25. THE CONQUESTS OF THE MIND.—Physical environment counts for much, but the physical environment of man is the same as that of the creatures below him who seem incapable of progress. It is as an intelligent being that he succeeds in bringing about ever new and more complicated adjustments to his environment.
From the point of view of his animal life in many respects inferior to other creatures—less strong, less swift, less adequately provided with natural means of defense, less protected by nature against cold, heat and the inclemencies of the weather, endowed with instincts less unerring, less prolific, through a long period of infancy helpless and dependent— man nevertheless survives and prospers.
He has conquered the strong, overtaken the swift, called upon his ingenuity to furnish him with means of defence. He has defied cold and heat, and we find him, with appliances of his own devising, successfully combating the rigors of Arctic frosts and the torrid sun of the tropics. Intelligence has supplemented instinct and has guaranteed the survival of the individual and of the race.
It has even protected man against himself, against the very dangers arising out of his immunity from other dangers. A gregarious creature, increasing and multiplying, he would be threatened with starvation did not his intelligent control over nature furnish him with a food-supply which makes it possible for vast numbers of human beings to live and thrive on a territory of limited extent. Moreover, he has compassed those complicated forms of social organization which reveal themselves in cities and states, solving problems of production, transportation and distribution before which undeveloped man would stand helpless.
And from the problem of living at all he has passed to that of living well. He has created new wants and has satisfied them. He has built up for himself a rich and diversified life, many of the activities of which appear to have the remotest of bearings upon the mere struggle for existence, but the exercise of which gives him satisfaction. Thus, the primitive instinct of curiosity, once relatively aimless and insignificant, has developed into the passion for systematic knowledge and the persistent search for truth; the rudimentary aesthetic feeling which is revealed in primitive man, and traces of which are recognizable in creatures far lower in the scale, has blossomed out in those elaborate creations, which, at an enormous expense of labor and ingenuity, have come to enrich the domains of literature, music, painting, sculpture, architecture. Civilized man is to a great extent occupied with the production of what he does not need, if need be measured by what his wants are at a lower stage of his development. But these same things he needs imperatively, if we measure his need by his desires when they have been multiplied and their scope indefinitely widened.
26. THE CONQUEST OF NATURE AND THE WELL-BEING OF MAN.—It is evident that the successful exploitation of the resources of material nature is of enormous significance to the life of man. It may bring emancipation; it offers opportunity. One is tempted to affirm, without stopping to reflect, that the development of the arts and sciences, the increase of wealth and of knowledge, must in the nature of things increase human happiness.
One is tempted, further, to maintain that an advance in civilization must imply an advance in moralization. Man has a moral nature which exhibits itself to some degree at every stage of his development. What more natural to conclude than that, with the progressive unfolding of his intelligence, with increase in knowledge, with some relaxation of the struggle for existence which pits man against his fellow-man, and subordinates all other considerations to the inexorable law of self- preservation, his moral nature would have the opportunity to show itself in a fuller measure?
When we compare man at his very lowest with man at his highest such judgments appear to be justified. But man is to be found at all sorts of intermediate stages.
His knowledge may be limited, the development of the arts not far advanced, his control over nature far from complete, and yet he may live in comparative security and with such wants as he has reasonably well satisfied. His competition with his fellows may not be bitter and absorbing. The simple life is not necessarily an unhappy life, if the simplicity which characterizes it be not too extreme. In judging broadly of the significance for human life of the control over nature which is implied in the advance of civilization, one must take into consideration several points of capital importance:
(1) The multiplication of man's wants results, not in happiness, but in unhappiness, unless the satisfaction of those wants can be adequately provided for.