agency operating 
 through the medium of peace ? Or is it possible 
 that greater ideals still may be conceived, that 
 wider possibilities of union may open out before 
 man's mind ? There can be little doubt that 
 man, as man, has entered upon new affinities, 
 that his conceptions of being are widening. 
 While his own individual good has ceased to 
 be the bound of his aspirations, the planet on 
 which he strives has ceased to be the bound of 
 his mental vision. With the dawn of conscious- 
 ness he began to conceive of existences beyond 
 his own, with the growth of consciousness the 
 unseen and uncomprehended are assuming 
 larger proportions to his mind. He is beginning 
 to apprehend a Universe in which his world 
 may count but as a grain of dust, the existence 
 of a vast, unfathomable scheme into which his 
 being fits. He is conscious of a sense of spiri- 
 tual relation to the Source and Centre of all Law 
 as he himself aims consciously at fulfilling that 
 
 N 
 
i 9 4 THE UNIT OF STRIFE 
 
 which he can conceive of Law. But he stands 
 overwhelmed at the sense of insignificance which 
 assails him as he strains his eyes towards the 
 mighty Stage of the Universe, where, beyond 
 his vision's bound, so great a drama is being 
 enacted — a drama in which all existence un- 
 consciously, and he himself with growing con- 
 sciousness, is compelled to play a part. He 
 begins to conceive the possibility that his little 
 world, even the seemingly great system in which 
 his world revolves, may hold a place in relation 
 to the great Eternal Scheme such only as an 
 individual cell holds to the human body, such 
 as an individual human being holds to the 
 greater body politic. 
 
 But here his imagination is arrested — the 
 visible lines of progress are lost sight of in 
 impenetrable mist. In the presence of the 
 inscrutable secrets of the Infinite man has no 
 choice but to acquiesce in the demands of 
 ultimate Wisdom, holding in his soul the re- 
 membrance of those vast provinces of thought 
 into which he must use his best strength to 
 penetrate, of those accumulating stores of re- 
 cognised law which he must use his utmost 
 effort to obey. 
 
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 Edinburgh e J London