Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 35.djvu/412

392 mentality that volition reaches its highest phase. Whosoever has attained those "shining table-lands" of human character where force, courage, endurance, and a due degree of altruism perennially abide is in his own person an apotheosis of power, the power whose beginnings we have traced to the muscular activities.

It then appears that in the twofold nature of man the physical and the psychical exist not merely in the relation of simple contiguity, but rather as involved in "the one and indivisible whole" of human existence, and that the psychical—the so-called spiritual—qualities are developed through the physical agents known as the bodily organs, by means of the activities which constitute the functions of those organs.

Said the great Spinoza, whose far-reaching vision penetrated depths beyond the ken of the common mind: "We do not desire or strive after anything because we think it good; we think it good because we are moved to strive after and desire it."



N Polynesia, the distinct classes constitute a similar state of things to the family group in the peoples of Asia, since they form an exclusive organization, holding property in common. It is not very clear how these classes arose, but we may assume that they are connected with an earlier distribution into clans, so that the chief represents the eldest line of the posterity of their common ancestor. In some cases this ancestor is supposed to be of divine origin; but we lay no stress on such a supposition, since it probably arose after the chief's position was established. The people are usually in possession of small plots of ground, either as comparatively independent proprietors, or as serfs; the nobles are owners or rulers of small districts, and the king is ruler of the whole. The conditions are in many respects confused and indefinite, yet the type is undoubtedly that of the joint family, or village community.

The classes differ from clans in a natural way. The nobles of different clans belong to one class, and while the clan is usually exogamous, the class always tends to become endogamous. In Polynesia, the definition of the class depends upon the line of kinship, and the classes are not isolated with the exclusiveness of 