Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/545

 embody the highest wisdom. They almost always have the powerful sanction of religion, and for this reason some have confounded them with religion itself. Others believe them to be of divine origin and not explainable on natural principles. In fact, they are difficult to explain, as, for example, how the lowest savages find out that close interbreeding deteriorates the stock. I am myself disposed to call in the law of natural selection and to assume that existing races represent the survivors in a prolonged struggle in which those not possessing these saving qualities have succumbed. This places them squarely in line with animal instincts, and the current of modern opinion runs in the direction of basing all instincts primarily upon some germ of reason.

Feeling may be said to have been developed as a means to the ends of nature, which are preservation and multiplication. But to the creature, which knew nothing of these ends, the means must be itself an end, and throughout the sentient world the subjective states described have always been, and must always continue to be, the ends of the feeling creature. But reason is a form of knowing, and step by step the knowing powers increased. The only purpose they could have for their possessors was that of better and better realizing the subjective states. It thus becomes easy to see how the pursuit of the creature's ends might often be quite a different thing from that of the ends of nature, and this, in fact, has been the case to a marked extent, which explains the dualism. It is this truth that lies at the bottom of the problem before us; indeed, it lies at the bottom of the whole philosophy of man and society.

In man reason has become a powerful element, and he has always used it, and will always continue to use it, for its primary purpose of better securing his only end, the satisfaction of the demands of his nature. As the eminent ethnologist, M. Paul Topinard, has recently said:

"His sensorium is the focus in which all is gathered. Me is