MIND AS A SOCIAL FACTOR. 565 gained by efforts to avoid the consequences of ignorance already felt. The intellectual development of the child must be an epitome of that of the race. It is thus only that nature operates, and surely nature is greater and wiser than man. All schemes of social reform are unscientific. Public charities tend to bolster up unworthy elements in society that nature has declared unfit to survive. Temperance reforms tend only to abridge individual liberty for even the liberty to destroy one's self should be respected. Philanthropy is zeal without know- ledge, while humanitarianism is fanaticism. This general class of views antedated by many years the publi- cation by Spencer and Darwin of their formulated doctrines of the " survival of the fittest " and " natural selection ". But it cannot be denied that these doctrines, supported as they were by facts fresh from nature, have greatly strengthened this habit of thought. Nature's method is now much better known than for- merly, and it is now well understood that an utterly soulless competition constitutes its fundamental characteristic. Surely man cannot go astray in foUowing in the footsteps of nature. Let him learn from the animal world. He has descended from some of the humble stocks which he is now studying. Nature's plan has raised him from the condition of a beast to that of a rational being. It has created and developed society and civilisa- tion. Unless tampered with by " reformers " all the operations of society would be competitive. Competition is the law of nature out of which progress results. Sociology, as its founder insisted, must be based on biology, and the true sociologist must understand this biologic law. Those who propose to apply methods to society which are opposed to the methods of nature are supposed to be ignorant of these fundamental truths and are called empiricists, " meddlers," and " tinkers ". Such, I say, is the tenor and tendency of modern scientific thought. I do not say that all scientific men hold these views. I merely maintain that leading ones have formulated and incul- cated them as natural deductions from the established facts of science, and that the public mind is rapidly assimilating them, while scarcely any attempts are being made to check their advance. 1 Is there any way of answering these arguments ? Can the Icn's&z f"ire doctrine be successfully met ? That all attempts to do this have been timidly made cannot be denied. That these have been few and feeble is equally certain. While there has existed in the minds of many rational persons a vague sense of 1 The social philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer possesses this tone throughout, and his disciples, particularly in America, delight in going even farther than their master. The most extreme statement of the laissez faire doctrine known to me is that of Prof. W. G. Sumner, in his recent work Social Classes,
