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BETTER-WORLD 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
^Jcr^-tS-&( 
 
BETTER-WORLD 
 
 PHILOSOPHY 
 
 A SOCIOLOGICAL SYNTHESIS 
 
 BY 
 
 J. HOWARD MOORE 
 
 CHICAGO 
 
 , THE WARD WAUGH COMPANY 
 
 McVICKER'S BUILDING 
 
 1899 
 

 CoPYKiGHTED, iSgg 
 Bv J. HOWARD MOORE 
 
\ HIS book does not claim to be 
 tnfatiibte — simply serious. No 
 being knows. He thinks he 
 kno<xvs. <A few grams strategically 
 shifted here and there in his organism, 
 and he knonvs, or thinks he knoivs, 
 something altogether otherwise. cAll is 
 attitude and relativity. 
 
 Chicago, 1899 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRY, ii 
 
 I. Man, like every other animal in the known universe, 
 
 is a creature of desires. 
 ■^. In order to satisfy his desires he must manage and 
 
 foreknow the inanimate universe. 
 
 3. The management of the universe is the task of industry. 
 
 4. Industry is labor. 
 
 5. Human beings escape labor by shzrking-y by ?««• 
 
 chinery, and by cooperation. 
 
 II. BLUNDERS, 49 
 
 4. There have been, among others, two great blunders 
 made by human beings in their efforts to manage and 
 interpret the inanimate universe. 
 
 V. The conception of the universe as destitute of law. 
 
 3. The conception of the inanimate as animate and vol- 
 untary. 
 
 III. THE SOCIAL PROBLEM, - 73 
 
 i. The problem of life is the problem of the relation of 
 each individual to the rest of the universe. 
 
 z. The social problem arises out of the plurality and gre- 
 gariousness of life in the universe. 
 
 3. The problem of life socialized is still the problem of 
 
 the relation of each individual of the universe to the 
 rest of the universe, but the problem is peculiarized 
 by the fact that conscious individuals sustain to each 
 other relations diflerent from those sustained to the 
 impersonal universe. 
 
 4. The social desires are the desires which have been 
 
 evolved by associated life, and are satisfied, not by 
 the inanimate, but by beings themselves. 
 
 5. The supposed infallibility of *' nature." 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 IV. EGOISM AND ALTRUISM, - 92 
 
 1. In the nature of living beings there are two elements— 
 
 that which impels action in behalf of self^ and that 
 which prompts or prevents movement out of consid- 
 eration ior others. 
 
 2. The problem of the origin of these two elements. 
 
 3. Egoism has been developed by the struggle of ZM^/z'/(f- 
 
 7ials to survive in the evolution of life on the planet. 
 
 4. A/truism has arisen, for the most part, from the 
 
 struggle between aggregates. 
 
 V. THE PREPONDERANCE OF 
 
 EGOISM, 122 
 
 I. The prevalence of preponderant egoism. 
 
 •^. The egoism manifested by the human species toward 
 
 other species is the most insolent and extravagant in 
 
 the universe. 
 3. The egoism of human beings toward human beings. 
 
 VI. THE SOCIAL IDEAL, 139 
 
 I. The ideal relation of the inhabitants of the universe to 
 each other is that relation which will aid most 
 actively in the satisfaction of the desires of the 
 universe. 
 
 ■£. The relation of the inhabitants of the universe to each 
 other which will aid most actively in the satisfaction 
 of the desires of the universe" is that which will enable 
 the animate universe as a whole to attain that rela- 
 tion which an individual living being, if he were 
 alone in the universe, would desire to achieve for 
 himself. 
 
 3. This proposition is corroborated by the teachings of 
 human sages and by current, historical, biological 
 and cosmical tendencies. 
 
CONTENTS 9 
 
 VII. THE DERIVATION OF THE NATURES 
 OF LIVING BEINGS, 169 
 
 I. By the nature of any being or species is meant the 
 character of its conscious tendencies to move. 
 
 M. The natures of living beings are the result of the co- 
 operation or concussion of two elements: the fortui- 
 ties of heredity and environment. 
 
 3. Environment is a trinity ; the inanimate, the animate, 
 and the internal. The contributions to evolution of 
 each of these three elements. 
 
 VIII. RACE CULTURE, 202 
 
 1. The generative stream will be regenerated or reformed 
 in a manner the same as that by which It has been 
 generated, that is, by amendments made thru en- 
 vironmental selection, 
 
 z. The agencies in civilized societies tending to promote 
 evolution. 
 
 3. The function of punishment. 
 
 4. The activities in society tending to neutralize selection. 
 
 5. The new social function is the displacement of the 
 
 rude and ruthless discriminations of the animate and 
 inanimate environments by conscious social self- 
 culture. 
 
 IX. INDIVIDUAL CULTURE, 243 
 
 1. The task of individual culture is more than cephaliza- 
 tion. The inculcation of altruism as important as 
 the injection of facts or the creation of capacity. 
 
 ■£. Culture is a farce because there is no systematic recog- 
 nition by culturists of the fact that human beings are 
 born egoists. 
 
 3. When culture becomes conscious, egoism yill be recog- 
 
 nized as the most formidable fact In human nature, 
 and as valiant efforts will be made for its elimination 
 as are now made to develop the intellect. 
 
 4. The revision of human nature by neural violence. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRY 
 
 Man, like every other animal known 
 to terrestrial intelligence, is a creature 
 of desires. He is not self-sufficient. 
 He is bound to the rest of the universe 
 by claws of the most relentless neces- 
 sity. His body is a mechanism made 
 up of certain substances derived from 
 the planet on which he finds himself. 
 This mechanism is continually crum- 
 bling and wasting away, and must be 
 replenished by additional portions of 
 the parent earth. He lives at the bot- 
 tom of an aerial sea, which is so capri- 
 cious that he must carry about him 
 continually an elaborate protection 
 against its violent extremes. He must 
 be provided with a habitation wherein 
 to lay his head and to administer the 
 pompous functions of the household. 
 
12 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 He desires a soft place to sleep, many 
 dainties on his table, and brilliants and 
 silks to strut in. He wishes his off- 
 spring to be educated. He desires the 
 services and society of his fellows. He 
 desires to travel over the face of the 
 earth, and contemplate in a general 
 way how dull and profitless the uni- 
 verse would be without him. Man's 
 desires are, indeed, innumerable, often 
 hopeless, and sometimes vile, but they 
 may all be rolled together into two : 
 the desire to avoid pain, and the desire 
 to experience pleasure. Every con- 
 scious movement made by living beings, 
 from oyster to philosopher, is directed 
 toward the accornplishment of one or 
 both of these ends. 
 
 Pleasure is the emotion accompany- 
 ing the achievement or satisfaction of 
 a desire. Pain is the antithesis of 
 pleasure. It denotes inhibited desires. 
 The amount of happiness experienced 
 by any being, therefore, depends, 
 first, on his talent for enjoyment, that 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRT 13 
 
 is, on the number and especially the 
 intensity of his impulses ; and secondly, 
 on the attitude or character of his 
 environment. The more numerous and 
 ample a being's impulses, the greater 
 his capacity for happiness — also the 
 greater his liability to misery. A lean 
 subjective, a consciousness of few and 
 feeble impulses, in a lean environ- 
 ment, an environment uninterested in 
 or hostile to the satisfaction of desires, 
 can not experience great happiness, 
 because there is neither capacity nor 
 opportunity. A rich subjective in a 
 lean environment will experience great 
 discomfort, great pain, because there 
 is a redundance of desire over oppor- 
 tunity for satisfaction. A gentleman 
 of culture, accustomed to the most re- 
 fined conveniences and associations, 
 but compelled to dwell in the squalid 
 shelters of savages, would be pro- 
 foundly wretched. The largest emo- 
 tional affluence will befall beings of 
 ample impulses breathing the air of a 
 
H BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 universe abundantly disposed to satisfy 
 them. 
 
 Man is a being of desires. And 
 what he is here for, according to him- 
 self, is to satisfy them. He is devoted 
 to no other thing. Every muscle he 
 strains and every nostrilful he poisons 
 are in the interests of some desire 
 which he is striving to pacify. All of 
 his desires man does not satisfy, but 
 the failure is no fault of his. It is the 
 fault of the universe which made him 
 and in the heart of which he lives. 
 Many of his desires he does not satisfy 
 because he has not the genius. He 
 desires frequently to be in two or three 
 places at the same time, but he is an 
 undistributable integer. He often de- 
 sires to extemporize wings, and fly 
 away to some fair haven and be at 
 rest, but he is not built that way. 
 Many of the desires which he has the 
 talent to satisfy he sacrifices. Minor 
 satisfactions are frequently foregone 
 for the sake of more precious ones 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRT 15 
 
 lying either in himself or in others. 
 Some desires he postpones and others 
 he strangles, and many he ought to 
 strangle that he does not. Generally 
 one or two desires become dominant 
 and suffocate or subordinate the rest ; 
 for there is an evolution, a struggle 
 and survival, among the desires of a 
 living being as truly as among indi- 
 viduals and species. Every being 
 comes into existence with a certain set 
 of impulses. To these impulses he is 
 absolutely devoted, for they are the 
 universe to him. He culls and cor- 
 relates them, he estimates and pets 
 them, and incessantly selects that 
 assortment of them whose satisfactions 
 seem to him to be the most available, 
 and at the same time promise to yield 
 to him the most valuable total. 
 
 It ought to be asserted, perhaps, 
 because it is so seldom realized, that 
 desire, as such, has no reason for exis- 
 tence except to be satisfied. It is 
 expediency only that dictates selective 
 
1 6 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 satisfaction rather than indiscriminate. 
 The satisfaction of every desire, " high" 
 or "low," is, per se, natural and proper. 
 The satisfaction of the much stigma- 
 tized "animal propensities," or "car- 
 nal desires," whatever they are, may 
 be just as exemplary and noble as the 
 satisfaction of the desire, for knowledge 
 or opulence ; and they are, in fact, fre- 
 quently more so. The only rational 
 characterization of a low desire is one 
 incapable of yielding to the universe in 
 its satisfaction large returns of happi- 
 ness. And a high desire is simply one 
 affording to the universe in its satis- 
 faction wide and profound welfare. 
 The only reason why any desire, so- 
 called "high" or so-called "low," 
 should be kept in abeyance is that its 
 satisfaction will not contribute to the 
 utilities. There is no reason why any 
 desire capable of satisfaction possessed 
 by a living being should not be satis- 
 fied, except that its satisfaction may 
 interfere with the satisfaction of other 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRY 17 
 
 more valuable desires possessed by the 
 being himself or by other beings. 
 Every pain is to be avoided, except 
 those whose endurance will enable the 
 avoidance of greater pain, and every 
 possible happiness is to be harvested, 
 save those whose foregoing will help 
 the universe to larger happiness. 
 There is no obligation commanding 
 any being to endure misery save to 
 avoid misery, and no consideration 
 demanding any one to neglect happi- 
 ness save for larger happiness — those 
 ascetics who proclaim the divinity of 
 wretchedness to the contrary notwith- 
 standing. 
 
 If there were but one being in the 
 universe, a low desire would be either 
 one affording to the possessor in its 
 satisfaction relatively small results, or 
 one whose satisfaction, in itself impor- 
 tant, were impaired by the neutralizing 
 effects upon the satisfaction of other 
 desires possessed by that being, or 
 which might be possessed by him in 
 
1 8 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 future. Human gregariousness, how- 
 ever, compels the contemplation to 
 widen, and instead of estimating the 
 results of the satisfaction of a desire 
 for one being, it is necessary, in deter- 
 mining the rank of a desire among 
 social beings, to reckon its results for 
 the community or universe. Hence, 
 in social life the highest desires are, as 
 a rule, the altruistic desires, that is, 
 desires in whose satisfaction there is 
 consideration of the community or uni- 
 verse, and the low desires are generally, 
 tho by no means invariably, the egois- 
 tic. Desires which do not hold in their 
 satisfaction a social significance or 
 effect, either in space or time, are to 
 be proceeded with and estimated as if 
 there were in the universe one or two 
 or six or whatever number of beings 
 are concerned in the satisfaction. The 
 pitiful fact is, that beings are so en- 
 dowed with desires that they manifest 
 such superfluous concern as to the 
 results of the satisfaction of their 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRT 19 
 
 desires upon themselves, and are re- 
 lentlessly unconscious of the effects 
 upon the rest of the universe. 
 
 Man, in satisfying his desires, in 
 avoiding misery and achieving happi- 
 ness, strives to do two things with the 
 inanimate universe: to manage it and 
 to foreknow it. The inanimate is not 
 devoted to us. We are not birdlings 
 cuddled in an order of things where 
 we need simply to yawn and be filled. 
 We ■ must bestir ourselves, or be in a 
 position to compel others to bestir 
 themselves for us, or perish. We are 
 waifs, brought into existence by a uni- 
 verse whose solicitude for us ended 
 with the travail that brought us forth. 
 The inanimate universe is our mother, 
 but without the blessed mother-love. 
 The first thing we are conscious of, 
 and about the only thing we ever 
 absolutely know, is that we are whirl- 
 ing around in a very helpless manner 
 on a whirligig of a ball, out of whose 
 substance by the sweat of our brows 
 
20 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHY 
 
 we must quarry our existence. The 
 universe is practically independent of 
 us. But we, alas, are not independent 
 of it. The food we eat, our raiment, 
 our habitations, our treasures, our 
 implements of knowledge, and our 
 means of amusement are all portions 
 of the inanimate, which we living beings 
 must somehow subtract from the rest. 
 In order to obtain these indispensable 
 portions of the universe about us, we 
 must halter it and control it and com- 
 pel it to produce to the tune of our 
 desires. 
 
 We manage, or modify, the inani- 
 mate universe in two ways: first, by 
 the direct application of the energies 
 of our bodies to contacting tendencies;* 
 and, secondly, by means of inventions. 
 
 *The word tendency, as used in this book, means 
 simply movement, or "direction toward." It is be- 
 lieved to be more truthful than force or energy ; for 
 the essential content of force and energy is volition. 
 There is no pulling and hauling and heaving in the 
 operations of the inanimate universe. They simply 
 take place- There is, so far as we know, no more 
 effort, or energy, ox force put forth by the earthquake 
 than by the opening flower. Volition and effort have 
 no existence outside of consciousness. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRY 21 
 
 Among non-human beings, portions of 
 their own bodies — jaws, talons, hands, 
 tail, tongue, proboscis and the like — 
 fashioned into contrivances, are almost 
 the only means possessed by them for 
 modifying their environment. Bare 
 bodies, however, are not formidable 
 when matched against the immense 
 processes of the infinite, and among 
 nearly all the human races bodily con- 
 trivances are supplemented by con- 
 trivances of various kinds fashioned 
 out of portions of the inanimate uni- 
 verse. The lever, the screw, the 
 wedge, and the pulley, and these elab- 
 orated into the most complicated and 
 accomplished inventions, are the ma- 
 chinery with which human beings assist 
 their bare hands in modifying and 
 dominating the universe of things. 
 
 An invention made from some por- 
 tion of the inanimate universe is not 
 identical with, but does not differ 
 essentially from, one made from some 
 portion of a creature's own body. 
 
22 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 Since the lever is the essence of both 
 classes of contrivances, they are in 
 principle the same. Both are special- 
 ized portions of matter used to effec- 
 tualize the energy of living beings, and 
 both require acumen for their contriv- 
 ance. It does not require less ingenu- 
 ity for a beaver to contrive a trowel 
 out of the material of his own tail than 
 for a human plasterer to devise a simi- 
 lar implement out of a piece of steel. 
 And the living, palpitating tail is as 
 truly a labor-assisting device as the 
 inanimate metal. The ground mole 
 which first contrived a way by which it 
 could plow up the soil with its nose 
 was as veritably an inventor and a 
 genius as the ancient troglodyte who 
 first scarred the surface of the planet 
 with a stick. And the first mole-nose 
 plow was probably no more crude com- 
 pared with the more evolved and 
 accomplished ones of modern moles 
 than the straight stick compared with 
 the steam cultivator. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRY 23 
 
 There is another class of inventions 
 — those which utilize the tendencies of 
 the inanimate itself. The resources 
 for his conflict with nature man must 
 draw from his own body or from the 
 bodies of other beings, unless he can 
 by some means induce some of the 
 tendencies of the inanimate to join 
 him. This he has done. Like the 
 dog and the falcon, whom man has 
 subdued and compelled to help him in 
 his further subjugation of the wild 
 tribes of nature, so the winds and the 
 w'aters have been captured and com- 
 pelled to ally themselves with man 
 against the rest of the inanimate. The 
 wind mill, the water wheel, and the 
 steam engine are inventions of this 
 sort. They capture the wild tendencies 
 of nature and harness them for the 
 most startling accomplishments. So 
 many of these tendencies are now 
 devoted to the service of man, and 
 they have been so sagaciously trained 
 that the task of industry has become 
 
34 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 to a considerable extent the superin- 
 tendence of throttles. Cataracts weave 
 fabrics, breezes draw the waters, and 
 steam does about everything man can 
 do except keep cool. And if the pres- 
 ent dramatic differentiation of things 
 continues, it would not startle prophets 
 much to see waterfalls before many 
 years cultivating crops on the prairies 
 of Kansas. 
 
 The sun, of course, is the chief 
 source of all kinds of terrestrial ten- 
 dency, both animate and inanimate. 
 The sun shining unequally on the 
 atmosphere causes the winds. The 
 sun lifts the waters to the mountain 
 top and sends them tobogganing to 
 the sea. The sun shining on primeval 
 forests created our coal deposits. The 
 hard, black carbon blocks, which we 
 to-day dig from the earth to feed to 
 our engines, are sunbeams which fell 
 on the earth long ages before sunbeams 
 fell on men. The source of all animal 
 energy is the plant, which stores its 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRT 25 
 
 potentialities from the sun. An ear of 
 corn or wheat is a battery of radiant 
 energy which our bodies, by means of 
 affinities, discharge in deeds of kind- 
 ness, crimes, and one thing and another. 
 Shut the sunshine from the spaces and 
 the arrogant processes here on earth 
 will for the most part lapse into sepul- 
 chral impotence. The most funda- 
 mental invention of any age, therefore, 
 will be that which will harness the sun- 
 beam itself, as it streams in fresh from 
 the spaces, and hitch the golden filly 
 directly to our spindles, our mills, and 
 our muscles, instead of apprehending 
 it in the torrent, the gale, and the vege- 
 table. It would seem very strange to 
 us, of course, because we are so unin- 
 itiated and so carnal, but future men 
 may dine on sunbeams as we now dine 
 on beans. 
 
 The second thing we wish to do with 
 the inanimate universe is to foreknow 
 its movements. We wish to foreknow 
 the inanimate simply because, and just 
 
26 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 to the extent that, we are unable to 
 manage it. With all our vanity and 
 machinery, and with all the tendencies 
 we have wheedled into our services, we 
 are able to influence only the margins 
 of things. The great fundamental 
 processes roll on as if we did not exist. 
 We live at the bottom of an aerial 
 deep whose abilities we can utilize, but 
 whose moods and petulance we are 
 powerless to determine. The plant 
 kingdom, at whose mercy we subsist, 
 depends for its processes on atmos- 
 pheric contingencies, and these con- 
 tingencies in turn depend upon inter- 
 planetary conditions. The ball over 
 whose surface we creep, and about the 
 possession of which we cavil so cease- 
 lessly, whisks us alternately thru glare 
 and gloom and thru seasons of bounty 
 ^nd dejection, and we can do nothing 
 but bewail our own helplessness. 
 
 The only thing we can do with these 
 too-powerful processes of the inani- 
 mate is to do the best we can to keep 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRT 27 
 
 out of their way. We may upholster 
 the hardships of an approaching mis- 
 sile, even tho we are not able to stay 
 it, if we can anticipate its approach. 
 We can not arrest the retreat . of the 
 sun southward in the autumn time, but 
 we can garner our harvests and pile 
 fuel for our fireplaces, and defy the 
 desolation from the poles. We can 
 not stop the rotation of the planet on 
 which we whirl, but we can foretell the 
 hours of sun and shade, and this 
 foreknowledge is of almost infinite 
 convenience to us. We can not disperse 
 tornadoes, but we can build subterra- 
 nean shelters and receive from the sig- 
 nal service warnings to get into them. 
 
 The ability to prophesy concerning 
 the every-day matters of life is so com- 
 monplace, and upon it so largely 
 depends our well-being from moment 
 to moment and from day to day, that 
 the most conscious of us can not easily 
 estimate its importance. If carbon 
 and oxygen were as frequently repul- 
 
28 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 sive to each other as attractive, and 
 were as often indifferent as otherwise, 
 and analysis were powerless to discern 
 any method in their moods — if liquids, 
 when unrestrained, sometimes moved 
 toward the center of the earth and' 
 sometimes away from it, and with no 
 perceivable regularity — if the sun, on 
 going down at evening, were as liable 
 to appear in the north or the south or 
 some place else as in the east, and 
 liable to rise two weeks or two or three 
 months later instead of exactly ten 
 hours, forty-six minutes, and sixteen 
 seconds — if, in short, there were no 
 regularity, nothing but originality, in 
 the behavior of the universe, then were 
 living beings indeed doomed perpetu- 
 ally to a pitiful fate. Few have the 
 talent to realize, too, how largely our 
 ill-being depends on our inability to 
 foresee our material future. Take, as 
 an instance, the atmosphere. The 
 atmosphere is our most immediate 
 environment, and sustains to us a more 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRT 29 
 
 vital relation than does any other por- 
 tion of the universe. It is, in the first 
 place, almost entirely unmanageable, 
 and, secondly, it is so disingenuous that 
 it is little understood. Since we are 
 powerless to compel the atmosphere 
 to be and to do as we desire, if we were 
 only able to foretell for each day or 
 for each week or for each season just 
 how it would be, whether cold or hot, 
 violent or calm, cloudy or clear, humid 
 or dry, we would be much happier and 
 much less reprehensibly tempered 
 animals. If droughts could be fore- 
 told, crops need not be planted. If 
 tornadoes could be anticipated, their 
 pathway might be vacated. Nearly 
 every human enterprise requiring time, 
 from neighborhood gossiping to agri- 
 culture, has mixed up with it more or 
 less of hazard and contingency because 
 of our ignorance of the meteorological 
 future. Aquatic and subterranean 
 creatures are, of course, little affected 
 by the atmosphere. But the creatures 
 
30 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 that creep over the atmospheric bottom 
 and they that swim in its bosom — it is 
 not at all adequately realized how 
 much the inability to manufacture and 
 anticipate atmospheric moods affects 
 their happiness. 
 
 The management, or modification, 
 of the universe is the task of human 
 industry. It requires labor, expendi- 
 ture of energy, waste. The inanimate 
 universe upon which man acts and the 
 contrivances which he wields in his 
 activity are two of the elements of 
 industry. The third element is the 
 labor of human and other beings. Man 
 may contrive levers and domesticate 
 the wild tendencies of the inanimate, 
 but they must be watched and supple- 
 mented in order to effect desired modi- 
 fications. So long as clouds continue 
 to fall in nothing more nutritious than 
 rain, somebody must work. All change 
 of place caused by a living being, 
 whether it be a modification of the 
 inanimate universe, or self-movement 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRY 31 
 
 on the part of the being to modify his 
 relation to the inanimate, requires the 
 expenditure of energy by him who 
 causes the change. The expenditure 
 of energy by a Hving being is labor', 
 and labor among human beings is, for 
 the most part, an experience to be 
 avoided rather than sought. Labor is 
 not its own reward. If the universe, 
 failing to provide for us, had charged 
 us with tireless energies, had made 
 labor sweet and sought after, it would 
 have saved us the worry and bad 
 humor of many an industrial tangle. 
 But labor is not sought after. It is 
 shunned. It is a necessary evil. We 
 endure it as we endure bramble pricks. 
 It is the softest of two horns, not a rich 
 and fragrant couch sought for its in- 
 trinsic delights. We submit ourselves 
 to it simply because it is so much worse 
 to starve, and also because it is so 
 refreshing to stand on the heads of our 
 fellow-men to crow. 
 
 There has been, therefore, a ten- 
 
32 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 dency among living beings, especially 
 among human beings, and shared 
 pretty evenly by both sexes, to avoid, 
 as much as possible, this very disagree- 
 able but indispensable function. Labor 
 is pain, and, like all other pain, human 
 beings have struggled to escape it. 
 They have attempted escape in three 
 ways: by shirking, by machinery, and 
 by cooperation. 
 
 The human species is the most 
 formidable of the species inhabiting 
 the earth. It is the most ubiquitous, 
 the most clannish, and the most 
 strategic. The non-human species 
 have, on this account, many of them, 
 long been subject to the dominion of 
 the human. The horse, the ox, the 
 fowl, the sheep, the dog, and the camel 
 have from time immemorial been com- 
 pelled to undergo the most cruel 
 slaveries for the benefit of their tyrant 
 species. Man has not only compelled 
 these races to submit to terrible servi- 
 tudes, but he has subjected them to 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRY 33 
 
 the most unparalleled personal plun- 
 der, unhesitatingly advancing even to 
 extermination, whenever such exter- 
 mination would contribute to human 
 nutrition, human amusement, or human 
 whim. In fact, all the non-human 
 races have been presumed to possess 
 no raison d'ttre except to cater in one 
 way or another to the master species. 
 They have been slaves and scapegoats 
 upon whom human beings have shifted, 
 or have attempted to shift, all possible 
 hardship. 
 
 But the human species, as the domi- 
 nant species of the earth, has not ex- 
 hausted its inclination to shirk hardship 
 by enslaving and victimizing the non- 
 human. The more powerful races of 
 the human species have perpetrated 
 on the less powerful injustices anal- 
 ogous to those perpetrated by human 
 beings as a whole upon non-humans. 
 Human history is little more than the 
 conquest and rapine and enslavement 
 of one aggregate, national or social, by 
 
34 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHY 
 
 another. It has been a shamefully- 
 short time since all the religions and 
 philosophies of the Aryans proclaimed 
 the propriety of the enslavement of 
 black, red, and tan by the triumphant 
 and heartless white. These less power- 
 ful races were assumed to have been 
 brought into the universe without the 
 vaguest sort of equity in the enjoyment 
 of life, but solely as accessories of their 
 masters. 
 
 The more powerful classes of each 
 nationality and race continue the anal- 
 ogy of victimization. The weak are 
 always exploited by the strong, the 
 weak species by the strong species, the 
 weak nation or nationality by the 
 strong nation or nationality, and the 
 weak class or clique by the strong class 
 or clique. The highest human societies 
 of the earth are not exceptions. Master 
 and slave survive in the very capitals 
 of culture. Their relation among the 
 genteel contains more of subtlety and 
 finesse, but little less vigorous reality. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRY 35 
 
 Slavery is the compulsory subjection of 
 one being or set of beings to another, 
 the suppression or extermination of 
 one being or set of beings by another 
 to whom the one being or set is com- 
 pelled to act as means. And slavery in 
 this sense is found everywhere among 
 the most genteel aggregates of the 
 earth at this moment. The enact- 
 ments of human aggregates whereby 
 the most astute and avaricious are 
 allowed to monopolize the elements of 
 production, or the only two elements 
 capable of monopoly (the inanimate 
 earth and the machinery used to 
 modify it); the enactments creating 
 the possibility of inheritances whereby 
 monopolies may be enlarged from gen- 
 eration to generation; and the enact- 
 ments whereby monopolies may be 
 confederated into trusts for the effect- 
 ual suppression of rivalry — such enact- 
 ments, by actually shutting out masses 
 of human beings from the means of 
 production, establish slavery, more 
 
36 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 equivocally and adroitly, but not less 
 actually, than enactments permitting 
 direct and overt dominion. 
 
 Human beings arriving on the earth 
 without looms and reaping hooks in 
 their hands and without a right to the 
 soil that sustains them, finding all the 
 machinery claimed and the surface of 
 the planet preempted, can do one of 
 three things: they can rent themselves 
 to the owners of things; they can enter 
 the professions where lands and imple- 
 ments are not needed; or, if they have 
 the heroism and the genius, they can 
 steal. Not everybody can crowd into 
 the professions, and most men are too 
 clumsy or too conscientious to steal. 
 So the disinherited loan themselves to 
 the possessors of things, the landlords 
 and the capitalists, who allow to them 
 a rental for the use of their bodies. 
 The industrial system which allows the 
 unlimited appropriation of land and 
 inventions furnishes to the more power- 
 ful and avaricious classes of communi- 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRT 37 
 
 ties the means by which they compel 
 the rest to labor for them. And not 
 to call such deprivation slavery is to 
 neglect to use the word with its most 
 essential connotation. The human 
 beings who possess the dominion of 
 land and machinery and compel others, 
 in order to obtain the essentials of 
 existence, to serve them, are as truly 
 masters of slaves as they who exact 
 blood from the dorsals of their fellows 
 with literal slave whips. 
 
 All of these victimizations, the en- 
 slavement of species by species, of race 
 by race, and of class by class, are 
 aspects of one and the same funda- 
 mental fact. They are all exemplifica- 
 tions of the same principle — the prin- 
 ciple asserting the right to escape one's 
 part in the hardships of life — the doc- 
 trine that the weak are, and of right 
 ought to be, the means, and the strong 
 the ends — the doctrine that might 
 makes it right for some to burglarize 
 the lives of others of all that is pre- 
 
3,8 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 cious, and at the same time to add to 
 others' woes by the compulsory imposi- 
 tion of their own. 
 
 The second means by which hum.an 
 beings have sought to avoid and effec- 
 tualize labor is machinery, or inven- 
 tion. Inventions are portions of the 
 inanimate universe so modified or ad- 
 justed as to achieve ends which previ- 
 ously had been accomplished wholly 
 or partially by the limbs of living 
 beings. All kinds of contrivances are, 
 or were at one time, inventions, from 
 the simple stick with which the savage 
 stirs the soil, to the factory of civiliza- 
 tion. The virtue of all inventions is 
 that they lessen the necessity for labor. 
 A bicycle will enable one to change his 
 place five times as effectively as walk- 
 ing. A self-binding harvester and one 
 man will do as much work as five men 
 and a reaper. A reaper and five men 
 will do more work and do it better than 
 twenty men with cradles and rakes. 
 And the cradle was considered, when 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRY 39 
 
 it superseded the reaping hook, a won- 
 derful invention. A type-setting ma- 
 chine performs the same kind and 
 quantity of work as five men. A Hoe 
 printing-press will cut, print, fold, and 
 address 55,000 newspapers in an hour, 
 an achievement which two generations 
 ago would have required 300 men. A 
 modern match-making machine will 
 perform the entire process involved 
 in the manufacture of matches, from 
 sawing the timber out of which they 
 are made to counting and boxing them, 
 at the incredible rate of 6,000 or 7,000 
 a minute. It is impossible to estimate 
 and almost impossible to conceive to 
 what extent such contrivances as the 
 cotton gin, the mill, and the railroad 
 have added to the efficiency of human 
 labor. A single gin, which does not 
 need' to be whipped nor hunted with 
 blood-hounds, will gin the cotton of a 
 community of pla;ntations; and a few 
 girls and a factory will do more work 
 than an unequipped army. Think of 
 
40 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 an overland trip across this continent 
 fifty years ago! Six long months of 
 struggle! To-day a New Yorker may 
 seat himself in one of the great trans- 
 continental projectiles on Monday, and 
 on Friday pick oranges in the groves 
 of San Diego. Inventions such as the 
 mill and the engine, which utilize the 
 possibilities of air, water, and steam, 
 are fundamental inventions, and fur- 
 nish to mankind incalculable refresh- 
 ment, by securing for the modification 
 of the universe the service of tenden- 
 cies outside the bodies of human beings 
 themselves. 
 
 Inventions are a blessing. They 
 tame the wild tendencies of the inani- 
 mate and train them to do human bid- 
 ding. They save human bodies hard 
 and laborious exertions by becoming 
 their obsequious aids. But they are 
 not invariable and universal blessings. 
 The sad and peculiar conditions pre- 
 vailing in human industry cause inven- 
 tions to be to many human beings a 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRY 41 
 
 catastrophe and a dread. To those 
 who are able to own them and have 
 lands on which to operate them they 
 are blessings. But to the great disin- 
 herited class, who have nothing on 
 earth but their hands, inventions are 
 a disadvantage and an evil. Those 
 who have not land nor machinery must 
 subsist on that for which they can sell 
 the use of their bodies. Their pros- 
 perity consists in a large demand for 
 their services. Anything which tends 
 to dispense with and cheapen their 
 labor is an injury to them. This is 
 precisely the function of inventions. 
 Their very virtue lies in lessening the 
 necessity for labor. Take the type- 
 setting machine. Suppose this to be 
 introduced into a city containing 
 twenty-five hundred compositors. Five 
 hundred machines will do the service 
 previously done by the twenty-five 
 hundred men, and only five hundred 
 men are required to attend them. 
 Twenty hundred workmen are, there- 
 
42 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 fore, dispensable. And just such con- 
 ditions, conditions with Httle demand 
 for labor and a vast deal of it to 
 be had, tend to bp created every- 
 where by the enormous expansion and 
 perfection of machinery in all the 
 departments of industry. This ten- 
 dency is neutralized in some measure 
 by the additional labor required to 
 produce the machines, and by the 
 larger industry which inventions tend 
 to provoke. But after taking into 
 account everything, including the ad- 
 vantage to the laborer of cheapened 
 commodities, inventions are found to 
 be blessings to the possessors of things, 
 but to those deprived of everything 
 but limbs they are misfortunes. In- 
 ventions are the direct cause of the 
 immense wealth of civilized nations — 
 of its production, not of its congestion 
 — and they have been the most influ- 
 ential factor in recruiting the great 
 gaunt-eyed army of dispensables — the 
 unemployed, the half-employed and 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRT 43 
 
 the hardly employed — which is to-day 
 the most pathetic and tremendous fact 
 in the industrial problem. 
 
 The third means employed by human 
 beings to render the management of 
 the universe less arduous is coopera- 
 tion. By cooperation is meant the 
 division or distribution of the task of 
 managing the universe. No civilized 
 being produces independently that 
 which is necessary for the satisfaction 
 of his desires. Each produces, as a 
 rule, that which is, for the most part, 
 consumed by others, and each con- 
 sumes chiefly the products of others. 
 The carpenter can not feed upon his 
 architectural productions, nor the 
 lawyer on his briefs. The man who 
 raises cotton must have coffee, and 
 clothes, and opportunities for vanity, 
 and these are furnished to him in 
 return for his crops. A human being 
 may consume in a single day that 
 which necessitates the cooperation of 
 thousands of beings scattered over the 
 
44 BETTER -WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 zones — may consume silks from France 
 and Lombardy, olives from Spain, rugs 
 from the Levant, lumber from Ontario, 
 tea from China and Japan, coffee from 
 Rio, fruits from Florida and the Pacific; 
 spices from Ceylon, time-pieces from 
 Switzerland, brilliants from South 
 Africa, skins from Argentina, a,nd 
 metaphysics from Rhineland. Each 
 human being performs a function in 
 the processes of industry, and receives, 
 theoretically at least, a benefit in re- 
 turn. Each is an organ, or the cell of 
 an organ, in the great social organism. 
 Each produces that which he wills, and 
 sends his product forth into the circu- 
 lating fund of civilization, and each in 
 turn subtracts, or is supposed to sub- 
 tract, from this fund the elements 
 necessary to his maintenance. The 
 analogy between the physiological and 
 social organisms in their procedures is 
 incomplete, because industry is unor- 
 ganized and unconscious. The func- 
 tions performed by the cells and organs 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTRT 45 
 
 of a physiological organism are all 
 performed for the welfare of the entire 
 organism. They are bound together 
 by niceties of sympathy, and by the 
 most careful and equable correlations, 
 and they all conspire to the one end — 
 the general welfare. The social organ- 
 ism is rudimentary. Its functions are 
 uncoordinated and mob-like. Every- 
 where is friction and intrigue and 
 treason. Each organ or cell contem- 
 plates its own welfare, and stubbornly 
 maintains unconcern for the welfare of 
 others. It is cooperation heavy with 
 egoism, inequity, and unfraternity. 
 
 Cooperation has arisen, as have 
 shirking and machinery, because it is, 
 or is destined to be, in the line of least 
 resistance. Human beings achieve 
 ends more easily by cooperation than 
 by individual effort. Cooperation util- 
 izes the diversity of human talent, and 
 the diversity of the resources and 
 opportunities of the planet. Some 
 human beings are endowed eminently 
 
46 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 for functions of a certain character, 
 and others for other functions. And it 
 would be the absurdest sort of economy 
 for beings under such circumstances to 
 perform functions for which they are 
 indifferently fitted. Certain regions 
 of the earth, too, are adapted to cer- 
 tain styles of production, and it would 
 be the sagacity of simpletons for the 
 inhabitants of each region not to pro- 
 duce that for which each region is 
 especially adapted. Proficiency, too, 
 is developed, and time is economized, 
 by an arrangement permitting each 
 individual to continue uninterruptedly, 
 or for long periods of time, in the same 
 occupation. 
 
 The opportunity for exploitation 
 afforded by the divisions of labor is, 
 however, a grave offset to the advan- 
 tage of economy. The higher the 
 differentiation of function, the more 
 dependent and helpless does each part 
 become, and the ampler the opportunity 
 for conspiracy of one part against an- 
 
THE PROBLEM OF INDUSTIiT 47 
 
 Other, and against the. organism as a 
 whole. Such gigantic combinations, 
 plots, and exactions as characterize 
 industry to-day are possible only in a 
 system so specialized as to render each 
 part in the social order highly helpless. 
 The task of industry has become so 
 divided and sub-divided, and each 
 human being performs functions of 
 such universal significance, that the 
 industrial transgressions of a single 
 soul or set of souls sends the universe 
 awry. He who makes toothpicks, 
 since toothpicks are a necessity to the 
 world, may plunder the universe. 
 
 But it is a splendid spectacle, defec- 
 tive, and disorderly, and maudlin as it 
 is — the spectacle of the diversity and 
 correlation of human industries, the 
 spectacle of a human being's sitting 
 down three times daily to a repast in 
 whose preparation a majority of the 
 nations of the earth (whom he has re- 
 quited by quiet labor in his shop or 
 garden) have taken part, and the col- 
 
48 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 lection and elaboration of the materials 
 for which, if accomplished by the par- 
 taker alone, would have required, per- 
 haps, if he could have accomplished 
 them at all, a long lifetime. 
 
BLUNDERS 
 
 There have been, among others, two 
 great blunders made by human beings 
 in their efforts to manage and interpret 
 the universe. The first blunder has 
 been in considering the inanimate uni- 
 verse as whimsical, or lawless. The 
 lowest intelligences on the earth have 
 no suspicion of law, as law, in the oper- 
 ations of nature. They have not the 
 talent to contain the conception, if 
 they had the intelligence to suspect it. 
 Only the most mature individuals of 
 the most highly evolved human races 
 have any genuine and rational concep- 
 tion of the universe as a ilniverse of 
 law. Indiv^idual human beings in their 
 earlier years, and all human races in 
 infancy, look upon the universe about 
 them as a disjointed, chaotic something, 
 
 49 
 
50 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 — something without cause or law, some- 
 thing incessantly and altogether fan- 
 tastic. It is so original and wilderness- 
 like that the feeble minds of children 
 and savages are bewildered by its 
 phenomena. As mind grows more 
 adequate, and experience, individual 
 and racial, riper, uniformity is observed, 
 first in the more manifest and every- 
 day operations of nature, and later in 
 the more and more involved. It is the 
 more inaccessible phenomena, the dark 
 and fortressed regions where mystery 
 beds, that are the most tardily invaded 
 by analysis and law. The struggle of 
 the human mind to comprehend the 
 universe, including itself, as a universe 
 of law and reliability, is one of the 
 most pathetic spectacles in the whole 
 range of evolution. The panorama of 
 things is ' so complicated that the 
 minds of the unsophisticated are help- 
 less to discern in it more than the in- 
 coherent thaw of senseless elements. 
 Even the uniformity discerned by 
 
BLUNDERS 51 
 
 civilized young, by savages, and by 
 non-human minds is not an inevitable 
 uniformity. It is a uniformity which 
 may be terminated at any moment. 
 The sun (earth) rolls regularly round 
 the earth (sun), not, however, as a part 
 of an immutable program, but because 
 it somehow happens to do so. Every- 
 thing, even the apparently established, 
 is mutable and mystic. Water may 
 change its nature, the sun turn to blood, 
 and armies disintegrate at the passing 
 of a simple wand. There is no definite 
 and fixed amount of matter in the 
 universe, matter being continually 
 created and annihilated, and there is 
 no correlation among its tendencies. 
 I can remember well when I conceived 
 that things could be and were without 
 difficulty deprived of and endowed 
 with material existence, and that 
 tendencies came into existence and 
 perished without necessary cause or 
 consequence. It is this stage of intelli- 
 gence that revels in magic, wonders. 
 
52 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 miracles, and the like, and which con- 
 ceives cosmologies in which the universe 
 is supposed to have been created. A 
 cosmogony, such as that found in the 
 Genesis of Hebrew scriptures, origi- 
 nates very naturally in an age such as 
 the one in which these scriptures were 
 conceived, an age ignorant of the in- 
 destructibility of matter and the cor- 
 relation and equivalence of tendencies. 
 But it could not possibly originate 
 among the scientific world of the pres- 
 ent generation. 
 
 Necessary, or inevitable, uniformity 
 was first discovered in the rude and 
 formidable phenomena of the rocks 
 and rivers, the seas and seasons, the 
 earth as a whole, and the sun and 
 stars. The inorganic was the first to 
 come under the dominion of law, 
 because it is the least sophisticated 
 part of the universe. Nature is here 
 plain and straightforward. Long after 
 mind had ceased to believe in the 
 phlogiston of flame, the aureity of gold, 
 
BLUNDERS 53 
 
 and the mystic dissolution ot moun- 
 tains, it continued to account for tlie 
 phenomena of plants by a "vital 
 principle," and to endow animals (the 
 bigoted part of them at least) with an 
 animating subtlety called "soul." Even 
 to-day, by most civilized beings, and 
 even by those with sufficient appre- 
 ciation of chemistry and physics to 
 recognize law in the operations of the 
 inorganic and botanical worlds, ani- 
 mals, especially human animals, are 
 believed to be somehow above and in- 
 dependent of law. The flowing of 
 the rivers and the atmospheres is ex- 
 plained in terms of the radiant and 
 gravitant tendencies, and the circula- 
 tion of sap in the haw and mulberry, 
 and its transformation into foliage and 
 fruit, are perceived to be explicable by 
 the known laws of chemistry and cap- 
 illary physics ; but the processes of 
 human organisms, these neophytes 
 take advantage of the slothfulness of 
 physiology and neurology to avow. 
 
54 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 are maintained by a tutelary "Ego." 
 The fantastic manner in which minds 
 of various intelHgence and idiosyn- 
 crasy recognize law in one or another 
 department of phenomena, and help- 
 lessly deny it to others, will be con- 
 sidered by the more highly conscious 
 ages of the future as one of the most 
 ridiculous and pitiable facts of intel- 
 lectual evolution. 
 
 But the universe, we may rest 
 assured, is all alike, the intricate and 
 the simple. It is all a universe of law, 
 from the daisy to the star and from 
 the diatom to the philosopher, from 
 the flowing rivers and growing fields 
 to the processes of our own brains. 
 There is a definite arnount of matter 
 and tendency in the universe and it is 
 incapable of undergoing either sub- 
 traction or addition. Not any particle 
 of matter nor any tendency has ever 
 been known to have been created or 
 annihilated, and it is eminently prob- 
 able there never will be. Matter 
 
BL UNDERS 55 
 
 changes its form and nature. It has 
 not the power to perish. Tendencies 
 lapse into other tendencies, but no 
 tendency perishes without giving rise 
 to correlative tendencies. Everywhere 
 there is change, nowhere absolute 
 genesis or absolute death. The uni- 
 verse is a stupendous skein of concat- 
 enations, so far as we can make out, 
 without beginning or end — a vast im- 
 perturbable mechanism, which acts in 
 the most startling but immutable 
 uniformities. Every cause is the effect 
 of some other cause and every effect 
 is the cause of some other effect. 
 Caprice is a hallucination. There is 
 no caprice, only ignorance. Mystery 
 is mental clumsiness. Identical con- 
 sequents follow with inexorable cer- 
 tainty identical antecedents. Law is 
 everywhere — as veritably in voluntary 
 as in involuntary nature. The leaf of 
 the forest does not flutter more in- 
 evitably than the human heart. The 
 great sea heaves in obedience to the 
 
56 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 same laws as the bosom of sorrow. The 
 migration of planets is not more im- 
 mutable than the migration of birds 
 and empires. Stars, oceans, species, 
 storms, leaves, emotions, societies, 
 water-drops — all are correlated and all 
 act by inexorable cause and conse- 
 quence. 
 
 The failure to apprehend this fact 
 has been a great disadvantage to those 
 intelligences who have been disposed 
 to manipulate and foreknow things. 
 They neglected to study the universe 
 in the first place, because they looked 
 upon it as unreliable and its study as 
 useless. They were unable, too, to 
 anticipate its behavior, for in the degree 
 in which they believed it lawless they 
 believed its future problematic. The 
 only possible way by which we can 
 know or conjecture .the future is by a 
 knowledge of the past. And the only 
 manner in which we can conjecture the 
 future by the past is on the supposi- 
 tion that the universe is true to itself 
 
BLUNDERS 57 
 
 and will repeat itself, that the causes 
 operating to-day will in future produce 
 effects similar to the known effects 
 produced by like causes in the past. 
 And if things just happen, and are as 
 liable to happen one way as another, 
 if the past, present and future are not 
 bound together by chains of unbroken 
 causation, then the past can have no 
 interest save as a rank and tumultuous 
 tale, and we would as well erase our 
 recollections, tear up our histories, and 
 establish desolation in the wake of the 
 universe. The universe, with its sys- 
 tems, suns, satellites, oceans, conti- 
 nents, empires, institutions, and emo- 
 tions, is evolving, and in its forms and 
 inflections is changing from moment to 
 moment ; but its great, fundamental 
 modes of motion are the same to-day 
 as yesterday, and will be the same for- 
 ever. And it is only by the observation 
 of its modes of behavior in the pan- 
 orama of past and present events, 
 and in the artificially produced phe- 
 
58 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 nomena of experimentation, and by a 
 careful classification of these events, 
 that intelligences are at all able to 
 foresee the future. 
 
 History, therefore — the study of the 
 processes which lead up to and are 
 the ancestors of present events — is of 
 the utmost possible interest and value. 
 It imparts longitude, or time con- 
 sciousness, to the mind, and furnishes 
 indispensable data for the sciences. 
 It is history that makes astronomy 
 possible, with its marvelous illumi- 
 nations, and physics and biology and 
 sociology and politics. When I say 
 history, I mean history rationalized, 
 not the nonsense of to-day. History 
 to-day is a product of the conception 
 of the universe as lawless, and, for the 
 most part, it is about as precious as 
 rubbish. It was never intended to be 
 of any use to any one, except as re- 
 freshment for gossips ; and it never 
 can be, so long as it takes cognizance 
 of the phenomena it does. What pos- 
 
BL UNDERS 59 
 
 sible utility is there in the information 
 that some particular idiot succeeded 
 some other idiot to the throne of 
 somewhere, after a great deal of in- 
 trigue and impropriety on the part of 
 both, and in spite of the protests of 
 idiot number one. Or that on a 
 certain day in sixteen hundred and 
 something, somewhere on the frontiers 
 of Tuscany, so many thousands of 
 enraged bipeds met and so many 
 hundreds were put to death and a 
 great many more were the next thing 
 to it, in a fierce international duel 
 which lasted all day. History is just 
 becoming rational, just beginning to 
 ascertain its function and to compre- 
 hend its rightful domain. History — 
 not that fragment we now call history, 
 but the record and contemplation of 
 the evolution of things — the history 
 of social conditions and tendencies, 
 of theories and experiments, of laws 
 and institutions, in times gone by — 
 that wider history which narrates 
 
6o BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 events antedating human memory and 
 consciousness — the history of the long 
 processes in the evolution of life on the 
 planet — history which tells of the 
 mighty, unseen cataclysms which took 
 place in the fiery eons of the earth's 
 babyhood — the biography of planets 
 and systems and of the peoples and 
 institutions that have evolved upon 
 them — this is history in its future, 
 rational and universal sense. And it 
 is this history, data-furnisher for the 
 social, physical, and biological sciences, 
 that has been excluded from the 
 minds of men by the dogma that the 
 universe is a universe of caprice. 
 
 The second blunder human beings 
 have made in their attitude toward the 
 inanimate universe is the considering 
 it and dealing with it as if it were 
 animate. Non-human animals, and the 
 very lowest human animals, have no 
 cosmic curiosity, and hence no cosmic 
 theories. Their consciousness is par- 
 ticular and their problems local. They 
 
BLUNDERS 6£ 
 
 encounter the natural tendencies about 
 them in a half-dazed, somnambulistic 
 sort of way, guided very largely and 
 very inadequately by the accumulated 
 experience of their ancestors. But a 
 vast majority of the human beings that 
 have lived upon the earth, and per- 
 haps the most of those now inhabiting 
 it, consider the inanimate imiverse to 
 be in one way or another animate, or 
 personal. Just when or how in the 
 evolution of intelligence on this globe 
 this delusion came into mind it is im- 
 possible to say with certainty. Whether 
 it originated in the minds of those 
 simple beings who, far away in the 
 past, occupied the hiatus now existing 
 between the anthropoid forms and the 
 lowest existing varieties of men, when 
 these beings were the most highly 
 developed forms of life and intelligence 
 on the earth, or whether it originated 
 later on in a stage of evolution cor- 
 responding to the simpler minded races 
 of existing humans, we know not. Nor 
 
62 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 do -wfe know by what processes of judg- 
 ment the first intelligences that attrib- 
 uted inanimate phenomena to per- 
 sonalities did so. The frail minded 
 creatures, in looking out upon the 
 movements of the atmospheres, and 
 the waters, and the cavalcade of celes- 
 tial bodies, with nothing whatever to 
 guide them, might very naturally have 
 imputed to these bodies consciousnesses 
 similar to those which accompanied 
 many of their own movements. I 
 suspect they did. They might, again, 
 have acquired the conclusion thru the 
 strange delusion of dreams and the 
 deduced delusion of ghosts, as Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer so plausibly contends. 
 However this may have been, it is very 
 certain that the panorama of events 
 about them was to very early intelli- 
 gences, as it is to all savages to-day, 
 the manifestation 'of innumerable per- 
 sonalities dwelling behind appearances 
 and controlling the course of things. 
 In the hands , of these personalities 
 
BL UNDBRS 63 
 
 human weal and human woe, and the 
 weal and woe of all other beings, were 
 supposed to rest. The bounteousness 
 and abortion of crops, the outcome 
 of disease, the success and failure of 
 expeditions, storms, eclipses, cataclysms 
 — all the varied fortunes and misfor- 
 tunes of creatures were supposed to be 
 celestial dispensations. When fortune 
 favored, when there was success in the 
 chase or in war, these personalities 
 were believed to be genial and inter- 
 ested. Disasters were attributed to 
 divine indigestion, absent-mindedness, 
 or a fit of the sulks. 
 
 These personalities were all anthro- 
 pomorphic, and of course partook of 
 the weaknesses and carnalities of their 
 creators. They were fond of sweet- 
 meats and fine array, drank wine, and 
 were especially susceptible to flattery. 
 It was by playing upon these weak- 
 nesses of their masters that men sup- 
 posed themselves able to ward off mis- 
 fortunes and to gain unintended favors. 
 
64 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHY 
 
 Drinks, dresses, provisions, and praise 
 were, therefore, regularly offered as 
 means for currying divine favor. And 
 in times of catastrophe, real or sus- 
 pected, and on occasions of special 
 success, as evidence of appreciation, 
 these offerings were enhanced. Costly 
 incense was burned, and its dainty 
 aromas daily rose to royal nostrils. 
 Animals, both human and non-human, 
 were massacred by millions; for the 
 gods, like their devotees, were not 
 vegetarian. Flattery, affection, appeals 
 to pity, and even brow-beating were 
 powerful supplements to the more 
 sensuous forms of influence. Prayer 
 was, supposed to accomplish thru the 
 reason what tidbits accomplished thru 
 the digestion. 
 
 To-day, in the provinces of the earth 
 most strongly suspected of being in- 
 tellectual, the more material means of 
 currying divine favor have been aban- 
 doned. The deities of civilized men 
 and women are not supposed to eat 
 
BLUNDERS 65 
 
 and drink and desire full dress. They 
 are attenuated folk, too spirituelle and 
 fine-spun for anything more material 
 than long-winded reminders of their 
 importance. Obsequiousness, appeals 
 to vanity, petitions, self-abnegation, 
 and zeal in furthering the terrestrial 
 enterprises of the gods are the recog- 
 nized means of placation in our day 
 and bailiwick. 
 
 So far as the rationality of the con- 
 ception is concerned, it makes no differ- 
 ence whether the universe is conceived 
 to be dominated by one personality or 
 two, by an oligarchy of personalities or 
 by innumerable personalities. All such 
 conceptions rest on the same kind of 
 insecurity. The primitive conceptions 
 are animistic, and all the innumerable 
 forms found among the more evolved 
 races of the earth to-day are differ- 
 entiations from this original proto- 
 plasmic type. There are concatena- 
 tions of evolving gods, and the 
 saints, seraphs, devils, and deities 
 
6() BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 of civilized folk are the evolved and 
 educated posterity of the spirits of 
 the fastnesses and the ghosts and 
 witches of the night wind. The evolu- 
 lution from animism to polytheism, and 
 from polytheism to monotheism, par- 
 allels rudely the evolution of the gen- 
 eralizing talent of the human mind. 
 The age of animism, when every indi- 
 vidual rock, glen, and event has its own 
 spirit or personality, is the period of 
 particularization in the human intel- 
 lect. As the generalizing power de- 
 velops, phenomena are grouped, and 
 instead of conceiving a personality for 
 each object or event, each class has a 
 single superintendent who dominates 
 the phenomena of his particular de- 
 partment. There are superintendents 
 of the sea, fire, war, wine, agriculture, 
 love — gods of the ingleside, gods of 
 the storm, good gods, bad gods, sylvan 
 gods, and so on. This is polytheism. 
 And polytheism, as mind grows more 
 conscious and cosmic, is superseded by 
 
BL UNDERS 67 
 
 a single supreme executive, assisted by 
 the subordinates whom he has evolu- 
 tionally outstripped. The conception 
 of the universe as a self-sufificient and 
 self-destined mechanism is the sequent 
 of monotheism. 
 
 The means by which placation is at- 
 tempted, too, is not rendered rational 
 or useful by procedure. That which is 
 intrinsically meaningless can not be 
 made significant by strategy. Whether 
 placation is attempted by libations, mis- 
 sionary contributions, faith, or provi- 
 sions, and whether the consequences 
 hoped for are immediate or post-mor- 
 tem, matters not. It is the same use- 
 less and impertinent transaction. The 
 senseless ceremonial of the poor black 
 children in the sunless jungles of the 
 Zambesi is just as justifiable and just 
 as profitable and divine as the high- 
 wrought ritualism of pompous priests. 
 The supplications sent into the atmos- 
 phere from this municipality are more 
 elaborate and fin-de-siecle, but not more 
 
68 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 useful, than the unembellished palaver 
 of the savage to his fetich. 
 
 Ethics is the science of the relation 
 of living beings to each other. It at- 
 tempts to find harmony and propriety 
 in these relations, and it is a most legiti- 
 mate and important science. But re- 
 ligion, it matters not how highly evolved 
 or how entangled with morality, is 
 erroneous. It is erroneous because it 
 is an attempt to manage and placate 
 the inanimate universe on the assump- 
 tion that the inanimate is personal and 
 voluntary , whereas it is involuntary and 
 acts absolutely and only by material 
 tendency, or by what is usually called 
 traction. Let me illustrate what I 
 mean: If I wished to incite a human 
 being, or any other part of the universe 
 endowed with volition, to a certain 
 kind of conduct, I would offer to that 
 being food or raiment or beverage or 
 advice or castigation or emolument or 
 some other something which would 
 satisfy, or defeat the satisfaction of, 
 
BL UNDERS 69 
 
 some of that being's desires — something 
 that would act as a motive. The char- 
 acter of the motive offered I should 
 determine from the character of the 
 individual and the character of the con- 
 duct I desired to cause. But if I were 
 dealing with a part of the universe un- 
 endowed with volition, I should pro- 
 ceed in a manner altogether different 
 from that in which I should proceed 
 were I dealing with a man. Suppose I 
 wished to remove an obstacle, as a 
 bowlder or a river: motives would be 
 useless. I might offer food and costly 
 presents and advice; I might pray and 
 have faith the size of the most robust 
 of mustard seeds; I might offer any 
 possible or conceivable m.otive to what- 
 ever spirit or deity I fancied had to do 
 with these things — but the bowlder 
 would lie there as indifferent to my 
 efforts as Gibraltar to the breezes, and 
 the river would flow on as if I did not 
 exist. But if by the use of a lever I 
 neutralize the tendency of gravity and 
 
yo BETTER-WORLD PHlLOSOPHr 
 
 offer to the bowlder a horizontal or 
 vertical tendency greater than that of 
 gravity, I accomplish my end. A dam 
 by offering opposition, or a new chan- 
 nel by offering easier access to the sea, 
 would accomplish like results with the 
 river. And so it is universally. No 
 amount of motive can influence the 
 impersonal universe, nor the personal 
 universe in its involuntary phenomena, 
 in the least infinitesimal degree. It is 
 modified by, and only by, material ten- 
 dencies. And all efforts put forth for 
 its management and placation, aside 
 from the genuine and the scientific, are 
 superfluous and silly. 
 
 The universe is accountable for itself, 
 both for its existence and for its modes 
 of action. It is here, useless and ridicu- 
 lous as it may seem, and it has probably 
 always been somewhere. The belief 
 that it was produced in an inconceiv- 
 able antiquity, out of nothing whatever, 
 by an architect with nothing to work 
 with but intangible fiats, is pitiable. It 
 
BLUNDERS 7 1 
 
 never could have been created, and It 
 can not be destroyed. It never has 
 been persuaded and it never can be in- 
 fluenced in its involuntary phenomena 
 by anything but material tendency. It 
 contains within itself all the potentiali- 
 ties of its phenomena. A tree falls in 
 the forest because the gravitating ten- 
 dency is more energetic than the affini- 
 ties of its fibers, not because possessed 
 by some rogue of a spirit. A drought 
 or a deluge is the result of the unstudied 
 conspiracy of natural tendencies, and 
 takes place or does not take place quite 
 regardless of the moral status of the 
 affected community. A plague is not 
 an onslaught of divine petulance to be 
 stayed by lamentations and piety. It 
 is a microbe, which can be circumvented 
 only by assiduous devotions to the lava- 
 tory. The planets are kept in their 
 ellipses and restrained from tangential 
 waywardness, not by angelic govern- 
 esses, as Kepler believed, but by .the 
 tendencies of their own nature. 
 
72 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 The universe of things in the midst 
 of which we discover ourselves, is to be 
 managed and placated, in so far as it is 
 to be managed and placated at all, by 
 the observation and classification of its 
 phenomena, by the ascertainment of its 
 habits, and by ingenious and business- 
 like manipulations of its tendencies, 
 and in no other way. 
 
THE SOCIAL PROBLEM 
 
 On the planet Earth one problem 
 rises incessantly before every being. 
 Whether it is the monad moping about 
 in the sea-slime, the miser conning his 
 accumulations, the wild bird incubating 
 her brood, the firefly kindling its twi- 
 light torch, or the lawyer lying about 
 his client, the problem is the same. 
 There is no other problem; for all other 
 problems are fractions or inflections of 
 this one. It is the problem involved 
 in the relation of each individual to the 
 rest of the universe. Every living 
 creature is a constituent of a universe 
 of things every part and particle of 
 which is by the most relentless affini- 
 ties related to and dependent upon 
 every other part. There is no such 
 thing anywhere as isolation, absolute 
 
 73 
 
74 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 detachment. Everything is a compo- 
 nent part of a stupendous integer. 
 Every living creature is an activity of 
 certain possibilities of emotion subsist- 
 ing amidst a universe of activities more 
 or less inscrutable to him, a universe 
 hopelessly inconsiderate and to which 
 he is chained inexorably. How to be- 
 have so as to achieve for ' himself his 
 choice of emotions is to everything 
 that breathes the problem which in- 
 cludes and consumes all others. 
 
 It has been called a problem of adap- 
 tation. There is a subjective and there 
 is an objective, a self and a not-self. 
 And between this self and the not-self 
 there is incessant irrelation. That 
 which is not-self is a process, always 
 changing. It never tires of adopting 
 new attitudes toward the self. The self 
 also is a process, and hence is continu- 
 ally losing joint, or is in continual dan- 
 ger of losing joint, with its environment. 
 Life, therefore, at best, since in the 
 nature of things it is a struggle and a 
 
TttE SOCIAL PROBLEM 75 
 
 search, is an enterprise with exasper- 
 ating lack of sunshine. If the rest of 
 cosmos were a conspiracy intriguing 
 for the maintenance and entertainment 
 of the sentient creatures it has brought 
 into existence, it would seem to be an 
 arrangement more creditable and more 
 worthy of an all-wise and amicably dis- 
 posed inventor. But it is not. It be- 
 haves very largely as if uninformed of 
 our existence. It hurries on in its un- 
 concern as if absorbed in the accom- 
 plishment of some immense end of its 
 own, leaving us to provide for ourselves 
 or perish. With this inexorable and 
 immense mechanism we are doomed 
 to associate. It is not within living 
 power to escape. We depend upon it 
 for everything — for our fortunes and 
 for our afflictions — for A*-e are a part of 
 it. We coax from it comforts as best 
 we can, and strive, tho vainly, to escape 
 its indifference. Our endeavor, there- 
 fore, is adjustment, the getting our- 
 selves en rapport with this immensity 
 
76 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 of matters in the midst of which we 
 poison nostrilfuls. 
 
 Now, if there were only one being in 
 the universe, or if the beings in the 
 universe were few and far enough be- 
 tween to be independent of each other, 
 that which has already been considered 
 would be all of the problem of life. In 
 such a case, a living being would, in 
 solving the problem of life, need, in the 
 first place, to study the physical and 
 mechanical sciences in order to be able, 
 by the classification of involuntary phe- 
 nomena and the ascertainment of in- 
 animate habit, to control the tendencies 
 about him; ,and, secondly, he should 
 contemplate himself and analyze him- 
 self, in order to apply his energies to 
 the ingenious and businesslike satis- 
 faction of his desires. But one being 
 is not alone in the universe, nor any- 
 thing like it. What creatures there 
 may be on other spheres, we know not. 
 The noiseless sapphires that cavalcade 
 the midnight firmament may be, for all 
 
THE SOCIAL PROBLEM 77 
 
 we know, loaded with wretches like 
 ourselves, or they may be sepulchres 
 which coffin the ashes of races that 
 wailed and wondered and went out 
 ages upon ages ago. We know not. 
 But on our own little clod, which we 
 arrogant grubs have amplified to a star 
 of the first magnitude, we know there 
 are billions of beings, all striving for 
 similar ends, all actuated by desires of 
 one kind or another which they are en- 
 deavoring with all the spirit and saga- 
 city of their natures to satisfy. Va- 
 rieties, races, and species supplement 
 and overlap each other everywhere 
 to such an extent, and they are so 
 lavishly jumbled together, that there 
 are universal clash of interest, univer- 
 sal ruthlessness and universal inter- 
 concern. What relation these inextri- 
 cably mixed and pretty thoroughly 
 bewildered children should sustain to 
 each other, while they struggle with 
 the problem of the inanimate, is, there- 
 fore, the second aspect of the problem 
 
78 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 of life, the aspect out of which arise 
 the ethical and societary problems, fan- 
 cies, and philosophies. 
 
 The plurality and gregariousness of 
 life in the universe immensely com- 
 plicate the already difficult problem of 
 life. The problem of life socialized is 
 still the problem of the relation of each ■ 
 individual of the universe to the rest 
 of the universe, but the problem is 
 peculiarized by the fact that conscious 
 individuals sustain to each other re- 
 lations altogether different from those 
 sustained to the impersonal universe. 
 The inanimate universe is related to 
 the animate as means to end. We 
 conscious individuals manipulate it in 
 manners best adapted to the satisfac- 
 tion of our desires. We barricade 
 its rivers, plow its seas, ingulf its 
 vegetations, enslave its atmospheres, 
 torture its soils, and perform upon it 
 any other surgery or enormity that 
 will help us .in the satisfaction of these 
 driving desires of ours. The inanimate 
 
THE SOCIAL PROBLEM 79 
 
 is, if reason is not treason, the gigantic 
 accessory of the consciousnesses that 
 infest it. The animate environment, 
 on the contrary, is related to each 
 living being, not as means, but as end. 
 The animate universe is composed of 
 personalities, and to these personalities, 
 possessing as they do the gift of 
 emotion, each conscious individual 
 sustains relations which we call ethical. 
 .Each being is an integer in the stupen- 
 dous scheme of consciousness. To 
 maintain their integrities they are all 
 striving with all the energy and intel- 
 ligence of their natures. In the main- 
 tenance each of his integrity, he can 
 not regardlessly injure or destroy the 
 integrities of others. There must be 
 forbearance and reciprocity. All are 
 ends as each is an end. Each living 
 being of the universe, therefore, sus- 
 tains to every other living being the 
 relation of possible right and wrong, 
 but to the insentient universe no such 
 relation exists. Right is that relation 
 
8o BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 which is conducive to happiness, or 
 welfare, or complete living, or what- 
 ever synonym is preferred. Wrong is 
 that which conduces to the opposite 
 of happiness — misery, ill-fare, mal- 
 adaptation. It is wrong for one being 
 to assault a fellow, because such con- 
 duct diminishes the fellow's happiness. 
 To the shivering and empty it is right 
 to give clothes and food, because 
 clothes and food further the ends of 
 the shivering and empty. It is some- 
 times well to administer misery to a 
 malefactor, because the punishment, 
 as an example, deters, and thus con- 
 duces to ultimate welfare. The exter- 
 mination of criminal races, races whose 
 natures menace the welfare of the 
 world, may be justifiable, tho the 
 necessity is always sad, because with- 
 out such extermination greater tragedy 
 would befall the universe than the 
 tragedy of their extermination. Why 
 is truth beautiful and falsehood repul- 
 sive? Because falsehood causes vex- 
 
THE SOCIAL PROBLEM Si 
 
 ation and truth brings certainty and 
 repose. Imagine a lie converted, and 
 it sometimes is, so as to bring peace 
 and happiness in its train, as does 
 benevolence, and a lie will become a 
 virtue. Imagine benevolence pro- 
 ducing misery, as does a lie, and it 
 sometimes does, and benevolence will 
 become a crime. Falsehood, slander, 
 burglary, murder, drunkenness, assault, 
 are all ostracized, and benevolence, 
 chastity, heroism, justice, kindness, 
 cleanliness, are approved as good, 
 because they are respectively the 
 enemies and promoters of well-being 
 in the universe. All conscious beings 
 are struggling, struggling to keep 
 themselves in joint with their environ- 
 ment. Those things and creatures 
 and events that aid them in their 
 struggles are desirable and they call 
 them good, and those things and crea- 
 tures and events that oppose and 
 defeat the satisfaction of desires are 
 called bad. Right and wrong exist as 
 
82 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHY 
 
 conceptions of mind, because there are 
 portions of the universe capable of 
 happiness and misery. Erase sentiency 
 from the universe and you erase 
 the possibility of ethics. Every con- 
 scious portion of the universe, there- 
 fore, has ethical relations to every 
 other conscious portion (man, woman, 
 worm, Eskimo, oyster, ox), but not to 
 inanimate portions (clod, cabbage, 
 'river, rose), because the ones are 
 sentient and the others are not. 
 
 The plurality of life has further 
 complicated the problem of life by 
 cultivating into existence a new set of 
 very perplexing desires seeking satis- 
 faction — the social desires or instincts. 
 Desires demanding for their satisfac- 
 tion food, raiment, shelter, lands, ma- 
 chinery, etc., are desires which have 
 developed out of the comradeship of 
 the inanimate. Their existence and 
 satisfaction are not contingent on 
 associated life. Desires, on the other 
 hand, such as the desire for sympathy. 
 
THE SOCIAL PROBLEM 83 
 
 the desire to do duty and philanthropy, 
 the desire to avoid extinction, the 
 desire for beauty and art, the desire .to 
 reproduce and its derivatives, and the 
 desire to be superior, which is the 
 fundamental of such a multitude, the 
 desire for games and other competi- 
 tions, the desire for fame, character, 
 and opportunity for vanity, and the 
 desire for social, political, and pecuniary 
 preferment — all these desires have 
 been evolved by the association of 
 human and other beings with each 
 other, and can not be satisfied by the 
 inanimate. They can be satisfied by 
 and only by the companionship and 
 cooperation of beings themselves. It 
 would not satisfy a human being long- 
 ing for sympathy to be presented with 
 granaries of farinacea, acceptable as 
 these things might be in the satisfac- 
 tion of other desires. The desire for 
 fame and applause can be satisfied by 
 the plaudits, or the expectation of the 
 plaudits, of glowing masses of human 
 
84 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 beings, and in no other way. The 
 philanthropic impulse, the impulse for 
 causing happiness and well-being in 
 others, could never be satisfied save by 
 the smiles of gladness kindled by love 
 in the gloomy countenances of pain. 
 The boisterous exultation of the vic- 
 torious cock! How impossible for this 
 ecstasy-clap to be caused by a whole 
 harvest of eatables! The desire to 
 adore and be adored, that passion of 
 the romantic soul, can be satisfied, not 
 by crowns and materialities, but by the 
 loving and undying devotion of a wor- 
 shiping true-heart. 
 
 ^he problem of the relation of living 
 beings to each other is a tremendous, 
 almost terrible, problem. It involves in 
 its solution such an arrangement of the 
 consciousnesses as will permit, as much 
 as possible, of both material and social 
 satisfaction. It involves, furthermore, 
 the task of possible desire-culture, that 
 is, the possibility of such a cultivation 
 of desire as will enable the universe to 
 
THE SOCIAL PROBLEM 85 
 
 realize in th.eir satisfaction a more 
 formidable total. 
 
 In solving great cosmic problems 
 like this, the tendency of the human 
 mind is to go to what is called " nature" 
 for a conception, and to adopt this or 
 some modification of it as the solution. 
 This has been a very prevalent prac- 
 tice in past human proceedings. 
 Whenever some malformation or mal- 
 relation, which has come down from 
 past ages, has been assailed by the 
 evolving sense of propriety, it has 
 been deemed an adequate defense to 
 remind would-be innovators that such 
 relations always have existed, are God- 
 ordained, and hence always will and 
 always should exist. Now, it may be 
 that we can, in our study of the social 
 problem, obtain suggestions from the 
 sociological and biological fields of 
 "nature." There is no reason why we 
 should not, nor, on the other hand, any 
 particular reason why we should. If 
 discrimination ia used, and information 
 
86 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHr 
 
 from this source is not accepted with- 
 out question, it is perfectly proper, and 
 may be profitable, to contemplate the 
 relations of living beings to each other 
 during the ages of unconscious evolu- 
 tion. But it should be remembered 
 that the inforniation derived from 
 "nature" is just as liable to be valu- 
 able in teaching how not to do things 
 as in teaching how to do them, if not a 
 little more so. There is nothing in- 
 fallible about the universe except the 
 infallible certainty of its laws. Its laws 
 are unalterable, but they may be be- 
 nignant or they may not be, and they 
 may be wise or very otherwise. One 
 of the strangest delusions that ever 
 encysted itself in the human mind is 
 the childlike supposition that the uni- 
 verse, outside of ourselves, never did 
 do anything and never can do anything 
 unwise or unworthy. It is a delusion 
 without any foundation whatever; and 
 the fact that it clings to the mind in 
 spite of the most positive evidence 
 
TI-IB SOCIAL PROBLEM 87' 
 
 tending to dislodge it, shows how help- 
 less the mind is when once hypnotized 
 by an assumption. We, you, reader, 
 and I, are parts of nature, and are as 
 liable to deserve the suspicion of in- 
 fallibility as any other part. Why not? 
 We represent the boldest and most 
 elaborate evolutions. Why should we 
 be the authors of the most disreputable 
 phenomena? The tradition that the 
 universe was originally constructed and 
 has ever since been, and is to-day, 
 guided by the cerebral processes of an 
 all-wise brain, is responsible for it all. 
 Blinded by this inheritance, human 
 beings condone the most palpable de- 
 fects in the economies of the universe 
 — limitations which, it is not violent to 
 say, if possessed by a fellow human 
 being, would be characterized as those 
 of an imbecile. Disease is contagious, 
 and death an unavoidable necessity. 
 , Pleasure is often exhausting, and life is 
 everywhere interpolated with pain. 
 Droughts, darknesses, floods, pesti- 
 
88 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 lences, storms, and scourges harrow the 
 earth from one pole of it to the other. 
 The earth is, and always has been, 
 peopled by deformities — creatures so 
 defective in their natures that they 
 visit upon each other without hesitancy 
 crimes and barbarities of the most horri- 
 ble hue. These wretches are compelled 
 to pass their lives in the midst of a uni- 
 verse so mysterious and mighty that 
 the most arrogant of us are helpless in 
 the crash and melee of its tendencies. 
 Yet human contemplators look out 
 over this dark and contentious chaos 
 and declare it to be without spot or 
 blemish. Imperfections which they 
 can not by any possible torture induce 
 to support their all-wise hypothesis 
 they complacently assure us would do 
 so enthusiastically in a wider generali- , 
 zation, easily overlooking the fact that 
 rational judgment can not transcend 
 knowledge, and the very additional 
 fact that universal knowledge might 
 reverse our judgments of the good, and 
 
THE SOCIAL PROBLEM 89 
 
 might convert the universe, instead of 
 into a universe of goods, into a universe 
 of evils. 
 
 The universe, so far as we can make 
 out, is neither all wise nor all foolish. 
 It is both good and bad. It maintains 
 some of the most careful economies 
 side by side with the most reckless. 
 The defects of the universe are just as 
 apparent to him who is not cowardly 
 or incompetent as are its excellencies. 
 It is the rogue and the ignoramus who 
 argue in justification of existing bar- 
 barisms that these barbarisms are 
 beautiful because they represent the 
 procedures of " nature." As a matter 
 of fact, all ways are nature's ways, the 
 unconscious and clumsy as truly as the 
 intelligent and exquisite. The philoso- 
 phers of laissez /aire, who would have 
 human beings disuse what little intelli- 
 gence has, during the past twenty mil- 
 lions of years, been developed on the 
 earth, and would have them derive 
 their ethics from the regidns of biolog- 
 
90 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 ical somnambulism, are the philoso- 
 phers to be heeded when humanity- 
 goes mad. It is childish to assume 
 that we upper intelligences can not im- 
 prove on the unconscious conditions 
 about us. It is the very thing that is 
 being done every hour of time. The 
 whole effort of industry is nothing else 
 than an effort to improve the attitudes 
 of the material universe. And it is 
 just as sagacious to suppose that living 
 beings are incompetent to improve 
 their relations to the inanimate uni- 
 verse as to suppose they may not reform 
 and enhance their relations to each 
 other. 
 
 The relations of living beings to each 
 other observed among the races (espe- 
 cially the unconscious races) of the 
 earth to-day, or as contemplated in the 
 paleontologies of past evolutions, are 
 not such, I assert, as to appeal with 
 anything like eloquence to the ideal of 
 any unbiased mind. I will assert fur- 
 ther, that the principle that has oper- 
 
THE SOCIAL PROBLEM 91 
 
 ated in the development of life on this 
 planet, the natural selection principle, 
 and the relations prevalently estab- 
 lished among living beings by the ne- 
 cessities of this principle, are irrational 
 and barbarous — that the moral prog- 
 ress thus far made by civilized beings 
 here on the earth has been made in 
 spite of, and in opposition to, this prin- 
 ciple — and finally, that the great task 
 of reforming and regenerating the uni- 
 verse and of establishing right relations 
 among its inhabitants consists in the 
 elimination of those tendencies im- 
 planted in the natures of living beings 
 by the struggle and survival principle. 
 
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM 
 
 In the nature of living beings there 
 are two elements — that element which 
 impels a living creature to move in 
 behalf or in the interests of itself, 
 and that which prompts or prevents 
 movement out of consideration for 
 others. The former of these two ele- 
 ments is called egoism, the latter, 
 altruism. 
 
 When one animal burrows a hole into 
 the earth or builds a house on the sur- 
 face of the earth, and enhances it into 
 a home, and goes out and gathers the 
 products of plants and carries them to 
 its home and dines upon them, it per- 
 forms acts of pure egoism. The acts 
 are performed wholly for itself and 
 altogether oblivious of others. It would 
 not act otherwise were it alone in the 
 92 
 
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM 93 
 
 universe. Animals, solitary in their 
 nature, and the pioneers of human civ- 
 ilization who dwell far away on the 
 lone frontiers, live lives more or less of 
 this character. When one animal goes 
 out from its home and pillages the 
 granaries of another, and perhaps cap- 
 tures the other animal and drags it to 
 its home and feeds upon its carcass, it, 
 also, performs acts of egoism; but of a 
 more positive character. Its acts are 
 performed, not simply in the interests 
 of itself, but with active and injurious 
 disregard for the interests of its neigh- 
 bor. The conduct of carnivora, human 
 and non-human, toward their herbivo- 
 rous neighbors illustrates this type of 
 egoism. When one animal living in 
 the midst of plenty goes out and plun- 
 ders the granaries of its neighbor or of 
 its neighbor's family, just for pastime, 
 it performs acts of extremest egoism. 
 The acts are, in the first place, in the 
 interests of no organic need of the ani- 
 mal performing them, and they are, in 
 
94 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 the second place, in deadly disregard 
 of the interests of its fellows. The 
 only utility is the tickling of an artifi- 
 cial and absurd instinct of animal num- 
 ber one. The acts of human sportsmen, 
 who slaughter other beings for pastime, 
 and the acts of those immense klepto- 
 maniacs of human industry, who, ac- 
 cording to established forms or in spite 
 of them, acquire possession of the 
 products of others' industry, not be- 
 cause they need, but in obedience to a 
 blind insanity for acquisition, are acts 
 of this type of egoism. 
 
 These three types of conduct may 
 be taken as types of all possible egoism. 
 In the first instance, the animal acts for 
 itself and oblivious of others ; in the 
 second instance, it acts for self with 
 active unconcern for others ; and in 
 the third instance, it acts with violent 
 disregard for the lives and welfares of 
 others, in obedience to a maniacal and 
 superfluous instinct. 
 
 Corresponding to these three types 
 
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM 95 
 
 of egoism, there are three types of 
 altruism. When one animal in abun- 
 dance shares its abundance with another 
 in need, it is an act of the simplest 
 altruism. It is no deprivation to the 
 one and a benefit to the other. Had 
 the rich man refused to allow Lazarus 
 the crumbs that fell from his banquet 
 table, he would have neglected to do 
 this simplest act of altruism. When 
 one animal having no more than 
 enough for itself shares its store with 
 its needy neighbors, it is an act of 
 intenser altruism. It acts with partial 
 disregard for itself and with real con- 
 cern for others. When human poor, 
 who have not enough or who have just 
 enough to live upon, contri-bute to char- 
 itable and philanthropic enterprises, 
 they perform acts of this class of 
 altruism. This does not apply to the 
 contributions, however dramatic, of 
 millionaires, for there is no self- 
 denial. The intensest altruism is ex- 
 hibited when one animal yields all it 
 
g6 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 has of life or of possessions for others. 
 This is an act wholly regardless of 
 self and altogether regardful of others. 
 When a mother bird or a woman gives 
 up her life in some terrible emergency 
 in order that by so doing her children 
 may live, she performs an act of the 
 intensest possible altruism. 
 
 The acts of living beings are, as a 
 rule, neither all altruism nor all egoism. 
 They consist generally of blends of the 
 two elements, with a preponderance 
 of egoism. It is frequently impossible, 
 too, to estimate just the amount of 
 each element in a given act. An act 
 which may seem altruistic may be in 
 reality only sly and far-sighted egoism. 
 A human being may establish a 
 museum or a university, ostensibly out 
 of a desire to deepen and elaborate 
 the cerebral convolutions of his fellow 
 creatures, but really because he dreads 
 oblivion. We may do good to our 
 enemies, not because we would singe 
 their scalps with metaphorical coals, 
 
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM 97 
 
 but because we fear them. I have seen 
 souls keep silent or preach strange 
 gospels, because they were "called" to 
 do it, they said, when there was no 
 opportunity to doubt that it was all in 
 the interests of their larder. There 
 are, however, genuine acts of altruism 
 as well as unalloyed deeds of egoism. 
 Observe the difference in the character 
 of their acts and the difference in their 
 essential natures between the herbivora 
 and the carnivora, the philanthropist 
 and the miser, the human mother and 
 the ghoul. 
 
 In a certain sense all altruism is 
 only egoism, for no animal ever acts 
 voluntarily, that is, moves its body in 
 company with its will, except with an 
 intention to satisfy some desire within 
 its own being. An individual who 
 spends his life in philanthropy, or 
 perishes for heresy, does so, if' he does 
 so at all, because he desires to do it. 
 He prefers to do, under the circum- 
 stances, whatever he does do. The 
 
98 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 difference in individuals is not in that 
 some act according to their own 
 inclinations and others do not. No 
 creature can by any possible ruse escape 
 from its own nature. The will is 
 always the composite of the impulses, 
 and every being acts always and 
 absolutely in the interests of its own 
 desires. The difference in individuals, 
 and it is great, consists in the different 
 class or character of their desires. A 
 mind must be tolerably rudimentary 
 which supposes that there is no in- 
 trinsic difference between that egoism 
 called egoism, which drives an individ- 
 ual to act for himself regardless of 
 others, and that egoism, called altru- 
 ism, which impels acts in behalf of 
 others and in violence to self. There 
 is no greater difference between Janu- 
 ary and June. 
 
 Where did these two elements in our 
 nature, egoism and altruism, come 
 from? Why have human beings and 
 all other beings known to terrestrial 
 
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM 99 
 
 intelligence these two elements, just 
 as they are, in 'their natures? Why 
 have they not all egoism or all altru- 
 ism? Why have not the beings in the 
 universe a tendency to act each for its 
 own individual self without any par- 
 ticle of regard for others? Or why are 
 they not so natured as to be oblivious 
 of self and conscious only of those 
 around them? These are profound 
 questions and questions of superlative 
 importance to the student of social 
 culture. What the social scientist is 
 attempting to do, or should be attempt- 
 ing to do, is to ameliorate the relation 
 of associated beings, and this is to be 
 accomplished by improving the con- 
 duct or modifying the modes of motion 
 of these beings. And it is necessary 
 in order to modify these modes of 
 motion to know where and how these 
 modes of motion have been acquired. 
 It is impossible for a physician to pre- 
 scribe rationally to a pathology whose 
 causation he does not know. 
 
lOO BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 The problem of the origin of altruism 
 and egoism is a problem associated 
 with the problem of the origin of good 
 and evil in the world. Goods and evils 
 are the names of two diverse kinds of 
 movements or things affecting living 
 beings. Goods are those movements 
 or things which affect living beings 
 pleasantly or advantageously, and evils 
 produce pain or disadvantage. Good 
 and evil may emanate from the inani- 
 mate universe, and consist in those 
 blessings and misfortunes coming upon 
 living beings from their inanimate 
 environments, or they may originate 
 in living beings themselves, and consist 
 in those kindnesses and crimes living 
 beings visit upon each other. Now, 
 the good originating in living beings, 
 the virtues and the graces of life, is 
 altruistic in its nature, and the evil, the 
 crimes and improprieties, is egoistic. 
 Good is popularly synonymous with 
 altruism, because the altruistic is the 
 neglected element, the element need- 
 
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM loi 
 
 ing emphasis and cultivation. The 
 problem of the origin of egoism and 
 altruism, therefore, is the problem of 
 the origin of that part of good and 
 evil originating among living beings. 
 
 The theological cosmology, which 
 looks upon the phenomena of the uni- 
 verse as being caused specifically, or in 
 a general way, by personality, sustains 
 the theory that the good and bad 
 phenomena in the movements of living 
 beings, like the beneficent and un- 
 beneficent phenomena of the inanimate, 
 are due to two diverse classes of per- 
 sonalities. Among the simpler minded 
 races good and bad spirits are sup- 
 posed to take possession of individuals, 
 dethrone their personalities, and com- 
 pel conduct in accordance with the 
 natures of the usurpers. By exorcism 
 these spirits are cast out and compelled 
 to move about from one habitat to 
 another. Among the more mature 
 races these two classes of spirits are 
 evolved into two individual personali- 
 
102 bs:ttbr-world philosophy 
 
 ties, opposite in character, and rivals, 
 who interfere in one way or another 
 with the destinies of individuals and 
 nations. And such expressions as 
 " full of the old Nick," " work of the 
 devil," "divine help and guidance," 
 "strength and inspiration from above," 
 " providential interference," and the 
 like, heard daily everywhere, indicate 
 that demonology lives, not alone in far 
 away ages and half-awake provinces of 
 the earth, but in the here and now. 
 
 Demonology in all its aspects is a 
 delusion. No being was ever "pos- 
 sessed" in any degree by any demon 
 or other personality other than his 
 own. All the diabolism manifest in the 
 movements of any being is his own or 
 that of his ancestors, and no divinity 
 ever glitters from the soul of any crea- 
 ture save that which is intrinsic. And 
 there is no difference in the believabil- 
 ity of the more primitive conception 
 and the more educated. It is just as 
 reasonable to suppose that some pecu- 
 
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM 103 
 
 liar old woman is the irresponsible 
 emissary of a witch as to believe that 
 the skeptical suspicions of a Christian 
 are the inarticulate whisperings of the 
 devil. The literal casting out of evil 
 spirits and their actual entrance into 
 startled swine herds are no more absurd 
 to a mind unaccustomed to supernatural 
 vagary than the modern religious 
 occultism in which the natures of beings 
 are supposed to be revolutionized by 
 the intangible activities of an extremely 
 sublimated ghost. Witchcraft, sorcery, 
 demoniacal possessions, theurgy, and 
 the like, are the untutored progenitors 
 of the superstitions of civilized peoples, 
 that the conduct of human beings, 
 individually and collectively, is inter- 
 fered with, more or less seriously, by 
 prevailing deities. 
 
 Mr. Kidd, an Englishman, has writ- 
 ten a book on "Social Evolution," 
 which has had a rather wide and sen- 
 sational sale. The author of this book, 
 while allowing to the egoistic element 
 
I04 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 In the nature of living beings (in the 
 nature rather of hitman beings, for he 
 is too clannish and too rudimentary an 
 animal to consider any other than his 
 own species in his philosophy) — while 
 allowing a perfectly natural and 
 rational origin to the egoistic element 
 of our natures, conceiving it to have 
 been evolved here on the earth, he 
 considers altruism an ultra-mundane 
 product, which has been surreptitiously 
 injected into our natures by some 
 meddler beyond our atmosphere. The 
 author of this book is rational just to 
 the extent of one-half. And this is 
 why his book has received such 
 immense consideration. If he had 
 been as rational in his explanation of 
 the origin of altruism as he was in his 
 account of egoism, his volume would 
 not have gone beyond his bailiwick. 
 He played to the theological galleries, 
 whether intentionally or inadvertently, 
 and the amazing attention the book 
 has received has been due, rather than 
 
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM 105 
 
 to any intrinsic usefulness, to the 
 enthusiasm with which a drowning 
 philosophy utilizes a straw. 
 
 The egoism of our natures is not 
 more mundane than is the altruism. 
 Both were born beneath the same blue 
 that to-day bends above them. Both 
 are the products of evolutional pro- 
 cesses which have gone on and are still 
 going on here on this planet. It is just 
 as sagacious to suppose that the bones 
 and bowels of living beings have re- 
 sulted from natural biological pro- 
 cesses, while the brain and its phenom- 
 ena are the result of supernatural 
 agencies, as to suppose that the egoism 
 of our natures is mundane and the 
 altruism celestial. Not only our dis- 
 positions and our bodies, with all their 
 charms and infirmities, but every pos- 
 sible thing apprehended or conceived 
 by mind is the result of evolution. All 
 the languages, laws, governments, re- 
 ligions, and industries, of animals ; 
 plants, with all their styles of stem, 
 
ig6 BETTER-WORLD PHlLOSORHT 
 
 fruit, and foliage ; the mannerisms of 
 molecules and atoms ; all the peculiari- 
 ties of oceans, continents, and atmos- 
 pheres ; the idiosyncrasies of comets, 
 systems, and abysses ; all are the result 
 of tendencies that have intermeddled 
 from eternity. 
 
 The nature of any creature, that is, 
 the tendencies with which it comes into 
 the world, as will be more fully shown 
 in the chapter on " The Derivation of 
 the Natures of Living Beings," is the 
 result of its environment, or the envi- 
 ronment of its species, up to date. 
 The egoistic and altruistic elements in 
 human nature are, therefore, the accu- 
 mulated results of the experience of 
 the hominine species in its phyletic 
 pilgrimage from the unicellular forms 
 to the present. This pilgrimage has 
 been long and sanguinary. There are 
 on the earth to-day several hundreds of 
 thousands of species of animals; and 
 It is estimated that three times as many 
 species have perished from the earth 
 
£G0ISM AND ALTRUISM 107 
 
 as to-day live upon it. It has, there- 
 fore, required millions of species of 
 beings (perhaps two or three millions) 
 to come into existence and struggle, in 
 order that the zoological process might 
 attain its present status. Nature is 
 more fecund than provident. More life 
 is brought into existence than can pos- 
 sibly continue to exist. Struggle for 
 existence and survival of the fittest 
 result. The defective and the indif- 
 ferent are eliminated and the strong 
 and the active-natured survive. It has 
 been in this simple, horrible manner 
 that men, after unknown generations 
 and infinite misery, have been made 
 out of monads. Egoism is simply that 
 trait of character which has been fit- 
 test in the great battle of life. Those 
 individuals who have been intensely ' 
 devoted to themselves have survived 
 and perpetuated themselves genera- 
 tion after generation, while the indif- 
 ferent have gone down. 
 
 All beings, therefore, that have come 
 
lo8 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 up thru Struggle and continue in strug- 
 gle have an intense desire to emerge 
 from the ample end of the horn, simply 
 because those of their ancestors who 
 preferred the little end of the horn or 
 were indifferent about it, perished with- 
 out progeny. If there had been during 
 the process of life evolution a scarcity 
 of individuals instead of a redundance; 
 if it had been best for the individual 
 and necessary to the life process that 
 each should accept an interest in his 
 fellows, and those individuals who did 
 this most assiduously from generation 
 to generation had survived and propa- 
 gated, then there would have been 
 developed beings radically different in 
 disposition from those on the earth to- 
 day — beings to whom it would have 
 been as natural to act in the interests 
 of others as it is for actual beings to 
 act in the interest of themselves — be- 
 ings whose most prominent propensi- 
 ties would have been altruistic and 
 whose noblest and most difficult virtue 
 
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM 109 
 
 would have been selfishness — beings 
 needing moral injunctions like these: 
 " Love yourself as you love your neigh- 
 bor," " It is more blessed to receive 
 than to give," and " Do not do to your- 
 self that which others do not like 
 when done to them." 
 
 Altruism has grown up in the nature 
 of living beings in more ways than 
 one. The most genuine altruism in 
 the universe is that seen in the regard 
 of the parent for its offspring. This 
 altruism extends with greater or less 
 sincerity thruout the biological series. 
 The offspring of all animals are com- 
 paratively helpless, and it has been 
 very prevalently necessary to protect 
 them from tribulations. This protec- 
 tive function, altho among some ani- 
 mals it is performed by the male, has 
 been developed chiefly in the maternal 
 parent, the mother being, in the ungre- 
 garious races in which this instinct had 
 its genesis, the only one present at and 
 participating in the birth act. Those 
 
no BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 mothers, therefore, who have been in- 
 terested in their infants, and those in 
 whom this instinct has been strongest, 
 have been continually the ones who 
 have successfully left offspring. The 
 fact that this mother instinct sustains 
 such vital relation to the destinies of 
 the life process itself explains the fact 
 that it is so unfailing and so nearly 
 universal. 
 
 It is, as has been said, the most gen- 
 uine altruism in the universe, mothers, 
 both human and non-human, not infre- 
 quently manifesting for their children 
 a higher regard than they do for them- 
 selves. Mother bears have been known 
 to allow themselves to be murdered in 
 order, if possible, to save the babies 
 by their side. Mother birds wail with 
 apprehension when there is even a 
 suspicion that their little ones are in 
 danger. Mother mice manifest, for 
 the safety of their endangered dar- 
 lings, all the anxiety and ingenuity of 
 human parents. Every human child 
 
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM III 
 
 knows that there is no one in the wide 
 universe who loves him like his own 
 mother, no one who will stand by him 
 when all others have forsaken him, no 
 one who shares his joys and his sor- 
 rows so sincerely, no one who is so 
 ready to forget his ingratitude and so 
 willing to forgive, as that being who 
 went down in pain to give him breath. 
 Mother love is one of the beautiful 
 things of earth. But, like other beau- 
 tiful things on this melancholy sphere, 
 it is not eternal. From its very nature 
 it is destined to grow feebler as life 
 grows more fraternal. Already in the 
 most social communities, where the 
 conditions of life are more hospitable, 
 where parental disregard is balanced 
 by the solicitude of the community, 
 and waifs and foundlings are cared for 
 by the State, the maternal instinct is 
 more or less anachronistic. Like the 
 instinct for hunting and fishing, and 
 the nomadic instinct of civilized life, 
 like the instinct which impels peaceful 
 
112 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 and industrial peoples to flavor all 
 their games and pastimes with strug- 
 gle, and like that cock-like instinct 
 called ambition (the instinct to get on 
 the heads of our fellow-men to crow), 
 the maternal instinct continues by the 
 inertia acquired in ages when it was 
 more nearly indispensable to the life 
 process. 
 
 Excepting reproduction, the very 
 earliest altruism, that which appears 
 lowest in the scale of being and hence 
 was probably the first to appear upon 
 the earth, is seen in those simple co- 
 operative colonies of unicellular forms 
 clinging to the rocks of the sea bottom. 
 These colonies are the prophecies and 
 precursors of that sublimest of all 
 altruism, the multicellular animal. For 
 it must be remembered that you, 
 reader, and I are aggregates of unicel- 
 lular forms, which in the morning of 
 life were separate and independent 
 organisms sprawling about without any 
 definite ambitions among the sea 
 
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM 1 13 
 
 depths, but which, in order better to 
 meet the emergencies of their environ- 
 ment, huddled themselves into colo- 
 nies, grew closer and closer together, 
 and as wholes more and more differ- 
 entiated and integrated, until finally, 
 as a sequel of the whole matter, we 
 have to-day that which you and I see, 
 whatever it is, when we look in a 
 mirror. 
 
 Those forms of altruism, like patriot- 
 ism and other similar feelings of 
 fraternity existing among the members 
 of tribes, races, clans, and classes, but 
 not extending beyond the class or 
 tribe, originated, like egoism, in war. 
 Unlike egoism, however, which has 
 been developed by struggle among 
 individuals, this aspect of altruism has 
 been the result of struggle among 
 aggregates of individuals. It has grown 
 out of the cooperation of individuals 
 in tribes and classes against their co- 
 operating enemies. It springs from 
 sameness of interest. The highest 
 
114 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 interests of individuals were found in 
 the welfare of the aggregate, for it was 
 thru the aggregate only that the indi- 
 vidual was able to maintain himself. 
 Individuals learned to help each other 
 and to stand by each other against 
 their common enemies, because it was 
 the only way in which they could stand. 
 Those tribes and nations and races 
 that have had strongest this feeling of 
 fraternity have survived, ,while the less 
 fraternal have gone down. 
 
 Industrial altruism, seen in the divi- 
 sion of labor and other forms of co- 
 operation arising out of the great task 
 of subjugating the inanimate universe, 
 is analogous in its essence and origin 
 to that cooperation against enemies 
 engendered in ages of militancy. 
 
 Out of these forms of altruism, if 
 they are altruism, which prompt indi- 
 viduals to help each other because they 
 thereby serve themselves and to give 
 gifts out of a desire to receive gifts in 
 return, has grown, thru sympathy, that 
 
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM 1 15 
 
 more positive and difficult altruism 
 called benevolence. That feeling 
 which prompts service in return for 
 service, or in return for expected 
 service, is very akin to that which 
 prompts service without expectations. 
 Sympathy is consciousness of kind. 
 It is the putting of one's self in the 
 place of another, the projection of 
 one's own personality into the periph- 
 ery of another and sharing or simu- 
 lating by nieans of the imagination the 
 emotions of that other. Sympathy is 
 the lily of the imagination. It is the 
 weeping with those who weep and the 
 rejoicing with those who are glad. It 
 is found only in animals of superfine 
 sensibilities and peculiar enlighten- 
 ment. It is more or less involuntary, 
 and, like all altruism, has its egoistic 
 aspect. A being so constructed as to 
 be uneasy and unhappy in the presence 
 of misery and joyous in the presence 
 of joy seeks to terminate the one and 
 perpetuate the other out of consider- 
 
Il6 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHY 
 
 ation for his own feelings. The in- 
 convenience of relieving his fellows in 
 distress is less than the discomfort to 
 himself of their continued distress. 
 
 Sympathy, consciousness of kind, 
 means simply the realization or the 
 conscious recognition by living beings 
 of the kinship of content. A human 
 being unconscious of kind, an un- 
 sympathetic and inhuman person, is 
 one who is likely to assume that his 
 conscious states are sui generis, that 
 they are more precious and intense 
 than, and intrinsically different from, 
 those of others — one who realizes that 
 an injured sensory is a savage thing in 
 his own organism, but who does not 
 suppose it to be anything of the kind 
 when it hangs to the brain of a Hotten- 
 tot or a horse. Why do the human 
 rich treat the human poor with such 
 inconsideration? Why do they allow 
 or compel them to remain disinherited 
 and crushed while they themselves loll 
 in superfluous wealth? Because there 
 
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM 117 
 
 is inadequate consciousness of kind. 
 Opulent employers look upon their 
 employes as a set of fibrous wretches 
 without manhood or aspiration. They 
 have no real realization that those 
 poor, hard-working fellows have the 
 same kind of emotions — the same love 
 for their wives, the same solicitude for 
 their children, and the same feelings in 
 disdain — as they themselves. When 
 a dozen dogs get after a little harm- 
 less hare, why do the whole human 
 family applaud the dogs? Simply 
 because the human family do not put 
 themselves in the place of the hare. 
 There is no sympathy, no conscious- 
 ness of kind, no realization that the 
 emotions experienced by that valiant 
 little creature struggling to avoid the 
 mouths of those instinct-maddened 
 dogs are similar to the emotions they 
 themselves would experience in an 
 identical predicament. 
 
 There is a kinship of all beings, for 
 the life process has sprung from one 
 
Ii8 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHY 
 
 source and evolved according to one 
 fundamental principle. Consciousness 
 of kind, therefore, the ability to partici- 
 pate in the psychic states of others, is 
 cultivated by a knowledge of the 
 nature and content of those around us, 
 and anything which tends to increase 
 or complete our knowledge of others, 
 as identity of language, association, or 
 ambition, tends to intensify conscious- 
 ness of kind, and whatever limits or 
 prevents knowledge of others tends to 
 cause us to consider them of a differ- 
 ent order or kind from ourselves. 
 Foreigners are and have been in all 
 ages looked upon as a different and as 
 a far less considerable order of beings; 
 because foreigners are strangers-, curi- 
 ous in form, custom, and address, and 
 unable to speak the language of the 
 land to which they are alien. The 
 Romans, Greeks, Jews, and others con- 
 sidered all who did not belong to their 
 particular swarm as barbarians, fit 
 chiefly for slavery and contempt; and 
 
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM 119 
 
 the most depraved tribe in the least 
 luminous regions of the earth to-day 
 pity the rest of mankind, and believe 
 with all the energy of their rude con- 
 sciousnesses that they are the noblest 
 and most important people in the uni- 
 verse. Why are non-human beings 
 ostracized and treated by humans with 
 no consideration save as they admin- 
 ister to selfish human ends? Whence 
 the doctrine that non-human species 
 were made for the hominine species, 
 and that there is no logic or sanity in 
 their existence save as they feed or 
 slave for their human tyrants? Be- 
 cause they are dumb, that is, because 
 their language is not understood by 
 human minds, and because they are 
 wild, that is, because they are for the 
 most part unassociated with human 
 animals, and because the civilized con- 
 sciousness, which is barely able to 
 realize the kinship of human beings, is 
 yet too feeble and rudimentary to 
 comprehend the solidarity of all beings. 
 
120 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHr 
 
 Inconsideration by human beings to- 
 ward the rest of sentients is an aspect 
 of that vast unconsciousness which 
 taught that blacks were made for 
 whites, females for males, and "bar- 
 barians " for Romans. 
 
 Longitudinal or serial altruism, that 
 is, altruism toward the generations in 
 future time, arises, like lateral or space 
 altruism, thru sympathy, that is, thru 
 the imagination. The living sustain a 
 vital relation to the unborn. Every 
 one who recognizes and shows any 
 regard for this relation, and there are 
 very few who do, does so by putting 
 himself in the place of the unborn 
 billions, and by anticipation sharing 
 their welfare and ill-fare. 
 
 The evolution of consciousness, in 
 its ethical import, means the extension 
 in both space and time of the con- 
 sciousness of similarity. Starting from 
 individual egoism, consciousness has 
 extended, vividly or vaguely, from in- 
 dividual self to family, and from family 
 
EGOISM AND ALTRUISM 1 21 
 
 to clan, and from clan to tribe, and 
 from tribe to nation, and from nation 
 to race, and from race to species, and 
 from species to kingdom. This ampli- 
 fication has gone on and is still going 
 on in both space and time. Universal 
 consciousness of similarity contemplates 
 all the beings in space and all those to be 
 in time. 
 
THE PREPONDERANCE OF 
 EGOISM 
 
 The sad and unmistakable thing one 
 observes in looking out over the uni- 
 verse of conscious existence is the pre- 
 ponderance of egoism, the intense and 
 almost maniacal regard with which be- 
 ings, as a rule, act in behalf of them- 
 selves, and the lukewarm consideration, 
 on the whole, allowed to others. This 
 fact needs little argumentation. Hu- 
 man beings need simply to analyze 
 their own consciousnesses, and to ob- 
 serve the conduct of the conscious- 
 nesses about them, to be overwhelmed 
 with its evidence. All species of ani- 
 mals, from the octopus punctatus, which 
 sometimes includes in its terrible em- 
 braces protesting humans, to the author 
 of the Synthetic Philosophy, whose re- 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF EGOISM 123 
 
 morseless cosmology befits him to feed 
 on heifer and fish, exemplify this fright- 
 ful fact. Among individuals of the 
 same aggregate there is consideration 
 for each other, but between different 
 cliques and species there is the most 
 violent inamity. All over the non- 
 human world, with few exceptions, 
 each being seeks the satisfaction of his 
 own desires, if not with positive disre- 
 gard for the happiness and misery of 
 the rest of the universe, at least with 
 sincere unconcern. There is no cour- 
 tesy; sympathy, or amenity there — a 
 cold, heartless, implacable world of 
 strangers. The chief activities of be- 
 ings, both human and non-human, are 
 put forth, directly or indirectly, for the 
 purpose of procuring food. The sup- 
 pression, entire or partial, of one being 
 by another for nutritive purposes is, 
 therefore, the form of the most frequent 
 and excessive egoism. The lowly forms 
 of life — the worms, echinoderms, mol- 
 lusks, and the like; — are, for the most 
 
124 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 part, vegetarians. So, also, are preva- 
 lently the insects, birds, rodents, and 
 ungulates. These creatures are not, as 
 a rule, aggressively harmful to each 
 other, chiefly indifferent. But upon 
 these inoffensive races feed with re- 
 morseless maw the reptilia, the insec- 
 tivora, and the carnivora. These 
 being-eaters cause to the earth-world 
 its bloodiest experiences. It is their 
 nature (established organically by long 
 selection, or, as in the case of man, ac- 
 quired tentatively) to subsist, not on 
 the kingdom of the plant, the natural 
 and primal storehouse of animal en- 
 ergy, but on the skeletons and sensi- 
 bilities of their neighbors and friends. 
 The serpent dines on the sparrow and 
 the sparrow ingulfs the gnat; the tiger 
 slays the jungle-fowl and the coyote 
 plunders the lamb; the seal subsists on 
 fish and the ursus marii-imus subsists 
 on seal; the ant enslaves the aphidae 
 and man eats and enslaves what can 
 not get away from him. Life riots on 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF EGOISM 125 
 
 life — tooth and talon, beak and paw. 
 It is a sickening contemplation, but life 
 everywhere, in its aspect of activity, is 
 largely made up of the struggle by one 
 being against another for existence — 
 of the effort by one being to circum- 
 vent, subjugate, or destroy another, 
 and of the counter effort to reciprocate 
 or escape. 
 
 The human species, because it is 
 more powerful and more conceited 
 than any other, is the most egoistic tow- 
 ard other species of all the species 
 that live. The gorilla, that formidable 
 and noble ancestor of man who wan- 
 ders with his family thru the sylvan 
 silences of his native continent feeding 
 on the fruits that fall from the arms of 
 the forest, is gastronomically a much 
 more exemplary individual than his 
 struttish and more strategic descendant. 
 Human beings have been sufficiently 
 clever and sufficiently devoted to each 
 other to evolve into the masters of the 
 earth; but, instead of converting them- 
 
126 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 selves into preceptors for the conquered 
 races, they have become the butchers 
 of the universe. Instead of becoming 
 the models and school-masters of the 
 world in which they have outstripped, 
 and striving to repair the clumsy natures 
 and regulate the straying feet of those 
 by means of whom they have been 
 lifted into distinction, they have become 
 colossal pedants and assassins, pro- 
 claiming themselves the pets and gods 
 of creation, and teaching each other 
 that other races are mere fixtures to 
 furnish food and amusement for them- 
 selves. They inculcate as a rule of 
 conduct, and they preach it valiantly, 
 that each should act upon others as he 
 himself would wish to be acted upon. 
 This ideal of social rectitude has been 
 taught by the sages of the species for 
 more than two thousand years. But 
 with miserable pusillanimity they con- 
 fine its application to the members of 
 their own species. No non-human is 
 too innocent or too interesting or too 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF EGOISM 127 
 
 wonderful to escape the most frightful 
 humiliations, if by those humiliations 
 human comfort or human amusement 
 or human whim is in any way whatever 
 garnished. Look at the horse ! No 
 nobler or more beautiful creature is 
 found in all the animal realm. A mar- 
 vel of strength, speed, and splendor ! 
 The most useful and consummate asso- 
 ciate of man! What wonderful possi- 
 bilities of reciprocity! Man takes the 
 horse from the plains where he is ex- 
 posed to the inclemencies of weather, 
 the contingencies of food, and the 
 blunders of his own childlike nature. 
 He gives him regular meals, pleasant 
 shelter, intellectual surroundings, and 
 a home. The horse in return gives 
 man the benefit of his superior strength 
 and speed, bearing man and his bur- 
 dens, and supplementing in a thousand 
 ways the inadequate energies of his 
 mentor. These are the possibilities, 
 the ideal — gigantic strength supple- 
 menting superior wisdom. Beautiful 
 
128 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 reciprocity! What are the actualities? 
 Sad indeed. The horse is not an asso- 
 ciate, but a slave. He has no rights, 
 and is seldom suspected of being enti- 
 tled to feelings or vanities at all. He 
 is treated as if he had merely existence 
 and usefulness. He is neglected, over- 
 burdened and overworked, beaten, 
 insulted, starved, maimed, misunder- 
 stood, deprived of leisure and liberty, 
 unconsidered, doomed to an environ- 
 ment out of which has been drained 
 every element calculated to promote 
 his happiness and intelligence and per- 
 petuate his nobility and beauty. He is 
 a mere suggestion of the might-have- 
 been. The regal neck is wilted, the 
 splendid flanks are lean and drawn, the 
 ambitious face is sad. The proud gal- 
 loper of the plains, the companion of 
 the winds, bearing fire in his nostrils 
 and thunder in his hoofs, has become a 
 soured, impoverished, broken-hearted 
 but faithful wreck. The stars of heaven 
 never looked down on a more pitiful 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF EGOISM 129 
 
 sight than that of a horse, after having 
 drudged faithfully all his days in the 
 service of his lord, cast out in his help- 
 less old age to wander and perish. 
 
 Our own happiness and that of our 
 species are believed to be so much 
 more important than that of others, 
 that we sacrifice without scruple the 
 most sacred interests of others in order 
 that our own may be fastidiously 
 trimmed. Even for a tooth or a 
 feather to wear on our vanity, marau- 
 ders are sent thru the forests of the 
 earth to ravage and depopulate them. 
 Beautiful beings which fill the woods 
 with song and beauty are compelled to 
 sprawl, lifeless and disheveled, on the 
 skulls of unconscionable sillies. Crimi- 
 nal and inconvenient races are exter- 
 minated with eager and superfluous 
 violence. Thousands of innocent and 
 helpless souls are caught up and carried 
 by unfeeling emissaries into foul dun- 
 geons, and there doomed by ghoulish 
 clowns of science to the most protracted, 
 
130 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 useless, and damning victimizations. 
 Millions of the most sensitive and 
 lovely organisms, all palpitating with 
 life and full of nerves, are hourly- 
 assassinated, flayed, and haggled, and 
 their twitching fragments hauled away 
 to be ungracefully interred in the 
 stomachic sepulchers of men and 
 women who have the insolence to 
 murmur intimacies to him who in 
 mountain thunders said, " Thou shalt 
 not kill!" The very energy with 
 which men preach peace, justice, and 
 mercy is obtained by stripping the 
 bones and tearing out the vitals of 
 their fellow-beings. Holy days, days 
 above all others when it seems men's 
 minds would be bent on compassion, 
 are farces of gluttony and ferocity. 
 Unfeeling ruffians cowardly shoot down 
 defenceless birds, or prowl the country 
 in rival squads, massacring every liv- 
 ing creature that is not able to escape 
 them, and for no higher or humaner 
 purpose than just to see who can kill the 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF EGOISM 131 
 
 most/ This is egoism unparalleled on 
 the face of the earth. No species of 
 animal except man plunges to such 
 depths of atrocity. It is bad enough, 
 in all conscience, for one being to sup- 
 press another in order to tear it to 
 pieces and swallow it; but when such 
 outrages are perpetrated by organized 
 packs, just for pastime, it becomes an 
 enormity beyond characterization. The 
 insectivora, the carnivora, and the rep- 
 tilia are cruel. It is fearful to con- 
 template the enormous wickedness 
 perpetrated on the less offensive races 
 by these relentless brutes. But the 
 egoism of the hominine species toward 
 the other species is the most cruel and 
 extravagant in the universe. Non- 
 human murderers are ruthless, but even 
 serpents and hyenas do not extermi- 
 nate for sport. 
 
 Oh, universe! Pitiful spectacle! Ag- 
 gregation of tragedy, somnambulism, 
 inhumanity, terrorism, and death! It 
 makes one long to seal up his sensibili- 
 
132 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 ties and leap out into the gulfs and be 
 swallowed up. The handiwork of an 
 all-wise biophilist? Rhapsody of an 
 idiot! Gods? No! The monstrous 
 kindergarten of an idle-pated knave! 
 A Satanic prank! The surreptitious 
 handiwork of an ass! A universe is, 
 indeed, to be pitied whose dominating 
 inhabitants are so unconscious and so 
 ethically embryonic that they make life 
 a commodity, m-ercy a disease, and sys- 
 tem,atic massacre a pastime and a pro- 
 fession. 
 
 In their treatment of each other 
 human beings are less egoistic. But 
 "man's inhumanity to man" is mourn- 
 fully more than a poetic fiction. 
 
 Look at the intrigue and intimida- 
 tion going on among the nations of 
 men for conquest and supremacy. The 
 seas heave with navies nosing and 
 blustering about the continents, seek- 
 ing imperial vantage, or bullying " de- 
 pendencies" and "possessions." 
 
 Look at the manner in which human 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF EGOISM 133 
 
 females are treated by males, savage 
 and civilized, all over the globe. 
 Women are everywhere systematically 
 deprived of privileges which men have 
 fought and bled and died to obtain 
 for themselves. In many lands a 
 woman legally ceases to exist the day 
 she is wed — if she ever existed before. 
 Man has always been, and is to-day, 
 the race, and woman his shadow. 
 
 Look at the manner in which the 
 aborigines are swept away from con- 
 tinent after continent by the sword 
 and beverage of the Aryans. See how 
 the red children of America have been 
 cheated and debauched and driven 
 from homes where they and their 
 fathers had lived from immemorial 
 generations. When the banner of 
 Castile first furled in Bahama breezes, 
 America was inhabited by a noble, 
 magnanimous, and happy people. They 
 were not like the sodden, suspicious, 
 revengeful remnants that to-day hud- 
 dle on barricaded reserves, the vin- 
 
134 BBTTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 dictive survivors of four centuries of 
 injustice. They were kind and gener- 
 ous. They came to the invading 
 Europeans as children, with minds of 
 wonder and with hands filled with 
 presents. They were treated by the 
 invaders like refuse. They were 
 plundered, and their outstretched hands 
 cut off and fed to Spanish hounds. 
 They are gone from the valleys where 
 once their camp-smokes curled to 
 heaven, and their quaint canoes ruffle 
 the moonlight of the rivers no more. 
 They that remain are too weak to 
 rise in warlike challenge to the aggres- 
 sions of the mighty white. But the 
 story of the meeting of the pale and 
 the red, and of the wrongs of the van- 
 quished red, will remain as one of the 
 mournful tales of this world when the 
 kindred of Lo, "like fleecy clouds, have 
 melted into the infinite azure of the 
 past." 
 
 Look at human industry ! See the 
 pounds of flesh daily torn by men 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF EGOISM 135 
 
 everywhere from the skeletons of each 
 other in the awful riot of "business." 
 Just look at it! The inequity, the un- 
 consciousness, the hard-heartedness, 
 the ruffianism, and the infernalism of 
 the industrial relations and conditions 
 of men ! Watch an unfortunate 
 approach a rich man's mansion and 
 ask in the most graceful manner for 
 a necessary of life. Observe the 
 egoism the baron shows as he sends 
 the sufferer away unfed. See the lord 
 in his marble palace, upholstered with 
 all the comforts of civilization and 
 stuffed with the dainties of the zones, 
 and around him the men and women 
 who made his wealth feeding on 
 garbage, suffocating in shanties, and 
 working like wretches from morning 
 till night. See the multi-millionaire, 
 scraping the palms of his slaves till the 
 blood starts for the last farthing their 
 struggles have produced, not because 
 he is hungry and would buy, but 
 because he is a ruffian and can. No 
 
136 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHY 
 
 attention whatever is paid to the fact 
 that some have all they can utilize in 
 the satisfaction of their desires and 
 multiples more, while others just as 
 good-looking and more worthy have 
 nothing. No attention is paid to the 
 fact that this little pill of a world is to 
 man the only accessible portion of the 
 universe; that he is cut off from other 
 balls by leagues of impassable space. 
 One human being may have the autoc- 
 racy of townships of the most fertile 
 and strategic portions of the earth's 
 crowded surface, while others are 
 utterly disinherited, and are compelled, 
 in order to continue in the universe, to 
 loan themselves as lackeys to their 
 luckier or less scrupulous masters. 
 Countless counties of the earth's sur- 
 face are compelled to idleness for 
 purposes of speculative vantage, or 
 enclosed and policed to afford lazy 
 grandees opportunity to amuse their 
 savage instinct for slaughter; while 
 millions of civilized souls, thru no fault 
 
PREPONDERANCE OF EGOISM 1 37 
 
 of theirs, are forced to apologize for 
 their existence, and to go thru life 
 deprived even of a place on which they 
 may lie down and die without incurring 
 the risk of being ordered off. No 
 quarter is shown. Certain forms of 
 acquisition and ownership have become 
 established, and the more powerful, 
 according to these forms or in spite of 
 them, pillage and disinherit the weak 
 with an inconsideration that is simply 
 sickening. The weak submit because 
 they are helpless and because they are 
 ignorant, because they are incarcerated 
 and disarmed, and because they have 
 been taught and intimidated into be- 
 lieving that the conventional and the 
 legal, whatever they are, have been 
 ordained and established by the im- 
 measurable manufacturer of things. 
 A more pyramidal farce could not be 
 framed at the present stage of the 
 human imagination than that of human 
 industry — the immense privilege and 
 monopoly and the immense flatulence 
 
138 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 of wealth side by side with the most 
 helpless and sickening deprivation — 
 all brought about and perpetuated by 
 hypocrites who lapse into hysterics 
 over the injunction, " What you do not 
 like when done to yourself do not do 
 to others." 
 
 It is a sad, sad spectacle — the spec- 
 tacle of beings coming into a universe 
 so intrinsically bleak and inhospitable, 
 and coming into it with such unjust 
 and unbrotherly natures. 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 
 
 What is the ideal relation to each 
 other of the inhabitants of the uni- 
 verse in which we live? It is that 
 relation which will aid most sincerely 
 in the satisfaction of the desires exist- 
 ing in the universe. This is almost 
 axiomatic. There may be differences 
 of opinion as to what that relation is 
 which is best adapted to the satisfac- 
 tion of the desires of the universe. 
 But as to the truth that that arrange- 
 ment of the social units, whatever it 
 is, which will result in the greatest 
 welfare, or which, in other words, will 
 be most useful, is the ideal relation, 
 there is scarce opportunity for ques- 
 tion. The end or ideal which every 
 individual being strives after and ap- 
 proximates but never attains is the 
 139 
 
140 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 satisfaction of his desires, whatever 
 those desires may be. And the ideal 
 of a community of individuals must be 
 the composite of individual ideals, that 
 is, the largest totality of satisfaction 
 possible to the community contem- 
 plated. That relation, therefore, of 
 the individuals of a community to each 
 other which will most earnestly enable 
 the individuals of the community, as a 
 whole, to attain, or most successfully 
 to approximate, the ideal end, must be 
 the social ideal of the community; and 
 the ideal of a universeful of commu- 
 nities must be for a like reason that 
 articulation of the individuals and ag- 
 gregates to each other which will most 
 genuinely serve the utilities of the 
 cosmos. 
 
 The great trouble thus far with as- 
 sociated life on the earth has been, 
 perhaps, not the failure to recognize 
 that association should serve cosmic 
 utilities, but the conviction, or conceit, 
 or hallucination, that each individual 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 141 
 
 or clique or species was so exceedingly 
 precious, and the satisfaction of its 
 desires was so eminently indispensable, 
 that the interests of the rest of the in- 
 habitants of the universe were deemed 
 trifling in comparison. The rest of 
 the universe were supposed to attain 
 their loftiest utilities in acting as acces- 
 sories to this transcendent individual 
 or set. Such a philosophy is, of course, 
 an exceedingly comfortable meditation 
 for those who possess the privilege and 
 the power, but it loses its consolation 
 the moment a stronger individual or 
 set comes upon the scene. 
 
 During the historic evolution of the 
 human species, social ethics has made 
 its most substantial advances. And 
 the fact that there has been during 
 this period a gradual and rather start- 
 ling increase in the number of beings 
 in the universe deemed by the domi- 
 nant ones to be worthy of considera- 
 tion is a significant one, and indicates 
 that the ideal of associated life con- 
 
142 BETTER -fl'ORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 templated by the cosmos is one of 
 wider and wider and more nearly uni- 
 versal consideration. The earliest 
 examples of human association were 
 those practically of autocentricism. 
 Each individual considered himself the 
 only or chief end for which the uni- 
 verse existed. Each's own individual 
 welfare was the end for which he 
 struggled, and all the rest of the uni- 
 verse, sentient and insentient, was con- 
 templated as means to this end. From 
 this I-am-the-universe state of things 
 have evolved, thru struggle, the vari- 
 ous forms of aggregation — the family, 
 the clan, the tribe, and the nation. 
 Ethnocentricism is that stage of social 
 evolution in which a nation or a race, 
 as the dominant aggregate, looks upon 
 itself as the only legitimate or profit- 
 able end for which the universe should 
 exert itself. Ethical relations of one 
 degree of seriousness or another are 
 observed by the members of this na- 
 tion or race to each other, but all those 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL J 43 
 
 beings, human and non-human, beyond 
 the aggregate are treated as a right- 
 less and altogether different order of 
 existences. Ethics, in our part of the 
 world, may be considered to have ad- 
 vanced, at least in its pretensions, to 
 the anthropocentric stage of evolution. 
 Aggregation has advanced from in- 
 dividual to tribe, and from tribe 
 to race, and from race to sex, and 
 from sex to species, until to-day 
 the ethical conception of many minds 
 includes, with greater or less vivid- 
 ness and sincerity, all sexes, col- 
 ors, and conditions of men. The fact 
 that an animal is a human, that is, 
 that he belongs to the hominine species 
 of beings, entitles him, regardless of 
 his imperfections, to some sort of con- 
 sideration. Members of the human 
 species can not suppress, in the achieve- 
 ment of their ends, even the lives of 
 their own offspring or that of the veri- 
 tablest barbarian of the community, 
 without risk of retribution. But enor- 
 
144 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT ' 
 
 mities of any proportion and with 
 astounding impunity may be rained 
 upon those of differing anatomy. 
 Zoocentricism, that stage of solidarity 
 in which the entire sentient universe is 
 contemplated, universal consideration 
 and love, is as yet too difficult for hu- 
 man consciousness. Human philoso- 
 phy, which has been so slow in discov- 
 ering the solidarity of the human 
 species, is to-day, except in its Ori- 
 ental manifestations, as reluctant to 
 recognize other species in its ethical 
 contemplations as were dominant hu- 
 man groups in less advanced stages of 
 aggregation reluctant to recognize the 
 solidarity of the hominine species. 
 But to the prophet, that supermun- 
 dane soul who has heard the secrets 
 and intentions of the universe, the 
 grand confederation of all the graceful 
 races and species of the earth into one 
 universal scheme of consideration, is 
 as inevitable as the processes of evo- 
 lution. The deprecations to-day of 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 1 45 
 
 the most wanton crimes perpetrated 
 by the human on associated species, 
 seen in societies for the prevention of 
 cruelties of various sorts, are but the 
 dawn-peeps of a clearer consciousness 
 and of more sweeping and consistent 
 consideration. The ideal relation of 
 the inhabitants of the universe to each 
 other, then, is that relation which will 
 most actively conduce to the welfare 
 of the universe; and the welfare of the 
 universe means, not the welfare of any 
 one individual or guild, but the welfare 
 of all the beings who now inhabit it, 
 and of those who shall come after — ■ 
 the welfare of that mighty and immor- 
 tal personality who comprehends all 
 species and continues from generation 
 to generation — the Sentient Cosmos. 
 
 What is the relation of the inhabi- 
 tants of the universe to each other 
 which will be most conducive to the 
 satisfaction of the desires of the uni- 
 verse? I believe this question to be 
 caipable of definite and conclusive an- 
 
146 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHY 
 
 swer. The desires of the inhabitants 
 of the universe are those which are 
 satisfied or inhibited by living beings 
 themselves, and those satisfied or inhib- 
 ited by the inanimate univere. The 
 ideal universe is a universe so ordered 
 or natured as to allow its inhabitants 
 to understand and dominate it suffi- 
 cient to satisfy their desires, and inhab- 
 ited by beings with desires so poised 
 and assorted that there is not only not 
 mutual inhibition of desires, but such a 
 dovetailing and intertwining of the 
 consciousnesses that there is mutual 
 aid in the satisfaction of desire— a uni- 
 verse responsive to the whims of its 
 inhabitants, and inhabited by beings 
 socially harmonious and helpful. The 
 relation of the inhabitants of the uni- 
 verse to each other most favorable 
 to the satisfaction of the desires of the 
 universe is, therefore, that which will 
 enable the animate universe, as a 
 whole, to attain that relation which an 
 individual living being, if he were 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 1 47 
 
 alone in the universe, would desire to 
 achieve for himself — a relation such as 
 is sustained to each other and to the 
 whole by the individual cells of a mul- 
 ticellular organism — a relation in which 
 each acts in the interests of all, includ- 
 ing himself, and all act in the inter- 
 ests of each. 
 
 There are two beings bearing bur- 
 dens. They are ' going somewhere. 
 The way is hard. There is great dis- 
 parity in the qualifications, muscular 
 and mental, of the two individuals. 
 One is powerful in intellect and limb. 
 His burden is inconsequential to him. 
 His formidable frame and brilliant 
 understanding enable him to accom- 
 plish the pilgrimage with ease and ex- 
 ultation. The other individual is his 
 opposite. Nature has been niggard 
 with him. He has been unfortunate, 
 either in his choice of heredity or in 
 the allotment of circumstances among 
 which he has existed, or in both. He is 
 a defective, lank in limb and in intellect. 
 
148 BETTER-WORLD PHTLOSOPHT 
 
 His feeble levers, unfortified by a van- 
 tage-devising mind, creak beneath their 
 unescapable burden, and he is inces- 
 santly victimized by the conditions 
 among which he moves. 
 
 Now, the more adequate of these 
 two travelers may adopt toward his 
 less adequate companion one of three 
 attitudes. He may say to himSelf: He 
 is weak and I am strong: that is his 
 misfortune. He is helpless-minded and 
 I am not: that is his lookout. We 
 are here in the universe, and we are 
 evidently here for what there is in it. 
 I will transfer my burden, or a part of 
 it, to him. He is too unsophisticated 
 to feel it, and if he does feel it, what 
 is he going to do about it? He was no 
 doubt brought into the universe for 
 this very purpose, anyhow. He ought 
 to be satisfied, since he has been so 
 scarcely created, to be tolerated. 
 
 This attitude is the attitude of the 
 principle, or doctrine, that might deter- 
 mines that which is right. It is the 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 149 
 
 most cruel and rudimentary attitude of 
 associated life. It is, and has always 
 been in this world, the prevailing atti- 
 tude of the more adequate toward the 
 less adequate. It is the attitude of 
 brute force and of struggle. Human 
 beings in their earliest associations as- 
 sumed assiduously this attitude, and 
 they are not unfamiliar with every 
 aspect of it to-day. 
 
 The stronger individual, instead of 
 saying that might is right, may say: 
 I am strong and my comrade is weak. 
 I could take advantage of his weakness 
 if I wished, but I do not wish to do so. 
 I will consider him. I will refrain from 
 imposition. He may bear his burden 
 and I will bear mine. He can not in- 
 terfere with me and I will not interfere 
 with him. A fair field and no favor. 
 
 This is what is called equity, or jus- 
 tice. It is the attitude of fair play. 
 Each being has, or is supposed to have, 
 an equal chance in the race of life. 
 Each accepts whatever allotment is 
 
150 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHY 
 
 made to him on entering the universe, 
 and makes of it the most. There is 
 neither fear nor favor, neither pity nor 
 plunder. It is the relation of equal 
 opportunity. It is the stage of associa- 
 tion exemplified by human industry; 
 that is, it is supposed to be, but it is not. 
 What is meant by equality of opportu- 
 nity is equal freedom to avoid the ills 
 and to gain the goods of life, equal 
 access or equal liberty to acquire access 
 to the means for the satisfaction of de- 
 sires. This is not by any means guar- 
 anteed by associated human beings. 
 The immense inheritances of land and 
 machinery, and the immense favor ob- 
 tained by the intrigueful thru govern- 
 ment, coupled with the astonishing fact 
 that a majority of the human beings 
 who come into the universe come into 
 it with the inalienable birthright to 
 nothing, make a farce of equal oppor- 
 tunity in the human struggle for life. 
 Every individual human has an oppor- 
 tunity at his birth to inherit lands, just 
 
THB SOCIAL IDEAL 151 
 
 as every individual has an opportunity 
 to be born healthy or ornamental; but 
 the mournful fact is, that some are born 
 so and others are not. 
 
 The third attitude which may be 
 adopted by the stronger of the two 
 travelers toward his unfortunate fellow 
 is that of helpfulness. He may say: I 
 am strong and he is weak. I could ex- 
 ploit him if I would, and plunder him 
 of the meanings of life, but I will not 
 do so. I could allow him to bear his 
 burden and I could bear mine, but I 
 will not do even this. These altruistic 
 instincts, if I did such a thing, would 
 cause me trouble. I will help him. He 
 is my brother and I am his keeper. I 
 will put myself in his place. I will do 
 to him as I, if circumstances were re- 
 versed, would desire him to do to me. 
 We shall be in truth and in deed brothers. 
 
 This is more than the equalizing of 
 opportunities. It is the balancing of 
 abilities. It is the recognition of the 
 inequalities which a capricious and un- 
 
152 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 thinking cosmos has established in the 
 birth of beings. It is the attitude of 
 love, and it is as superior to equity as 
 equity is superior to might. It is the 
 ultimate and only noble attitude of the 
 strong of the universe toward the weak. 
 It is the social id^al, or one precious 
 aspect of the ideal, because it is that 
 relation, or one important aspect of 
 that relation, which will afford to the 
 universe its largest welfare. It is the 
 doing as you would be done by. It is 
 the loving of others as you love your- 
 self. It is the equilibrium of relation, 
 egoism and altruism in ideal balance. 
 It is the putting of one's self in the 
 place of others, and this has been a 
 prevalent impossibility to the powerful. 
 It is the acting by one being upon 
 others as he would that others would 
 act upon him, and this has always been 
 a reluctant attainment of the mighty. 
 It is from each according to his ability 
 and to each according to his needs. It 
 is simple justice of being to being. 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 153 
 
 Justice is more than equity: it is 
 benevolence. It is not enough to live 
 and let live. We should live and help 
 live. There is as much grace and 
 utility, as genuine moral glory, in the 
 lifelong succor of the helpless by the 
 strong as there is in the temporary 
 chivalry shown by a human being in 
 extricating a fellow from passing mis- 
 fortune. 
 
 Accept this truth — the truth that it is 
 as beautiful to help an unfortunate as 
 to refrain from his exploitation — and 
 you are in possession of the most 
 essential element of the social ideal. 
 But it is not all of the ideal. The 
 strong should supplement the weak, 
 because it is graceful, because the 
 strong would desire to be so supple- 
 mented if they were weak. But it is 
 not the whole of supplementation. 
 Individuals, not unequal but diverse, 
 may mutualize their efforts to the ad- 
 vantage of all. We are a world of sup- 
 plements, and the most eminent utilities 
 
154 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 are served by the universal pooling of 
 interests and destiny. Each individual 
 should perform in the social economy 
 that function for which he is best 
 fitted, and should receive in return a 
 graceful equity in the means for the 
 satisfaction of his desires. The social 
 ideal comprehends the most rational 
 and extensive possible differentiation 
 and integration of function in the 
 grand scheme of associated life. The 
 ideal relation of living beings to each 
 other is, therefore, not altogether un- 
 like that existing among the members 
 of the most civilized societies of the 
 human species. The social ideal im- 
 plies the same sort of division or dif- 
 ferentiation of function as that in 
 existing societies, only more conscious 
 and systemic. Each individual per- 
 forms in the social ideal a function, how- 
 ever humble or eccentric, and each per- 
 forms as , nearly as possible that func- 
 tion for which he is most brilliantly 
 fitted. " Nature arms each man with 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 155 
 
 some faculty which enables him to do 
 easily some feat impossible to any 
 other," says Emerson. And this is 
 true — more or less. The functions of 
 the social organism in the ideal state 
 are all accurately synthesized into one 
 harmonious whole. Ideal cooperation 
 is rational and intentional rather than 
 accidental. The clumsy, unsystematic 
 production of existing societies is re- 
 placed by perfectly symmetrical and 
 unified procedures. The whole of 
 society constitutes one mighty organ- 
 ism carrying on the functions necessary 
 to its maintenance and welfare in the 
 most intelligent and magnanimous 
 manner. The social ideal is an organ- 
 ized fraternity of perfectly articulating 
 supplements, assaulting the inanimate 
 as an individual personality, not as a 
 mob of incompatible ruffians. 
 
 The most deplorable defect in exist- 
 ing societies of men consists, not in a 
 lack of differentiation of function, for 
 the diversity of talents among living 
 
156 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 beings and the diversity of the resources 
 of the earth have prompted a com- 
 paratively high degree of functional 
 evolution among human and associated 
 species, but in unjust and unsystematic 
 assimilation. Human beings, even with 
 their maudlin methods, can produce 
 enough for the reasonable satisfaction 
 of all organic desires. The gigantic 
 defect is in the distribution of the 
 results of effort. The preponderance 
 of egoism in human nature has im- 
 pelled men to take advantage of the 
 helplessness of each other caused by 
 the differentiation of function. Mal- 
 assimilation and social discord result'. 
 This book dwells little on the matter 
 of the management of the inanimate, 
 because that part of the problem of 
 life were already magnificently ad- 
 vanced toward solution. Man com- 
 mands the tendencies about him as 
 captains command cockades. The 
 frightful dereliction is in the distribu- 
 tion of the results of management. 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 1 57 
 
 Some are surfeited and others are 
 starved. The weak are enslaved, and 
 the strong and intrigueful have become 
 usurping parasites; "over-production" 
 orgies at the very lips of starvation; 
 the means of production idle in the 
 grip of the monopolizers; and gaunt- 
 eyed armies, footsore and desperate, 
 go up and down the lands seeking in 
 vain opportunity to produce the means 
 for the maintenance of their existence. 
 In ideal association there is no 
 struggle. Each performs his function, 
 and each is entitled in turn to assimil- 
 ate the essentials for his satisfaction. 
 The amount of assimilation does not 
 depend on genius for intrigue nor on 
 ability to be born royal, but on needs. 
 Why should living beings struggle 
 against each other, except as they 
 struggle to advance the general wel- 
 fare? Happiness is just as valuable 
 and just as beautiful a thing in one 
 being as in another. Some have 
 greater talent for it than have others. 
 
158 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 but it is a state of sweetness and ela- 
 tion always and everywhere. And 
 each living being, in deliberating on 
 the problem of the proprieties, should 
 realize the fact that, as a matter of fact, 
 it is a matter of indifference whether 
 this elation belongs to his sensorium or 
 to some other sensorium. It is msane 
 for each being to insist that he, as an 
 organism, is the one organism to whom 
 pleasure is indispensable. The only 
 indispensable is that pleasure be max- 
 imized. If a definite amount of happi- 
 ness is to be experienced, it is, in the 
 eyes of the absolute, a matter of 
 indifference whether this happiness is 
 experienced by one individual or by 
 another, by self or by some other con- 
 scious portion of the universe. 
 
 This universe is not an ideal uni- 
 verse. It is impossible, without more 
 fundamental revision of its character 
 than human beings can ever hope to 
 effect, to make of it an ideal place, or 
 anything like an ideal place, for the 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 159 
 
 satisfaction of desires. The cosmic 
 processes which have evolved con- 
 scious beings on the earth — and these 
 processes are but the hard-headed 
 tendencies of matter — have so hope- 
 lessly nuptialed pleasure and pain that 
 it is impossible to believe that fumbling 
 philosophy will ever be able to divorce 
 them. But we are here, useless and 
 mysterious as it may seem, a set of 
 incompatible vagrants, orphaned here 
 on a dervish-like lump of something, 
 in the midst of immensities so hard 
 and arrogant that no wail from our 
 worm-like larynxes can aught avail. 
 And, so far as we can make out, it is 
 the program of things that we are to 
 remain here. We can not lie down 
 peacefully and perish, for we are pos- 
 sessed by an instinct lashing us to live. 
 We are forbidden from other worlds 
 by leagues of unatmosphered space. 
 The earth is our mother, our habita- 
 tion, and our tomb. In the presence of 
 these facts, it would seem the highest 
 
i6o BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 sanity for us to be kind and merciful 
 to each other, and to cultivate without 
 hypocrisy the charming chivalry of the 
 Golden Rule. The task of under- 
 standing and managing the tendencies 
 which surround and beat upon us and 
 in the midst of which we writhe and 
 supplicate is certainly sufficient in itself 
 without our turning upon and cudgel- 
 ing each other. 
 
 The social ideal here sketched is not 
 a state into which the conscious uni- 
 verse or any considerable part of 
 it will, or could, immediately pass. 
 Human nature, just as it is, is undoubt- 
 edly capable in its higher and more 
 evolved manifestations of a much 
 intenser gregariousness and mutual- 
 ization than is actualized by existing 
 societies. Existing institutions have 
 been framed by egoistic individuals for 
 individualistic ends. And altho human 
 institutions are unframed for it, the 
 nature of the highest human beings 
 is probably capable, without further 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL l6l 
 
 modification, of the actual equalization 
 of opportunities in the struggle for 
 satisfactions. But the social ideal, 
 the state in which there is not only 
 the equalizing of opportunities but the 
 balancing of abilities, will never be 
 generally attained without further evo- 
 lution and revision of human nature. 
 This evolution will without any doubt 
 take place in future much more rapidly 
 than it could have taken place in the 
 past, and we may be nearer the realiza- 
 tion of the ideal than our dull intellects 
 suspect. One thing is certain, how- 
 ever, and that is, that the most power- 
 ful instinct of human nature, the 
 instinct to struggle and survive, the 
 instinct to be superior, must be de- 
 stroyed or greatly subordinated before 
 the state here outlined can be realized; 
 for the ideal state will be practically 
 bereft of opportunity for its satisfac- 
 tion. 
 
 It is not possible, and it never will be 
 possible, to organize all the beings 
 
1 62 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 occupying space into one immense 
 confederacy. This would be ideal, but 
 from the inexorable nature of things 
 it can never be. The denizens of the 
 sea depths can not correlate with the- 
 inhabitants of the clouds. The lion 
 can not fraternize with the lamb, nor 
 the hawk with the sparrow. The 
 natures of beings have been evolved 
 thru war, and they are in large part 
 irredeemably antagonistic. But the 
 approximation, if honest, may be more 
 successful than is supposed, and may 
 include many species not human. The 
 bird may contribute his song and 
 plumage, the sheep his fleece, the 
 horse, the ox, the elephant, and the 
 camel their strength or speed, the cow 
 and the fowl their secretions, the dog 
 his fidelity, and man his art. The 
 ultimate and ideal aggregation of the 
 living universe will not be a pan- 
 American union nor a Euro-American 
 league, nor even an aggregation whose 
 spirit is embodied in a parliament of 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 1 63 
 
 man, but the widest and most consum- 
 mate possible Confederation of the 
 Consciousnesses. 
 
 The social ideal enunciated in this 
 essay is the ideal which has been held 
 up from time to time by the sages of 
 the human species, and the ideal 
 toward which the ages have ever 
 heaved. The profoundest moralists 
 who have poured out their precepts 
 upon this erring world have, indepen- 
 dently of each other, by simply observ- 
 ing and contemplating the actions of 
 men, promulgated the same golden 
 formula for the regulation of the con- 
 duct of associated beings. "What you 
 do not like when done to yourself, do 
 not do to others," said the Mongolian 
 sage with wonderful inspiration twenty- 
 four centuries ago. Five centuries 
 later the great law-giver of the Chris- 
 tian faith reiterated the same senti- 
 ment when he said to the mountain 
 multitude, " Do unto others as you 
 would that others would do unto you." 
 
164 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 Buddha said the same thing, and Lao 
 Tse and Seneca and Kant. It is 
 the injunction which has been pro- 
 claimed by the sublimest souls that 
 have pondered and agonized over the 
 sins of beings. And what is it to act 
 upon others as you would that others 
 would act upon you? It is to put your- 
 self in the place of others. It is con- 
 sideration of others as ardent as 
 consideration of self. It is the bal- 
 ancing of abilities, supplementation, the 
 social ideal. 
 
 The social ideal here enunciated is 
 the ideal, also, of the evolutional pro- 
 cesses by and in accordance with whose 
 intentions all things are determined. 
 Human society is but the van of the 
 life evolutions on the earth. Human 
 history is the remembered chapter, the 
 current events, of biology. And bio- 
 logical evolution is a part, an insig- 
 nificant but constituent part, of the 
 stupendous performances of the infinite. 
 Social phenomena are phases of uni- 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL 1 65 
 
 versal phenomena; and it is only by- 
 contemplating them in their biological 
 and cosmical perspective that they can 
 be understood. Emancipating one's 
 self from all participation in affairs, and 
 contemplating the evolutional proceed- 
 ings as purely objective, we are less 
 concerned about the reformation of 
 the universe than about the ascertain- 
 ment of the intentions of the universe. 
 We confide in its instincts. We look 
 upon it as grinding to powder all who 
 are not in sympathy with it. It has a 
 program. The social ideal is a goal. 
 All evolution is aspiration after hetero- 
 geneity and agglutination. Human 
 aggregation — the emancipation of 
 masses and races in historic time 
 and the nationalization and munici- 
 palization of industries in present 
 time — is but the continuation of a pro- 
 cess as old and as universal as the 
 atoms. 
 
 The earliest forms of society on the 
 earth were societies of protozoa, socie- 
 
i66 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 ties of unicellular forms which were 
 evolved in the struggle for existence 
 as the types of life best fitted to survive. 
 These creatures formed themselves 
 into societies because they found it 
 better to cooperate than to contend, 
 and because they could, by the mutual- 
 ization of interests and effort, encoun- 
 ter more successfully the exigencies of 
 their environment. It was in the line 
 of least arrest. They grew closer and 
 closer together, and more and more 
 differentiated and integrated — notwith- 
 standing the protests of the individual- 
 ists among them, no doubt, who foresaw 
 in the trend of things a fearful slavery. 
 By the continued organization of func- 
 tion, these societies finally became 
 organisms, with fins and with the dispo- 
 sition to move about. They climbed 
 out upon the continents, differentiated 
 legs, ascended to the forest tops, ac- 
 quired wings, and sailed off into the 
 azure. We call them metazoa. Every 
 metazoan, therefore, in organization if 
 
THE SOCIAL IDEAL ■ 167 
 
 not in sentiment, is a socialist, and a 
 socialist of the "rankest" sort. 
 
 The aggregation going on among 
 metazoa, including the aggregation of 
 human metazoa, is of the same charac- 
 ter as that which took place long, long 
 ago in the protozoan societies of pri- 
 meval seas. It is the same kind of 
 differentiation and integration, and it is 
 taking place for the same reason and 
 with identical inevitableness. It will 
 continue, because it is. in the line of 
 least arrest. The less specialized ag- 
 gregates will give way to the more 
 specialized, as the less specialized types 
 of life have always given place to the 
 more specialized, because in the strug- 
 gle with each other and with the inani- 
 mate the most highly specialized forms 
 are the best fitted to survive. Metazoa 
 will evolve into compound metazoa, as 
 protozoa have evolved into compound 
 protozoa. It may seem very strange 
 to us, because we are so accustomed to 
 social incoherence, and are so uncon- 
 
l68 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 scious of social possibility; but there is 
 nothing in this universe more certain 
 than that metazoan aggregation will 
 go on until there is evolved on this 
 earth a literal social organism (or 
 organisms) of metazoa, in which there 
 is differentiated a class for every dis- 
 tinct function and sub-function per- 
 formed by the organism — a class for 
 the prehension of nutrition, a class for 
 the circulation of commodities, an in- 
 ventive class, a governing class, a re- 
 productive class, and so on. It is 
 inevitable, because it is best, and be- 
 cause it is in accordance with the 
 primal tendency of the universe — that 
 province of it, at least, in which the 
 earth is located. The differentiation 
 of seas and continents out of incandes- 
 cent fire-mud, and the curdling of pri- 
 meval haze into globes and systems, 
 were not more inevitable. The ten- 
 dency of human and other beings to 
 mutualize is a phase of the universal 
 tendency toward aggregation. 
 
THE DERIVATION OF THE NA- 
 TURES OF LIVING BEINGS. 
 
 The final question, and the most 
 important and diiKicult to be answered 
 in formulating a better-world philos- 
 ophy, is how to achieve the relation 
 which has just been described; how to 
 bridge the hiatus between the actually 
 existing, over-egoistic condition of 
 things and the ideal; how to develop 
 ourselves into beings with natures that 
 will spontaneously act each for all and 
 all for each. This is a question of 
 unusual importance, for an ideal is 
 of the utmost conceivable uselessness 
 unless it can somehow be achieved or 
 approximated. 
 
 I will preface the answer to this 
 
 question with a discussion of another 
 
 question: What is the derivation of 
 
 the natures of living beings? Why is 
 
 169 
 
l7o BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 there such endless variety in the 
 natures of beings? Why are they not 
 all natured alike? And why are all 
 natured just as they are natured ? Why 
 is the fox sly, and the antelope timid, 
 and the Ethiopian emotional? Why 
 is not the fox intrepid, and the antelope 
 fierce, and the Ethiopian passionless? 
 Why are they not all pensive? Why 
 is the ant prudential, and the human 
 female vain? Why are some human 
 beings selfish and others philanthropic, 
 some sage-like and others witless? It 
 will be easier to indicate how to develop 
 our natures into natures of a specified 
 style, if we are previously informed in 
 what manner we derived the natures 
 we now have. 
 
 By the nature of any being or species 
 is meant the character of its conscious 
 tendencies to move. In the conscious- 
 ness of every creature are impulses, or 
 tendencies to change place. These 
 impulses, or tendencies to move, are 
 not capricious, liable, each one, to be 
 
THE NATURES OP LIVING BEINGS 171 
 
 unlike all those that have preceded. 
 They are capable of more or less classi- 
 fication. These classes of impulses 
 are called instincts. And the nature of 
 any being or species depends on the 
 quality or' style of the instincts, or 
 classes of conscious tendencies to move, 
 which it possesses. The nature of the 
 horse is gentle, that of the hyena is 
 violent, man's is bigoted, and the bit- 
 tern's melancholy, because the im- 
 pulses existing in the consciousnesses 
 of these animals are such as cause 
 conduct that is respectively gentle, 
 violent, egotistic, and gloomy. 
 
 Since impulses are simply sensations 
 which have become motor, and since 
 sensations are only tendencies from 
 without become conscious, the nature 
 of any being may be said to be the 
 manner in which it correlates the ten- 
 dencies which it contacts, or the manner 
 in which a being, as a distinct and de- 
 tached portion of the universe, reacts 
 upon the rest of the universe. 
 
172 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 The similarity and dissimilarity in 
 the natures of individuals, tribes, and 
 species are due to the similarity and 
 dissimilarity in their instincts. An ox 
 is of a very different nature from a 
 fox, and men (some of them) are very 
 unlike serpents, because the classes 
 of impulses in the consciousnesses of 
 these animals are for the most part 
 very different in one animal from 
 another. Serpents, oxen, foxes, and 
 men, however, are all similar in their 
 eagerness to reproduce themselves, and 
 in their emphatic reluctance to die. 
 
 By individuality of nature are meant 
 instincts, or inflections of character, 
 peculiar to an individual. Fido is a 
 canine of considerable individuality, 
 because the styles of Fido's impulses 
 are to a notorious extent std generis. 
 Melancthon is a man of no individuality 
 whatever, because his instincts are of 
 that commonplace character prevailing 
 among the members of his species. 
 The lower orders of beings are, as a 
 
THE NATURES OF LIVING BEINGS 173 
 
 rule, distinguished for the poverty of 
 their natures, that is, for the fewness 
 of their instincts, and for lack of in- 
 dividuality, that is, for the sameness 
 of the impulses among the members 
 of an order; while the higher orders of 
 animals are characterized by wealth of 
 nature and individual initiative. 
 
 The natures of living beings are the 
 result of the cooperation or concussion 
 of two elements: the fortuities of hered- 
 ity and environment. By fortuities of 
 heredity are meant those mysterious 
 pre-natal conditions, or caprices, which 
 cause variety in offspring. The chil- 
 dren of the same parents are not iden- 
 tical. They differ, not only in the 
 inflections of their character and in 
 degree of acumen, but in color, form, 
 muscularity, and the like. These indi- 
 vidual variations, caused by the com- 
 pound character of parents, and called 
 here fortuities of heredity, are the 
 geneses of the natures (and structures) 
 of living beings. 
 
174 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 By environment are meant those sur- 
 roundings which have accompanied the 
 ancestral, or phylogenetic, career of in- 
 dividuals and species. Environment is 
 the rest of the universe, or as much of 
 the rest of the universe as affects that 
 which is environed. Environment is 
 flavored with hardship. It is a vast 
 colander thru which the generations 
 perpetually strain. Those inflections 
 of character (and structure) which in 
 the mutations of heredity arise, and 
 which assist the life of the individual 
 or species, are passed on, and those 
 that are useless or deleterious are 
 estopped. The nature of any being or 
 species, therefore, is, in its fundamental 
 features, the result of its environment 
 up to date. For every instinct, aside 
 from the anomalous and transient acci- 
 dents of heredity, exists because there 
 has been somewhere in the ancestral 
 life of the individual or aggregate pos- 
 sessing it an environment which ac- 
 centuated and selected that particular 
 
THE NATURES OF LIVING BEINGS 175 
 
 instinct. Ever since the life process 
 began, it has encountered hardship and 
 discrimination. Millions of species have 
 perished, and those that have survived 
 have been incessantly those whose 
 modes of motion were compatible with 
 and tolerated by their environment. 
 A number of antelopes are born, some 
 of them sluggish and some alert, and 
 their environment contains beings of 
 considerable sagacity who eat ante- 
 lopes. Those antelopes who survive, 
 other things equal, will be those of 
 vigilant and susceptible natures. If 
 some serpents are fierce and others 
 submissive, and these serpents are sur- 
 rounded by beings who destroy all from 
 whom they are not by fear deterred, 
 then the surviving serpents will be war- 
 like. Foxes are sly, because their en- 
 vironment is, or was at one time, 
 discouraging to boldness. Bears hiber- 
 nate, because those bears with the 
 hibernating ability were the only ones 
 able to encounter successfully the cli- 
 
176 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHY 
 
 matic exigencies of their environment. 
 The disparity between the sexual in- 
 stincts of the male and female of most 
 animals, and which is probably the 
 cause of so much unhappiness among 
 civilized beings, is to be accounted for 
 by the conditions which prevailed in 
 the savage and sub-human stages of 
 evolution — conditions which developed 
 in one sex an appetite out of all pro- 
 portion to the necessities of civilized 
 life, and in the other sex a flavorless 
 and tantalizing disinterestedness. The 
 dread of death, an instinct so unfailing 
 in all animals, exists, not because ex- 
 istence is intrinsically so sweet, nor be- 
 cause annihilation is so distressing, but 
 because this bugaboo has been an indis- 
 pensable safeguard against the suicide 
 of the life process. The expectation 
 of post-mortem consciousness, so preva- 
 lent and so insistent among human be- 
 ings, is a hope arising from the con- 
 cussion of a desire and a fancy — the 
 desire to persist just referred to, and 
 
THE NATURES OF LIVING BEINGS 177 
 
 the fancy or hallucination of a double 
 which originated among savages from 
 shadows, images, dreams, and the like. 
 The instinct for inactivity among hu- 
 man beings, the instinct which makes 
 labor a burden and impels the most of 
 us to shuffle upon others, if possible, 
 our part of it, is an instinct which ex- 
 ists because there is such an enormous 
 disparity in the labor requirements be- 
 tween the civilized life we now live and 
 the indolent, lackadaisical life of the 
 savage from which we have compara- 
 tively just emerged. In the course of 
 ages, after selection has done its work, 
 if labor continues to be a necessity, 
 labor will become a pleasure and a de- 
 light. And if the human world, after 
 the work-Instinct becomes established, 
 should suddenly lapse again into a stage 
 where exertion were superfluous, indo- 
 lence and leisure would be as disagree- 
 able and as energetically shunned as is 
 labor now. For it must be remembered 
 that instincts are not only developed 
 
178 BETTER-WORLD PHTLOSOPHT 
 
 by environment, but they are also elim- 
 inated. If a trait of character, devel- 
 oped by a certain environment, suddenly 
 encounters an entirely different envi- 
 ronment — an environment which disre- 
 gards it and encourages a dissimilar 
 and antagonistic trait — the neglected 
 trait, in the course of ages, will disap- 
 pear. Instincts rise and fall, develop 
 ■ and disappear, with the varying muta- 
 tions of environment, slowly evolving 
 under the protectorate of a friendly 
 environment, and reluctantly perishing 
 under the influence of a hostile one. 
 
 The reluctance of an instinct to 
 perish which has once become estab- 
 lished explains the frequent super- 
 fluous instincts to be found in many 
 animals — instincts which are obeyed, 
 not because they are useful, but simply 
 because they exist — instincts which 
 were at one time essential to the life 
 of the species, but which on account of 
 changes in environment are now use- 
 less and absurd. The annual migra- 
 
THE NATURES OF LIVING BEINGS 179 
 
 tion westward of the Norway leming, 
 resulting in the destruction of vast 
 numbers of the species in the sea, 
 must have been at one time a beneficial 
 performance, but is now, owing to 
 changed conditions, highly decimative. 
 Domestic animals, who were originally 
 undominated by human beings and 
 whose environments have been revo- 
 lutionized by man, possess abun- 
 dantly these anachronisms. Horses 
 scamper preceding an impending blast, 
 as was their wont on the unprotected 
 prairies; birds beat their prisons at 
 migrating time; and pampered cats 
 and canines prowl the woods and 
 prairies as intently as during their 
 wild, ante-slavery careers. About the 
 first thing a human infant does is to 
 demonstrate its anthropoid, or arbo- 
 real, ancestry by grasping and spite- 
 fully clinging to everything that 
 stimulates its palms. The ghost and 
 goblin instinct of children — the instinct 
 which causes the imagination of civil- 
 
l8o BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 ized young to people the darkness 
 with unfriendly forms — is a stubborn 
 survival of savage superstition, which 
 often requires half a lifetime to extir- 
 pate. Perhaps the most unfortunate 
 survival of this character among 
 human beings is the instinct among 
 industrial peoples for struggle and 
 survival. In the mutations that have 
 resulted in the evolution of civilized 
 human beings on the earth, as has 
 already been shown, struggle has per- 
 formed a continual and predominating 
 function. Among the non-human 
 races, by far the greatest amount of 
 energy expended is expended in the 
 attempt of one animal to overcome 
 another and in the counter effort to 
 escape. Even among savages war is 
 the principal business. Those peoples, 
 therefore, who have emerged out of 
 the predatory stage into the peaceful 
 and industrial, still retain this passion 
 for struggle and triumph developed 
 during the long ages of biological 
 
THE NATURES OF LIVING BEINGS i8i 
 
 militancy. The whole fabric of in- 
 dustry is a system of competitive 
 struggle which ought in all conscience 
 to be displaced by the more economical 
 and graceful system of cooperation. 
 But it is perpetuated because the 
 instinct for achieving the apex of 
 the heap is too prominent to remain 
 unentertained. Among children and 
 youths, and to a disgraceful extent 
 among adults, this instinct is exercised 
 in sports, games, regattas, and other 
 contests of speed, strength, or sagacity. 
 The fact that nearly all human amuse- 
 ments, from school-yard divertisements 
 to tournaments which attract nations, 
 are devices which contain no utility 
 nor interest whatever except in offer- 
 ing opportunity to tickle this instinct, 
 is a fact full of sadness and significance. 
 A boy with such an aversion for the 
 useful expenditure of energy that he 
 will avoid work at . all hazards will 
 plunge into some senseless competition, 
 and surge and struggle for hours as if 
 
l82 BETTER-WORLD PtilLOSOPHT 
 
 his life were at stake, simply to put to 
 rout imaginary foes. The polite name 
 for this subjugating instinct is Ambi- 
 tion; but whether it manifests itself 
 in national conquests, literary set-tos, 
 fistic bouts, or school-room rivalries, 
 it is essentially the same old holo- 
 thurian. 
 
 Not only the psychical character of 
 beings, but that which, if it does not 
 cause, accompanies the psychical, that 
 is, the physical, is also the result of 
 the same or of similar environmental 
 selection. Every established inflection 
 of form, function, and structure of 
 animals exists because it has at one" 
 time or another been selected by en- 
 vironment. Equine fleetness and feline 
 agility, piscatorial scaliness and human 
 hairlessness and perpendicularity, the 
 beauty and beardlessnes's of woman 
 and the puissance of man — all the 
 myriad qualities of physique what- 
 soever possessed by living beings have 
 been assigned to them by the environ- 
 
THE NATURES OF LIVING BEINGS 183 
 
 mental moulds to which the life process 
 has been compelled continually to con- 
 form. Life originated in the sea, 
 afterward crept out upon the land, 
 entered the forests, climbed and 
 clambered among the trees, became 
 endowed with perpendicularity and 
 hands, descended and walked upon 
 the soil, invented agriculture, built 
 cities and states, and is to-day engaged 
 in threatening to become civilized. If 
 there had been no forests upon the 
 earth, therefore, man in all proba- 
 bility would have been a quadruped, 
 and it is impossible to conceive in this 
 contingency how different, and espe- 
 cially how much less conscious, the 
 face of the earth might have been. 
 Why is the brain of vertebrates, which 
 is an enlarged and elaborated section 
 of the spinal cord, located in expanded 
 vertebrae of the anterior spine, instead 
 of in coccygeal vertebrae or some 
 place else? Because the forms of life 
 in which it developed or began to de- 
 
184 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 velop were roving horizontals, and the 
 foremost section of this ganglionic 
 train, on account of continual contact 
 with environment, out-developed the 
 rest. Why are there sexes? In the 
 beginning of the life process reproduc- 
 tion was accomplished by fission and 
 gemmation. Why has reproduction 
 come to be an enterprise requiring 
 two? I do not know: probably to 
 multiply variations in offspring. But 
 it is certain that very early in the 
 life process conjugation prevalently 
 superseded the original modes of gen- 
 eration. And it is altogether probable 
 that this transition took place, like the 
 transition from the unicellular to the 
 multicellular mode of life, the transi- 
 tion from the solitary to the gregarious 
 style of existence, and other transitions 
 from individualism to socialism, as a 
 result of that advantage which ema- 
 nates from the pooling of interests and 
 destinies. The aquatic genesis of life 
 has been one of the most conspicuously 
 
THE NATURES OF LIVING BEINGS 185 
 
 influential facts of biological evolution. 
 So many of the structural idiosyn- 
 crasies of animals (and plants) have 
 been developed to defend an enter- 
 prise primarily marine against atmos- 
 pheric desiccation. If life, instead of 
 originating in the sea and afterward 
 fitting itself to atmospheric and sub- 
 terranean conditions, had originated in 
 the air and subsequently entered the 
 earth or the waters, or if it had been 
 transplanted from some differently 
 conditioned planet and been compelled 
 to adapt itself to mundane arrange- 
 ments, the life process, it is highly 
 interesting to imagine, would have 
 been an altogether different, and let 
 us hope less riotous, aggregation than 
 the one we now contemplate. 
 
 The peculiarities of plants, also, all 
 of them, like those of animals, have 
 been the result of environmental selec- 
 tions. 
 
 The natures of the beings that live 
 upon the earth to-day, then, are made 
 
1 86 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 up of instincts, certain general tenden- 
 cies to move, which, in common with 
 their physical accompaniments, have 
 been impressed upon them by that 
 which has during the past surrounded 
 them. The instincts of a living being 
 do not necessarily represent all of the 
 elements of all the environments thru 
 which it, during its ancestral pilgrim- 
 age, has passed; for many have prob- 
 ably been superseded. But every 
 prevalent instinct, every prevalent style 
 of conduct, indicates that the being or 
 aggregate possessing it has at some 
 period in its evolution been in an en- 
 vironment which produced and popu- 
 larized that particular instinct. The 
 life process, starting from simple, al- 
 most impulseless, initials, but with an 
 inherent tendency to vary, has heaved 
 itself onward and upward, dispatching 
 from its central trend multiples of 
 the most fantastic ramifications, until 
 to-day it is a genealogical arbor of 
 something like a million branches. 
 
THE NATURES OP LIVING BEINGS 187 
 
 philosophers at top and monera at 
 base, and occupying in all its general 
 delineaments, psychical and physical, 
 that outline assigned by environmental 
 opportunity. 
 
 All evolution is achieved by selec- 
 tion, and all selection is determined by 
 environment. Environment is a trinity: 
 the inanimate environment, the animate 
 environment, and the internal environ- 
 ment. The inanimate environment is 
 that mechanism of things in the midst 
 of which the life process exists. The 
 living beings of all kinds outside of and 
 surrounding that which is environed 
 constitute the animate environment. 
 And by internal environment is meant 
 that which is environed itself, the in- 
 fluence of a self upon itself, individual 
 and social self-determinativeness. The 
 selective activities of these three ele- 
 ments of environment have produced 
 all of the dispositional and structural 
 peculiarities to be found in the seas, 
 soils, and atmospheres of the earth to- 
 
1 88 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHY 
 
 day, all of those that have in times 
 past lived and perished, and the mil- 
 lions that shall appear till the life pro- 
 cess is no longer. 
 
 The inanimate is the fundamental 
 of things, the substratum upon which 
 the possibilities rear themselves. Be- 
 fore life was, it was, and it will be when 
 life's last inertia is spent. Out of its 
 mysterious parts the life process came, 
 and upon its hard herbage and by the 
 grace of its scanty tolerances it sur- 
 vives. The inanimate is the mighty 
 trellis about whose inhospitable parts 
 the tendrils of sentiency creep. It is 
 the riddle, the catastrophe, and the sine 
 qua non of the enterprise of conscious- 
 ness. The inanimate is and has always 
 been indifferent to life, and for this 
 reason it has been indefatigable in 
 its selections. It has no ears for dis- 
 tress, no eyes for injustice, and no 
 sympathy for the unsophisticated. Its 
 hardships, of food, climate, and cata- 
 clysm have entered with tireless energy 
 
THE NATURES OF LIVING BEINGS 1S9 
 
 into the destinies of the conscious- 
 nesses. It must have been some 
 unprecedented scarcity of nutrition 
 that originated that coarse and fearful 
 manifestation of egoism, carnivorous- 
 ness. The continual concussion of the 
 living and the non-living probably de- 
 veloped to a considerable extent sen- 
 sation and intelligence. Hands, the 
 most faithful and effectual of anatomi- 
 cal contrivances, and perpendicularity, 
 a stylish but questionable idiosyncrasy, 
 and wings, those aerial levers which 
 make locomotion grace, were all prob- 
 ably imparted to the life process dur- 
 ing its arboreal reconnoissance. 
 
 The animate environment has been 
 the most formidable factor in the evo- 
 lution of mundane life. The inanimate 
 has been indifferent. The animate 
 has not been so. It has been relent- 
 less. While the ages were yet tender, 
 life began to riot upon life, and it has 
 continued to do so to this moment. 
 Where the inanimate has slain and 
 
190 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 selected one, the animate has slain 
 multitudes. It is estimated that the 
 life process is now about twenty millions 
 of years old. Its existence has been 
 one unbroken bacchanal of blood. 
 Aggregate has preyed upon aggregate 
 and species has decimated species. 
 Tides of irresponsibles have swept over 
 the continents and thru the deeps, 
 collided, grappled, and exterminated 
 each other. What is hidden in the 
 horrible chasm between monera and 
 man, no fancy will ever illume. It is 
 the mighty charnal of creation. The 
 skeletons of two millions of extermi- 
 nated species of living beings are there 
 with all their unimaginable accompani- 
 ments — wars, blacknesses, frightful 
 manglings, eclipses, horrible concus- 
 sions, inextinguishable malignities, 
 hell. Imagine, if you can, and you 
 can not, the amount of inconsideration 
 and violence necessary, by the outright 
 destruction, age after age, of inferiors, 
 to develop an organism of such hope- 
 
THE NATURES OF LIVING BEINGS 191 
 
 less Structural monotony as the monad 
 to an animal as highly specialized as 
 the fish. Think of what would be neces- 
 sary to lift life from its aquatic cradle 
 out upon the land, to convert a fish, 
 breathing water and wearing fins and 
 gills and scales, into a quadruped with 
 legs and lungs and hair. Contemplate 
 again what it would take to convert a 
 waddling marsupial into a quasi-per- 
 pendicular anthropoid. Conjecture 
 what must have happened in the post- 
 anthropoid ages of evolution, when 
 those rude-browed, half-crouching an- 
 cestors of ours, with clubs and missiles, 
 moved thru the forests and mountains 
 in conquest of the earth. For it must 
 be remembered that there was a time 
 when no set of beings tyrannized and 
 terrorized the planet as do the reign- 
 ing cutthroats to-day. Estimate finally, 
 if you can, and history will help you, 
 the amount of bloodshed and war and 
 woe necessary to develop those un- 
 finished Troglodytes into beings clever 
 
192 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHY 
 
 enough to write history and invent gin 
 and originate the hope of heaven. 
 Compute these totalities, and you will 
 know what it has cost to teach you and 
 me and the rest to talk politics and wax 
 sarcastic with our fore limbs in the air. 
 Question: If it has required two or 
 three millions of species struggling for 
 life twenty millions of years to produce 
 a being barely above derision, how 
 long will it take and how many millions 
 of species to evolve a being as nearly 
 divine as the average man thinks he is? 
 The internal environment is, as has 
 been said, the influence of the aggre- 
 gate or individual itself in its aggregate 
 or individual capacity, the individual 
 or aggregate exercising self-selection, 
 social or individual self-culture. The 
 life process as a whole is devoid of 
 this environment, because there is not 
 and has never been any organic relation 
 among the groups and sub-groups of 
 which it is composed. The groups, or 
 aggregates, have not been independent 
 
THE NATURES OF LIVING BEINGS 193^ 
 
 of each other, but their dependence 
 has not been systemic. The life 
 process has not been conscious. Its 
 career has been accidental rather than 
 intentional. Internal environment ex- 
 ists where organization exists, where 
 corporate consciousness exists, and in 
 so far as it exists. It is teleologic. 
 The promiscuous action of individuals 
 as individuals upon other individuals 
 of the same aggregate, like the influ- 
 ence of individuals and aggregates of 
 the process as a whole on other indi- 
 viduals and aggregates, belongs to the 
 animate element of environment. In 
 purely individualistic societies, there- 
 fore, where the conduct of each is de- 
 termined exclusively by himself, there 
 can be no internal environment of' the 
 social sort, because there is no organic 
 interlacement of concern. It is in col- 
 lectivistic aggregates, where the con- 
 duct of each conditions to a greater or 
 less extent the conduct of others and 
 is conditioned by others, where each 
 
194 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 individual blends to some degree into 
 and is partially exterminated by the 
 composite consciousness, that the in- 
 ternal environment exists. 
 
 The internal environment has per- 
 formed a subordinate role in the past 
 evolutions of life. Aggregates have 
 thruout the past exerted an immeasur- 
 ably greater influence upon each other 
 than they have exerted each upon 
 itself. Excepting among some social- 
 istic insects, and in the cell socialism of 
 metazoa, there is no internal environ- 
 ment of consequence outside of human 
 aggregates. But among all human 
 societies, excepting perhaps the very 
 lowest, the internal environment has 
 exercised an increasingly, conspicuous 
 influence upon the destinies of the 
 races. The internal environment, which 
 is nothing more nor less than Society, 
 which is intense and conscious gregari- 
 ousness, which is the functional partici- 
 pation of individuals in a more or less 
 organic oneness, must have been era- 
 
THE NATURES OF LIVING BEINGS 195 
 
 died in those terrible ages when our 
 post-anthropoid ancestors wandered in 
 heroic herds over the unconquered 
 continents. It comprehends all dis- 
 plays of social sovereignty, , from the 
 crude coordinations effected by the 
 chief of an aggregate of savages to 
 those ponderous and complicated func- 
 tions performed by the governmental 
 machinery of civilized states. 
 
 The evolution of the attitude of the 
 life process toward itself, the animate, 
 has been analogous to the evolution of 
 its attitude toward the inanimate. Both 
 attitudes have evolved from conditions 
 of indifference to those of continually 
 increasing aggression. The earliest 
 forms of life were simple suggestions 
 of protoplasm wafted hither and thither 
 by the environing waters. Devoid of 
 all powers of initiative, and in some 
 instances anchored, they were at the 
 absolute caprice of their environment. 
 They appropriated whatever food came 
 in contact with them, and fell victims 
 
196 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 to every rambling adversity. They 
 were undifferentiated cellules of help- 
 less plasm buffeted at the caprice of 
 an irresponsible universe. From this 
 state of inertia, by the continual sur- 
 vival of the energetic and enterprising, 
 the life process has evolved into a most 
 insistent and marvelous dominance of 
 the inanimate. None of the non- 
 human animals uses tools, which are 
 portions of the inanimate universe used 
 to accomplish the domination of other 
 portions. Even among primitive men 
 the appliances for modifying the inani- 
 mate world are few and rudimentary. 
 Among civilized societies, however, as 
 was indicated in the first chapter, the 
 conquests of industry, which are subju- 
 gations of the inanimate by the ani- 
 mate, are almost sensational. Tools 
 have not only attained a wonderful 
 pitch of proficiency, but they are com- 
 bined and compounded into mighty 
 machines, for the manipulation of 
 
THE NATURES OF LIVING BEINGS 197 
 
 which inanimate tendencies themselves 
 have been domesticated and trained. 
 
 The attitude of the animate universe 
 toward the animate universe, that is, 
 toward itself, has followed an evolution 
 analogous to that followed in the 
 evolution of its attitude toward the 
 inanimate. The control of themselves 
 by associated beings, like the control 
 of the inanimate, is seriously attempted 
 only by the highest orders of sentients. 
 Among all the non-human aggregates, 
 with the mentioned exceptions, the 
 individuals -of one group mingle indis- 
 criminately with the individuals of 
 other groups and with each other. 
 They associate as sovereigns, not as 
 constitutents of an organism. Social 
 organization, social self-modification, 
 social self-management, is genuinely 
 manifested only among human socie- 
 ties. It has developed with the pro- 
 cession of the races, and among the 
 very foremost societies a comparatively 
 
198 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 high degree of social self-determina- 
 tiveness exists. Social self-dominance 
 has been developed by the survival of 
 the more intricately knit groups in the 
 struggle for life. 
 
 It must not be supposed that self- 
 dominance, whether exercised by an 
 individual living being, or by a society, 
 means the cessation of struggle and 
 survival, and that the character of the 
 selections is determined by some 
 spontaneous, self-poised something or 
 somebody independent of the phe- 
 nomena of time and space. Social 
 self-control, or social self-culture, means 
 simply definite and intelligent atten- 
 tion to the struggle and survival among 
 the masses of the society itself and 
 the methodization of that struggle, 
 just as individual self-culture means 
 the measurement of the struggles go- 
 ing on among the instincts of an indi- 
 vidual consciousness, and a conscious 
 recognition of their relative strengths 
 and enthusiasms. 
 
THE NATURES OF LIVING BEINGS 1 99 
 
 It must not be concluded, either, that 
 the life process in its more ambitious 
 and more conscious portions is less 
 correlated with the inanimate than it is 
 in its humblest. Every part of the 
 universe is related by law to every other 
 part. A modern state is just as inex- 
 orably conditioned in its phenomena 
 by the material order of things about 
 it as a rabble of comparatively mind-' 
 less moUusks. The philosopher is less 
 helpless, but is not less carefully corre- 
 cted with his environment, than is the 
 amoeba, or the particular embryo from 
 which he individually sprang. He is 
 more complex and potential and pre- 
 tentious, but he is not more automatic. 
 Automatism is unthinkable ajnong the 
 integers of an organic infinite. The 
 life process proceeded from the inani- 
 mate, and it can never for one moment 
 forget its origin. Living beings are 
 more or less detached and complicated 
 fragments of the ball earth. They 
 float in its fluids and strut over its sur- 
 
200 BETTER-WORLD PHTLOSOPHT 
 
 faces, and aggregate, but in all their 
 physical phenomena they simulate the 
 inanimate. Living beings are not 
 aerolites compounded of clays from 
 another and altogether different order 
 of things, and surreptitiously dropped 
 here. They have been compounded, 
 all of them, from material which has 
 been obtained, all of it, right here on 
 this planet — material the elements of 
 which are identical with those that 
 glitter in the soils, skies, and seas. 
 And in all their phenomena, individual 
 and social, living beings obey the same 
 chemical and physical tendencies as 
 the inanimate. Consciousness arises 
 with, or out of, and accompanies, these 
 clay con:\pounds called creatures, but 
 it does not cause, nor in any way in- 
 terfere with, their phenomena. If it 
 were possible to construct artificial 
 clods, chemically as accomplished as 
 philosophers, but without any accom- 
 panying consciousness, these soulless 
 
THE NATURES OF LIVING BEINGS 2ol 
 
 mechanisms, without will, feeling, or 
 conscious intelligence, simply acting 
 out their chemical and physical affini- 
 ties, would not behave otherwise in 
 any infinitesimal particular than the 
 real, conscious meditators on things. 
 
RACE CULTURE 
 
 The character of the generative 
 stream has been imparted to it by 
 amendments made by environmental 
 selection. A generation of beings 
 have come into existence. They have 
 been of various disparities of form, 
 color, structure, and disposition. The 
 universe has been decimative. Some 
 have escaped, and, reproducing them- 
 selves, have imparted, or have tended 
 to impart, to the generations their own 
 characteristics. The great mass have 
 perished without progeny, and the 
 qualities which they would have im- 
 parted, or would have tended to impart, 
 to the generations, if they had lived, 
 have perished, or have tended to per- 
 ish, with them. Since the first proto- 
 plasmic specks sprawled in primeval 
 
RACE CULTURE 203 
 
 seas, millions of species and innumera- 
 ble varieties of living beings have been 
 evolved. And they have all been 
 evolved in this simple, horrible man- 
 ner. All of the qualities of form, 
 color, structure, and disposition of ani- 
 mals — the beauty of the gazelle, the 
 immensity of the whale, the speed of 
 the partridge, the tenderness of the 
 hare, the sagacity of the philosopher, 
 the altruism and pusillanimity of men 
 — and all of the styles of stem, foliage, 
 and fruit of plants, have been pro- 
 duced, all of them, by the selection, or 
 siirvival, from generation to genera- 
 tion, of the superior. 
 
 And the generative stream will be 
 changed, or regejterated, in so far as it is 
 in future changed or regenerated at all, 
 in a manner the same as that in which 
 it has been generated. That is, any 
 quality of form, structure, or character, 
 which living beings possess in future, 
 different from those existing to-day, 
 must be selected, or conserved, and this 
 
204 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHY 
 
 selection, or conservation, must be made 
 by environm-ent. There is no alterna- 
 tive. Future modifications of the life 
 process must take place according to 
 the • same general plan as those that 
 have taken place in the past. There 
 is no way known of re-form-in^ the 
 generative stream save as it has been 
 form.ed. 
 
 The fundamental laws of heredity, 
 we have every reason to believe, will 
 always remain as they are to-day and 
 as they have been thruout the past. 
 Animals in the past have in their re- 
 productions always approximated them- 
 selves, they continue to do so to-day, 
 and there is no reason for expecting 
 that they will not continue to do so to 
 the end of time. Offspring vary, but 
 not fundamentally. Their variations 
 are incidental. Foxes bring forth foxes; 
 snails produce snails; and the children 
 of Caucasians are, and will always 
 continue to be, the same pale dupli- 
 cates of their progenitors. Each being. 
 
JiACB CULTURE 205- 
 
 on coming into existence, represents in 
 its make-up approximately the com- 
 posite, or total, of the natures and 
 structures of the authors of its exist- 
 ence; and the supposition is unavoid- 
 able that this fundamental fact of 
 heredity will never be different. The 
 generative changes or reforms in future 
 must consist, therefore, as they have 
 in the past consisted, of selective ac- 
 centuations of variations in heredity. 
 And these selections must in future be 
 made by the same elements of environ- 
 ment as have past selections. No new 
 environmental agency can enter into 
 the selections, for the inanimate, the 
 animate, and the internal environments 
 embrace the universe. The only pos- 
 sible variation in procedure in future 
 from what it has been in the past will 
 be in the relative activities of the three 
 elements of environment. Instead of 
 the chief selective activities being put 
 forth in the future as in the past by the 
 animate environment, the internal en- 
 
2o5 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHY 
 
 vironment will be, among the elite, the 
 all-important element of environment 
 in future evolution. Human society is 
 the van of an evolutional process which 
 had its beginning away back in prime- 
 val seas. History is but the remem- 
 bered chapter of this evolution. The 
 evolution effected by the human race 
 during the period of human history has 
 been of the same kind, and has taken 
 place according to the same laws, as 
 has pre-historic evolution. Sociology 
 is a department of biology. Civilized 
 societies are but branches of the gigan- 
 tic arbor of life. Men are animals, and 
 human societies are aggregates of ani- 
 mals, and they are to be studied as are 
 other aggregates and species of ani- 
 mals. Civilized states remain in the 
 very universe where they have been 
 evolved. They find themselves in the 
 midst of, and subject to, the same laws 
 and influences as have operated since 
 the beginning of life on the planet. 
 Evolution in human societies is taking 
 
RACE CULTURE 207 
 
 place to-day, if it Is taking place at all, 
 and it will take place in the future, if 
 it takes place at all, according to the 
 same manner as has all past evolution. 
 Whatever styles of nature and struc- 
 ture human and other beings wear one 
 thousand years from now different from 
 those they wear at this moment, there- 
 fore, will depend on the character and 
 rigidity of the discriminations made 
 during the impending millenium. Any 
 quality may be imparted, modified, or 
 effaced. The only indispensable, aside 
 from a properly disposed heredity, is 
 an environment disposed to execute 
 the discriminations. In one period of 
 his evolution, civilized man was a sav- 
 age; in another period more- remote, 
 he was an ape; in another, a marsupial; 
 in another, an amphibian; and In still 
 an earlier period, he was a fish. If 
 the selective activities of environment 
 which have evolved this series from 
 shark to gentleman were sagaciously 
 reversed, and those individuals were 
 
2o8 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 incessantly selected to survive who ap- 
 proximated successively the savage, the 
 ape, the marsupial, and the fish, a na- 
 tion of law-making, pocket-picking, 
 glory-hunting Americans would, in the 
 course of a sufficient number of ages, 
 lapse into a rabble of inglorious, brine- 
 breathing sea-scourers. In his anthro- 
 poid stages of evolution, man was cov- 
 ered with hair. Top-knot jungles and 
 thickets on the faces of males are 
 about the only existing remnants. If 
 we would return to the shaggy con- 
 dition of primitive ages, we need only 
 acquire an environment which will 
 favor from age to age those whose 
 peripheries retain to the intensest ex- 
 tent the hirsute tendency. If the dis- 
 parities between the sexual tastes of 
 male and female would be leveled or 
 inverted, the conditions which have 
 caused the existing disparity must be 
 reversed. The horse exposed to a fad 
 for dwarfs would, in the course of ages, 
 the length of time depending on the 
 
RACE CULTURE 209 
 
 pitch of discrimination, be dwindled to 
 its fox-like proportions of eocene times. 
 In an environment requiring courage, 
 foxes would either disappear or grow 
 heroic. Serpents could be rendered as 
 loving as doves by a procedure no more 
 laborious than that by which they have 
 been made vindictive. And beardless 
 aesthetes may become philosophers as 
 easily as have men. Human beings 
 are bigots and egoists almost to a 
 creature. They are so because their 
 phyletic environment has fancied this 
 disgusting cut of consciousness. And 
 the only possible way to attain, with 
 anything like alacrity, any other pat- 
 tern is by means of an environment 
 with an enlightened and inextinguish- 
 able dislike for the prevailing style of 
 things. Let this truth be distinctly and 
 profoundly realized. It is the essential 
 spark of the illumination. If we would 
 bloom into beings of beauty and light, 
 we must acquire an environment which 
 will insist on beings of beauty and light 
 
2IO BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 as the mammas and papas of posterity. 
 If this ball is ever other than a globule 
 of alloy, if the universe ever experi- 
 ences the long longed for millennium of 
 prophecy and hope, all must come thru 
 the reformed and glorified gateway of 
 the womb. Individual, or post-natal, 
 reformation is, and must always be, 
 more or less imperfect. It is power- 
 less in determining the nature with 
 which beings come into the world, and 
 it is ineffectual in modifying it after it 
 is determined. 
 
 The most indefatigable environment 
 can not efface, it can only tamper with, 
 the instincts stamped by the womb into 
 the nature of any being. Convert a 
 vulture into a kind-hearted altruist or 
 an ignoramus into a sage, and you will 
 know what I mean. Convert a being 
 with a considerable instinct for leisure 
 into a being of industry: it is nearly 
 impossible. An idler may become in- 
 dustrious, but it will be because his 
 environment acquires a whip — seldom, 
 
RACE CULTURE 211 
 
 if ever, because he has traded instincts. 
 It is chiefly the twigs of things that 
 post-natal environment affects, and 
 then only after long and violent pro- 
 ceedings. What the universe needs is 
 not babes, but a particular kind of 
 babes — babes of genius and virtue, not 
 brats who must travel to maturity in 
 splints and chains to keep them from 
 unhinging the universe, fledglings who 
 need only to bloom to be beautiful, 
 generations white from embryo, pre- 
 natally illuminated and refined babes 
 — born gods. Individual, or post- 
 natal, culture would not be the futile 
 and interminable system of screws and 
 rods and steel shoes and brain-boards 
 and martyrdoms it is to-day, if it in- 
 cluded in its functions the superin- 
 tendence of the birth, as well as the 
 development, of human souls, if it 
 planted as well as pruned, or, more 
 accurately, if it pruned aggregates and 
 races as well as or instead of individtials. 
 The inanimate element of environ- 
 
212 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 ment has always been in its destruc- 
 tions the most indiscriminate of all the 
 elements of evolution. It has destroyed 
 but not selected. The inanimate is 
 blind. Its selective effects upon human 
 societies to-day are approximately the 
 same as its effects, past and present, 
 upon non-human societies. Its disas- 
 ters of flood, flame, famine, climate, 
 and the like claim multitudes of human 
 beings. But the strong and the weak, 
 the evil and the altruistic, the gifted 
 and the gross, perish with pathetic 
 impartiality. The animate environ- 
 ment, also, in so far as it is non-human, 
 exercises an indifferent influence on 
 human evolutions. Man is too talented 
 and too triumphant an animal to be 
 greatly affected by the feebler forms of 
 life below and around him. Man him- 
 self is the unrivaled reformer in the 
 universe to-day. He is conquering 
 and transforming the whole face of the 
 planet. He selects at will. The influ- 
 ences of one human aggregate upon 
 
RACE CULTURE 213 
 
 another thru war, commerce, and 
 migration have to a very large extent 
 produced the evolutions of human his- 
 tory. Nation has overrun nation, and 
 race has exterminated race. See how 
 the Slav and Saxon are supplanting 
 less powerful peoples all over the 
 world. Industrial competition is an- 
 other considerable means of selection. 
 Industry is war. Human beings come 
 into the world unequally equipped for 
 this contest. The strong and the re- 
 sourceful survive, and the inadequate 
 perish in the struggle for existence. 
 This is true whether the competitors 
 are individuals, classes, or kingdoms. 
 Perhaps the most judicious and relent- 
 less selections among civilized states 
 are made by those invisible organisms 
 causing epidemic and contagious dis- 
 eases. Micro-organisms attack the 
 weak and unfortified. Animals of 
 robust vitalities defy them. They are 
 everywhere, and they are as relentless 
 as wolves. They eat up the defective 
 
214 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 and dying carcasses o£ the race. Dis- 
 ease is more useful in promoting race 
 vigor than both war and famine. What 
 a deplorable thing from the standpoint 
 of race progress would be the discovery 
 of a cure for consumption! This dis- 
 ease has been looked upon as one of 
 the greatest enemies of mankind. But 
 by fastening upon and carrying away 
 year after year tens of thousands of 
 those physically inferior, consumption 
 performs a service to the race, in the 
 promotion of physical vigor, that is 
 almost incalculable. Consumption is 
 the knife of the surgeon — the dreadful 
 forceps which relieve us of the still 
 more dreadful molar. It is a sad sight 
 to look upon the wasted victims of this 
 dreadful malady, sitting, with hectic 
 faces and shrunken forms, awaiting, 
 with no balm but the lonely grave, the 
 outrage of final dissolution; but, after 
 all, such sights are less tragic than the 
 spectacle of whole races sinking into 
 physical decay. Cholera, scrofula. 
 
RACE CULTURE ^15 
 
 leprosy, cancer, typhus, diphtheria, 
 measles, whooping cough, syphilis, in- 
 fluenza, small-pox — their victims are 
 like the sands of the sea. They are the 
 scavengers that devour, terrify, and 
 regenerate the race. A large percent- 
 age of human beings die in infancy. 
 Infantile diseases are, therefore, a 
 formidable factor in race culture. The 
 sickly perish, as a rule, and the strong 
 survive to perpetuate the race. 
 
 In nearly all of these eliminations 
 there is more of physical selection than 
 of intellectual, and more of intellectual 
 selection than of moral. The resource- 
 ful are somewhat more likely to survive 
 in war, in the competitions of industry, 
 and even in times of natural disaster. 
 And to the extent that they possess a 
 greater likelihood of survival, to that 
 extent there is intellectual selection. 
 But this is true to a much less extent 
 in disease — especially in infantile dis- 
 eases. And moral selection in nearly 
 all of these cases can hardly be said to 
 
2l6 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 exist. Moral progress has probably been 
 accomplished more thru race experience 
 than thru selection. Men have found 
 it better to tolerate each other than to 
 quarrel and fight. They refrain from 
 quarreling and fighting more because 
 of policy or fear than from natural im- 
 pulse. The outbreaks of barbarism 
 among civilized communities when fear 
 is removed furnish evidence of this fact. 
 It is doubtful whether the cradles of 
 Massachusetts contain infants innately 
 much nobler than did the arms of those 
 barbarians who came on the north 
 wind and settled England so many 
 centuries ago. The children of Mas- 
 sachusetts grow up in a nobler atrtjos- 
 phere. 
 
 Moral selection is exercised by 
 human societies in the discriminations 
 which they everywhere wage against 
 their criminal and injurious elements. 
 Evolution is discrimination, or the 
 result of it, and the alacrity of the evo- 
 lution depends on the energy of the 
 
RACE CULTURE 217 
 
 discrimination. But any discrimina- 
 tion, however insensible, exercised per- 
 sistently thru vast measures of time, 
 promotes evolution. The hardships, 
 formal and informal, dealt out by 
 society to its unworthy members may 
 seem slight so far as their reformatory 
 effects on the generative stream are 
 concerned; but ages of such intolerance 
 make appreciably for righteousness. 
 A selfish or dishonest member of 
 society becomes more or less of an 
 outcast and the victim of a thousand 
 discriminations. He is distrusted, pun- 
 ished, and perhaps incarcerated, and 
 his likelihood of representation in the 
 next generation is immensely dimin- 
 ished. All the punishments, reproaches, 
 ostracisms, imprisonments, and elimi- 
 nations, all the social intolerances so 
 tirelessly waged everywhere by society 
 against its vicious and egoistic mem- 
 bers, and all the honors and emolu- 
 ments conferred upon the exemplary, 
 while they are designed primarily to 
 
2l8 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 protect the living generation only, yet 
 possess, when continued thru ages, 
 distinct evolutional value. 
 
 And here it may not be improper to 
 digress briefly on the function of 
 punishment in the social economy. 
 There is so much of awkwardness and 
 inhumanity in the effort put forth by 
 society to protect itself against its 
 injurious elements that any digression 
 that will lend consciousness to the 
 matter would seem eminently apropos. 
 
 Penalties are the teeth of society; 
 but what right has society to have 
 teeth? Happiness is supposed to be 
 the qnd for which society is striving; 
 and why does society deliberately 
 diminish its happiness by administer- 
 ing misery to its members? Suppose 
 crimes have been committed ; is it 
 righteous or sane for society to per- 
 petrate reciprocal crimes and entail 
 additional misery? 
 
 The primitive function of punish- 
 ment was revenge. Revenge is a burn- 
 
RACE CULTURE 219 
 
 ing in one who has been harmed to 
 reciprocate injury. It is a passion 
 growing out of combativeness, and 
 rages with immense sincerity among 
 all savage and semi-civilized peoples, 
 occasional cases having been observed 
 even among philosophers. When a 
 savage is injured, he is immediately 
 afflicted with this very painful in- 
 flammation, and in order to relieve his 
 sufferings, he maintains the privilege 
 of inflicting like harm on his offender 
 or on his offenders. The original 
 wrong is in this way supposed to be 
 obliterated, or avenged, and fever 
 ceases to burn the blood of the injured. 
 The function of punishment was, there- 
 fore, in the primitive regime, to re- 
 establish serenity in the tormented soul 
 of the aggrieved. 
 
 Revenge is an instinct which was 
 evolved in the natures of struggling 
 beings by the incessant elimination of 
 the meek — an instinct which is not 
 without meaning in an individualistic 
 
220 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 chaos of things, but which has no 
 utility or justification in a state of or- 
 ganized cooperativism. If a wrong 
 has been done or illfare inflicted, it is 
 always and wholly reprehensible to 
 inflict reciprocal wrong just for the 
 sentimental sake of it. 
 
 Punishment must be judged by its 
 utilities. An act of punishment is a 
 species of conduct, and like all other 
 conduct, it is good or bad as it dimin- 
 ishes or increases the illfare of living 
 beings. Punishment is, therefore, per 
 se, an evil, because it is an addition to 
 the misery of the universe. The in- 
 trinsic evil of punishment may be 
 atoned for, however, by that which it 
 obviates. All deliberate inflictions 
 of misery by one living being or 
 aggregate of living beings on an- 
 other living being or aggregate, in 
 consequence of invasions of welfare, 
 have one and only one justifica- 
 tion — the supposition that the in- 
 flicted misery will forestall a larger 
 
RACE CULTURE 321 
 
 misery which could not in any more 
 graceful manner be prevented. The 
 absolute and only function of punish- 
 ment is to reform the one receiving the 
 punishment and to deter others of like 
 impulses. No misery should be in- 
 flicted upon a criminal because he has 
 done a wrong, but because he and 
 others have dispositions to do other 
 wrongs. The function of punishment 
 is not to " satisfy " in some mysterious 
 sense a past offense, but to provide 
 against and curtail future offenses. 
 Savagery should be condemned and 
 terrorized and philanthropy applauded, 
 not because the one class of conduct 
 is less inevitable than the other, but 
 solely to encourage the one to dis- 
 appear from the universe and to 
 enable the other to prevail and mul- 
 tiply. The purpose of all penal 
 schemes should be, not reciprocity, but 
 " reformation pure and simple ; not the 
 relentless and absurd infliction of 
 misery commensurate with the crimes 
 
323 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 committed, but the achievement of the 
 largest possible reformation with the 
 gentlest and most strategic deprivation. 
 
 The schemes of post-mortem pun- 
 ishment, therefore, such as the theolo- 
 gians contemplate, the infliction of an 
 eternity of retribution on miscreants 
 whose deeds are all done, is a concep- 
 tion to be pitied rather than refuted. 
 Hell, as a scarecrow and a fiction to 
 startle timid scoundrels here on the 
 earth, is an institution with meaning, 
 but as a fact to be felt and realized, it 
 is without sense. 
 
 The purpose of punishment is the 
 same everywhere, whether the punish- 
 ment is administered as a reproach for 
 accidents and improprieties, or as an 
 accompaniment of public law, and 
 whether it is imposed by society upon 
 an individual, or whether it is volunta- 
 rily imposed by an individual upon 
 himself. A society which imparts mis-' 
 ery to its members in order to prevent 
 worse miseries in future is actuated by 
 
RACE CULTURE 223 
 
 the same pitch of intelligence as an 
 individual who voluntarily undergoes 
 arduous or dangerous toil in order to 
 avoid starvation. 
 
 The logic of punishment is to make 
 it easier to do right. Punishment 
 revolutionizes motive, and makes the 
 perpendicular possible to those who 
 would not otherwise wear it. Motives 
 which, without penalties, provoke 
 crime, with them prompt rectitude. A 
 being who would steal the watch of 
 another, if there were no penalty, re- 
 frains from the crime in the presence 
 of probable penalty, because the mis- 
 ery of the probable penalty is greater 
 than the probable pleasure he would 
 derive from the timepiece. 
 
 Punishments, deprivations of some 
 sort, are necessary to protect society 
 from the attacks of its inadequately 
 evolved members. But they should 
 be administered with delicacy and 
 economy. The nicest strategies should 
 be studied, in order that the softest 
 
224 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 totality of hardship may accomplish 
 the largest amount of prevention. 
 The clumsy enthusiasm of revenge 
 should be displaced by clemency and 
 regret. The criminal should be con- 
 sidered and pitied, not despised. He 
 simply complies with the nature with 
 which he came into the world, modified 
 by the environment in which he has 
 lived, the same as does every other 
 being who breathes. You or I, with 
 identical heredity and environment, 
 would do identical deeds. Measured 
 by his ability to do otherwise, the vil- 
 lain is not less divine than the humani- 
 tarian. Every creature acts out the 
 impulses which arise in his own con- 
 sciousness, and the will cannot create, 
 but simply registers, those impulses. 
 Punishment is one of the means pos- 
 sessed by society for its self-culture, 
 and its administration should not be 
 made an opportunity for pugilistic 
 cocks to color their spurs. 
 
 If the spirit of retribution were ex- 
 
MACE CULTURE 225 
 
 tinct, and the function of punishment 
 were really understood, I suspect that 
 other ways, less shocking and just as 
 effectual, would be devised for the con- 
 version of sinners. Most of the crimes 
 and clumsinesses perpetrated upon 
 criminals are the ferocities of ruffians 
 perpetrated to satisfy the anachronistic 
 instinct of revenge. They are not es- 
 sentially intended to benefit either 
 criminals or society, but to allay inflam- 
 mation in the minds of the perpetra- 
 tors. Let society come to pity its 
 wayward ones, and to realize the 
 coarseness of crucifixion, and reforma- 
 tories, with their mild and ameliorating 
 procedures will supplant the dungeon 
 and the scaffold as implements of re- 
 generation. Evil instincts must be 
 bereft of opportunity for exercise, but 
 every consideration demands that the 
 deprivations shall be useful and con- 
 scious, and shall be such as allow the 
 leading of lives as unrestrained and 
 as valuable in themselves as possible. 
 
226 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 Thousands of susceptible souls are to- 
 day languishing in torture-chambers, 
 suffering infernos of useless immure- 
 ment, who ought simply to be in- 
 structed in the psychology of self- 
 control. 
 
 A very large percentage of criminals 
 are the victims of industrial condi- 
 tions. They were driven to their 
 deeds by economic impalement. Un- 
 able to conquer a livelihood on account 
 of the preempted condition of oppor- 
 tunities and the finiteness of their own 
 powers, they chose violence as a last 
 horrible resort. If they had not been 
 endowed with an instinct to live, they 
 might have lain down peacefully and 
 passed away, if they could have found 
 some monopolist gracious enough to 
 allow to them six feet of his dominions 
 as a ceasing-couch. But being, like 
 other sons of mortals, too fastidious to 
 rot, they did the only thing possible to 
 avoid it. This large class of offenders 
 do not need penal institutions to 
 
JiACB CULTURE 227 
 
 regenerate them. They need justice. 
 They are already honorable. Society 
 robbed them — robbed them of the very 
 refuse of existence — and they simply 
 attempted to regain in some measure 
 that which was by right theirs. Dun- 
 geons are damnable which immure 
 souls whose only sin is the enthusiasm 
 to live. When men, capable and eager, 
 traverse the land in sad-eyed armies, 
 season after season, seeking opportu- 
 nity to earn honest nutrition, and seek- 
 ing in vain for even the ravellings of 
 existence, the marvel is, that they are 
 so patient — the rnarvel is, that they do 
 not in an epileptic of despair leap at 
 the throat of society, and exact from 
 its rich jugulars that which the simplest 
 justice adjudicates to them. 
 
 The selective influences of the ani- 
 mate and inanimate elements of human 
 environment are vigorously neutral- 
 ized by the ameliorative and coUectiv- 
 istic tendencies of civilization. The 
 weak are boldly suckled, and the dis- 
 
228 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 eased have ceased to die with anything 
 like alacrity. Wars, especially wars 
 of extermination, are coniparatively 
 seldom, and they are destined to be- 
 come more and more so. Socialism, 
 that state into which the genteel world 
 is inevitably slipping, purposes to mini- 
 mize in every possible manner the 
 hereditary discriminations of the inani- 
 mate. No existing society of men 
 actually equalizes the opportunities of 
 its members in the struggle for life, but 
 all civilized societies tend to do so. 
 Might is not the synonym of right 
 among any beings excelling barbarism. 
 Society goes further in its preservation 
 of the unfit than to protect the weak 
 from the powerful. It compels the 
 powerful in many instances to succor 
 the weak. It balances abilities as well 
 as equalizes opportunities. The well- 
 equipped classes share their talents 
 and fortunes with the scantily equipped. 
 Asylums for the blind, deaf, maimed, 
 
RACE CULTURE 229 
 
 orphaned, aged, poor, epileptic, insane, 
 inebriate, incurable, etc., are institu- 
 tions by means of which society par- 
 ticipates in the privations of its less 
 fortunate. Public schools, sustained 
 by the opulent but patronized equally 
 by the poor, charities and benevolences 
 of all kinds, all mutualizations such as 
 the nationalization and municipaliza- 
 tion of industries, all efforts put forth 
 by society as an organism to molify 
 the hardships falling on its unfit, are 
 influences tending to neutralize the selec- 
 tive tendencies of the animate and inani- 
 mate elements of environ^nent . Another 
 fact tending to retard evolution is the 
 comparative sterility of the capable 
 classes. The ignorant have large 
 families, and the cultured are often 
 childless. The laborer has, on an 
 average, twice as many children as the 
 lawyer. Men and women of ambition 
 enter matrimony late in life and are 
 sparing in offspring. The artist and 
 
230 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 the genius desire leisure, and are re- 
 luctant to assume the duties and bur- 
 dens of matrimony. 
 
 Perhaps the greatest checks upon 
 natural selection come from the scien- 
 tific treatment of disease. Many of 
 the most destructive diseases are 
 actually disappearing before the bril- 
 liant discoveries of modern medicine. 
 A tolerably successful cure for con- 
 sumption has just been announced. It 
 is now evidence of ignorance or neglect 
 for a patient to die of typhoid. The 
 fatalities from contagious disease have 
 been reduced fifty per cent in the 
 last fifty years. Many micro-organisms 
 have been banished to remote parts of 
 the earth. Small-pox, once one of the 
 most dreadful of pestilences, is now 
 scarcely known. There are props and 
 appliances and panaceas for almost all 
 the ills and disabilities of the race. 
 Infantile hygiene has astonishingly 
 reduced the mortalities of that most 
 dangerous period of life. A Jiuman 
 
RACE CULTURE 231 
 
 babe comes into the world. The sci- 
 ence of obstetrics stands by and sees 
 that it is successfully born. If it is 
 sickly and liable to be pounced upon 
 by bacilli, it is hedged about by sani- 
 tary precautions. Scientific splints and 
 cushions supplement its lifeless levers, 
 and pre-digested food enables it to get 
 along without organs of digestion. It 
 grows up amid these artificial surround- 
 ings, and continues its hot-house exist- 
 ence to manhood or womanhood. It 
 propagates, and posterity reaps the 
 harvest in a bounty of afflicted off- 
 spring. Infantile hygiene, protective 
 sanitation, scientific surgery, charity, 
 peace, and socialism — these agencies, 
 by suspending selections, have brought 
 civilized society to a physical condition 
 in which it is exceptional to find a 
 human being without an ailment or 
 inability of some sort. 
 
 This is the crisis. The agencies of 
 unconscious evolution have been dis- 
 qualified, but not superseded. The 
 
232 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 selective activities of the animate and 
 inanimate elements of environment 
 have been neutralized, and the civilized 
 world stands face to face with moral 
 and physical degeneracy. It is more 
 than a problem. It is a gulf. It is a 
 situation calculated to produce thought. 
 The human mind is disposed to glitter 
 in emergency. The most valuable illu- 
 minations come out of darkness. A 
 new and very additional function must 
 be acquired by society. Society can 
 not grow less humane nor less organic. 
 It must become m.ore conscious. It must 
 continue to succor and protect its un- 
 fortunate, hence it must become more 
 ingenious. Society must continue more 
 and more to neutralize the selective 
 activities of the animate and inanimate 
 elements of environment; hence it must 
 devise its own discriminations. Evolu- 
 tion is not possible without selection, 
 and if the selective tendencies of the 
 animate and inanimate are stayed, they 
 must be compensated for by an equiva- 
 
RACE CULTURE 233 
 
 lent increase in the selective activity 
 of society. 
 
 The whole substance of discrimina- 
 tion consists in the failure of individu- 
 als to continue themselves, whether 
 that discontinuance is accomplished by 
 violence or by voluntary or imposed 
 neglect. Extermination by metaphor, 
 that is, by voluntary neglect to repro- 
 duce, is as valuable as a contribution 
 to progress as extermination by mas- 
 sacre. And the new social function is 
 the displacement of the rude and ruth- 
 less discriminations of the animate and 
 inanimate environments by a conscious 
 and painless social self-discrimination. 
 Evolution must be beautified and 
 rationalized. It has been too long a 
 thing of blood and tergiversation. The 
 universe is to be regenerated by a 
 rational and conscious discrimination 
 in favor of the fitter elements of soci- 
 ety in the performance of the repro- 
 ductive function. The defective mem- 
 bers of society, whether their defects 
 
234 BETTER-WORLD PHJLOSOPHT 
 
 be physiological, intellectual, or dispo- 
 sitional, should not be permitted to 
 continue themselves into coming gen- 
 erations. I insist that this, the self- 
 selective, is the most graceful, the 
 most economical, and the only rational 
 mode of regenerating the generative 
 stream — those philosophic grandmam- 
 mas, who fancy that no evolution is 
 possible save by massacre, to the con- 
 trary notwithstanding. 
 
 The social organism should be 
 sufficiently conscious by this time to 
 realize that outright idiots are not the 
 only persons who should, out of con- 
 sideration for the future, suicide their 
 generative line. There should be 
 systematic accentuation of the good, 
 the beautiful, and the true by system- 
 atic discrimination in favor of the 
 reproduction of morally, physically, and 
 intellectually adequate members of 
 society. We have groped too long. 
 We have too long supposed, without 
 thinking, that savages are a necessary 
 
RACE CULTURE 235 
 
 social evil. We know better now. 
 We know where we came from, and 
 how we arrived here, and all about it. 
 We can rear instincts. We can culti- 
 vate beings to order. We can not re- 
 enter the womb and re-create ourselves, 
 but we can determine, by counseling 
 among ourselves, just about what style 
 of bipeds posterity may be. We know 
 the character of the generation which 
 succeeds this one will depend on the 
 character of those who take part in 
 its production, and that savages exist 
 among civilized societies simply be- 
 cause societies are too dull-minded to 
 discontinue them. We know that it is 
 just as possible to develop a certain 
 fancy of the hominine species as of the 
 equine or bovine species. By selection 
 — ^by selection, too, without eyes — we 
 have developed fair women and brave 
 men. We can by analogous and more 
 expeditious selection develop good 
 men and profound women. Men can 
 develop brains in the spinal marrow. 
 
236 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 learn to love work and death, and 
 grow noses the size of water-pitchers. 
 Society can eliminate its irresponsibles, 
 if it will only comprehend really the 
 methods of evolution. 
 
 If a certain savage in 1720 had been 
 prevented from propagating himself, 
 the notorious "Juke" family of crimi- 
 nals, which has cost the state of New 
 York more than ten millions of dollars 
 and incalculable contamination, would 
 . never have existed. And if the sav- 
 ages and imbeciles and semi-savages 
 and semi-imbeciles among genteel so- 
 cieties to-day were unrepresented in 
 the generations to come for a few gen- 
 erations, our penal and eleemosynary 
 institutions might be converted into 
 concert-halls. It indicates a helpless- 
 ness that is truly pitiable for a social 
 organism to go on generation after 
 generation carrying in its blood the 
 venom of savage ages, when a few gen- 
 erations of rational procedure would 
 free it. Any society, by judicious se- 
 
IIACE CVLTURE 237 
 
 lection, might in a hundred years have 
 average citizens as good as its best at 
 present. In the name of common sense, 
 why should not one whose blood is can- 
 cerous or criminal neglect, or be com- 
 pelled to neglect, to inject his virus 
 into the veins of posterity? Why should 
 drunkards and kleptomaniacs be al- 
 lowed to insure drunkards and. klep- 
 tomaniacs among our children and 
 children's children? Why should the 
 fool propagate, when it is reasonably 
 certain that his offspring will be idiotic? 
 Why should I, a hypochondriac, unless 
 it were to counteract something worse, 
 curse the generations with my wretch- 
 edness? By what legerdemain of logic 
 is any one justified in joining in an act 
 whose inutility even fools discern? 
 Have we no obligations to the future? 
 Has utility in time no value when util- 
 ity in space is so precious? We de- 
 velop almost every imaginable manner 
 of dogs, flowers, horses, plants, and 
 pigeons. Is it not as worth the while 
 
238 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 to rear high-minded, strong-bodied 
 boys and girls as fantastic fowls and 
 exaggerated vegetables? It requires 
 no greater expenditure, of genius. Mal- 
 fectives should be treated with consid- 
 eration and patience. They are the 
 sad survivals of a surpassed evolution 
 or the careless flotsam of a capricious 
 .heredity. But society has as unques- 
 tionable a right and as unflinching an 
 obligation to protect posterity against 
 their offspring as it has to protect itself 
 against themselves. 
 
 Parenthood is the gravest of all re- 
 sponsibilities. The act of generation 
 is a momentous act. It should be illu- 
 minated. It should be more serious, and 
 deliberate, and conscious. It should 
 be far more frequently neglected. Hu- 
 man beings should know that it is a 
 grave conspiracy, the conspiracy to 
 bring into the universe a living being, 
 an organism with lungs and responsi- 
 bilities and the faculty for being af- 
 fected. Would-be parents should ascer- 
 
RACE CULTURE 239 
 
 tain whether or not they are undertaking 
 the dissemination of disease and crime 
 among future generations. For society 
 not to know, nor care to know, and not 
 to determine, nor care to determine, 
 the character of purposed contributions 
 to a new generation, would seem amaz- 
 ing, were we not born looking upon it. 
 Were we accustomed to accomplished 
 and scientific procreation, our indis- 
 criminate somnambulism would scarce 
 wear the aspects of sanity. 
 
 In all the ordinary functions of life, 
 human beings are required to furnish 
 evidence of their fitness for purposed 
 functions. Why not in a function of 
 such singular importance as the pro- 
 creative? If manufacturers wanting 
 machinists should engage whosoever 
 applied, demanding no evidence of fit- 
 ness; if teachers and governesses were 
 employed without thought of capacity 
 or worth; and if officials of state had, 
 (and they frequently have) nothing to 
 recommend them except gender — there 
 
240 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 would be manifested the same lack of 
 sagacity as that manifested by states- 
 men and sociologists, who permit to 
 participate in the propagation of a new 
 generation any twain with the disposi- 
 tion of mind. If it is of sufificient 
 utility to require a certificate of moral 
 and intellectual fitness of one who pur- 
 poses to educate the growing genera- 
 tion, is it not of sufficient utility to 
 demand a much more significant assur- 
 ance from one who purposes to engage 
 in the far more momentous undertaking 
 of creating a new being? We punish 
 a man for neglecting to send his child 
 to school, but place no check on the 
 begetting of monstrous offspring. 
 
 Consciousness of time relations suc- 
 ceeds in development consciousness of 
 space relations. Men talk of brother- 
 hood and fraternity and the infirmity 
 of patriotism and the parliament of 
 man, and even of non-human consider- 
 ation, before consciousness seriously 
 invades the dimension of time. It was 
 
RACE CULTURE 241 
 
 only the other day that human con- 
 sciousness came into possession of the 
 conception that the universe is not an 
 immense petrifaction which has existed 
 and which will continue to exist in 
 pretty much the same condition from 
 eternity to eternity. We now no 
 longer look upon the universe as fixed. 
 It is a process, a changeling, an evolv- 
 ing caprice, and in mundane neighbor- 
 hoods, at least, is advancing pretty 
 uniformly from the homogeneous to 
 the heterogeneous. Current events 
 are links in endless concatenations. 
 The present is the product of the past, 
 and the future will be the more ac- 
 complished product of the present. We 
 are, when we come into the world, what 
 our ancestors have made us ; and on 
 what we are depends what posterity 
 ■shall be. This development of lon- 
 gitudinal, or serial, consciousness is 
 the development of the sort of con- 
 sciousness that will stimulate human 
 stirpiculture. Human beings will forego 
 
243 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 the apparent naturalness of contrib- 
 uting to the future generations when 
 they become really conscious that it 
 is philanthropy to do so. The more 
 highly evolved elements of society will 
 be irritated, too, to a livelier discrim- 
 ination against the vicious, who natu- 
 rally will be the most tardily impressed 
 with the duty of longitudinal philan- 
 thropy. 
 
 Social self-culture will come, as does 
 every transition, imperceptibly. It 
 will proceed from the more manifest 
 to the less, and from the less manifest 
 to the least. From the clumsiest kind 
 of a perception that idiots and felons 
 and incurables should perhaps be for- 
 bidden to take part in the production 
 of a new generation, the social con- 
 sciousness will develop finally into the 
 most consummate and caustic system- 
 of discriminations. The sun will yet 
 potir his fire upon an a^e, fanciful as it 
 7nay seem, when it will be a crime for 
 malfectives to beget. 
 
INDIVIDUAL CULTURE 
 
 What I have just striven to illumine 
 s the generative stream. I have de- 
 cribed in what manner this stream may 
 )e endowed so as to bring forth beings 
 )f an approximately ideal quality. But 
 here is atavism and heredity and the 
 nertia of human mind, and these for- 
 nidable facts will delay many ages 
 his brilliant possibility. In the mean 
 ime, what? What about to-day and 
 lext year and the next generation? 
 s an apocalyptic possibility the whole 
 )f hope? Deformities are pouring 
 ipon existence with the inexhaustible 
 haw of the infinite. What can be 
 lone to these? What hope more 
 angible exists for one born deformed 
 han the dream that a distant posterity 
 nay escape his evils? Are there post- 
 243 
 
244 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPIIT 
 
 natal possibilities of amendment, and 
 if so, what? What about ourselves, 
 who are already here with dispositions 
 fresh from the forest heart? We can 
 not re-invade the womb and come forth 
 again. And if we did, it would lend no 
 luster to our inheritance. The genius 
 for bringing beings into the world of a 
 specified excellence is valueless for de- 
 formities who are already here. 
 
 "Educate?'' Not unless there is 
 etymological reform. To educate is to 
 lead out, to amplify, to differentiate. 
 Education is the evolutional augmen- 
 tation of that which is. To educate a 
 deformity is to confer teeth upon a 
 monster. Would you endow the pre- 
 cipice and teach profundity to the 
 gulf? Would you thaw the avalanche? 
 Bottled diabolism is less harmful 
 corked. Clumsiness, when a bandit 
 wears it, is a praise. Only beauty 
 deserves to bloom. Education, ety- 
 mologically and practically, means the 
 development or effectualization of that 
 
INDIVIDUAL CULTURE 245 
 
 which is, and to educate deformity is 
 to strengthen the genius of universal 
 evil. Beings who conie into the world 
 as we have come into the world, and 
 as millions after us will come into the 
 world, mal-tempered and awry, need 
 more than a somewhat assiduous effect- 
 ualization. They need revision. They 
 need effectualization, but more than 
 effectualization they need surgery. 
 The supposition that the young, who 
 are invariably born with an inherent 
 tendency to mal-behave, need primarily 
 space and provocation to expand, is 
 the fundamental blunder in individual 
 culture. Did we breathe in that age 
 of which we dream, when infants shall 
 enter the~universe spontaneously right- 
 eous and requiring only sunshine in 
 order to grow grand, we might appro- 
 priately educate. But we do not. We 
 are the not very remote posterity of 
 brutes, the untamed and unrectified 
 progeny of eternal ages of militancy 
 and hate, savages flung a little higher 
 
246 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 by the evolutional surges than our 
 ancestors, but compounded of their 
 substance. Our forefathers were Trog- 
 lodytes, and wove their lairs from 
 jungle twigs. The blood of cannibals 
 bowls along our veins. Civilization, 
 contrary to delusion, is not civilized, 
 but tremendous. The fundamental 
 function of individual culture, there- 
 fore, or one of the two or three funda- 
 mental functions, should be r^-construc- 
 tion — the elimination as much as may 
 be of a dark and egoistic heredity. 
 
 Individual culture, as it exists to-day, 
 is a gigantic farce. It is clumsy in its 
 pedagogy, in the first place. Instead 
 of making the process of culture life 
 itself, it is an artificial and vexatious 
 preliminary of life. So much is incul- 
 cated that is obsolete, and that which 
 is inculcated is inculcated so little by 
 experience and so largely by arbitrary 
 injection, that the whole process, from 
 the standpoint of the taught, resembles 
 martyrdom, and the lives of teachers 
 
INDIVIDUAL CULTURE 247 
 
 are ruined in compelling mutinous 
 young to submit to it. In the second 
 place, culture is unsuccessful utterly in 
 the attainment of essential ends. In- 
 stead of making human beings consum- 
 mate, it is satisfied with their cephali- 
 zation. It does not make men and 
 women unselfish and graceful. It makes 
 them strategical. It does not implant 
 love. It does not produce characters 
 indisposed to cheat and falsify and 
 despise and slay. It does not render 
 its patrons peaceful and philanthropic. 
 It cultivates -finesse, but it does not re- 
 move the intrigue and acrimony and 
 evil and barbarism from the world. 
 It should do these things. The two- 
 fold function of individual culture is so 
 to develop beings that they shall be able to 
 perceive their proper relations to the rest 
 of the universe, to the inanimate about 
 them, and to other beings in space and 
 time, and realizing their relations to 
 others, to be disposed to assume them. 
 The former of these two functions, the 
 
248 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 irritation and development of the intel- 
 lect, culture, honestly tho awkwardly, 
 attempts to perform; but the disposi- 
 tion to sustain graceful relations to 
 others, the neglect of the inculcation 
 of which causes most of the misery 
 among men, is almost wholly unat- 
 tended to. 
 
 Individual culture is a failure, be- 
 cause its assumptions are false and its 
 procedures the reverse of what they 
 should be. It is assumed by the culti- 
 vators that babes are practically im- 
 maculate. Helplessness is mistaken 
 for innocence. Character culture is 
 considered inconsequential, and the in- 
 jection of facts colossal in importance. 
 The exceptions usurp the cultural des- 
 tination of the mass. Instead of 
 r^-forming the exceptions and educat- 
 ing the mass of the young, the excep- 
 tions should be educated and the mass 
 enter reformatories. Only exceptions 
 are fit for education, for only excep- 
 tions are not malformed. Infants are 
 
INDIVIDUAL CULTURE 249 
 
 ignorant. There is practically no 
 doubt about that; but ignorance is not 
 their only nor their most menacing 
 negation. They need data and develop- 
 ment, but more than data and develop- 
 ment they need re-formation. Children 
 are innate egoists and savages. I do 
 not mean that they are fierce. They 
 are too helpless for ferocity. But I do 
 mean that beings, with well-nigh no 
 exceptions, are excessively fond of 
 themselves, and are more or less seri- 
 ously indifferent toward others. I do 
 mean that the inhumanity, formal and 
 informal, governmental and social, 
 manifesting itself everywhere among 
 all the orders of men, is not the result 
 altogether nor primarily of the tradi- 
 tional and institutional framework in 
 which these beings exist. It is innate, 
 and is simply an aspect of that univer- 
 sal egoism with which the processes of 
 evolution have contaminated the planet. 
 And instead of recognizing these in- 
 herent tendencies, and combating them 
 
250 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 from the birth hour, they are assumed 
 by culturists not to exist. The human 
 child is supposed to be a sort of un- 
 stained page, an embryonic angel not 
 yet contaminated by his environment; 
 and this is a remnant of the pre-Dar- 
 winian delusion that human beings 
 were originally, and are still intrin- 
 sically, almost gods. 
 
 Children are nearly all of them ego- 
 ists. They should be assumed to be 
 so. They derive their natures by a 
 process of very inadequate filtration 
 from a dark and terrible past. They 
 have within them the dawn-peeps of 
 holier possibilities, but they have also 
 the uneliminated alloy of that out of 
 which they have travailed. Simply to 
 unfold them transcends stupidity and 
 approximates the monstrous. They 
 can not become ideal men and women, 
 nor anything like ideal men and 
 women, unless they are systematically 
 and tirelessly revised. 
 
 Children should be analyzed and an 
 
INDIVIDUAL CULTURE 251 
 
 inventory made of their talents, in- 
 stincts, and probabilities, and then de- 
 veloped in the light of this illumination. 
 The successful teacher is the accom- 
 plished analyst — he who can peer into 
 the consciousnesses of his pupils and 
 ascertain what they are made of, and 
 having ascertained the instincts which 
 compose them and the reactions of 
 those instincts, becomes, by reason of 
 his strategy, the reigning element in 
 their environment. The ductile days 
 of childhood is the period of the most 
 successful amendment. If beings are 
 not converted while they are yet 
 young, they are reasonably certain to 
 approximate that which they at birth 
 intended to become. The environ- 
 ment of each should correspond as 
 precisely as possible with the necessi- 
 ties of each. The more mal-born the 
 child, the more rigid and relentless 
 should be the influences for its regen- 
 eration. The same patience and solici- 
 tude now given to the creation and 
 
252 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 endowment of capacity should be de- 
 voted to the remodelment of character. 
 It is not brilliant to expect that ignoble 
 children, without sciences and institu- 
 tions devoted to their sublimation, will 
 bloom into radiant characters. Men 
 and women are but babes grown 
 stately; how stately, however, depends 
 on the profile of their sky. 
 
 An individual living being in his in- 
 dividual development is an analogue of 
 the race. The individual career of a 
 human from the unicellular embryo to 
 maturity is an epitome of the morpho- 
 logical pilgrimage from amoeba to 
 mammal. This is true of both physical 
 and psychical development. Physically, 
 both individual and race commence as 
 homogeneous, unicellular organisms, 
 and advance toward more and more 
 highly heterogeneous multicellulars. 
 Mind, also, in both racial and indi- 
 vidual evolution, proceeds in time from 
 the particular to the general, from the 
 concrete to the abstract, and from the 
 
INDIVIDUAL CULTURE 253 
 
 inert and helpless to the more and 
 more determinative. An individual is 
 an aggregate of tendencies among 
 which there are struggle and survival 
 as veritably as among the individuals 
 of a society. The fittest survive. The 
 conduct of an individual is the resultant 
 of his conscious tendencies to move, 
 just as the conduct of a society is the 
 composite of its individual constitu- 
 ents. 
 
 The gigantic task in individual char- 
 acter culture, as in social, is the devel- 
 opment of altruistic tendencies. The 
 ideal nature is one of balanced egoism 
 and altruism — a nature responding with 
 identical alacrity for self and for others. 
 The generative stream produces beings 
 who act with immense favor to them- 
 selves. The task of human stirpicul- 
 ture is so to amend the generative 
 stream that beings will begin to exist 
 with the ideal balance of the tenden- 
 cies, and individual, or post-natal, 
 culture discerns its task in the estab- 
 
254 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 lishment of this equilibrium during in- 
 dividual duration. This . displacement 
 of egoism, or inculcation of altruism, 
 in an individual is effected in a manner 
 identical with that by which egoism is 
 displaced in a society, that is, by selec- 
 tion — selection among the instincts, or 
 impulses, or conscious tendencies to 
 move, of which an individual is psychi- 
 cally composed. Environment, too, is 
 that which determines the character of 
 the discriminations. Environment fur- 
 nishes the stimuli, the tantalization, 
 and by deciding the style of the tan- 
 talization determines the manner in 
 which instincts shall exercise and de- 
 velop themselves. Instincts develop 
 and decay with use and disuse. It is a 
 psychological law. The oftener a train 
 of states passes thru consciousness the 
 more fixed and habitual it becomes, 
 and the greater the likelihood of its 
 recurrence. Every time a tendency is 
 exercised it is invigorated, and every 
 time it is neglected or subordinated it 
 
INDIVIDUAL CULTURE 255 
 
 is weakened. Any tendency may be 
 stimulated or destroyed by a series of 
 successes or a succession of submissions. 
 A living being comes into existence; 
 he is endowed with a certain nature, a 
 certain set of potentialities, with a cer- 
 tain relation of understanding among 
 them. What he may be by nature fif- 
 teen or fifty years later different from 
 what he is at birth depends on the en- 
 vironment in which he passes these 
 years. Everything that grows, whether 
 it be a tree, a personality, a grass blade, 
 or a race, starts with a certain heredi- 
 tary trend, a certain cut of tendency or 
 intention, and what it becomes depends 
 on the shape of the particular niche of 
 the universe in which fate flings it. 
 
 This is a stupendous fact, and one 
 uncontemplated by the cultivators of 
 the young. Culturists are about as 
 conscious of the vital role of environ- 
 ment in the production of individual 
 character as they are of the prepon- 
 derance of egoism in human heredity. 
 
256 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 Human beings come into existence. 
 They come into it each with immense 
 consideration for himself. They pass 
 their lives in an environment calculated 
 to inflame the very tendency which 
 more than all others needs restraint. 
 From the time an individual human 
 comes into the world a sprawling, squall- 
 ing, unpeepered vagrant, to the hour 
 he goes out in tragedy and pain, life is 
 one continuation of the very condi- 
 tions which brought him into the world 
 a confirmed egoist. The very first im- 
 pressions that invade the consciousness 
 of a human infant are such as to im- 
 part a very ludicrously untrue concep- 
 tion of his relations to others. An 
 infant is pampered and distinguished 
 and spoiled and exaggerated as if he 
 were of a specially engendered order 
 of beings. He must frequently be dis- 
 tended with the vanity that he is the 
 most extraordinary personage that has 
 for a long time appeared among the 
 populations, and that there is a highly 
 
INDIVIDUAL CULTURE 257 
 
 interesting disparity between himself 
 and others. The "spoiling" which an 
 individual human being usually under- 
 goes during the first two or three years 
 of his conscious existence can not help 
 having, since these initial experiences 
 frame the foundations of consciousness, 
 a considerable influence in all instances, 
 and in some a very noticeable influence, 
 on the character of the superstructure. 
 From three to thirteen years of age, a 
 child passes his time for the most part 
 in the association of other savages like 
 himself. The profession of children is 
 play, and the primary purpose of most 
 play is struggle. Children are domi- 
 nated by this instinct to struggle and 
 be superior, and whenever two or more 
 of them are gathered together, they 
 occupy themselves in its exercise. Par- 
 ents and teachers unwittingly devise, 
 and teach to them, varieties of means 
 by which they may effectively satisfy 
 this instinct. Competitions of every 
 imaginable kind, appealing to strength, 
 
258 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 skill, speed, or sagacity, and all of them 
 having primarily the purpose to pro- 
 vide entertainment for their egoistic 
 instincts, are systematically held out 
 for childish indulgence. Even in the 
 school-room, where above every place 
 else culture ought to be rational, the 
 same crimes and degradations are per- 
 petrated. Persistent intellectual appli- 
 cation is unnatural and repulsive to 
 the young, and they are goaded to arti- 
 ficial industry by appeals to this pow- 
 erful propensity. Rewards, prizes, 
 contests, merit marks — every conceiv- 
 able device by which this instinct may 
 be harnessed to the service of intel- 
 lectual excellence is used. 
 
 These competitive indulgences, in 
 one form or another constantly before 
 the mind of childhood, and forming 
 the most vivid and influential experi- 
 ences during the dozen most impres- 
 sional years, have, without any doubt 
 whatever, a powerful tendency to 
 develop the inherent egoistic tendency 
 
INDIVIDUAL CULTURE 259 
 
 of the child soul, for the essence of all 
 competition is egoism. A game is a 
 battle, not a battle in which the com- 
 batants would do each other violence, 
 but one in which they seek, and seek 
 vehemently, for each other's discomfi- 
 ture. It is war by means of assump- 
 tions. Each competitor assumes his 
 antagonist to be his enemy. He de- 
 sires to achieve a certain end, and his 
 opponent desires to prevent its achieve- 
 ment. They struggle. They set them- 
 selves against each other. It is all 
 feigned and mimic, but the conscious 
 states are intense. It is war, so far as 
 the consciousness is concerned. It is 
 certainly the opposite of altruism. 
 The attitude of a consciousness indul- 
 ging in contest is one of pure or relative 
 selfishness, either one in which an indi- 
 vidual alone yearns for his own success 
 and the discomfiture of others, or for 
 his success as associated with that of 
 others against still others. And it is 
 impossible for a consciousness to as- 
 
26o BETTER-WORLD PHTLOSOPHT 
 
 sume an attitude, especially one of 
 such intensity, without engendering a 
 tendency to perpetuate in conscious- 
 ness that tendency. I do not mean 
 that a game of marbles or hand-ball 
 or whist will cause an individual to be- 
 come appreciably more egoistic. But 
 I do mean to assert that the fact that 
 human beings, infant and adult, choose 
 to expend, without utility, vast ener- 
 gies in a competitive manner is prima 
 facie evidence of the existence of this 
 instinct, and that competitions inces- 
 santly indulged in thru a period of 
 years, especially by young and mallea- 
 ble minds, can not help stimulating the 
 instinct they exercise. Any instinct, 
 whether it be the mania for the accu- 
 mulation of superfluous wealth, the 
 appetite for fame, or what not, v/ill 
 grow if it is exercised, the amount of 
 the growth depending on the pitch and 
 duration of the exercise. 
 
 Is it any wonder, therefore, that the 
 
INDIVIDUAL CVLTVRE 261 
 
 young, accustomed to such an envii'on- 
 ment, grow up to consider life itself a 
 game, in which they are to strive to 
 outwit those about them? Is it any 
 wonder that you and I and men and 
 women everywhere are helplessly self- 
 ish, when we were born so, when all 
 that we know of altruism has come 
 thru Sunday-school rumors and strag- 
 gling precepts, and when we have all 
 our lives been surrounded by selfish 
 people and occupied in selfish pastimes 
 . and professions? Nothing could be 
 more natural. Altruism is anomalous 
 on the earth, and it is not astonishing. 
 Living beings who love themselves no 
 more ardently than they love others 
 are prodigies, and it will never be 
 otherwise so long as beings are born 
 as they are and live in like conditions. 
 Reformers would as well attempt to 
 keep down conflagration with every 
 citizen an incendiary as to banish self- 
 ishness from a world into which be- 
 
262 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 ings are born selfish, and in which 
 selfishness is promoted or tolerated 
 from cradle to tomb. 
 
 There must be radical revolution in 
 procedure. Egoism must be recog- 
 nized, and recognized as the most for- 
 midable fact in human nature. It 
 must be discouraged at all hazards, 
 even, if necessary, at the expense of 
 intelligence. It must be combated 
 from the moment a child is capable of 
 impressions. The young should be 
 drilled and disciplined in social eie- 
 gance, and with the same valiancy and 
 science as are employed in the develop- 
 ment of the intellect. Altruism should 
 be inculcated from the cradle, and 
 savagery should be denounced. Max- 
 ims and precepts, proclaiming the 
 equal preciousness of all, should be 
 assiduously dinned into the conscious- 
 ness. The young should be convinced 
 beyond all chance of deterioration that 
 the only laudable thing in the world is 
 the causing of happiness, and that hap- 
 
INDIVIDUAL CULTURE 263 
 
 piness in others is just as precious and 
 valuable as it is in themselves. They 
 should be taught that only " happiness 
 which comes like the red flowers of the 
 oleander out of the bosom of the all" 
 is true happiness, not that which is 
 gleaned from the pain and discomfiture 
 of others. Every child, and not only 
 every child but every intelligence, 
 should avoid the sin of struggle — 
 I mean, of struggle against others. 
 The only legitimate adversary is the 
 inanimate — never a living soul. Instead 
 of struggle against others, children 
 should be taught helpfulness, struggle 
 for others, sympathy instead of subju- 
 gation. It is an injury for a child ever 
 under any circumstances to participate 
 in any game, or contest. It fires the 
 very instinct it is the duty of culture 
 to curb. Childhood pastimes should 
 be scrupulously those which afford 
 divertisement without degradation — 
 dancing, dumb-bells, see-saw, sailing, 
 stilts, kites, tree-planting, strolling, ex- 
 
264 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 ploring, sleighing, swimming, swing- 
 ing, outing, and the like. Or, better 
 than pastimes which do not stimulate 
 egoism, are those which actuate altru- 
 ism. The cooperative construction of 
 a mimic dam or domicile is better than 
 bicycling, in so far as character culture 
 is concerned, because in the one there 
 is actual cultivation of • helpfulness, 
 while the other contains only the nega- 
 tive virtue of neglecting the cultivation 
 of egoism. All school-room competi- 
 tion should be abolished. The school 
 should be a family, a fraternity, a col- 
 ony of cooperating, helping, sympa- 
 thizing brothers and sisters, not a camp 
 of hot combatants bent on mutual dis- 
 comfiture. Competition is not neces- 
 sary, and if it were necessary, it would 
 not be justifiable. If it is not possible 
 to produce great intellects without 
 crimes on character, then let us doze 
 forever in the holy haze of mediocrity. 
 A graceful nature is the most essential 
 psychic possession of a living being. 
 
INDIVIDUAL CULTURE 265 
 
 The ability to weigh the stars and dis- 
 sect the sunbeams is more marvelous 
 but not more valuable than the dispo- 
 sition to be true, generous, and just. 
 Over-intellectualization is more than 
 a possibility: it is a fact. We lack 
 grace of nature more than sagacity. 
 Clumsiness is not horrible in a hyena. 
 Let the intellect sleep, or civilize it. 
 I am not decrying culture, but culture 
 as it is, lop-sided culture, the cultiva- 
 tion of the strategies to the neglect, 
 and especially at the expense, of the 
 humanities. 
 
 In reply to those who maintain that 
 to utilize the struggle and survival in- 
 stinct is unavoidable in achieving a 
 task so onerous as intellectual excel- 
 lence, I would say: // is not. The in- 
 stinct to be superior is a prominent 
 instinct in nearly all children. But it 
 is not the only instinct. The desire 
 for approbation is almost as strong and 
 perhaps quite as prevalent. The in- 
 stincts of honor, of self-respect, of 
 
266 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 curiosity, of fear, of sympathy, etc., 
 are found almost everywhere, and may 
 be appealed to successfully by any one 
 with tact and analysis enough to un- 
 dertake the development of human 
 young. Then, it is not necessary that 
 intellectual culture be such a forced 
 and repulsive something as it is. The 
 most repulsive portions of curricula 
 are the obsolete and the anachronistic. 
 Who, that has pity, is disposed to cen- 
 sure a child for rebelling against the 
 useless and absurd rumination, thru 
 painful years, of mummified languages 
 and fearful mathematical formulae, 
 which have no more real bearing, and 
 which to the average human being 
 never will have any more real bearing, 
 on the great, living, performing universe 
 around him than the esoteric nonsense 
 of the Five Kings? The extent to 
 which Latin and Greek are pondered 
 and agonized over to-day is not only 
 ridiculous, but criminal. A few months 
 of word-analysis and systematic study 
 
INDIVIDUAL CULTURE 267 
 
 of English will do more toward im- 
 parting a mastery of one's vernacular 
 than as many years of the study of 
 dead languages. And so far as disci- 
 pline is concerned, geometry and the 
 concrete sciences are far superior to 
 any language in the development of 
 rational mind. Another thing that 
 renders intellectual culture unpopular 
 with the young is the illogical manner 
 in which tasks are spread before them, 
 or the illogical manner in which their 
 development is attempted. The ini- 
 tial concern in intellectual culture — 
 the very first thing to be accomplished, 
 and that which should employ the 
 early years of child life — should be 
 the training and develop'inent of the 
 senses for the accurate acquisition of a 
 knowledge of the surrounding uni- 
 verse. The mind is made up of that 
 which passes in along its avenues, and 
 rich and accurate knowledge is de- 
 pendent upon accurate and educated 
 sensations. The second essential is 
 
268 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 that the universe be presented as much 
 as possible directly to the senses. The 
 universe presented in the primary 
 schools of the world to-day is not the 
 actual universe: it is a caricature. 
 Knowledge, especially primary knowl- 
 edge, should be experienced, not ac- 
 quired thru the very imperfect medium 
 of language. Experience must form 
 the basis and substance of all knowl- 
 edge; for the only way in which any 
 consciousness is able to assimilate sec- 
 ondary information is by means of the 
 primary information derived thru the 
 experience of the senses. The acqui- 
 sition of a knowledge of remoter and 
 more involved aspects of ■ the uni- 
 verse, and the acquisition of the opin- 
 ions and knowledge of other beings 
 (and the acquisition of the means 
 for making all these acquisitions), are 
 matters of secondary and subsequent 
 consideration. It is a crime to set a 
 child the task of learning the names 
 and uses of a wilderness of alphabet- 
 
INDIVIDUAI. CULTURE 269 
 
 ical symbols, or combinations of sym- 
 bols, at an age when it needs and de- 
 sires nothing but the exercise and 
 development of its senses. The arts 
 of reading and writing are difficult 
 acquisitions. They should be acquired 
 incidentally. They should be reserved 
 for an age when they can be acquired 
 easily and without nausea. They are, 
 and should be, acquired as means for ad- 
 ditional acquisition. To allow them to 
 become usurpers — to become the ends 
 of primary culture — is preposterous. 
 The primary means of intellectual cul- 
 ture are the senses, and the primary end 
 is a knowledge of the universe. Read- 
 ing and writing are arts which supple- 
 ment the primary means of knowl- 
 edge. And the fact that they are to- 
 day made the primary end of all early 
 culture is largely responsible for the 
 supposed necessity for harnessing the 
 most dangerous propensities for their 
 acquisition. 
 
 If the curriculum were freed of its 
 
270 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 archaic portions, the remainder reorgan- 
 ized in the Hght of the latest psychol- 
 ogy, and the cultural process made to 
 enter more sincerely into the every- 
 day life of the young, instead of being 
 a sort of excrescence or superimposi- 
 tion which juveniles are expected to 
 endure five twenty-fourths of one half 
 the days of the year, intellectual cul- 
 ture would be a less fearful and for- 
 bidding thing than it is at present. 
 
 The revision of human nature thru 
 the rational revision of juvenile nature 
 is perhaps the only solution of the 
 ethical, political, and economic prob- 
 lems of the mind. These problems 
 exist primarily, all of them, on account 
 of the preponderance of the egoistic 
 element in human nature. Do away 
 with this preponderance, and you do 
 away with the social tangles and con- 
 tentions which grow out of it. Men 
 and women are mischievous and coarse 
 because they were born so, and because 
 they were not refined while they were 
 
INDIVIDUAL CULTURE 271 
 
 growing. Teach a child to love others 
 as it loves itself ; let this be the first 
 and most impressive injunction that 
 invades its ears ; allow it never to 
 infringe this rule in its conduct toward 
 others, and never to associate with 
 those who do ; teach it that the highest 
 virtue is forbearance and helpfulness ; 
 inculcate the equal rights of all to the 
 joys of the universe ; forbid all com- 
 petitive indulgence as degrading and 
 ungallant ; teach it the propriety of 
 exercising its combativeness against 
 the tendencies of the inanimate, never 
 against a fellow-creature ; allow only 
 those amusements which encourage 
 kindness and the rivalry of good- 
 doing; — and when that child grows to 
 manhood or womanhood, and encoun- 
 ters the conditions of more serious 
 life, it will encounter them, not ideally, 
 perhaps, but in a spirit very remote 
 from that in which it would have ap- 
 proached them had it come up thru 
 conditions of incessant egoism. 
 
272 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 The environment of the formative 
 yeai-s of human beings, in order to 
 justify very courageous expectations, 
 must be consistent. An environment 
 four-fourths maudlin is not reformed 
 by becoming one-fourth sane. I mean 
 that the intermittent efforts of the 
 school-room, however serious and 
 judicious, can not produce unaided the 
 necessary revolution in human nature. 
 The environment of the school is a 
 small part of the environment of a 
 human being. A human being on an 
 average is in the school only five 
 hours of one half the days of a few 
 years of his life, and rational treatment 
 during this time could be largely 
 counteracted by the immense influences 
 of the rest of his existence. Culture 
 comprehends more than school-room 
 meddlement, and cultural reform 
 means more than the inoculation of 
 otherism along with facts during the 
 scanty hours of school life simply. 
 The nursery, the street, the school, the 
 
INDIVIDUAL CULTURE 273 
 
 Goncert-hall, the market, the universe, 
 all must conspire to the same end. 
 The environment of the whole life must 
 proceed with revolutional intent. 
 
 The most successful character cul- 
 ture is that which is attempted in the 
 tenderer years of existence. In in- 
 dividual life as in social, the more 
 helpless and impressionable period is 
 the earliest period, the period of in- 
 fancy and juvenility. This is the period 
 in which the organism is most suscepti- 
 ble to the influences of the animate 
 and inanimate elements of environ- 
 ment. In after years a being becomes 
 more or less fixed in nature, more or 
 less self-determinative, more or less 
 calloused and inaccessible to the influ- 
 ences of those who are, and that which 
 is, about him. Realization of his own 
 power and importance enters with 
 triumphant ado into his consciousness. 
 Instead of acquiring, he concocts his 
 impulses. It is the stage of indepen- 
 dency, and of possible self-culture. 
 
274 BETTER-WORLD PHILOSOPHT 
 
 Self-culture is the art of self-modifica- 
 tion, the art of that stage of psychic 
 evolution when a consciousness recog- 
 nizes itself as a process capable of 
 conquest. And when psychology be- 
 comes a science of less rarefied func- 
 tions, it will teach pitiful mortals this 
 glorious art. 
 
 It is excessive to hope that all the 
 egoism, I mean the superfluous egoism, 
 of the populations may during the life 
 period of human beings be subtracted. 
 The period of possible reform is brief, 
 the nature of human nature is stubborn, 
 and environment is necessarily imper- 
 fect. It all depends on the amount of 
 egoism to be eliminated, and on the 
 length, the sanity, and the relentless- 
 ness of the effort. 
 
 Revision of character will be a much 
 more tangible and scientific thing when 
 the physiology of psychology becomes 
 more than a controverted conjecture. 
 There has been no attempt, no methodi- 
 cal attempt, to amend character thru 
 
INDIVIDUAL CULTURE 275 
 
 physiological and neural violence; and 
 about all we know about the possibilities 
 of such a surgery consists of glimpses 
 caught on occasions of casualty. We 
 do know, however, that neural changes 
 appear promptly and invariably in con- 
 sciousness, and that there is every 
 reason to suspect perfect parallelism 
 between the neural and psychic pro- 
 cesses. This unfailing attendance and 
 dependence of mind on physical 
 phenomena, and the superior tangibility 
 of matter over consciousness, assure 
 the prophet that an accomplished and 
 sensitized attention is the all-essential 
 to the achievement of psychical amend- 
 ment by neural and physiological 
 alteration. In the New Age which we 
 prevision and approach, among the 
 marvels to amaze our clumsy contem- 
 plations will be the miracles of cerebral 
 surgery, the physics of the humors, the 
 science of the physiology of conscious- 
 ness. 
 
PRINTED BY R. R. DONNELLEY 
 AND SONS COMPANY AT THE 
 LAKESIDE PRESS, CHICAGO, ILL. 
 
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