Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IX THE GROWTH OF POPULATION Mass as a Factor in Social Evolution. — Mass is a factor in the survival of a social group. Other things being equal, that group will stand the best chance of surviving which has the greatest numbers. In a large and growing population also, competition will be keener, selection more stringent, and hence the level of efficiency will tend to rise. " Civilization is a function of numbers and of the contact of numbers," as Professor Keller says, however, not so much because of the two facts just mentioned, as because of the fact that the larger the mass of a given group the greater can be the industrial and cultural division of labor. This means higher, more complex social cooperation and so greater progress in industry and in civilization. With the proper organization and division of labor of large numbers the mastery over nature becomes easier. For this reason the higher types of industry and of civilization have depended upon the growth of numbers as one important factor. As we pass from savagery to civilization we find population constantly increasing. The lowest savage hordes have scarcely ever more than forty or fifty individuals, while not until high civilization is reached do we find nations numbering many millions. There is thusan intimate connection between numbers and a high state of civilization. Perhaps the chief reason for this is that the human mind gets practically all of its development through contact with other minds, and hence the multiplication of mental contacts is favorable to both mental and cultural development. Provided there is relatively free intercommunication maintained between individuals, mental interstimulation can be immensely more rich, varied, and intense in a large population than in a small one. The nu...