Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/482

478 They both (Aristotle and Plato)—unlike as they are—hold with Zenophon—so unlike both—that man is the "hardest of all animals to govern.". . . We reckon, as the basis of our culture, upon an amount of order, of tacit obedience, of prescriptive governability, which those philosophers hoped to get as a principal result of their culture.

Bagehot, of course, had no difficulty in explaining this increase in social amenability which he believed he observed. He had accepted the idea that acquired characters are inherited; and he thought that our modern orderliness and sympathy would be attained "when the soft minds and strong passions of youthful nations are fixed and guided by hard transmitted instincts." But if we rule out this agency, and adhere to the position of Weismann, now generally acknowledged as correct, we must forego this easy explanation and seek some other reason than the transmission of acquired characters for the world's increasing moral stability.

There remain two possible views to be taken of the fact that the moral complexions of the ancient world and the modern are so different. First, we may accept the orthodox dictum, and maintain that any apparent changes are due to the increased weight, so to speak, of the race's moral heritage—to strengthened social controls and the ascendency of new ethical types; or secondly, we may postulate a change in man's innate moral nature, accompanying and reenforcing the influence of the augmented social heritage. We shall be justified in pursuing the second, and bolder, course only if we can discern some selective agency adequate to effect the change.

It is here suggested that such a selective agency can be discerned as operative, an agency at once powerful, comprehensive and continuous. We may denominate it the elimination of the anti-social—that is, the constant cutting off of those elements in society which do not fit in with the requirements of orderly civilized life. The forms that this process has taken—a number of which we shall examine shortly—have been many and diverse; but the result has been unified and focused.

Settled community life creates an environment of its own, imposing new requirements of "fitness." A heavy survival value comes to attach to tractability, so that non-conformity, in greater or less degree, leads to extinction or failure to beget offspring. The church and the state cut off the anti-social person by capital punishment, imprisonment and banishment; while the anti-social individual eliminates himself by suicide, by choice of a dangerous occupation, by withdrawal to the world's frontiers, by exposing himself to vice and racial poisons. Those who tend to survive and perpetuate themselves, on the other hand, are those whose moral natures make the restraints of sedentary communal life less irksome.

It would not be possible—nor is it necessary to our present purpose