'democracy', 'good', 'true', 'beautiful', these have been immemorial bones of contention among philosophers. They are accepted, taken for granted, without any question as to their meaning by the individual, until he finds, perhaps, in discussion that his acceptation of the term is entirely different from that of his opponent. Thus many an argument ends with 'if that's what you mean, I agree with you'. Intellectual inquiry and discussion to be fruitful must have certain definitive terms to start with. As Professor Dewey says:

Discussion . . . needs to have the ground or basis of its various component statements brought to consciousness in such a way as to define the exact value of each. The Socratic contention is the need compelling the common denominator, the common subject underlying the diversity of views, to exhibit itself. It alone gives a sure standard by which the claims of all assertions may be measured. Until this need is met, all discussion is a self-deceiving play with unjudged, unexamined matters, which, confused, and shifting, impose themselves upon us.27

To define our terms means literally to know what we are talking about and what others are talking about. One of the values of discussion is that it enables us more clearly to realize the meaning of the words with which we constantly operate. A man may entertain for a long while a half-conscious definition of democracy as meaning political equality, and suddenly come face to face with another who means by it industrial cooperation and participation on the part of all workers. Whether he agrees with the new definition or not, at least his own becomes clearer by contrast.

'Science', wrote Condillac, 'is a w-l made language'. No small part of the technique of science lies in its clear definition of its terms. The chemist knows what he means by an 'acid', the biologist by a 'mammal'. Under these names he classifies all objects having certain determinable properties. Social science will never attain the precision of the physical sciences. until it also attains as clear and unambiguous a terminology. As we shall see in the chapter on science, however, the definitions in the physical sciences are arrived at through precise inquiries not yet possible in the field of social phenomena.

27 Dewey: Essays in Experimental Logic, p. 151.

CHAPTER XI

RACIAL AND CULTURAL CONTINUITY

That the history of the race is an unbroken continuum goes without saying. What this means in the way of transmission of the arts, the sciences, the religion, the ideas, the customs of one generation to the next, we shall presently see. Cultural continuity is made possible by the more fundamental fact of the actual biological continuity of the race. This biological continuity extends back, as far as we can infer, from the scientific evidence, unbrokenly through the half million years since man has left traces of his presence on earth. The continuity of life itself goes back to that still more remote time when man and ape were indistinguishable, indeed to that hypothecated epoch when life as it existed on earth was no more complex than it is as it now appears in the amoeba. Evolution has taught us that life, however it started, has been one long continuous process which has increased in complexity from the amoeba to man.

The continuity of the human race is a contrivance of nature rather than of man. It is, as it were, a by-product of the sex instinct. Man is endowed natively with a powerful desire for sex gratification, and though offspring are the chief utility of this instinct, desire for reproduction is not normally its primary stimulus. But while the production of offspring may thus be said to be an incidental result of the sex instinct, human reproduction may be subjected to rational consideration and control, led according as offspring are or are not considered desirable.

The sense of the desirability of offspring may, in the first place, be determined by social rather than individual considerations. To the group or the state a large birth rate, a steady increase of the number of births over the number of deaths, may be made desirable by the need of a large population for

agriculture, herding or war. In primitive tribes, superiority in numbers must have been, under conditions of competitive warfare, a pronounced asset. In any imperialistic régime, where military conquest is highly regarded, the maintenance and replenishment of large armies is a factor that has entered ⚫into reflection on the question of population.

In cases where a small ruling class is benefited by the labor of a slave or serf class, there is, at least for the ruling classes, a marked utility in the increase in population. It means just so much opportunity for increase of wealth on the part of landowning and slaveholding or serf-controlling classes. In any country, increase in the labor supply means just so much more human energy for the control of natural resources, so many more units of energy for the production of national wealth.

Offspring may come to be reflectively desired by the individual as a means of perpetuating property, family, or fame. A man cannot nonchalantly face the prospect of obliteration, and the biological fact of death may be circumvented by the equally real. A man's individuality, we have already had occasion to see, is enhanced by his possessions, and if his fortune or estate is handed down he shall not altogether have been obliterated from the earth. Similarly, where a family has become a great tradition, there may be a deliberate desire on the part of an individual to have the name and tradition carried on, to keep the old lineage current and conspicuous among men. A man may think through his children to keep his own fame alive in posterity. At least his name shall be known, and if, as so often happens, a son follows in his father's profession, carries on his father's business or farm, or philanthropies, the individual attains at least some measure of vicarious immortality. His own ways, habits, traditions are

carried on.

A man may, moreover, come to desire offspring for the pleasures and responsibilities of domesticity and parenthood. There is, most psychologists maintain, a parental instinct as such, certainly very strong in most women, and not lacking to some degree in most men. The joys of caring for and rear

ing a child have too often been celebrated in literature, and in life by parents both young and old to need more explicit statement here.

Restriction of Population

But reproduction has been, in human history promiscuous, and increase of population has been less a problem to moralists and economists than has its restriction. The danger of overincrease in population was first powerfully stated by Malthus in his 'Essay on Population'. Malthus contended in effect that population always tends to increase up to the limit of subsistence, and gives indications, unless increase is checked, of increasing beyond it. In its extreme form, as it appeared in Malthus' first edition of his Essay, it ran somewhat as follows:

As things are now, there is a perpetual pressure by population on the sources of food. Vice and misery cut down the number of men when they grow beyond the food. The increase of men is rapid and easy; the increase of food is in comparison, slow, and toilsome. They are to each other as a geometrical increase to an arithmetical; in North America, the population double their number in twenty years.1

Malthus' pessimistic prophecy of the increase of population beyond the means of subsistence has been subjected to refutation by various causes. For one thing, among civilized races, at least, the birth rate is declining. Again, intensive agriculture has vastly increased the possibilities of our natural resources. On this point, Kropotkin, more than most social reformers acquainted with agricultural conditions writes: Speaking of market gardeners, he says:

They have created a totally new agriculture. They smile when we boast about the rotation system having permitted us to take from the field one crop every year, or four crops each three years, because their ambition is to have six and nine crops from the very same plot of land during the twelve months. They do not understand our talk about good and bad soils, because they make the soils themselves, and make it in such quantities as to be compelled yearly to seed some of it; otherwise it would raise up the levels of their gardens by half an inch,

'Bonar: Philosophy and Political Economy in Their Historic Relations, p. 205.

every year. They aim at cropping, not five or six tons of grass on the acre as we do, but from fifty to one hundred tons of various vegetables on the same space; not 51 pounds worth of hay, but 100 pounds worth of vegetables of the plainest description, cabbages and carrots.2

Of intensive industry the same might be said. Where formerly a man could produce only enough for one man's consumption, under conditions of machine production, one man's work can supply quantities sufficient for many. With a declining birth rate, and the vastly increased productivity of industry and agriculture, there is a greatly reduced danger of the population growing beyond their possible sustenance by the available food supply.

Under certain economic and social conditions there are marked variations in the birth rate. This may be due to various causes which are, by different writers, variously assigned. The variation of the birth rate among different classes is again a matter of common observation and statistical certainty. Higher standards of living are found regularly to be correlated with a decrease of the number of children in a family. An important factor in the voluntary restriction of population is the desire to give children that are brought into the world adequate education, environment, and social opportunity.

Cultural Continuity

To the very young the world seems an unprecedented novelty. It seems scarcely older than their own memories, which are few and short, and their own experience, which is necessarily limited and confined. Through education our experience becomes immeasurably widened; we can vicariously live through the experiences of other people through hearing or reading, and can acquire the 'racial memory' which goes back as far as the records of history, or anthropological research. As we grow older we come to learn that our civilization has a history; that our present has a past. This past extends back through the countless æons before man walked upright. The past of human life on earth goes back itself over nearly half a million years. With this long past,

Kropotkin: Fields, Factories, and Workshops, p. 74.