community on all these points. Were the strangers to bring with them
telescopes, looking through which it might at once clearly be seen that an
eclipse of the sun was caused merely by the moon's passing over its face,
the more intelligent members of the community would at once come to the
conclusion that the insect was not the cause of eclipses, would cease to
regard it as a god, and might even kill it; the more stupid and immobile
section of the community might refuse to look through the telescope, or
looking might refuse to see that it was the moon which caused the eclipse,
and their deep-seated reverence for the insect, which was the growth of
ages, would lead them to regard as impious those individuals who denied its
godhead, and might even lead to the physical destruction of the first
unbelievers. The society, once so homogeneous and co-ordinated in all its
parts, would become at once a society rent by moral and social problems;
and endless suffering must arise to individuals in the attempt to co-
ordinate the ideals, manners, and institutions of the society to the new
conditions! There might be immense gain in many directions; lives
otherwise sacrificed would be spared, a higher and more satisfactory stage
of existence might be entered on; but the disco-ordination and struggle
would be inevitable until the society had established an equilibrium
between its knowledge, its material conditions, and its social, sexual, and
religious ideals and institutions.

An analogous condition, but of a far more complex kind, exists at the
present day in our own societies. Our material environment differs in
every respect from that of our grandparents, and bears little or no
resemblance to that of a few centuries ago. Here and there, even in our
civilised societies in remote agricultural districts, the old social
conditions may remain partly undisturbed; but throughout the bulk of our
societies the substitution of mechanical for hand-labour, the wide
diffusion of knowledge through the always increasing cheap printing-press;