Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/715

 INDIVIDUAL TELESIS. CONTRIBUTIONS TO SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY. XI.

THE kind of social progress described in the last paper as Social Genesis constitutes the greater part of what has hereto- fore been recognized as having taken place. Man has been looked upon as a product of nature and as having developed like other such products. Society has been contemplated as an evolution, which term is restricted in its scope to the products of natural forces acting under the various laws which have been discovered to be in operation throughout the universe. Mr. Herbert Spencer has formulated those laws more fully than any other writer for both cosmic and organic evolution.

This point of view may be regarded as a purely objective one in the sense that the products of evolution are conceived as the passive recipients of the impulses that have combined to form them, and as not themselves taking any part in the proc- ess. This view is not meant to exclude internal reactions to external stimuli, which are essential to any correct idea of evo- lution. It does not even exclude the efforts which creatures put forth in seeking satisfaction, which is believed by Lamarck- ians to constitute the largest factor. All this belongs to genetic progress or evolution proper. I am, I believe, the only one who has attempted to show from a biologic, or rather a psychologic standpoint, that in restricting social progress to these passive influences an important factor has been left out of view. This factor, I maintain, is a subjective one not found at any lower stage of development, and exclusively characterizing human or social progress. It was chiefly to emphasize this factor that Dynamic Sociology was written, and the second volume of that work is devoted to this task. But although the first volume was limited to setting forth the nature of the already recognized objective, passive, or negative kind of social progress as defiiu -l

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