Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/731

 INDIVIDUAL TELESIS 715

everywhere found to lie athwart the path of human progress, and the whole upward struggle of rational man, whether physically, socially, or morally, has been with this tyrant of nature, the law of competition. And in so far as he has progressed at all he has done so by gaining, little by little, the mas- tery in this struggle. In the physical world he has accomplished this through invention from which have resulted the arts. Every utensil of labor, every mechanical device, every object of design, and every artificial form that serves a human purpose, is a triumph of mind over the physical forces of nature in ceaseless and aimless competition. In the social world it is human institutions religion, government, law, marriage, customs that have been thought out and adopted to restrain the unbridled individualism that has always menaced society. And finally, the ethical code and the moral law are simply the means employed by reason, intelligence, and refined sensibility to suppress and crush out the animal nature of man. '

Such has been the influence that the telic faculty of man has exerted in all the great domains of nature, and the general result is what I understand by telic progress. The reason is there- fore clear why it is necessary to insist that sociology shall from the outset recognize man as a rational being endowed with this faculty which he has exercised from the first and continues to exercise more and more. Thus far, however, it is only the employment of this faculty by the individual that has been con- sidered. This has sufficed to subject the law of nature to the law of mind only for the individual. It has not done this for society at large. Society remains a prey to the law of nature, i. e. t to the competitive regime that prevails throughout the animal kingdom. The struggle has simply been raised to a higher plane to go on as fiercely as before. This, as we saw, does not secure the survival of the fittest except in the narrow sense of best adaptation to an adverse environment, which often, as in parasitism, involves degeneracy. The power to expand always exists but is checked by competition. Individual telesis acting upon inferior organisms removes the competition, and these expansive powers immediately assert themselves, produ-

1 "The Psychologic Basis of Social Economics." Address of the Vice President for the Section of Economic Science and Statistics of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, at the Rochester meeting, August 1892. Proc. A. A. A. S., Vol. XLI, Salem, 1892, pp. 308-312.