History.

CHAPTER X.

THE SUPERMOVEMENT.

No comprehensive understanding of what human history is can be reached by the sole consideration of the subject of it as a creature of biological and chemical changes. Only in a subordinate way is man a physical survival. He has, it is true, come to a supreme position in the kingdom of life, and the steps by which he has reached this vantage ground are pretty well understood and commonly accepted. But the human life, as it is, can not be interpreted under the action of one law. The human body may be an ascent from lower forms of life, but it is not so, feature by feature. That theory, ingenious as it is and capable of making a fine show for itself in a region where cosmic mind brings about similar forms for similar functions everywhere, and where the variations of form and function are almost infinite, has never been proven. It requires incredible reaches of time-incredible stretches of the Evolution is a great truth in the

imagination.

unfolding and development of life forms, but it will not bear the onus of all explanations. Evolution must be made to consist with the action of psychic law in nature, and that introduces the spontaneous.

And only in the same way shall we have any collective understanding of the race. The social instinct may be depended on to keep human beings together in families, tribes, and nationaliities. And very much may be known of the ways of men by the events which have been chronicled of them, one after another. How they have lived together and increased in numbers and built civilizations and left enduring monuments of art and architecture and literature and law. How they have also turned on one another to devastate and destroy. How famines and pestilences and scourges of many sorts have eaten them up by the million. How conquest and diplomacy is constantly shifting the geography of nations. How the arts of peace, in favored times, have grown into the ascendant and called into life an industrial age and sent ships of interchange and commerce into all the seas. This is common history and worthy of record.

But the temper of the time is to weigh events

by a kind of scale which often magnifies the less spectacular things and which occasionally puts the affairs of the world out of joint chronologically. And for the reason that man has come to be considered the subject of an order which includes more than his human associations and fellowships, and which identifies him with the profounder concerns of his cosmic correspondences. We belong to a political and social and religious order, and we also belong to a scheme too great for us to understand much about, and with which we do not have very much to do.

The planet on which we live turns on its axis, and it moves in the plane of its orbit about the sun-and the knowing ones tell us that the system to which we are attached is rushing towards an apex of its own at the rate of four hundred million miles a year. We are not sensuously conscious of any of these movements. We are in the grip of them-we can not help ourselves.

In the equipoise of tremendous antagonism we can lie down and go to sleep, and wake up cared for. Neither are we aware of the numberless influences which shape our social career. We are daily absorbed in the projection into life of our own little energies, and as they go out from us

we are able to see somewhat of their value. We are not able to estimate the true and full social effect of a single word or action. All the words and actions of a single life of all lives-are thrown out a hodge-podge they are wrought into an order. Above the prevision of any life of all lives we get the sense of a superforce, which appears to be kneading the human forces and which guarantees, somehow, the safety of the social system. We can no more understand it, or manage it, than we can control the weather. We are not great enough to have historic causation charged up to us-we are not good enough. We are not even able to stand by and appreciate the modes by which the actions of individuals and the social currents are co-ordinated to do service in the determining tendencies of the world's life. Many of these modes slip by us unnoticed and others come upon us like divine surprises. The inquiry we make here, however, is healthful and practical, because there is a sense in which we may get in front and be ground to powder.

The Swarming Instinct.

When the bees swarm, each insect is, apparently, held absolutely to obey the hive intent.