The answer we give to this question will depend on two things. It will depend first on whether we think that men are or are not competent to advance, and are aided to advance, as beings not only spiritual in essential character and purpose, but self-creative and so able to reach both an efficiency beyond all constraint by institutions and machines, and an enlargement of community-life which shall embrace society upon society in all their diverse modes. Secondly, it will depend on whether we are or are not willing to organize any society by what used to be called biological methods, that is by the methods of the arena—of the 'gladiators' show.' If we decide on the gladiators' show and a social efficiency with no further outlook than a highly superior human ant-hill's, we pronounce ourselves believers that in principle the ant-hill manner of life with its isolation of society from society will work for men. We may be wrong even in a short view or a narrow view of man's capacities and existence; we are certainly wrong if spiritual progress lies before him as a glorious prospect not only for this man or society of men here, or another there, but for all men as members of an all-containing community made one only by an all-containing principle. In face of the promise and adventure of life we are as certainly wrong in giving consent to the ant-hill principle for society as we should be if we consented to exchange our own pregnant incompleteness for the perfection of the ant. Yet we of the modern civilized nations of Europe and America have been far too much influenced of late years, not only by our animal inheritance and the passions that we share with 'ape and tiger,' but by what is now a powerful tradition and in the last century was a new force—the mechanistic conception of social life. Our reasoning about society, our social science, even our social practices, have by this tradition been made not only more materialistic—many of us know that—but more plausibly mechanistic. It has seemed to us that we have science and nature both on our side, in trusting less to the initiative of life and more to its organization of circumscribed institutions and ordered means. We have taken a biological hypothesis far too seriously. And no doubt we have done this in great part because it has enabled us to leave uncriticized, or even to justify, habitual ways of acting and thinking which have about them still the taint of the pit from which we have been digged. These ways of ours were laid down for us in the long effort of each man to keep his footing on earth for himself and for the few he recognized as his own; but we have made them both more difficult and more dangerous by loading ourselves with a burden of perverted or artificial needs which not only call for perverted or artificial means to satisfy them, but set us in opposition to other men from whom we wrest their satisfaction. Those ways and this burden are proper to a