which man has in common with the
whole organic kingdom. It is in this philosophical sense that the most
eminent civilization must be pronounced to be fully accordant with
nature, since it is, in fact, only a more marked manifestation of the
chief properties of our species, properties which, latent at first, can
come into play only in that advanced state of social life for which they
are exclusively destined. The whole system of biological philosophy
indicates the natural progression. We have seen how, in the brute
kingdom, the superiority of each race is determined by the degree of
preponderance of the animal life over the organic. In like manner we see
that our social evolution is only the final term of a progression which
has continued from the simplest vegetables and most insignificant
animals, up through the higher reptiles to the birds and the mammifers,
and still on to the carnivorous animals and monkeys, the organic
characteristics retiring and the animal prevailing more and more, till
the intellectual and moral tend toward the ascendancy which can never be
fully obtained, even in the highest state of human perfection that we
can conceive of. This comparative estimate affords us the scientific
view of human progression, connected, as we see it is, with the whole
course of animal advancement, of which it is itself the highest degree.
The analysis of our social progress proves indeed that, while the
radical dispositions of our nature are necessarily invariable, the
highest of them are in a continuous state of relative development, by
which they rise to be preponderant powers of human existence, though the
inversion of the primitive economy can never be absolutely complete. We
have seen that this is the essential character of the social organism in
a statical view; but it becomes much more marked when we study its
variations in their gradual succession.

4. Progress and the Historical Process[336]

The conclusion which these reflections suggest is that the uncritical
application of biological principles to social progress results in an
insuperable contradiction. The factors which determine the survival of
physical organism, if applied as rules for the furtherance of social
progress, appear to conflict with all that social progress means. A
sense of this conflict is no doubt responsible for the further
reconstruction which the biological view has in recent years undergone.
Biologists now begin to inquire seriously