This does not require all knowledge; no such complete information as Tennyson spoke of in the “Flower in the crannied wall.” Flowers are sufficiently understood for us to raise them in beauty and health and profusion; and we can learn enough about this last great form of life, Society, to mend its ways, without waiting for absolute wisdom.

This book is a study of the economic processes of society, explaining the immediate causes of a large part of our human suffering, and suggesting certain simple, swift, and easy changes of mind by which we may so alter our processes as to avoid that suffering and promote our growth and happiness.

II: MAN AS A FACTOR IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION
Summary

Social development affected by physical conditions. By our personal choice. We have overestimated the latter. “Natural” in contradistinction to “personal,” or genetic and teleological. Conscious acts most conspicuous to man. Recognition of some other forces at work. Man’s contribution to his own conduct. How individuals have promoted it, and the mass always retarded. How we retard evolution. Pterodactyls as conscious agents. Salutary effect of unconscious social processes. Our conscious behaviour always behind the times. Historic instances. Nature of the brain. Effect of education. Relative depth and size of early impressions as compared with later. Our ability to preserve and transmit ancient ideals. Folk-myth of a superior past. Reversionary tendencies, upward tendency of new brains checked by education; effect on religious progress. Should we have done better without conscious conduct? No. Enormous benefit if rightly used. Race memory, use of past. Real value of youth. Our attitude toward it. What it should be. Great advance in education in social consciousness. How to adjust conscious conduct to action of law.

II
MAN AS A FACTOR IN SOCIAL EVOLUTION

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.