Page:The Native Races of the Pacific States, volume 2.djvu/42

26 hate as love, and selfishness does infinitely more for the progress of mankind than philanthropy. Thus is humanity played upon by this principle of progress, and the music sometimes is wonderful; green fields as if by magic take the place of wild forests, magnificent cities rise out of the ground, the forces of nature are brought under the dominion of man's intelligence, and senseless substances endowed with speech and action.

It is verily as Carlyle says; "under the strangest new vesture, the old great truth (since no vesture can hide it) begins again to be revealed: That man is what we call a miraculous creature, with miraculous power over men; and, on the whole, with such a Life in him, and such a World round him, as victorious Analysis, with her Physiologies, Nervous Systems, Physic and Metaphysic, will never completely name, to say nothing of explaining."

Thus, to sum up the foregoing premises: in society, between two or more individuals, there is at work a mysterious energy, not unlike that of force between molecules or life in the organism; this social energy is under intelligent governance, not fortuitous nor causeless, but reducible to fixed law, and capable of being wrought into a science; is, moreover, a vital actuality, not an incident nor an accident, but an entity, as attraction and repulsion are entities; under this agency society, perforce, develops like the plant from a germ. This energy acts on the intellect, and through the intellect on the organism; acts independently of the will, and cannot be created or destroyed by man; is not found in the brute creation, is not transmittable by generation through individuals, is wrought out by man as a free-will agent, though acting unconsciously, and is the product alike of good and evil.

As to the causes which originate progressional phenomena there are differences of opinion. One sees in the intellect the germ of an eternal unfolding; another recognizes in the soul-element the vital principle of