imagination. Though everywhere around
them are creatures with structures and instincts which have been
gradually so moulded as to subserve their own welfares and the welfares
of their species, yet the immense majority ignore the implication that
human beings, too, have been undergoing in the past, and will undergo in
the future, progressive adjustments to the lives imposed on them by
circumstances. There are a few, nevertheless, who think it rational to
conclude that what has happened with all lower forms must happen with
the highest forms,--a few who infer that among types of men those most
fitted for making a well-working society will hereafter, as heretofore,
from time to time, emerge and spread at the expense of types less
fitted, until a fully fitted type has arisen.

It is, at the same time, conceded that the view thus suggested cannot be
accepted without qualification. If we carry our thoughts as far forward
as palaeolithic implements carry them back, we are introduced, not to an
absolute optimism, but to a relative optimism. The cosmic process brings
about retrogression, as well as progression, where the conditions favor
it. Only amid an infinity of modifications, adjusted to an infinity of
changes of circumstances, do there now and then occur some which
constitute an advance: other changes, meanwhile, caused in other
organisms, usually not constituting forward steps in organization, and
often constituting steps backward. Evolution does not imply a latent
tendency to improve everywhere in operation. There is no uniform ascent
from lower to higher, but only an occasional production of a form,
which, in virtue of greater fitness for more complex conditions, becomes
capable of a longer life of a more varied kind. And, while such higher
type begins to dominate over lower types, and to spread at their
expense, the lower types survive in habitats or modes of life that are
not usurped, or are thrust into inferior habitats or modes of life in
which they retrogress.

Mr. Spencer's examination of "The Principles of Sociology" has led him
to the belief that what holds with organic types must hold also with
types of society. Social evolution throughout the future, like social
evolution throughout the past, must, while producing, step after step,
higher societies, leave outstanding many lower. Varieties of men adapted
here to inclement regions, there to regions that are barren, and
elsewhere to regions unfitted, by ruggedn