Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/286

 2/2 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The Genesis of Social Classes. A type is an ensemble of distinctive charac- ters. An aggregation of individuals of a certain type constitutes a "class." Heredity and environment are the factors in the formation of type and class.

Heredity is not a force ; it is a process. Continuity is its essential fact. The line of ancestral generation in every individual increases in accordance with the law of geometrical progression, and so a child of today has more than a thousand progenitors it we commence with the Pilgrim Fathers. Hence remote ancestors cannot materially have contributed to the mental and physical energy of any man, woman, and child now living. It can only have been heightened by exceptional vigor, or by isolation and inbreeding.

Heredity exercises a great influence. Although it is the primary factor in evo- lution, it is not necessarily the principal factor. It is a conservative influence and must be modified by environment to produce evolution at all. Circumstance or environ- ment is the other factor. Much that finds explanation as heredity may also be explained on the basis of being due to training and imitation in the domestic circle.

"No doubt there is something innate in every man, of which nothing can deprive him, which he cannot cultivate out of himself, and which external conditions and influ- ences can modify only in part. This is his original physical constitution, the limitations of which govern his limitations in mind and morals. Upon the persistency of the original physical type depends the persistency of his intellectual and ethical traits. His power of self-destruction is of course greater than his power of expansion. Yet the possibilities of impairment and growth, through the assimilation or non-assimi- lation of his personal experience, may almost be said to be practically infinite. We have all unnumbered facets, so to speak, by which we are enabled under favorable con- ditions to adhere to any of the corresponding facets of aggregate human life. Men are like blocks of marble, which are capable of being hewed into any one of unnum- bered shapes. Every bit of marble in the world if the piece is only large enough contains within itself in posse every statue that has been chiseled, or that might have been chiseled, in response to the sculptor's creative fancy."

Anthropological types are self-perpetuating by inheritance. They probably origi- nated in the separation of a segment of mankind by migration, and environment has accentuating the original differences. Inbreeding is the essential condition prec- edent to anthropological variation. "Social classes are not the result of inbreeding ; they are groups of types, the resemblance between which is largely accidental ; such resemblance is due rather to similar than to identical heredity and environment, and more to environment than to heredity."

The term social class is applicable to all groups of men and women who present in the aggregate and who repeat with more or less completeness an ensemble of distinctive characters. They may and may not be stigmata of degeneracy.

Degeneracy signifies a physical affection, an impairment of the cells of which the tissue of the body is composed. This affection of the cells is general and results in a lowered " physical tone." The mental and moral natures are affected sympathetically. The effect is to assimilate the victim to some special type of so-called degenerates paupers, lunatics, idiots, criminals in a word, incompetents who are also more or less anti-social.

The origin of social classes as here used is not biological. "The only biological subdivisions of the great human family are those of sex and race." "There may be hereditary and congenital members of special classes, but not all the members of any special class fall under that category.

Degeneracy perpetuates itsels by inheritance. It would thus accentuate into anthropological type if not interfered with. Interference comes either through being counteracted by intermarriage with a more healthy and vigorous stock or by extinction through enfeebled vitality or sterility. We must therefore not press biological analogy too far in the consideration of problems essentially sociological. FREDERICK HOWARD WINKS, Charities Review, April 1897.

The Process of Social Change. "Natural selection," "the survival of the fittest," and " the struggle for existence " are now applied to social phenomena with some vagueness. Natural selection operates as far as concerns the race elements of