The contribution of the human race to its own development is the distinguishing feature in social evolution. That prompt and simple reaction to the environment by which the evolution of sub-human species has been accomplished, is complicated, with us, by a delayed and uncertain reaction, due to stored energy and to the internal environment of man’s conscious mind. We are of course modified by conditions, and transmit the modification through heredity. The results in social formation and conduct are clear and startling, but if man could in no way alter these results or select among the causes, to study them would be painful and useless.

Man has, however, a limited private supply of energy, his storage battery of nerve force; not initial with him, but temporarily his to use; and he has also, in the imaged world of his mind, an environment which leads him to use that personal energy according to his separate views of life; thus he can, and does, modify his conduct to a considerable degree. His contribution varies widely in extent; some individuals living very largely from personal initiative, and some almost without; it varies as widely in value; being sometimes of a most advanced grade, and at others distinctly primitive and reversionary.

We have heretofore gravely overestimated the relative extent of this personally modified conduct or telic action, as compared with the conduct which is the result of unconsciously transmitted forces, or genetic action. In the dawn of human consciousness the field of personal conduct was most prominent to man, and he took small note of what things he did under the unobstructed action of natural tendencies.

The word “natural” is here used in contradistinction to “personal”; not as holding man’s personal conduct to be un-, anti-, or super-natural, but as distinguishing between the actions resultant from general laws, and those resultant from the man’s choice and will; between the genetic and the telic. Marriage, for instance, is a result of the natural laws of sex-attraction, with their deeper bases in race-preservation; celibacy is a result of personal choice and will, based on certain ideas cherished by the individual; marriage is genetic—celibacy, telic. The cerebral activity required to decide upon and enforce a given act, apart from and perhaps in spite of the natural tendencies, makes such acts more perceptible and more memorable; and man inevitably grew to overestimate that part of his behaviour which had passed muster in the front halls of the brain. In these cases he felt himself act, and assumed that the acts which he felt were the sum of his conduct. Plainly perceiving, however, that these acts of his were very irregular and unreliable, often indeed differing widely from his intention, he soon postulated other forces as working upon him, supposedly personal, for he knew no others; and gods and devils were installed in his universe as cogent factors in this perplexing mass of conduct. Some, feeling dimly the larger currents of tendency pressing upon them, conceived of Fate, Destiny, Karma, Fore-ordination—something high and invincible, governing conduct from afar. In all the history of man’s conscious life he has been struggling with his conduct, and seeking to modify it to what he from time to time considered desirable ends.

That he has accomplished so much is due to the tremendous power he has to use in this way; that he has accomplished so little is due to his misapprehension of the best means of applying this power; and that he has produced such strange, peculiar kinds of personally modified conduct is due to his varying conception of the desired ends.

Overestimating his personal power, he constantly overdraws upon its resources, exhorting the individual to behave thus and thus; as if all conduct were telic. He has known little or nothing of the genetic laws of human progress which would have guided his course and lightened his task so wonderfully, could he but have understood them. Better housing for the poor does more to develop chastity than preaching it to two families who live in one small room.

As we now begin to grasp something of the position of man in nature, and of the processes of social evolution, we see how irresistibly he was urged upward by the progressive tendencies which lift mankind from savagery as they lifted the savage from the brute; and also how he has been held back by cumulative habits and earlier instincts. In this vast field of evolutionary processes, man, as a conscious, self-directing agent, flounders slowly along, now pushing violently toward a stage of development quite beyond his immediate grasp; and now as violently maintaining standards and ideals long since outgrown and become retroactive and injurious.

The extremes of his influence are most marked. Again and again has the race put forth a man with a specialised brain fitted to grasp a scheme of conduct far superior to that obtaining in his time; and, under the functional necessity of a member of society, urging this higher scheme of conduct upon his fellows with sublime faith, courage, and endurance. Social evolution has been markedly promoted by minds like these. Always someone seeing ahead and proclaiming the advance, and the mass, as they become able to grasp the new concepts, struggling mightily to modify their conduct thereto. Looking only at this side of it, we should say that man, as a factor in social evolution, worked most powerfully to promote it.

There is quite another side to it, however. The human brain, while it has the capacity to foresee future conditions, and to dictate conduct modified to such improved ends, has also memory, the power to retain past conditions, and to modify conduct upon them. If we can imagine active self-consciousness in some stage of physical evolution, it is easy to see how diversely it might have worked.

Take a high-minded pterodactyl, for instance—some poetic, philosophic, progressive pterodactyl. He might have had dim concepts of larger wings and lighter bones, of dryness and sunshine and wide spaces of sweet air; he might even have had faint visions of soft feathers, of nestled eggs, and the joyous music of love. If he were capable of transmitting these ideals among his brethren, they might have been induced to soar more assiduously and perch the higher—so sooner introducing the archeopteryx.

But if on the other hand we postulate our self-conscious pterodactyls as possessing long memories and venerable traditions, ancestor worship and a retroactive education, we should then find them forever yearning for their reptilian past; forcibly re-immersing each aspiring young generation in adhesive depths of mud, and piously destroying the would-be birds as enemies to society. It is on this side of our consciousness that man, as a factor in social evolution, is of such doubtful value.

A consciousness that works backwards, a personal modification of conduct based on the forced retention of more primitive conditions and ideals, this has been, and still is, one of the heaviest drawbacks to human progress. Fortunately for us the general mass of our conduct is resultant from natural causes, rather than personal. We are forced upward from century to century by changing conditions, whether we will or not. The tempting island and sheltered waterway evolved from us the boat, and the boat grew and spread mightily and changed the fate of nations. Under its influence man widened and thickened in social intercourse, and became wise and friendly in practice, long before his conscious ideals of conduct were anything but ignorant and savage.

Steam communication has united modern peoples faster than all religions, joining land to land in bands of iron, and the biting edges of the nations must wear smooth under the wheels. A Russian railroad track comes to the edge of Germany, with a different gauge from the German road which continues it, but the railroad is stronger than Czar or Emperor, and makes ultimately for peace.

Our constantly increasing facilities for communication are social functions, evolved in the human race on natural lines, and they bring different character and conduct long before the popular mind has understood their meaning and consciously adopted their results. As an effect of changed conditions our conduct to-day is at the grade required by steam and electric communication; but as far as that conduct springs from personal judgment and will we are still in the sailing-vessel period, some even in that of the slave-rowed galley.

Every line of social evolution makes for peace to-day, for smooth and rapid growth of international agreement; but our personally modified conduct, resting as it does on very ancient ideals and traditions, still drives us into war. Man’s personal conduct has never, as a whole, been up to the level of his socially evolved conduct. Note how the development of industry and commerce lifted and lightened Europe, leading on to peace, to education, to freedom; and how all the while the dominant ideals and conscious efforts of the same people were all for war, its highly prized glories and its supposed gains. See, when learning began to lift its head as a great social factor in those dark ages, how the proud knight still boasted that he could not read or write—mere priestcraft, much beneath him. Quite late in English history it was held derogatory for the nobility to spell well, these baser arts were for their inferiors. In more recent times we can see as plainly how the advance of women, their fuller education and general development, a most important step in social evolution, has been as earnestly opposed by the great majority of persons, acting under the dominance of long-held lines of hereditary ideas and superstitions.

It would seem here as if man were a most undesirable factor in social evolution; as if he acted solely as a brake on the wheels of progress, always seeking to maintain previous conditions, and to modify conduct retroactively. We can easily see how this deterrent position is taken by us. Our range of perception depends on our brain. The brain is an organ, transmitted with hereditary modification like any other organ, and that hereditary modification is of course resultant from earlier conditions. The older the modifying conditions the deeper the modification; racial habits of unbroken centuries are not to be offset by one lifetime’s change. So we look out upon the world through an ancestral brain which is far more responsive to simple primitive stimuli than to the more subtle combinations of the present; witness the absurd delight of modern man in hunting.

By this inheritance we find it easier to enjoy, approve of, understand, and uphold that which has been than that which is; to say nothing of that which is to be. Nevertheless the brain is of most easily modifiable structure, and, of itself, shares in the uplifting pressure toward higher development. Each child should bring to the race a little more brain capacity, a little more inclination to progress, and no doubt he does. But this tendency to new power of thought and breadth of vision, which is ours in every child by virtue of social evolution, is heavily offset by the parental action, by our conscious contribution to our own conduct.

Nothing is firmer in our minds than the concept of parental duty; an instinct of primitive force and cumulative development. Parental duty involves education, and education, as previously grasped by man’s consciousness, has been one of the most retroactive of social forces as well as one of the most beneficial.

It is a simple physiological law that the impressions first received are keener and deeper than those of later years. Thus each old person carries a memory of better things in his youth; not that they were better in any way, but that his machinery was fresher and took stronger impression. Owing to this the teaching of the aged has always harked back to the superiority of the past—their youth, and deprecated the decadence of the present—their age. It is the measure of personal life erroneously applied to racial life. Under its pressure has sprung one of the most universal of our folk-myths, the legend of a Heroic Past.

The diminutive size and narrow experiences of a child make the events of youth seem larger than those of maturity. The aging brain, as it weakens in recent memories of what a large experience makes small events, recurs vividly to those important records of its youth, and thus naturally cherishes this conviction of the real superiority of those early days. The long life and wide range of impression of the human being give a broad field for this natural assumption, and the power of speech makes the assumption transmissible.

An ancient bear may fondly imagine that in his youth he did more glorious deeds than the enfeebled descendants he sees around him; but if he does think so, he cannot discourage them with his delusions. An ancient man could and did!

The education of the young is necessarily in the hands of their elders; and youth, with no knowledge or experience of its own, cannot conclusively deny, or even ably criticise, the statements made by the aged. This pride of the past, so manifest in the old, is not so injurious to-day. Recognised as a physical phenomenon, offset by wider knowledge of the facts, and with accessible records to give immutable proof that our environment has not shrunk in the least since we were young, this natural tendency of waning brain power does small harm. In our racial babyhood it did enormous harm. There was no record then to dispute with grandpa as to the number of wolves he had slain, or just how big were the nuts on the towering trees of his infancy.

So the Superior Past tradition was hammered hard into the unprotected infant brain, and took fast hold of it, wore deep furrows in it, set that habit of thought so rigidly in the mind of the race that it has taken all these unnumbered ages for a shouting universe to convince us that life is Growth! Only a few of us can see it even now. Deep down below our modern learning still may be found this basic assumption that things were better once—this recurring wish to go “back to nature,” or back to handicrafts, or back to something or another—so sure are we in our sub-soil minds that Heaven is behind us!

All this reversionary habit of old brains would have been offset by the “tendency to vary” in young ones; by the steady uplift of each new generation; but for the cumulative weight of our conscious efforts at education. Education, necessarily traditional at first, and instilling tremendous veneration for the ever-receding past,—especially in those earliest years when memory was the only record of events,—has steadily met the expansive tendencies of each new brain by the repressive weight of all foregoing centuries. The development of new brain tissue, and its expanding cellular arrangement, urges constantly to new discovery, and to a rearrangement of earlier impressions, but education has diligently endeavoured to enforce upon each brain precisely that mass and order of impression considered as beneficial in the past. To re-impress forever the same facts in the same relation, and to severely discourage and prohibit any reconsideration of this supply, has been for ages our method of education.

How seriously this has interfered with our progress it is impossible to say. We know that in spite of it the brain has developed in more normal lines under the beneficent action of genetic social forces. A growing industry preached peace to us while church, and state, and school were yet preaching war. Social unity and organic relation are forced upon our consciousness by the facts, while education still hands down the individualistic concepts of far earlier times.

Even in the most rigidly repressed of all lines of growth, the moral perceptions, we can see how social evolution has developed the soul of man in direct opposition to religious traditions. A given stage of brain development is capable of formulating only such and such moral concepts—of postulating only such and such a perception of God.

The current apprehension of God in a given age is accepted as final and forced upon the consciousness of each succeeding age, thus tending to preserve a necessarily inferior standard, and, in preserving it, to check any brain growth tending to its contradiction. This is one of the most conspicuous and persistent of man’s efforts to modify conduct. Faithfully and conscientiously he had striven to maintain the innocent errors of his racial youth as guides to succeeding ages. With every gathered force of established religion, with the growing pressure of education, with the tremendous sanction of parental government, man has always striven to preserve the religious limits of his remote ancestors.

And yet, in spite of all the allied forces of conscious humanity, the evolution of brain tissue went on; the new brains saw larger glimpses of truth and transmitted what they saw to others; those who had ears to hear heard, and the world’s religions have grown and spread under genetic forces, in the face of opposition, persecution, and execution based on telic forces. A clearer and sadder illustration of the attitude of man as a factor in social evolution need not be asked. All that he could do he has done to throttle progress and stop the growth of his own soul; and this under a sublime conviction of virtue.

In scientific progress, in artistic development, along all the lines of human growth, we find the majority acting as obstructionists; always valiantly upholding that which has been, and maintaining, as respectable pterodactyls, that mud of a proper consistency is far superior as a vehicle of life to the untried vicissitudes of air. Is it then to be supposed that social evolution would have got along faster without our conscious cerebration? That we might have slid peacefully up the ladder with our eyes shut, instead of struggling on in our toad-in-the-well fashion—up three steps and down two? Surely not. The very fact that this power to alter conduct marks the highest stage of animal evolution proves its value. Nature does not make such huge mistakes as to introduce and maintain an injurious function.

We must remember, too, as against the deterrent drag of the majority, the grand uplift of the few; the power never yet measured by which the conscious life of one man can inspire and lift and stimulate the others. Again and again we see the whole race seized and pushed on by some dominant individual life, the currents of whose action vibrate unceasingly through the mass, and stir it to better growth.

When man does by some blessed chance go with the forces of evolution, and uses his conscious power to resist the downpull of old habit, and the opposition of his past-ridden fellows, he becomes an immense accelerating power. By the aid of his racial memory he can see where a new age brings us to the same danger-signals that we ignored in the past, and learn to avoid them. Man’s vast stretch of consciousness, made permanent and accessible to all by the arts, especially the art of literature, gives him the advantage of well-nigh limitless experience.

Our irrevocable past, exposed before us all in the increasing light of knowledge, is not a thing to worship and to follow, but a record of splendour and of warning, of deep humility, of patience, and of hope. Our power to postulate a future, to erect hypotheses on which to work, gives us another advantage over the unconscious products of evolution. We have yesterday to learn from, and to-morrow to plan for, and these two give a far broader basis of action than the passing experience of to-day. Our ability to modify conduct, so painfully proven by our successful repressive measures, will have even greater effect when we work with the upward tendencies, instead of against them.

So far the attitude of the race towards its own vanguard—the young—has been that of a heavy old gentleman throwing himself solidly down on an active child, and seeking to smother him and pin him to the earth. Being larger and heavier than the child, he seriously interfered with his normal activity. But when this size and weight is turned to account to help and not hinder, when, instead of piling the dead years on the quivering young brain of the child, we set ourselves as a bulwark to keep the past off him—then we shall see surprising progress. We have but to gain a clear idea of what the natural lines of social evolution are, and cease our opposition, to make large and healthy increase in our growth.

Nowhere is this better shown than in the rapid improvement of education to-day. Instead of a mere transmission of what people used to believe, the young mind is set to find out what is to be known, helped by a large array of carefully tested facts, and the best machinery of latest inventors. The laboratory method, to learn by experiment, to test by proof—this is the modern system; as against the blind belief in changeless traditions that held us back so long. The educator of to-day seeks to develop the brain by exercising all its powers—not to fill and seal it like a preserve jar.

That superstitious respect for the aged which distinguishes China is giving way to a respect for wisdom, for knowledge, for judgment, and ability wherever manifested; and if we swing too far toward honour for the young, it is a healthy extreme to counterbalance the huge and heavy back action of the past. The mind of man is now being opened to perceptions of facts as he finds them, rather than the retention of old stories, and is exercised more in free, responsible action during its early years.

We are beginning to learn now something of the true history of our race—what we rose from, and how we have risen; what forces urged us most, what conditions helped us most. We are seeing with increasing clearness the desirable lines of action, and how best to follow them. Alert, intelligent, and active among the great currents of social evolution, we can do much to promote their effects. Here we can let them alone, there we can oppose our allied wills against some eddy of reversionary tendency, or check the growth of some disadvantageous excess; we can use our consciousness to choose between the varying forces, and such individual power as we possess to steer among them.

To see our line of progress, to see the tremendous currents that push us upward and take advantage of them; to see also the pitfalls and stumbling-blocks, the reaction and inertia to which mere genetic progress is exposed; and then to use our telic energy to assist nature and go farther—that will make man a far more useful factor in social evolution.