inventions, reforms, some few of which prove fruitful and for a time survive. The competition in this sphere is no less keen,[1] and though aberrant social, ethical or political ideas may long survive by reason of their correlation with other ideas or principles, elimination is in the end effected by a process which parallels that which occurs in the biological realm. Three hundred years ago it was not the exception but the rule for a genuine scientific conception to make its way into the world under the protective coloring of theological ideas. On the other hand, ideas regarding the antipodes, the form of the earth, the nature and cause of motion, etc., based upon Scripture or the authority of Aristotle, long served as 'warning colors' which for centuries told of the power and venom which lay in ecclesiastical system, and bade the over-curious adventurer in the realm of nature keep his distance from 'truths' held sacred.
We see too how phenomena which occur in the animal world are paralleled at the human stage of evolution in the migration of fashions, customs, ideas, philosophies—witness the displacement of an endemic by an exotic species in the migration of German idealism to England in the last century. And again the old problem, How an organ, not yet functionally active and thus without utility, can be preserved, obtains its solution in the sphere of human ideas in the protection which a proven theory or name offers. Its continuance is rendered possible by its correlation with useful ideas or its utility for subsidiary ends. Even seemingly useless organs in the growing body of thought are here preserved. Who but for the powerful influence of a Lodge, a James, or a Lombroso would still treat spiritualism as a living issue?
The business, social, and political worlds furnish abundant instances of the general tendency to the checking of variations unserviceable to the continuance of group-ideas within each sphere. The cheaply made article must be protected by an inducement to the public in the form of a prize package, and if the expensive article is to make its way, a demand—a new environment—must somehow be created. The social reformer must
- ↑ Vide, e.g., S. Alexander, "Natural Selection in Morals," Int. Jour. Ethics, Vol. 2.
