PART III

RESUMÉ AND CONCLUSIONS

WHEN an institution or an organ ceases to be functional or in any way useful, it very soon disappears altogether. If, as happens in some exceptional cases, it persists, it is because neither of the chief factors in causing atrophy, variability or selection, have intervened.

Sometimes the vestiges are of too insignificant a nature to call for their removal by either artificial or natural selection, and sometimes their existence is ensured by the lack of variability, as in the case of the persistence of flowers in plants which multiply asexually. This absence of variation occurs equally in the social domain, especially in matters connected with religion, wherein ancient customs are credited with a divine origin. Religions may pass away, philosophies may be transformed, and old beliefs cease to prevail, but the remnants of old creeds, conveyed by popular tradition through the centuries, defy destruction by modern innovations.

The ancient winter festival, on which day the

dead were supposed to leave their graves and join the living in a feast around the family hearth, is still celebrated in the keeping of Christmas and in the various customary practices on the first two days of November.

The May-Day festivals-pagan festivals held in honour of vegetable and human fecundity-are still held in their early form round about Locmariaquer and in the village of Campine. Traces also remain in the picking and wearing of flowers on the 1st of May, and the same day is selected by the socialists for the celebration of their near approach to a life under freer and happier conditions.

This survival of festivals, customs and traditions, while the religions and civilizations which produced them have passed away, is the principal link which connects us with bygone generations.

"Their value lies," says Houzeau in his Étude de la Nature," in the establishment of a chain between successive generations. The memory of an individual may be regarded as constituting his personality. Take from him the memory of his past, and he is left at a point in time wherein there is no stability and complete isolation. To be himself, a man requires not only his recollections, but a knowledge of his past habits and traditions. When a savage is removed from his fellows and transported to new surroundings in a distant country, he loses all knowledge of his former condition. Society itself, made up as it

is of customs and prejudices, constitutes history. The mirror of the past is exhibited in the consciousness of the collective individual which is called a nation. What link shall we have with former generations if not a heritage of their ideas-i.e. of their discoveries and their mistakes? Nations, like individuals, are continually modifying this inherited legacy, but, like the individual, they cannot get away from it without breaking the thread which has made them themselves."

GENERAL CONCLUSIONS

I

All evolution is at once progressive and retrogressive.

All modifications of organs and institutions are attended by retrogression. This occurs equally in the modifications of organisms and of societies. All existing forms, whether organic or social, have undergone certain modifications, and, as a result, have lost some parts of their structure. This universality of degenerative evolution may be proved either by the comparative method, or by showing that all organisms contain rudimentary organs, and that all societies contain survivals.

II

Degenerative evolution follows no definite path, and can in no way be regarded as constituting a return to the primitive condition.

In some cases-when one cause of dissolution equally and simultaneously affects all the parts of an institution or an organism-the most complicated and delicate structures are the first to disappear; but it must not be taken as a general principle that the most complicated structures are necessarily

the most recent, and that consequently degeneration always retraces the path of progress. Evolution is irreversible, and accordingly, with a few more or less obvious exceptions, we draw the following conclusions:

1. That an institution or an organ which has once disappeared never reappears.

2. That an institution or organ once reduced to the condition of a vestige cannot be

re-established and resume its former functions.

3. Neither can they assume fresh functions.

III

Degenerative evolution is brought about by a limitation in means of subsistence - either in nutriment, capital or labour. In biology the principal if not the sole agents in its accomplishment are the struggle for existence between the various organs, and the struggle for existence between the various organisms.

In sociology it is artificial selection which is the dominating agent, and natural selection plays only a secondary part.

The occasional causes of degenerative evolution are inutility of function, insufficiency of nutriment or resource, and (in biology only) lack of space.