ABSTRACT
SECOND LAW OF COMMUNAL DEVELOPMENT: THE CORRELATION OF SOCIALISA1'ION AND COMMUNAL ECONOMY
Outside society there is no economy and no question of economy. Economy is relative to purpose and intelligence, and can be established only in so far as purpose and intelligence are revealed. As purposive beings we seek ends, but as intelligent beings we seek them in the least wasteful manner-that is the mea.ning of intelligence. The lower the intelligence the smaller the economy, and the absence of intelligence is necessarily the absence of economy. Nearly all naturalists in these latter days have been struck by the seeming wastefulness of "nature," how "she" produces myriads of seed in every generation of Hfe for everyone that attains fruition, so that the total potentiality of life becomes infinitely greater than the amount conserved and made actual. A single plant or tree of almost any species produces so many fertile seeds that, did they all come to fruition, they would in a few generations cover the whole earth. In a few years of like unimpeded fruition the sea would become solid with fish, and the land would have only standing-room for its multitudes of animals. But this most profuse expenditure cannot be named waste. Waste is needless expenditure, expenditure without return or without the greatest possible return. Nature's expenditure is not superfluous, for only by the multiplication of chances is life conserved in a world in which intelligence has not eliminated chance. 1 The sum of expenditure is necessarily directed not to the development but to the multiplication of life. Whether we say that this very multiplication is itself the work of intelligence, certainly over the multiplied lives chance and not intelligence rules, and only in the multiplication of chances is chance defeated.
