Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/349

Rh Observe again: in all forms of development the culmination and decline are in strength rather than in quality. This is only another mode of expressing subordination to a higher force. The perceptive and imaginative faculties, indeed, decline in strength and vigor as age advances; but they steadily progress in refinement, if intellectual culture continues. If, for example, relish for art is more intense in youth, it is also more gross. If it declines with age, it becomes also more refined, more discriminating, higher—i. e., it becomes subordinated to higher faculties. The same is true of development of the organic kingdom; for, when a dominant class declines, it declines in strength, not in organization. So, also, is it in society. The principle of chivalry, for example, culminated in the middle ages. It has since declined in strength, but gained in refinement; lost in quantity, but gained in quality. It has become less fantastic, less extravagant, less affected; more rational and genuine. In other words, it has become subordinated to still higher principles.

Observe again and finally: this idea of progress of society by cyclical movement is comparatively modern, and even yet imperfectly apprehended. Whence did it come? We see no evidence of it among the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, or Romans, nor among modern Chinese or Japanese. None of these could conceive any civilization higher than their own. None of these dreamed of an onward progress of the whole race, of which their own civilization was only one temporary phase. The Jews had it not. They could not conceive of their religion and polity passing away. Is it to be wondered at, therefore, that they rejected Christ, who preached the unheard-of doctrine of the introduction of a new era? The idea was, in fact, first announced by Christ himself, when he taught that the Jewish polity and ritual must pass away, and yet the law he fulfilled; that the form is temporary, but the spirit eternal; that the form dies, but the spirit must take on higher and higher forms. Until that time it is doubtful if the idea of any scheme of religion or politics being a temporary phase of civilization, and therefore passing away by the very law of human progress—the idea that the forms of the social body like the forms of the animal body are necessarily temporary—ever entered the human mind. How imperfectly it is yet apprehended, even by the most advanced peoples, is plainly shown by the history of both church and state. Immutable forms have ever been asserted and maintained by force until violently broken and thrown off by revolution. This great law is now generalized and made a universal law of all evolution only by biological research.

(d.) Survival of the Fittest.—The survival of the fittest, in the fierce struggle for life, is the best known and most universally recognized factor of the evolution of the organic kingdom. The manner in which this factor operates especially in successive differentiation, and the increasing specialization of each differentiated form, in causing the