Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/327

Rh conduct in all orders of living creatures is guided by the fitness or unfitness of such and such combinations of external actions for the constant life-contest.

We might find illustrations of this in every kingdom, sub-kingdom, order, and type, of animal life. Let us, however, content ourselves by noting it in man.

In the lower races of man as at present existing, and in still greater degree among the lower races when the human race as a whole was lower, we see that the adjustments of external actions to obtain food, to provide shelter against animate and inanimate enemies, and otherwise to support or to defend life, are imperfect and irregular. The savage of the lowest type is constantly exposed to the risk of losing his life either through hunger or cold, or through storm, or from attacks against which he has not made adequate provision. He neither foresees nor remembers, and his conduct is correspondingly aimless and irregular. The least provident, or rather the most improvident, perish in greatest numbers. Hence there is an evolution of conduct from irregularity and aimlessness by slow degrees toward the regularity and adaptation of aims to ends, seen in advancing civilization. The ill-adjusted conduct which diminishes the chances of life dies out in the struggle for life, to make way for the better-adjusted conduct by which the chances of life are increased. The process is as certain in its action as the process of structural evolution. In either process we see multitudinous individual exceptions. Luck plays its part in individual cases; but inexorable law claims its customary rule over averages. In the long run conduct best adapted and adjusted to environment is developed at the expense of conduct less suitable to the surroundings.

With man, as with all orders of animals, conduct which tends to increase the duration of life prevails over conduct having an opposite tendency. Wherefore, remembering the ever-varying conditions under which life is passed, the evolution of conduct means not only the development of well-adjusted actions, but the elaboration of conduct to correspond with those diverse and multitudinous conditions.

To these considerations we may add that the evolution of conduct not only tends necessarily to increased length of life (necessarily, because shortening of life means the diminution of such conduct as tends to shorten life), but it results in increased breadth of life, and (in the highest animal) in increased depth of life also. It is manifest that, in the elaboration of activities by which length of life is increased, breadth of life is increased pari passu. For these activities maybe said 'to constitute breadth of life. Passing over the numerous illustrations which might be drawn from the lower orders of animal life, we recognize in man a vast increase in the breadth of life as we pass from the limited orders of activity constituting the life of the savage to the multiplied and complex activities involved in civilized life.