Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 9.djvu/320

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308 L. F. WAED'S DYNAMIC SOCIOLOGY. both in quantity and quality. And this, when sifted to the bottom, may be attributed to the more universal practice of recording, preserving, and inculcating on succeeding generations the truths learned by preceding ones and found by experience to be most valuable. The general deduction which follows of itself from these facts obviously is that, where intellect is equal, intelligence will vary with the amount of education." We may pass over the chapter on Anthropogeny, which contains nothing new to readers of the calibre for whom Dynamic Sociology is designed scarcely anything more than arguments in favour of the now accepted doctrine that man descends from a simian ancestor and proceed at once to that on Tertiary Aggregation or Sociogeny, which embraces an immense amount of novel and very suggestive matter. To give a summary, even the briefest, however, of this long and interesting essay would be impossible within the limits at our disposal : Mr. Ward has done so himself in schematic outline at vol. I, pp. 480-482, and his table of heads alone, there set forth, occupies nearly three entire pages. This chapter closes the first volume, which is thus entirely given over to clearing the ground for the effective development of the Dynamic Sociology. The real work of the treatise begins in the second volume. Un- fortunately, it does not fully come up to the promise of the rather lengthy and wasteful preamble. Mr. Ward's ep^ov is inferior on the whole to his irapep^a. Setting out with the position of man in the world, as a conscious, intelligent, purposive agent, in the midst of an unconscious, non-intelligent, blindly active environment, he declares that man should not rest content with being the minister et interpres naturae, but should aspire on the contrary to be her master not parendo but sciendo imperare. Though intelligence is merely a product of evolution, it can itself further and advance evolution in future, by substituting the teleological method of purposive endeavour towards a definite end, for the genetic method of blind advance towards the empirically established better. " Society can and should seriously undertake the artificial im- provement of its condition upon scientific principles strictly analogous to those by which the rude conditions of nature have been improved upon in the process which we call civilisation. How is this to be done ? Not by what Mr. Ward describes as the " direct method of conation," that is to say, by an endeavour to take happiness by storm to get at it by immediate effort ; but by what he calls the "indirect method of conation," that is to say, by ascertaining and ultimately producing the conditions under which alone increase of happiness is really possible. What these conditions are, Mr. Ward sets forth in the following systematic table of the Theorems of Dynamic Sociology. " A. Happiness is the ultimate end of conation. B. Progress is the direct means to Happiness ; it is, therefore, the first proximate end of conation, or primary means to the ultimate end. C. Dynamic Action is the direct means to Progress ; it is, therefore, the second proximate end of conation, or secondary means to the ultimate end.