community might
refuse to look through the telescope, or looking might refuse to see
that it was the moon which caused the eclipse, and their deep-seated
reverence for the insect, which was the growth of ages, would lead them
to regard as impious those individuals who denied its godhead, and might
even lead to the physical destruction of the first unbelievers. The
society, once so homogeneous and co-ordinated in all its parts, would
become at once a society rent by moral and social problems; and endless
suffering must arise to individuals in the attempt to co-ordinate the
ideals, manners, and institutions of the society to the new conditions!
There might be immense gain in many directions; lives otherwise
sacrificed would be spared, a higher and more satisfactory stage of
existence might be entered on; but the disco-ordination and struggle
would be inevitable until the society had established an equilibrium
between its knowledge, its material conditions, and its social, sexual,
and religious ideals and institutions.

An analogous condition, but of a far more complex kind, exists at the
present day in our own societies. Our material environment differs in
every respect from that of our grandparents, and bears little or no
resemblance to that of a few centuries ago. Here and there, even in our
civilised societies in remote agricultural districts, the old social
conditions may remain partly undisturbed; but throughout the bulk of
our societies the substitution of mechanical for hand-labour, the
wide diffusion of knowledge through the always increasing cheap
printing-press; the rapidly increasing gathering of human creatures into
vast cities, where not merely thousands but millions of individuals are
collected together under physical and mental conditions of life which
invert every social condition of the past; the increasingly rapid means
of locomotion; the increasing intercourse between distant races and
lands, brought about by rapid means of intercommunication, widening
and changing in every direction the human horizon--all these produce a
society, so complex and so rapidly altering, that social co-ordination
between all its parts is impossible; and social unrest, and the strife
of ideals of faiths, of institutions, and consequent human suffering is
inevitable.

If the ancient guns and agricultural implements which our fathers
taught us to use are valueless in the hands of their descendants, if the
samplers our mothers