Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/378

 362 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

work out along this line, he would have said that they would have led the individuals of the strong societies to crush out the individuals of the weak societies, to kill them off, leaving only certain races surviving.

A good deal of this has gone on. The mystery of it is why more of it has not taken place, and why at the most advanced stage of evolution it is not becoming more rather than less pro- nounced. The theory of evolution will explain the growth of sympathies between members of the same race or between indi- viduals of the same social structure. But the last step, by which sympathy is extended to every human creature and a concep- tion of a universal human social structure arises, does not seem to be in keeping with the laws or tendencies prevailing in earlier times. Yet conscience, as we now understand it, applies to man as such, and not just to the man with whom I have some special affiliation. It is even hinted that there is more than one species of human beings, considering them as animal organisms. If so, why this tie in spite of varying species ?

Could any finite intelligence who knew what the theory of evolution meant, and what had been the tendencies or laws by which the process had gone on, have in the faintest degree anticipated the rise of the religion of Buddhism ? We have there a religion founded on the sense of pity not, however, pity for others as being of the same tribe, but pity for each other as fel- low human creatures. Take again the lines in which Cardinal Wolsey gives a summary of the mistakes of his life : "Cromwell, I charge thee, fling away ambition." One asks : Could any finite intelligence have prophesied, throughout all the stages in the history of evolution, that any one living creature should have used language of this kind ? As for the charge against ambition or self-assertion, why, it has been by such ambition, one may say, that the human race came into existence. The story of evolution is a story of what is alluded to in these lines as "ambition."

Yet I fancy that most of us in reading these lines approve them, regard them as ideally true, as the best or finest utterance of the human consciousness. But natural selection, a struggle