Having endeavoured to place thus prominently before our minds the conditions under which human progress has been made throughout the past, and under which it, so far, continues to be made in the midst of the highest civilisation which surrounds us at the present, we must now direct our attention to another striking and equally important feature of this progress. The two new forces which made their advent with man were his reason, and the capacity for acting, under its influence, in concert with his fellows in society. It becomes necessary, therefore, to notice for the first time a fact which, later, as we proceed, will be brought into increasing prominence. As man can only reach his highest development and employ his powers to the fullest extent in society, it follows that in the evolution we witness him undergoing throughout history, his development as an individual is necessarily of less importance than his development as a social creature. In other words, although his interests as an individual may remain all-important to himself, it has become inevitable that they must henceforward be subordinated—whether he be conscious of it or not—to those larger social interests with which the forces that are shaping his development have now begun to operate.

The evolutionist who endeavours to obtain a fundamental grasp of the problems which human society presents, will find, therefore, that there is one point, above all others, at which his attention tends to become concentrated—the point where he stands, as it were, between man as a member of society endowed with reason on the one side, and all the brute creation that has gone before him on the other.