Language has been treated as
an individual mental product, and so have the arts of life and of
pleasure; but all of these things find their greatest utility in their
social usage,--in their value as bonds which hold together the few or many
human beings composing groups of lower or higher grade. Without
discovering any other reasons we would be impelled to take up social
evolution, for this process is inextricably bound up with the origin and
development of all departments of human thought and action.
If now this new field is actually to be included within the scope of the
laws controlling the rest of nature's evolution, two general conclusions
must be established. Although no formal order need be followed, it must at
some time be shown that human social relations are biological relations,
to be best explained only through their comparison with the far simpler
modes of association found by the biologist among lower orders of beings;
and in the second place it must be demonstrated that identical biological
laws, uniform in their operation everywhere in the organic world, have
controlled the origin and establishment of even the most complex societies
of men. So far no reason has been discovered by science for believing that
evolution has been discontinuous, holding true only for the merely
physical characteristics of humanity as a whole; and furthermore, the
impersonal student of nature finds ample positive evidences showing that
the basic laws of associations of whatever grade are exactly the same.
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