GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS.

SOCIAL philosophy may be aptly divided (as political economy has been) into statics and dynamics; the first treating of the equilibrium of a perfect society, the second of the forces by which society is advanced towards perfection.* To determine what laws we must obey for the obtainment of complete happiness is the object of the one; while that of the other is to analyze the influences which are making us competent to obey these laws. Hitherto we have concerned ourselves chiefly with the statics, touching on the dynamics only occasionally for purposes of elucidation. Now, however, the dynamics claim special attention. Some of the phenomena of progress already referred to need further explanation, and many others associated with them remain to be noticed. There are also sundry general considerations not admissible into foregoing chapters, which may here be fitly included.

And first let us mark that the course of civilization could not have been other than it has been. Given an unsubdued Earth; given the being-Man, fitted to overspread and occupy

* I had seen this division of Political Economy in the work of Mr. J. S. Mill, where he refers to it as having been made by some one-a political economist I supposed. In the above sentence I assumed that I was giving the division a wider application; whereas it appears that I was simply giving to it the original application made by M. Comte. But at that time Comte was to me only a name.

it; given the laws of life what they are; and no other series of changes than that which has taken place, could have taken place.

Each member of a race fulfilling the conditions to greatest happiness, must be so constituted that he may obtain full satisfaction for every desire without diminishing the power of others to obtain like satisfactions: nay, must derive pleasure from seeing pleasure in others. Now, for such beings to multiply in a world tenanted by inferior creaturescreatures which must be dispossessed to make room—is a manifest impossibility. By the definition, such beings would lack all desire to exterminate the races they are to supplant. They would, indeed, have a repugnance to exterminating them; for the ability to derive pleasure from seeing pleasure, involves the liability to derive pain from seeing pain. Evidently, therefore, these hypothetical beings, instead of subjugating and overspreading the Earth, would themselves become the prey of pre-existing creatures, in which destructive desires predominated. Hence the aboriginal man must have a character fitting him to clear it of races endangering his life, and races occupying the space required by mankind. He must have a desire to kill; for it is the law of animal life that to every needful act must attach a gratification, the desire for which may serve as a stimulus. In other words, he must be what we call a savage; and must be left to acquire fitness for social life as fast as the conquest of the Earth renders social life possible.

Whoever thinks that men might have full sympathy with their fellows, while lacking all sympathy with inferior creatures, will discover his error on looking at the facts. The Indian whose life is spent in the chase, delights in torturing his brother man as much as in killing gaine. His sons are schooled into fortitude by long days of torment, and his squaw made prematurely old by hard treatment. Among partially-civilized nations the two characteristics have ever borne the same relationship. Thus the spectators in the

Roman amphitheatres were as much delighted by the slaying of gladiators as by the death-struggles of wild beasts. The ages during which Europe was thinly peopled, and hunting a chief occupation, were also the ages of feudal violence, universal brigandage, dungeons, tortures. Here in England a whole province depopulated to make game a preserve, and a law sentencing to death the serf who killed a stag, show that great activity of the predatory instinct and utter indifference to human happiness coexisted. In later days, when bull-baiting and cock-fighting were common pastimes, the penal code was far more severe than now; prisons were full of horrors; men put in the pillory were maltreated by the populace; and the inmates of lunatic asylums, chained naked to the wall, were exhibited for money, and tormented for the amusement of visitors. Conversely, among ourselves a desire to diminish human misery is accompanied by a desire to ameliorate the condition of inferior creatures. While the kindlier feeling of men is seen in all varieties of philanthropic effort-in charitable societies, in associations for improving the dwellings of the labouring classes, in anxiety for popular education, in attempts to abolish capital punishment, in zeal for temperance reform, in ragged schools, in endeavours to protect climbing boys, in inquiries concerning "labour and the poor," in emigration funds, in the milder treatment of children, and so on-it also shows itself in societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, in Acts of Parliament to put down the use of dogs for purposes of draught, in the condemnation of battues, in the late inquiry why the pursuers of a stag should not be punished as much as the carter who maltreats his horse, and lastly, in vegetarianism. Moreover, to make the evidence complete, we have the fact that men partially adapted to the social state, retrograde on being placed in circumstances which call forth the old propensities. The barbarizing of colonists, who live under aboriginal conditions, is universally remarked. The back settlers of America, among whom unpunished murders, rifle duels,

and Lynch law prevail-or, better still, the trappers, who leading a savage life have descended to savage habits, to scalping, and occasionally even to cannibalism-sufficiently exemplify it.

The same impulses govern in either case. The desire to inflict suffering distinguishes not between the creatures who exhibit that suffering, but obtains gratification indifferently from the agonies of beast and human being. Contrariwise, the sympathy which prevents its possessor from inflicting pain that he may avoid pain himself, and which tempts him to give happiness that he may have happiness reflected back upon him, is similarly undistinguishing. It reproduces in one being the emotions exhibited by other beings; and it extracts pleasure from the friskiness of a just-unchained dog, or excites pity for an ill-used beast of burden, as readily as it generates fellow feeling with the joys and sorrow of

men.

Thus it is necessary that the primitive man should be one whose happiness is obtained regardless of the expense to other beings. It is necessary that the ultimate man should be one who can obtain happiness without deducting from the happiness of others. The first of these constitutions has to be moulded into the last. And the manifold evils which have filled the world for these thousands of years-the murders, enslavings, and robberies-the tyrannies of rulers, the oppressions of class, the persecutions of sect and party, the multiform embodiments of selfishness in unjust laws, barbarous customs, dishonest dealings, exclusive manners, and the like simply illustrate the disastrous working of this original and once needful constitution, now that mankind have grown into conditions for which it is not fitted-are nothing but symptoms of the suffering attendant on the process of adapting humanity to its new circumstances.

But why, it may be asked, has the adaptation gone on so slowly?

The answer is, that the new conditions to which adaptation has been taking place have themselves grown up but slowly. The warfare between man and the creatures at enmity with him has continued down to the present time, and over a large portion of the globe is going on now. Where the destructive propensities are on the eve of losing their gratification, they make to themselves artificial spheres of exercise by game-preserving, fox-hunting, cock-fights, bullfights, bear-baiting; and are so kept in activity. But note, chiefly, that the old predatory disposition is in a certain sense self-maintained. For it generates between men and men hostile relationship similar to those which it generates between men and inferior animals; and by doing so provides itself a lasting source of excitement. This happens inevitably. The desires of the savage acting, as we have seen, indiscriminately, necessarily lead to quarrels of individuals, to fightings of tribes, to feuds of clan with clan, to wars of nations.

Hitherto, then, human character has changed but slowly, because it has been subject to two conflicting sets of conditions. On the one hand, the discipline of the social state has been developing it into the sympathetic form; while on the other hand, the necessity for self-defence partly of man against brute, partly of man against man, and partly of societies against one another, has been maintaining the old unsympathetic form. And only where the influence of the first set of conditions has exceeded that of the last, and then only in proportion to the excess, has modification taken place.

Regarded thus, civilization is a development of man's latent capabilities under favourable circumstances; which favourable circumstances, mark, were certain some time or other to occur. Those complex influences underlying the higher orders of natural phenomena, but more especially those underlying the organic world, work in subordination to the law of probabilities. A plant, for instance, produces