In another way this atrophy of mind may be seen and felt as a temporary condition by members of boards and committees. What is everyone's business is nobody's business; and when each person feels that he is not personally responsible, a numbness and inaction ensues which is characteristic of such bodies. Men, any one of whom would act sensibly when alone, will succumb to the paralysing sense that they need not think because nine other men are doing so, and the results are well known as characterising these assemblies which have "neither a body to be kicked nor a soul to be damned." There are very few public bodies which are not really dependent on the individual thought and design of one person, criticised and amended by the collateral views of others. In short, all action and rule must be personal and not corporate, however much the person may be checked and controlled by general opinion of the public, or of a restricted body. Without personal initiative atrophy is the result.
Another great theatre of mental atrophy is officialism, where a man is bound to follow certain rules and routine rather than to think. A German has remarked to me that a man who is perfectly reasonable and intelligent in private life becomes quite foolish as soon as he enters his office. This constant result is the strongest reason for not extending official control of affairs needlessly, or the management of public work by officials. Private enterprise will always be more effective than an official system, because it is solely the result of individual initiative. The enormous monopolies of railways in England are on the whole far more beneficial to the public than the State railways of other countries. The evils of corporate monopoly, checked by law and supervision of the Board of Trade, are less than the evil of stagnation by official atrophy. In the Republic of France the principal line runs its best trains slower than, and at three times the cost of, the best trains on great English lines.
(7) It is only competition which makes permanent the improved mental variations which occur. The evils of competition in physical things almost disappear in the mental field; and, unless misused as in a foolishly designed examination, there seems an unmixed benefit from unlimited competition of mind. It is only by such competition that higher types of ability have been established in the past, and it is to such that we must look for future improvement. It is true that in various directions we find a dislike of competition; but that is the surest sign that it is effective, and therefore beneficial to the whole body.
We see then that each of those principles which rule in physical modification is equally true of mental modification.
But though the modes of mental variation may be fairly clear, we must not be carried away by the view that therefore great changes in man are to be expected. The effects of various conditions upon the body are tolerably familiar, yet the average form of man has varied extraordinarily little during ten thousand years. The highest type of ancient man differs almost inappreciably from the highest type of modern man, certainly by not a tenth of the difference that may be seen between different types at present. It may be practically said that man is at a standstill in physical development. Sanitary improvements and better feeding may do great things, but they leave the essential form and constitution unaltered. The same is true of mind. When we become familiar with details of early ages nothing is more astonishing than to see how unaltered the mind of man is in its essentials. In tales and maxims six thousand years old we see not only the common stock of primary instincts, but also the finesse of conduct in public life, the modes of ensuring respect in dealing with superiors and inferiors, the attention to very varied elements of character, and a fine suavity and kindliness pervading the whole. There is not a single class or a single public body at present that practically stands as high as the ideal of two hundred generations ago. And when we look at the material civilisation we see still farther back the appreciation of qualities of work which only a very small proportion of mankind care for now. The overwhelming zeal for minute accuracy was as perfect a mental state at 4700 b.c. as it is in a Royal Society paper of our day. The subject and the method have changed; but the mental attitude is the same in a man who demanded, and in those who executed, beautifully true plane surfaces, and long measurements exact to far within the variation of size caused by a hot or a cold day, and the men now who triangulate a continent and measure the world. The mind is the same, only the stock-in-trade of it has increased. At the beginning of history the palaces were adorned with table services cut in the hardest and most beautiful stones, exquisitely formed and polished; and such homes were assuredly inhabited by men whose tastes and artistic sense were closely the same as the best of ours, and who would, like us, have revolted at most of the products of the present time. Not only was there the body of highly skilled and intelligent men to do such work, but there must have been a widely spread standard of taste demanding this exquisite work as an aesthetic pleasure. The nature of mind is unchanged, its motives, its feelings, its sense of life; only in knowledge and the applications of it do we differ from the earliest civilisation that we can trace.
It is, therefore, quite unreal for us to anticipate any change in the essential nature of man in the next few thousand years. The increase of knowledge and its applications will not alter that nature, or the relation of mind to mind. We shall still desire and admire the same things, and be moved by the same impulses; and we may neglect as ignorant dreams all speculations about any essential changes in the motives or constitution of man.