f political
reasoning, that many of the logical difficulties arising from our
tendency to divide the infinite stream of our thoughts and sensations
into homogeneous classes and species are now unnecessary and have been
avoided in our time by the students of the natural sciences. Just as the
modern artist substitutes without mental confusion his ever-varying
curves and surfaces for the straight and simple lines of the savage, so
the scientific imagination has learnt to deal with the varying facts of
nature without thinking of them as separate groups, each composed of
identical individuals and represented to us by a single type.

Can we learn so to think of the varying individuals of the whole human
race? Can we do, that is to say, what Mazzini declared to be impossible?
And if we can, shall we be able to love the fifteen hundred million
different human beings of whom we are thus enabled to think?

To the first question the publication of the _Origin of Species_ in 1859
offered an answer. Since then we have in fact been able to represent the
human race to our imagination, neither as a chaos of arbitrarily varying
individuals, nor as a mosaic of homogeneous nations, but as a biological
group, every individual in which differs from every other not
arbitrarily but according to an intelligible process of organic
evolution.[113] And, since that which exists for the imagination can
exist also for the emotions, it might have been hoped that the second
question would also have been answered by evolution, and that the
warring egoisms of nations and empires might henceforth have been
dissolved by love for that infinitely varying multitude whom we can
watch as they work their way through so much pain and confusion towards
a more harmonious relation to the universe.

[113] Sir Sydney Olivier, e.g. in his courageous and penetrating book
_White Capital and Coloured Labour_ considers (in chap. ii.) the racial
distinctions between black and white from the point of view of
evolution. This consideration brings him at once to 'the infinite,
inexhaustible distinctness of personality between individuals, so much a
fundamental fact of life that one almost would say that the amalgamating
race-characteristics are merely incrustations concealing this sparkling
variety' (pp. 12, 13).

But it was the intellectual tragedy of the nineteenth century that the
discovery of organic evolution, instead of stimulating such a general
love of humanity, se