Principles of western civilisation

Vv THE PROBLEM 139

preceded it by one of the most clearly marked lines of demarcation in the history of life. On one side of the line this general instinct sees the cosmic process operating under one set of conditions. On the other side it conceives it as having entered on a new phase, subject to other principles, and proceeding towards problems quite different from any that have ever before been encountered.

Now, in regarding the development upwards towards higher social efficiency of a rational creature in which, as it were, the cosmos itself moves towards consciousness, it will become more and more evident on reflection that the process at a particular stage must possess features of extraordinary interest. The development in progress in human society is, it may be observed, over and above everything else a process of progress towards higher social efficiency. The individual, it must always be remembered, has in that process once and for ever ceased to be the factor of the first importance. For as society is of necessity greater and more effective than the individual, it has been, from the beginning, the efficiency of the system of social order to which the individual belongs that has become the determining element of success in the process which is progress. And as, under the operation of the law of Natural Selection, it must have happened from the outset that it was the types of social order in which the subordination of the interests of the individual to those of the social system around him was most complete and most efficient which proved to be the winning types; so it must be the increasing subordination of the interests of the individual to the larger interests of society which must con-