Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 9.djvu/496

 482 W. R. BOYCE GIBSON : i.e., for such forms of activity as cramp his restless energies into orderly grooves, but he has no objection to making the most strenuous efforts at hunting and killing, looting and drinking. We must surely distinguish between the least effort of inertia and the least disciplined effort of exuberance. The illustration which M. Ferrero draws from social evolution involves similar confusions. Leviathan moves slowly as we all know but it does not follow that he has been sparing his efforts. A climb up a slippery height takes time, not because one's exertions are less, but because one is apt to lose almost as much ground as one gains. There is nothing to show that the small advance made at any time doesn't represent the difference between the results of a great effort in a forward direction and an equally great effort to avoid being pushed back by circumstances beyond the point one started from. Moreover even if the fact of slow but continuous progress in one direction is accepted, the slowness of the advance may well be a sign not of least effort but only of least hurry. We should distinguish between a spurious and a genuine conservatism. The body politic like Wordsworth's cloud tends to move together, if it move at all. This is the true conservative tendency to avoid plunging too far forward in any single direction at the expense of the other connected interests of a complex organisation ; but the conservative is not necessarily a lazybones. It is surely not in the service of Least Effort that the wheels of God grind slowly. M. Ferrero's illustration turns out as we see to be a negative instance confirming the fundamental psychological principle of the tendency to cumulative activity. If a system of politics or of science proves faulty, it is modified, but no further than the defect requires. It is supplanted by another system involving another principle of unity only when its cumbrousness is more burdensome than the con- sequences of its removal. Thus the Ptolemaic system of the heavenly movements went on accumulating its epicycles and excentrics for a century or two after the outraged astronomer-king made that costly declaration for it is stated to have cost him his throne that had the Almighty only seen fit to consult him at the Creation, things would have been managed more simply. Even the Copernican change when it came was not a complete wrench from the old order of things. It only did away with the first main presupposi- tion of the Ptolemaic system, to wit that the earth was certainly at rest and the celestial movements observed, the real movements ; it left unchallenged the second main pre-