Part 4

An ancient bear may fondly imagine that in his youth he did more glorious deeds than the enfeebled descendants he sees around him; but if he does think so, he cannot discourage them with his delusions. An ancient man could and did!

The education of the young is necessarily in the hands of their elders; and youth, with no knowledge or experience of its own, cannot conclusively deny, or even ably criticise, the statements made by the aged. This pride of the past, so manifest in the old, is not so injurious to-day. Recognised as a physical phenomenon, offset by wider knowledge of the facts, and with accessible records to give immutable proof that our environment has not shrunk in the least since we were young, this natural tendency of waning brain power does small harm. In our racial babyhood it did enormous harm. There was no record then to dispute with grandpa as to the number of wolves he had slain, or just how big were the nuts on the towering trees of his infancy.

So the Superior Past tradition was hammered hard into the unprotected infant brain, and took fast hold of it, wore deep furrows in it, set that habit of thought so rigidly in the mind of the race that it has taken all these unnumbered ages for a shouting universe to convince us that life is Growth! Only a few of us can see it even now. Deep down below our modern learning still may be found this basic assumption that things were better once—this recurring wish to go “back to nature,” or back to handicrafts, or back to something or another—so sure are we in our sub-soil minds that Heaven is behind us!

All this reversionary habit of old brains would have been offset by the “tendency to vary” in young ones; by the steady uplift of each new generation; but for the cumulative weight of our conscious efforts at education. Education, necessarily traditional at first, and instilling tremendous veneration for the ever-receding past,—especially in those earliest years when memory was the only record of events,—has steadily met the expansive tendencies of each new brain by the repressive weight of all foregoing centuries. The development of new brain tissue, and its expanding cellular arrangement, urges constantly to new discovery, and to a rearrangement of earlier impressions, but education has diligently endeavoured to enforce upon each brain precisely that mass and order of impression considered as beneficial in the past. To re-impress forever the same facts in the same relation, and to severely discourage and prohibit any reconsideration of this supply, has been for ages our method of education.

How seriously this has interfered with our progress it is impossible to say. We know that in spite of it the brain has developed in more normal lines under the beneficent action of genetic social forces. A growing industry preached peace to us while church, and state, and school were yet preaching war. Social unity and organic relation are forced upon our consciousness by the facts, while education still hands down the individualistic concepts of far earlier times.

Even in the most rigidly repressed of all lines of growth, the moral perceptions, we can see how social evolution has developed the soul of man in direct opposition to religious traditions. A given stage of brain development is capable of formulating only such and such moral concepts—of postulating only such and such a perception of God.

The current apprehension of God in a given age is accepted as final and forced upon the consciousness of each succeeding age, thus tending to preserve a necessarily inferior standard, and, in preserving it, to check any brain growth tending to its contradiction. This is one of the most conspicuous and persistent of man’s efforts to modify conduct. Faithfully and conscientiously he had striven to maintain the innocent errors of his racial youth as guides to succeeding ages. With every gathered force of established religion, with the growing pressure of education, with the tremendous sanction of parental government, man has always striven to preserve the religious limits of his remote ancestors.

And yet, in spite of all the allied forces of conscious humanity, the evolution of brain tissue went on; the new brains saw larger glimpses of truth and transmitted what they saw to others; those who had ears to hear heard, and the world’s religions have grown and spread under genetic forces, in the face of opposition, persecution, and execution based on telic forces. A clearer and sadder illustration of the attitude of man as a factor in social evolution need not be asked. All that he could do he has done to throttle progress and stop the growth of his own soul; and this under a sublime conviction of virtue.

In scientific progress, in artistic development, along all the lines of human growth, we find the majority acting as obstructionists; always valiantly upholding that which has been, and maintaining, as respectable pterodactyls, that mud of a proper consistency is far superior as a vehicle of life to the untried vicissitudes of air. Is it then to be supposed that social evolution would have got along faster without our conscious cerebration? That we might have slid peacefully up the ladder with our eyes shut, instead of struggling on in our toad-in-the-well fashion—up three steps and down two? Surely not. The very fact that this power to alter conduct marks the highest stage of animal evolution proves its value. Nature does not make such huge mistakes as to introduce and maintain an injurious function.

We must remember, too, as against the deterrent drag of the majority, the grand uplift of the few; the power never yet measured by which the conscious life of one man can inspire and lift and stimulate the others. Again and again we see the whole race seized and pushed on by some dominant individual life, the currents of whose action vibrate unceasingly through the mass, and stir it to better growth.

When man does by some blessed chance go with the forces of evolution, and uses his conscious power to resist the downpull of old habit, and the opposition of his past-ridden fellows, he becomes an immense accelerating power. By the aid of his racial memory he can see where a new age brings us to the same danger-signals that we ignored in the past, and learn to avoid them. Man’s vast stretch of consciousness, made permanent and accessible to all by the arts, especially the art of literature, gives him the advantage of well-nigh limitless experience.

Our irrevocable past, exposed before us all in the increasing light of knowledge, is not a thing to worship and to follow, but a record of splendour and of warning, of deep humility, of patience, and of hope. Our power to postulate a future, to erect hypotheses on which to work, gives us another advantage over the unconscious products of evolution. We have yesterday to learn from, and to-morrow to plan for, and these two give a far broader basis of action than the passing experience of to-day. Our ability to modify conduct, so painfully proven by our successful repressive measures, will have even greater effect when we work with the upward tendencies, instead of against them.

So far the attitude of the race towards its own vanguard—the young—has been that of a heavy old gentleman throwing himself solidly down on an active child, and seeking to smother him and pin him to the earth. Being larger and heavier than the child, he seriously interfered with his normal activity. But when this size and weight is turned to account to help and not hinder, when, instead of piling the dead years on the quivering young brain of the child, we set ourselves as a bulwark to keep the past off him—then we shall see surprising progress. We have but to gain a clear idea of what the natural lines of social evolution are, and cease our opposition, to make large and healthy increase in our growth.

Nowhere is this better shown than in the rapid improvement of education to-day. Instead of a mere transmission of what people used to believe, the young mind is set to find out what is to be known, helped by a large array of carefully tested facts, and the best machinery of latest inventors. The laboratory method, to learn by experiment, to test by proof—this is the modern system; as against the blind belief in changeless traditions that held us back so long. The educator of to-day seeks to develop the brain by exercising all its powers—not to fill and seal it like a preserve jar.

That superstitious respect for the aged which distinguishes China is giving way to a respect for wisdom, for knowledge, for judgment, and ability wherever manifested; and if we swing too far toward honour for the young, it is a healthy extreme to counterbalance the huge and heavy back action of the past. The mind of man is now being opened to perceptions of facts as he finds them, rather than the retention of old stories, and is exercised more in free, responsible action during its early years.

We are beginning to learn now something of the true history of our race—what we rose from, and how we have risen; what forces urged us most, what conditions helped us most. We are seeing with increasing clearness the desirable lines of action, and how best to follow them. Alert, intelligent, and active among the great currents of social evolution, we can do much to promote their effects. Here we can let them alone, there we can oppose our allied wills against some eddy of reversionary tendency, or check the growth of some disadvantageous excess; we can use our consciousness to choose between the varying forces, and such individual power as we possess to steer among them.

To see our line of progress, to see the tremendous currents that push us upward and take advantage of them; to see also the pitfalls and stumbling-blocks, the reaction and inertia to which mere genetic progress is exposed; and then to use our telic energy to assist nature and go farther—that will make man a far more useful factor in social evolution.

III: CONCEPT AND CONDUCT Summary

Human evolution. New faculties and instincts. Egoistic concept useful to individual animal. Disadvantage of outgrown ideals. Persistence of social rudiments explained. Need of social scrap-heap. Social relations psychic. Despot only a concept. Concepts internal environment. Shipwreck and character. Maternal and sex instinct and concepts. Negro hero, power of concept on conduct. Man’s efforts to check his growth. Prejudice a physical brain condition. Healthy brain must be used. Virtue of “believing.” Natural organic tendency to consistency,—how perverted. Belief in luck. Charades. Basic concepts wrong. Superior past traditions. Ancestor worship. Fanaticism. Forced inconsistency. Concepts antedate facts. French Revolution. Slavery. Undertow of old brain habits. Increase of social convenience. Brain as developed by natural selection, by social selection. Apparent injustice. Individual hunter. On his own head. Mistakes most possible in highest grades. Peasant grade always preserved. Rub out and do over. Society the best culture for fools. Present concepts in economics, primitive, false, injurious. Ego concept. If bees were “idiots.”

III CONCEPT AND CONDUCT

Human evolution involves the development of a number of individual animals into specialised functionaries of organic social life. This requires the gradual assumption of new faculties, new desires, new instincts, and new activities; and the gradual disuse and discarding of older ones. The egoistic mental make-up of a solitary animal, of a low savage, of any reversionary self-supporting human hermit, is advantageous to him as a separate creature; but disadvantageous to a society to which he might become attached, and, if he was so attached, to himself.

A given society, in any age, possesses certain dominant ideas and feelings proper to it; and the individuals manifesting most of those ideas and feelings are most beneficial to that society and so to themselves. But if members of a given society persist in maintaining and acting upon social ideals of a previous age, they are injurious to their society and so to themselves. Social evolution, in any given place and time, is visibly checked by the number of persons who do not keep up with it; but insist on feeling and thinking after long-past standards, and trying to act on that basis.

This peculiar persistence of social rudiments in all stages of our progress requires some special explanation.

When a given social process, once useful, then useless, then increasingly injurious, continues to force itself upon a growing civilisation, there must be some strong agency to account for it. Naturally, it would have been gradually eliminated by proven undesirability, as cartwheels of solid wood were eliminated. In our material development we have moved steadily on, growing into ever newer and better methods, simplifying, cheapening, quickening, easing, following nature’s methods exactly—the conservation of energy—the line of least resistance. Our American industrial supremacy is attributed to precisely this willingness to grow, to discard the old things, to our constant resort to the scrap-heap. But in social development we seem to have no scrap-heap, or never to use one unless compelled to, making history a sort of sacred junk-shop.

In business life, that is, in its material processes, we eagerly accept the new. In social life, in all our social processes, we piously, valiantly, obdurately, maintain the old.

Why?

Because of the peculiar effect of the human brain on human action—the relation between concept and conduct. In adaptation to our physical environment, whether the original face of nature, or the latest inventions in mechanics, we have material relations to deal with, and have learned how.

Social relations are psychic. That a steel spade is better than a wooden one is easily proven to the hand and eye. That a democracy is better than a despotism is not so simple a proposition. The laws of the hydraulic press are established by visible experiment; but the laws of the distribution of wealth work in another medium, and are more difficult to establish.