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Gross mistakes in agriculture would be soon punished by the extinction of the mistaken society, or errors in mechanics, in navigation, in any part of our work which deals with the primal necessities of life, but errors in astronomy, in religion, or education do not result in such immediate destruction.

Thus the human intellect on the lower stages shows a certain solid average ability, built up by natural selection acting on societies as it acts on individuals, but the human intellect in its higher grades is painfully irregular and defective, making our higher social manifestations as questionable, uncertain, and often mischievous as our lower ones are clearly good.

Man has stayed alive because he knew enough to plough and sow, to kill wolves and steer a ship, but in later social development he has been as open to destruction as any poor beast below him. In the long lesson of history we may see him again and again killed down to the level of his intelligence. Nations have been conquered, civilisations destroyed, kings decapitated, but the peasant survived.