pment of bellicose impulses to
keep him in trouble with his fellows. An intensification of the
exhibition of one may accompany an intensification of the display of the
other, the only difference being that social arrangements cause the
kindly feelings to be displayed toward one set of fellows and the
hostile impulses toward another set. Thus, as everybody knows, the
hatred toward the foreigner characterizing peoples now at war is
attended by an unusual manifestation of mutual affection and love within
each warring group. So characteristic is this fact that that man was a
good psychologist who said that he wished that this planet might get
into war with another planet, as that was the only effective way he saw
of developing a world-wide community of interest in this globe's
population.

The indispensable preliminary condition of progress has been supplied by
the conversion of scientific discoveries into inventions which turn
physical energy, the energy of sun, coal, and iron, to account. Neither
the discoveries nor the inventions were the product of unconscious
physical nature. They were the product of human devotion and
application, of human desire, patience, ingenuity, and mother-wit. The
problem which now confronts us, the problem of progress, is the same in
kind, differing in subject-matter. It is a problem of discovering the
needs and capacities of collective human nature as we find it aggregated
in racial or national groups on the surface of the globe, and of
inventing the social machinery which will set available powers operating
for the satisfaction of those needs.

We are living still under the dominion of a laissez faire philosophy. I
do not mean by this an individualistic, as against a socialistic,
philosophy. I mean by it a philosophy which trusts the direction of
human affairs to nature, or Providence, or evolution, or manifest
destiny--that is to say, to accident--rather than to a contriving and
constructive intelligence. To put our faith in the collective state
instead of in individual activity is quite as laissez faire a proceeding
as to put it in the results of voluntary private enterprise. The only
genuine opposite to a go-as-you-please, let-alone philosophy is a
philosophy which studies specific social needs and evils with a view to
constructing the special social machinery for which they call.

3. Progress and the Limits of Scientific Prevision[339]

Movement, whether of progress or of retrogres