epends upon two
things: the preservation in books, in memory, and in works of art and
industry, of the ideas of ancient workers and thinkers; and the mental
activity of living thinkers and inventors, whose work takes its start
from this standpoint of stored-up thought. Rob any community of all its
basic ideas, and it would quickly retrograde to a primitive condition
of thought and organization, from which it might need many centuries to
emerge.

It has been said above that man is the highest example of the social
animal. While that is the truth, it is not the whole truth. He is at the
same time the highest example of the communal animal. Mutual aid,
organization into strictly rounded communities, labor for the good of
the whole, is as declared in him as in the most developed community of
the ants, and we admire the work of the latter simply because they
repeat at a lower level the work of man. In truth, in man we have a
splendid example of the existence of the individual initiative in
connection with the communal organization. Specialism exists in a
hundred forms. Some nations have been tied down by it to conditions
almost as fixed as those of the ants. But generalism exists in as full a
measure, new ideas are constantly modifying or replacing the old, and
the communism of man is a progressive one, steadily borne upward on the
wings of new ideas. Individual thought has the fullest swing, and it is
to the system of special reward for useful thought and act that man owes
much of his great advance. On the other hand, reward without useful
service has been one of the leading agencies that have acted to check
human progress.

The lower animals do not possess the advantage of man in his power of
preserving the thoughts and products of the past as a foundation for
new steps of progress. Memory may aid them to a slight degree, but they
have no special means of recording useful ideas. This cannot fairly be
said of the communal forms, which possess the result of the labors of
former generations as useful object lessons. But in the higher animals
no means exist for the permanent preservation of ideas, and each step of
progress must be due to the direct influence of living individuals and
the indirect result of natural selection.

This is one cause of the slow mental advance of the lower animals. A
second is the deficiency in educational influences, which have had so
much to do with human progress. Education is not quite wanting