Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/542

 528 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

I long ago pointed out that reason often works at cross pur- poses with natural law, and may have brought about the extinc- tion of races. 1 This, however, related to the effect of error, which only a rational being can commit, and the remedy lies in the discovery of truth and the diffusion of knowledge. This stage is probably past by the leading races of the world. But there is another way in which reason may conflict with law, and this is the case before us. There is a great dualism in the organic world. There are two wholly independent forces at work which may cooperate, or may follow parallel lines without affecting each other, or may conflict in any and all degrees. The only check upon this last is the fact that direct conflict, if sufficiently prolonged, leads to extinction, and only such races have survived as have avoided such conflict, at least to the extent of maintaining their existence.

These two forces are the ones which I have on numerous occasions described as those, on the one hand, which secure the performance of function, and those, on the other, that proceed from feeling. The first are normal, and constitute the primary law of evolution as it operates in the organic world. The second are supra-normal, and constitute an entirely new depar- ture from that primary law. They are, so to speak, wholly incidental and unintended, not having been, as it were, contem- plated by nature when the psychic element was introduced. That element was developed for a totally different purpose, viz., as already stated, in order to enable a certain class of evolution- ary products to exist which could not have existed without it, to wit : plastic organisms. These must possess some means of escaping destructive tendencies and of replenishing organic waste through metabolism of their substance. The only such means that we can conceive of is feeling, i. e., sensitiveness to pain and capacity for pleasure. In order to secure the end these subjective states must constitute the motives to all the so-called spontaneous activity of this class of beings. As a matter of fact, they do constitute such motives. Their normal operation secures the ends of nature in a most admirable manner, and this

1 Dynamic Sociology, Vol. II, pp. 270, 287.