Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/108

 94 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

, set up for themselves conscious ideals, esthetic, moral, intellectual, and pursue them till they are attained. They are therefore chiefly dynamic.

Here is perhaps the place to bring forward one of the most far-reaching laws in the domain of sociology, viz., that the rela- tive value of feeling and function is not a fixed but a variable quantity, and that throughout organic evolution this ratio increases in favor of the former. More precisely stated, the law is that while function is fixed, feeling increases somewhat in proportion to development. It would be easy to illustrate this in the lower orders of life where everything seems to be subor- dinated to function, and nature seems wholly indifferent to feel- ing. In biotic progress it is obvious that the capacity for both pleasure and pain increases with the advance in structure. The truth is exemplified even in cases of degeneration where the opposite obtains. But it is still more apparent in man, where the psychic and especially the intellectual element so largely enters in. All that was said in the fifth paper relative to the object of man and that of nature applies at this point. There has been a steady rise, as it were, in the price of life. The low- est savages value life at a very low figure and throw it away on the slightest provocation. The value put upon human life is one of the safest tests of true progress. The gradual abolition by the most advanced nations of the so-called code of honor is one among many of the signs of this advance. Even the dying out of the spirit of martyrdom, regarded by many as a mark of moral degeneracy, is, on the contrary, an assertion of the grow- ing value of life, and as such is a step forward.

But it is not life alone that is valued ; it is rather what life affords. The primitive man is not only indifferent to life, but he is also indifferent to pain, as witness the horrible mutilations to which savages so often voluntarily submit, as we are told, without manifesting the usual reflex movements which even the thought produces in us. Here, of course, comes in the principle of anticipation which I have discussed elsewhere. 1 The savage,

1 American Anthropologist, Vol. VIII. Washington, July 1895, p. 254.