I have already urged, when considering the conditions of political reasoning, that many of the logical difficulties arising from our tendency to divide the infinite stream of our thoughts and sensations into homogeneous classes and species are now unnecessary and have been avoided in our time by the students of the natural sciences.  Just as the modern artist substitutes without mental confusion his ever-varying curves and surfaces for the straight and simple lines of the savage, so the scientific imagination has learnt to deal with the varying facts of nature without thinking of them as separate groups, each composed of identical individuals and represented to us by a single type.

Can we learn so to think of the varying individuals of the whole human race?  Can we do, that is to say, what Mazzini declared to be impossible?  And if we can, shall we be able to love the fifteen hundred million different human beings of whom we are thus enabled to think?

To the first question the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 offered an answer.  Since then we have in fact been able to represent the human race to our imagination, neither as a chaos of arbitrarily varying individuals, nor as a mosaic of homogeneous nations, but as a biological group, every individual in which differs from every other not arbitrarily but according to an intelligible process of organic evolution.[113] And, since that which exists for the imagination can exist also for the emotions, it might have been hoped that the second question would also have been answered by evolution, and that the warring egoisms of nations and empires might henceforth have been dissolved by love for that infinitely varying multitude whom we can watch as they work their way through so much pain and confusion towards a more harmonious relation to the universe.

[113] Sir Sydney Olivier, e.g. in his courageous and penetrating book White Capital and Coloured Labour considers (in chap. ii.) the racial distinctions between black and white from the point of view of evolution.  This consideration brings him at once to ’the infinite, inexhaustible distinctness of personality between individuals, so much a fundamental fact of life that one almost would say that the amalgamating race-characteristics are merely incrustations concealing this sparkling variety’ (pp. 12, 13).

But it was the intellectual tragedy of the nineteenth century that the discovery of organic evolution, instead of stimulating such a general love of humanity, seemed at first to show that it was for ever impossible.  Progress, it appeared, had been always due to a ruthless struggle for life, which must still continue unless progress was to cease.  Pity and love would turn the edge of the struggle, and therefore would lead inevitably to the degeneration of the species.