Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/412

 398 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

immaturity and with the increasing necessity of the co-operation of both parents in the care of the young, it becomes supremely significant for the social life. While it is a law that the higher we ascend in the animal scale, the less energy is devoted to mere physical reproduction, it is equally a law that the higher we ascend in the animal scale the more energy is devoted to the care and rearing of the offspring that are bom. The social results of the reproductive process become, therefore, increasingly rich, significant, and complex as we ascend in the scale of animal life. It is among the higher animals that the family as a form of association receives its highest development, and hitherto it has been among the most highly civilized peoples that the family as a human institution has been held in highest regard and most safeguarded in custom and in law.

It is not, therefore, too much to say that the social process is a function of the reproductive process quite as much as it is a function of the food-process; that the social order exists to safe- guard the birth and upbringing of each new generation quite as much as to assure an adequate supply of material goods to those already existing. Of course, these two phases of the social process are supplementary and should not be set in oppyosition to each other. They would not need to be distinguished, were there not some who talk as if the only function of the social life were to secure for all an adequate supply of material goods. Certain it is that all forms of social life, from the ants and bees to man, and in the human world from savage to civilized, have been determined from considerations of reproduction quite as much as from considerations of nutrition. The goal of social develop- ment is, therefore, quite as much control over the reproductive process as control over the food-process. The child is not only the center of the family life, but of the whole social system as well. The child's heredity, birth, care, and education are the supreme concern of church and state as well as of the home, and the sooner this is recognized the better.

If the general forces at work in the genesis of association or group life are now clear, it remains only to say a word about the social character of the individual mind; that is, how con-