carried on in contact with a
relatively simple and invariable material environment. When the habits
superinduced by the emulative method of life have ceased to enjoy the
section of existing economic exigencies, a process of disintegration
sets in whereby the habits of thought of more recent growth and of a
less generic character to some extent yield the ground before the more
ancient and more pervading spiritual characteristics of the race.

In a sense, then, the new-woman movement marks a reversion to a more
generic type of human character, or to a less differentiated
expression of human nature. It is a type of human nature which is to be
characterized as proto-anthropoid, and, as regards the substance if not
the form of its dominant traits, it belongs to a cultural stage that may
be classed as possibly sub-human. The particular movement or evolutional
feature in question of course shares this characterization with the rest
of the later social development, in so far as this social development
shows evidence of a reversion to the spiritual attitude that
characterizes the earlier, undifferentiated stage of economic
revolution. Such evidence of a general tendency to reversion from the
dominance of the invidious interest is not entirely wanting, although it
is neither plentiful nor unquestionably convincing. The general decay
of the sense of status in modern industrial communities goes some way as
evidence in this direction; and the perceptible return to a disapproval
of futility in human life, and a disapproval of such activities as serve
only the individual gain at the cost of the collectivity or at the
cost of other social groups, is evidence to a like effect. There is a
perceptible tendency to deprecate the infliction of pain, as well as to
discredit all marauding enterprises, even where these expressions of the
invidious interest do not tangibly work to the material detriment of
the community or of the individual who passes an opinion on them. It
may even be said that in the modern industrial communities the average,
dispassionate sense of men says that the ideal character is a character
which makes for peace, good-will, and economic efficiency, rather than
for a life of self-seeking, force, fraud, and mastery.

The influence of the leisure class is not consistently for or against
the rehabilitation of this proto-anthropoid human nature. So far
as concerns the chance of survival of individuals endowed with an
excepti