CHAPTER IV - THE CENTRAL FEATURE OF HUMAN HISTORY

Summary

The outlines of the great fundamental problem which underlies our social development are now clearly visible. We have a rational creature whose reason is itself one of the leading factors in the progress he is making; but who is nevertheless subject, in common with all other forms of life, to certain organic laws of existence which render his progress impossible in any other way than by submitting to conditions that can never have any ultimate sanction in his reason. He is undergoing a social development in which his individual interests are not only subservient to the interests of the general progress of the race, but in which they are being increasingly subordinated to the welfare of a social organism possessing widely different interests, and an indefinitely longer life.

It is evident that we have here all the elements of a problem of capital importance—a problem quite special and entirely different from any that the history of life has ever before presented. On the one side we have the self-assertive reason of the individual necessarily tending to be ever more and more developed by the evolutionary forces at work. On the other, we have the immensely wider interests of the social organism, and behind it those of the race in general, demanding, nevertheless, the most absolute subordination of this ever-increasing rational self-assertiveness in the individual.