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But so soon as any social relation was established, when our gains and losses were fused in collective action, this method of brain culture was no longer reliable. Once firmly established as a living species through the process of agriculture, the degree of intelligence necessary to the maintenance of this process was sufficient to sustain life, while the further development of intelligence rested on other activities less instantly important to the life process, and not so sharply brought home in personal consequences.

The individual hunter, if he failed to show the grade of ability necessary to supply his wants, promptly died of his own inferiority, but man, in social relation, is maintained by the collective effort, prospering or suffering with his society, and his pooling of abilities is so far-reaching and hopelessly intermixed that it is impossible to pick out the consequences of one man’s action and pile them neatly on his own head. Naturally, selection acts on the society rather than the man, and must needs act slowly and with an appearance of injustice. Incipient errors are not met by the sharp reproof of individual consequence, and wide ranges of eccentricity are possible, so that they do not touch those basic economic processes of society on which all our lives rest.