Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/534

522 raises it to higher and higher planes. This slow secular method of socializing the members of society belongs, therefore, to a different department of sociology, and lies outside of the field marked off for investigation.

Were not all our thinking vitiated by the exigences of the disciplinary system itself, it would not be necessary to clear the way for a study of social control by showing the need of it. Any straight, unhampered thinking, even that of an observant child, leads to the conclusion that there is a conflict between the aims of a man and the interests of his fellows, i. e., of his social group. This is not to allege that man is by nature wholly egoistic, or that the keen pleasures and pangs felt on beholding the experiences of others, are illusory or merely the vestiges of past associations of ideas. Biology has barred the attempt to dissolve the phenomena of sympathy into self-seeking, by showing that the law of preservation of offspring is as firmly rooted in organic life as the law of self-preservation. The wonders wrought by a selective process working on variations, quite prepares us to expect unselfishness as soon as the reproductive process reaches a certain stage of development; and, in the light of facts collected by many workers, it is no longer difficult to trace the slender stem of altruism, rising from the lower levels of mammalian life, side by side with the thicker and tougher trunk of egoism. Again it is certain that the visible destruction of passionate, turbulent or predatory men, whether by collision with other men, or by conflict with the agents of society, occurring through scores of generations, compels us to look for a slow adaptation of men's natures to the requirements of healthful associated life. To doubt it is to deny that selection selects. On the other hand it is inconceivable that in so short a time a rather languid improving process, operating by rejection of the few worst rather than by selection of the few best, should have already carried our race across the interval that lies between the seething, explosive passions of the solitary man, and the self-devotion, needed for harmonious communal life. This, moreover, when the tenderest and gentlest have likewise