Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/723

 INDIVIDUAL TELESIS 707

It is not proposed to restate these principles, but as they lie at the very foundation of all social progress, they require some further illustration than was there given. Indirection was classi- fied under two heads, moral and physical, both of which, but especially the second, require fuller treatment.

Following out the line of the first of these classes of actions, viz., those expended upon sentient beings, we find that the intel- lect, as the repository of the teiic force, first subjugates the animal kingdom and brings it under the power of man so that he can make any use of it that he pleases ; then it exerts itself upon men, and one man or class of men seeks to render other men subservient to self. Both of these operations involve deception. The general term for the form of deception prac- ticed on animals is cunning. The cruder efforts to make one man serve another go by the same name, but the higher and more refined methods of the intellect are called tact, shrewd- ness, strategy, and diplomacy. In every case it is a form of deception.

It must be remembered that the intellect or telic power was developed as an aid to the will for the better satisfaction of desire. But for its value as such it could not have come into existence under the biologic law of advantage. It is as much a product of that law as any useful organ in an animal or a plant. Its supreme utility accounts for its rapid development, and for the fact that the race in which it first appeared in a marked degree soon gained an ascendancy over all other races. The lower kingdom became an easy prey, but when mind became pitted against mind and the great battle of the giants began, higher and higher generalship was developed until there was produced what we commonly call the competitive system on which modern society rests.

I have been in the habit of characterizing the tclic or intel- lectual process or principle, as I have endeavored to define it, as the law of mind, in contradistinction to the process or prin- ciple according to which evolution in general takes place, which I call the law of nature. I do not mean by this to say that the