So is it as we ascend from savage to civilized and from the lowest
among the civilized to the highest. The rhythm of external actions
required to maintain the rhythm of internal actions becomes at once
more complicated and more complete, making them into a better moving
equilibrium. The irregularities which their conditions of existence
entail on primitive men, continually cause wide deviations from the
mean state of the moving equilibrium--wide oscillations; which imply
imperfection of it for the time being, and bring about its premature
overthrow. In such civilized men as we call ill conducted, frequent
perturbations of the moving equilibrium are caused by those excesses
characterizing a career in which the periodicities are much broken; and
a common result is that the rhythm of the internal actions being often
deranged, the moving equilibrium, rendered by so much imperfect, is
generally shortened in duration. While one in whom the internal rhythms
are best maintained is one by whom the external actions required to
fulfill all needs and duties, severally performed on the recurring
occasions, conduce to a moving equilibrium that is at once involved and
prolonged.
Of course the implication is that the man who thus reaches the limit
of evolution, exists in a society congruous with his nature, is a man
among men similarly constituted, who are severally in harmony with that
social environment which they have formed. This is, indeed, the only
possibility. For the production of the highest type of man can go on
only _pari passu_ with the production of the highest type of society.
The implied conditions are those before described as accompanying the
most evolved conduct--conditions under which each can fulfill all his
needs and rear the due number of progeny, not only without hindering
others from doing the like, but while aiding them in doing the like.
And evidently, considered under its physical aspect, the conduct of the
individual so constituted, and associated with like individuals, is one
in which all the actions, that is the combined motions of all kinds,
have become such as duly to meet every daily process, every ordinary
occurrence, and every contingency in his environment. Complete life in
a complete society is but another name for complete equilibrium between
the co-ordinated activities of each social unit and those of the
aggregate of units.
§ 29. Even to readers of preceding volumes, and still more to other
readers, there will seem a strangeness, or even an absurdity, in this
presentation of moral conduct in physical terms. It has been needful
to make it, however. If that re-distribution of matter and motion
constituting evolution goes on in all aggregates, its laws must be
fulfilled in the most developed being as in every other thing; and his
actions, when decomposed into motions, must exemplify its laws. This
we find that they do. There is an entire correspondence between moral
evolution and evolution as physically defined.
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