Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/756

 736 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

Blood and culture will be cosmopolitan. Man, occupying every available foot of land on the globe, will be a closer unit than he was on the day far back in period I, when, in a limited area hidden away in the broad expanse of some unidentified continent, the agencies of specialization first shaped up the species. 1

A SOCIOLOGICAL UTOPIA.

Such a view may seem Utopian, but it is only so in the same sense that every great epoch is Utopian from the standpoint of those that preceded it. Life and mind are Utopian when com- pared with a condition in which they do not exist, yet this cosmic step has been taken and an organic and psychic world evolved out of a lifeless and mindless world. Any of the highly developed types of life is Utopian relatively to the lower types that preceded it : the seed plant to the spore plant, the cup- seeded to the naked-seeded plant, the backboned to the soft or shell-bearing animal, the mammal to the reptile, the lowest man to the highest ape, the civilized man to the savage. It would be Utopian for an ape to aspire to manhood or for a troglodyte to picture the civilized state. It is only when we look backward and see how great the strides are that actually have been taken that we acquire a scientific conception of what evolution is capable of accomplishing.

Let us see what are some of the scientific elements in support of the utopia of ultimate universal race integration. This planet is believed to have supported some form of life during a period of something like 72,000,000 years. Half of this period was over before the forms of life that existed acquired sufficient material consistency to leave any recognizable impression in the thousands of feet of rock that was formed in that time, and we have scarcely more than graphite beds to prove that vegetable life in some perishable form existed. Doubtless this primitive flora was the food of equally frail and evanescent animal forms. One-third of the remainder, or 12,000,000 years, comprising the Cambrian and Silurian periods, was passed before vertebrated animals in the form of the oldest fishes and land plants of the spore-bearing types appeared. Another third, or 12,000,000

. * American Anthropologist, N. S., Vol. IV, No. 3 (July-September, 1902), pp. 387-90.