Without social life no one of the peculiarly human powers of a man comes to fruition. He may chatter, for example; he cannot speak. He has all the necessary organs and all the necessary power, but man-language is part of an inheritance stored up for him in community life. It is stored up there, just as clinging with his hands and sucking with his lips are stored up ready for him at birth, in his body. Society is for him an immense extension of his body, and therefore a further means of extension for his spirit. It is also an immense extension of the bodies and spirits of other men with whom he may enter upon relations. You may look on it as supplying a brain common to all men which all may use together, and in which their activities should find not only a recording medium but an unfailing stimulus and contributory aid. But the social brain is in a peculiar sense men's own making, as free and capable creators. They have come to be owners of life and directors of its course in a degree they certainly had not attained when their bodily brains were slowly growing to be what they are. This brain of theirs, used in community, is as truly built by their own efforts as are the houses in which they live. The evolution of man has to all intents of spirit ceased to advance by changes in his body, but it goes on by incessant change and enormous amplification in his community life.

Here, too, in this many-bodied and many-souled community, as well as in the individual man's life, function determines structure. But function has there become self-conscious and world-conscious, aware of the many bodies and the many souls, aware of their needs and dangers, aware of their giving and their gaining. Men have societies within the community such as on the whole their conscious desires and purposes, their attitude towards their fellows, their sense of responsibility and obligations, their aims and ideals, demand. We have indeed the societies we deserve. We may well ask ourselves why we deserve to have them as they are; we may well say to ourselves—'"Prisoner, tell me, who was it that wrought this unbreakable chain?"' And the answer is clear, convicting not only of error but of what some of us have learnt to know as actual sin, sin against the call and promise of life. '"It was I," said the prisoner ... "when at last the work was done and the links were complete and unbreakable, I found that it held me in its grip."'

There are other societies besides those of men. Some are far more completely organized. The bees and the ants have carried social organization to a state of harmony and of adjustment to ends which is as strongly marked in its contrast with any that human societies present, as is the triumphant surgery of the solitary wasp by contrast with the blunders of an untrained man. In 'the civility of these little citizens' society is carried to a completeness corresponding with that of the life of the creatures who are its parts. In an ant-hill or a hive we have before us, some may say, a model of what a society should be. Perfect co-operation, complete subordination of individual to social ends, the highest possible working efficiency of each and all—it sounds well, and no one can deny that for bees and ants it works well. Would it work equally well for men?

The answer we give to this question will depend on two things. It will depend first on whether we think that men are or are not competent to advance, and are aided to advance, as beings not only spiritual in essential character and purpose, but self-creative and so able to reach both an efficiency beyond all constraint by institutions and machines, and an enlargement of community-life which shall embrace society upon society in all their diverse modes. Secondly, it will depend on whether we are or are not willing to organize any society by what used to be called biological methods, that is by the methods of the arena—of the 'gladiators' show.' If we decide on the gladiators' show and a social efficiency with no further outlook than a highly superior human ant-hill's, we pronounce ourselves believers that in principle the ant-hill manner of life with its isolation of society from society will work for men. We may be wrong even in a short view or a narrow view of man's capacities and existence; we are certainly wrong if spiritual progress lies before him as a glorious prospect not only for this man or society of men here, or another there, but for all men as members of an all-containing community made one only by an all-containing principle. In face of the promise and adventure of life we are as certainly wrong in giving consent to the ant-hill principle for society as we should be if we consented to exchange our own pregnant incompleteness for the perfection of the ant. Yet we of the modern civilized nations of Europe and America have been far too much influenced of late years, not only by our animal inheritance and the passions that we share with 'ape and tiger,' but by what is now a powerful tradition and in the last century was a new force—the mechanistic conception of social life. Our reasoning about society, our social science, even our social practices, have by this tradition been made not only more materialistic—many of us know that—but more plausibly mechanistic. It has seemed to us that we have science and nature both on our side, in trusting less to the initiative of life and more to its organization of circumscribed institutions and ordered means. We have taken a biological hypothesis far too seriously. And no doubt we have done this in great part because it has enabled us to leave uncriticized, or even to justify, habitual ways of acting and thinking which have about them still the taint of the pit from which we have been digged. These ways of ours were laid down for us in the long effort of each man to keep his footing on earth for himself and for the few he recognized as his own; but we have made them both more difficult and more dangerous by loading ourselves with a burden of perverted or artificial needs which not only call for perverted or artificial means to satisfy them, but set us in opposition to other men from whom we wrest their satisfaction. Those ways and this burden are proper to a creature who in very truth is seeking so to encumber life as to prevent its carrying him on, so to contract his own life as to prevent its intermingling with the lives of others. In short they are proper to one who is arresting life in himself as it has been arrested in the tiger or the ant. It will be arrested at a higher point—that is all; and it will be consciously arrested by the conscious building up of an obstacle far more serious than death. Therefore it is no mere failure; it is sin—sin against the true nature of human life.

The mechanistic theories of biology, which have helped to confirm men in an evil course, are fast being discredited. With them will go a false philosophy which has been widely current of late and has had an influence reaching far beyond an acquaintance with its authors' names. Critical and careful biologists are now undoubtedly doing much to effect this salutary change. Yet, may be, we shall be driven to call some of their opponents (as has been prophesied) by the bad name of necrologists, that we may perhaps shock them into self-knowledge. It is a name only too grievously appropriate now, since the picture of natural evolution they have, all innocently, drawn has not only foreshadowed, but contributed to fill, the grave-yard of the peoples dug in the great war.

We are changing this baleful picture; we are learning too, partly in consequence, that the self-interest of utilitarian economists and the ruthless search for individual advantage which social mechanists have commended are not the mainsprings of evolution. Of far greater, more lasting, and more profound significance and effect than the self-interested struggle for existence among animals and plants has been the species-interest to which self-interest has been subordinated. A creature must first eat and only afterwards reproduce; but this in no way justifies us in thinking that competition for food is charged with more meaning in the long story of life than the protective care of parents for their offspring and the eminently natural self-sacrifice it involves. Progress among both animals and vegetables has been secured more by 'species maintaining' efforts than by a mere self-seeking struggle for self-restricted ends. It is a recognition of this fact that makes a distinguished biologist say, 'The ideal of evolution is thus no gladiator's show, but an Eden; and although competition can never be wholly eliminated ... it is much for our pure natural history to see no longer struggle, but love as "creation's final law."'