A NOTE ON THE TERM "SOCIAL EVOLUTION."
Writers on society, when they speak of social evolution mean something more than what Mr. Hobson, in his review of Kidd's Social Evolution in the November number of this Journal called the verbal proposition that the aim of social evolution is the development of social efficiency. They really mean that society has made man what he is, that it has not merely somewhat shaped him, but that it has conferred his entire intellectual and moral nature and given to his physical the grace and beauty, combined with strength, we find in the best types of the Aryan race. If the influences which, acting through a long period, raised the brute-like creature who fought for existence with other brutes to so high a level, they contend that indefinite development is possible by the continuous operation of such influences. The hypothesis has to be proved, but both hypothesis and conclusion lie behind every discussion on society from the point of view of biological sociology.
I submit that an appeal to the lowest forms of existing savage life lays the action in the wrong court. Mr. Spencer would be as well entitled to call as a witness of social development an anthropoid ape as a low type of savage. Not that I mean in the slightest degree that there is not an impassable chasm between the two, but the savage has no voice in history, and this is my court. The testim.ony which history receives is that of the men who made it, and the life of the human race is within the province of history and that alone. If it can be proved that a Bushman or a Polynesian, moulded and rounded by social action and reaction, developed into a Shakespeare or a Cæsar, I shall without faces drink the chalice of absurdity which Comte presents in his deified personification of humanity.
The earliest monuments give types of man equal to the best
