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56 The Human Cyclea clash of interests. The development of international law intoan effective force which will restrain the egoism of nations asthe social law restrains the egoism of individuals, is the solutionwhich still attracts and seems the most practicable to most whenthey seek to deal with the difficulties of the future. 1The growth of modern Science has meanwhile created newideas and tendencies, on one side an exaggerated individualismor rather vitalistic egoism, on the other the quite opposite idealof collectivism. Science investigating life discovered that the rootnature of all living is a struggle to take the best advantageof the environment for self-preservation, self-fulfilment, selfaggrandisement.Human thought seizing in its usual arbitraryand trenchant fashion upon this aspect of modern knowledgehas founded on it theories of a novel kind which erect intoa gospel the right for each to live his own life not merely byutilising others, but even at the expense of others. The firstobject of life in this view is for the individual to survive as longas he may, to become strong, efficient, powerful, to dominatehis environment and his fellows and to raise himself on thisstrenuous and egoistic line to his full stature of capacity andreap his full measure of enjoyment. Philosophies like Nietzsche’s,certain forms of Anarchism, — not the idealistic Anarchism ofthe thinker which is rather the old individualism of the idealreason carried to its logical conclusion, — certain forms too ofImperialism have been largely influenced and strengthened bythis type of ideas, though not actually created by them.On the other hand, Science investigating life has equallydiscovered that not only is the individual life best secured andmade efficient by association with others and subjection to a lawof communal self-development rather than by aggressive selfaffirmation,but that actually what Nature seeks to preserve isnot the individual but the type and that in her scale of values thepack, herd, hive or swarm takes precedence over the individual1 No longer perhaps now, except with a dwindling minority — now that the League ofNations, constantly misused or hampered from its true functioning by the egoism andinsincerity of its greater members, has collapsed into impotence and failure.