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.