Evolution Social and Organic

by Arthur M. Lewis

It is precisely because “caprice” can not be understood and cannot therefore, be made the basis of prevision, that it can not be admitted into the domain of science. Science, as Starcke well said, is founded on “faith in the universality of causation.” If the activities of men and the policies of nations are not ruled by cause and effect a science of society is impossible.

And yet, contends Ward, it was the very adoption of this “altogether sound abstract principle” that “led to the greatest and most fundamental of all economic errors, an error which has found its way into the heart of modern scientific philosophy, widely influencing public opinion, and offering a stubborn resistance to all efforts to dislodge it.”

And now we come to the keynote of Ward’s whole system and at the same time to the point where he completely breaks with the biological sociologists. The error, which Ward attributes to them all, the refutation of which is the main object of his work, is described as follows:

“This error consists in practically ignoring the existence of a rational faculty in man, which, while it does not render his actions any less subject to natural laws, so enormously complicates them that they can no longer be brought within the simple formulas that suffice in the calculus of mere animal motives. This element creeps stealthily in between the child and the adult, and all unnoticed puts the best laid schemes of economists and philosophers altogether aglee. A great psychic factor has been left out of the account, the intellectual or rational factor, and this factor is so stupendous that there is no room for astonishment in contemplating the magnitude of the error which its omission has caused.”

This is the foundation stone of Ward’s sociology. With great care he elaborates the vital difference between the economy of nature with its blind forces, and the economy of society with its mental arrangement of means to ends. He marshals that well-known array of facts which prove the tremendous waste continually going on in the natural world.

According to M. Quatrefages, two successive generations of a single plant-louse would cover eight acres. A large chestnut tree in June contains as much as a ton of pollen. Considering the size of pollen-grain the number on such a tree would be next to inconceivable. Burst a puff-ball and there arises from it a cloud that fills the air for some distance around. This cloud consists of an almost infinite number of exceedingly minute spores, each of which should it by the rarest chance fall upon a favorable spot, is capable of reproducing the fungus to which it belongs.

And yet in spite of all this enormous reproductivity the population of these species remains practically stationary. Ward objects very strongly to this insane waste of nature being set up as a model for human society, and he is entitled to the sympathy of Socialists who have always protested against the planless anarchy of capitalist production, which however, bad as it is, can hardly be considered a circumstance compared with the random waste of nature.

“The waste of being,” says Asa Gray, “is enormous, far beyond the common apprehension. Seeds, eggs, and other germs, are designed to be plants and animals, but not one of a thousand or a million achieves its destiny.” And Gray quotes with approval from an article in the Westminster Review: “When we find that the sowing is a scattering at random, and that for one being provided for and living, ten thousand perish unprovided for, we must allow that the existing order would be considered the worst disorder in any human sphere of action.”

Ward, of course, takes the same view: “No one will object to having nature’s methods fully explained and exposed, and thoroughly taught as a great truth of science. It is only when it is held up as a model to be followed by man and all are forbidden to ‘meddle’ with its operations that it becomes necessary to protest. I shall endeavor still further to show that it is wholly at variance with anything that a rational being would ever conceive of, and that if a being supposed to be rational were to adopt it he would be looked upon as insane.”

“Such,” says Ward, “is nature’s economy. How different the economy of a rational being! He prepares the ground, clearing it of its vegetable competitors, then he carefully plants the seeds at the proper intervals so that they shall not crowd one another, and after they have sprouted he keeps off their enemies whether vegetable or animal, supplies water if needed, even supplies the lack of chemical constituents of the soil, if he knows what they are, and thus secures, as nearly as possible, the vigorous growth and fruition of every seed planted. This is the economy of mind.”