Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/724

 708 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

law of mind is not also a natural law, but it certainly is utterly unlike the other law, and as it came forward at a late stage in the history of cosmic evolution, it seems to have inaugurated a wholly new order of things. Schopenhauer declares that the intellect, as contrasted with the eternal and universal will, is an 44 accident," and there is a certain amount of truth in this state- ment. Although, like all the rest of the extra-normal products of nature, some ,of which have been enumerated in previous papers, it had a natural origin and was brought forth as a means of advancing nature's ends, still, like them, when once created it soon cut loose from its original attachments and entered upon a career of its own, independent of, and to a considerable extent antagonistic to, its primary purposes. Not only did this faculty early become the champion of feeling as against function, until today it threatens the depopulation of the globe, but from the outset it took it upon itself to counteract the law of nature and to oppose to the competitive system, that completely dominates the lower world and still so largely prevails in human society, a wholly different system based on rational cooperation. In dealing with the animal world the law of nature is replaced by that of reason in destroying the feral tendencies and substitu- ting complete submission to man's will in a word by domesti- cation. In this state the equilibrium previously existing between the organism and the environment is destroyed, and even the colors of the fur and feather are changed. But these are not the most important changes. By a process of artificial selection, which supplants that of natural selection, those quali- ties which are most useful to man are rendered more and more prominent until most domestic animals undergo profound physical modifications in the direction of utility. These modifications are not always also in the direction of greater structural perfection so as to be in the line of natural evolution, but, so far as the particular qualities selected are concerned they usually are so, and in many cases careful breeding improves the whole animal, so that man becomes a powerful ally of evo- lution itself. This is not disproved by the fact, upon which so