the specific organism in certain respects magnifies the demands upon the other functions. Civilized man coöperates with his fellows far more fully than is the case in more primitive societies; but his need of such coöperation is again incalculably greater, so that a much narrower departure of egoism from the altruistic norm is sufficient to produce suffering.
A fourth characteristic opinion of the school was that good conduct in general represents a more advanced stage of evolution than bad conduct. The proposition may be true or false in half a dozen senses. It is true, for example, in the sense that good conduct commonly involves a recognition of motives which are of comparatively recent origin or development. To act from the cruder, lower impulses, to the denial of the more refined interests of life, is generally to do wrong. The proposition is true also in the sense that, as social conditions change, practices may be perpetuated which were innocent enough in the old days, but have become decidedly hurtful in the new. But the proposition is fatally wrong, if it is meant to assert a criterion by which right and wrong conduct may be discriminated. As Wundt, among others, has very clearly shown, new vices are constantly one part of the fruits of social progress. The sins of to-day are well-nigh as characteristic of our present measure of development as are its virtues.
Passing now to the fourth stage of the long discussion, we find it characterized by an earnest and finally successful insistence upon the peculiar nature of social evolution. The history of this movement is very interesting, and I think not unsuggestive. That the progress of society was not to be accounted for in terms derived from the analogy of the biological organism; that, in particular, the modes of social inheritance, the perpetuation of customs, the propagation of beliefs, were decidedly not matters of physiological heredity,—all this was repeatedly asserted during many years by a number of independent thinkers. A Californian can scarcely forbear mentioning the name of Joseph Le Conte in this connection. The fact remains that these protests were without sufficient effect upon the great body of thinkers. It was a biological age. The glory of Darwin's
