Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/559

 SOCIAL GENESIS 545

which the citizens of frontier districts, in the absence of ade- quate governmental protection, deal with adventurers and des- peradoes who disturb the peace. Vigilance committees may be regarded as incipient spontaneous governments, without any motive of ambition or emolument. So far as mere protection from anti-social tendencies is concerned, they seem to prove that government would always originate itself spontaneously. How far it would go if these motives were permanently absent seems, then, to be the real question.

It is therefore clear that society would not only exist with- out other government than that which would originate spon- taneously from other causes than the desire to rule, but also that it would progress in some degree. This progress might be regarded as typically genetic, and the exclusive product of the normal action of the social forces directly modifying the environment in the interest of society.

I have stated this hypothetical case in order to draw the dis- tinction as clearly as possible between genetic progress and telic progress. So large a part of even past social progress has been telic that it is extremely difficult to separate the two. Still, from a certain point of view, nearly all the progress thus far attained may be regarded as genetic. In the sense of being the result of the normal action of natural laws all of it must be so regarded.

There is a sense, then, in which society makes itself, is a genetic product, and its progress takes place under the general law of evolution that prevails in all departments of natural phe- nomena. In organic development new principles are constantly coming in, but none of these exempts the resultant phenomena from the action of the law of evolution. That law applied to plants after each of the successive steps, sexuality, exogeny, phanerogamy, gymnospermy, angiospermy, apetaly, polypetaly, gamopetaly, insect agency, etc., had been taken, the same as before. In the animal kingdom it was not affected by the suc- cessive appearance of the several higher types of structure from moners to mammals and to man. Even the psychic faculty, the