Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/532

520 in the afternoon, rather than the forenoon, aims to coordinate certain activities, but the rule that in social intercourse one should avoid all topics that may wound the feelings of listeners aims to control them. As social life grows more complicated, it is of increasing importance that each shall know what to expect of others and what others expect of him. But the conventions aiming to secure happy adjustment of essentially harmonious actions and hence needing no sanction, though phrased in the form of laws and scattered through the codes of society, are utterly different from the regulative portions dealing with incompatible aims and actions.

Not all the social feelings have arisen in consequence of Social Ascendency. The modern man and woman receives a fund of altruism, coming down from the relation of male and female, mother and offspring. Though developed by and for the sake of the family, it constitutes an emotional capital, helpful in smoothing the way for the beginning of the social stage. Besides the pre-social inroads or primitive egoism the many centuries of life in society have achieved a certain fitness of men for the social state. Not only has inter-society conflict extirpated the ill-compacted hordes and led to the survival of the best knit groups, but even within the groups perpetual elimination of the anti-social has sifted out the incorrigible stocks and permitted latter-day populations to be more and more made up of men whose desires admit of being bent into some kind of conformity to the conditions of group life.

A person, therefore, enters the vast social organizations of today with an inherited fitness of feeling, partly owing to the fact that for generations his forebears have been strained through ever finer meshes of legal and moral requirement, and partly owing to a familial selection, dating far back into the pre-social stage, but continuing with scarcely impaired efficacy down to the present time. The efficiency of the social system, into which the individual thus endowed is born, is tested by its power to shape him, far more thoroughly than his heredity has shaped him, to life in society, by its power to build on the foundation