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Our increasing consciousness of this distress is a most gratifying fact. Consciousness always involves power. The power to feel implies the power to act. Feeling was evolved as a guide to action; in nature’s wise administration there would have been no reason for giving conscious pain and pleasure to a creature which could neither avoid the one nor seek the other. The sensory nerves are developed in careful proportion to the motory: what feels can move, what moves can feel. This law is followed all the way up through physical evolution to social, and is just as true of the social body as of any other.

A comparatively inert primitive society reacts to injury or benefit as does a plant, but shows little evidence of pain or pleasure. Modern society, however, in proportion to its rapidly differentiating organism and its increase in swift, accurate, complex activity, manifests a corresponding increase in consciousness. We are now socially conscious to an acute degree; and this proves our equal ability to act, to avert injury, and seek benefit, not as individuals, but as a society.