Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/725

 MOTES AND ABSTRACTS Jll

haps done a little more cautiously than formerly ; but it is a question whether we have yet, for purposes of social study, exhausted the significance of the "selective slaughter." The selective process has been altered and modified, but it is nevertheless still opera- tive. The lower we get in the social scale, the more pitilessly do we find it operating, as is shown by the high rate of mortality and the short duration of life among the submerged tenth. The "unfit" do perish from inadequate food, shelter, and care. The physical struggle has merely been replaced by one of wits. The Malthusian principle cannot be put aside by sentimental talk of God not making men without providing for them. The bearing of the selective principle is :

First, it precludes all optimistic anticipations for the future of society. Calm study of history forbids the hope of the millennium's coming right away. We can at best only hope that the substitution of a struggle for domination for that of the strug- gle for existence may lessen the virulence and bitterness of the struggle.

Secondly, the selective principle, on the other hand, in its persistence in society sanctions no fatalistic attitude towards social betterment. In the domain of social life there is no rigid boundary between the cosmic process and the ethical process, between the cut-throat struggle for existence and the elevated struggle for domina- tion, between the natural body and the spiritual body, between the flesh and the spirit.

We may hope to push back the barbaric struggle for existence, but it can never be utterly eliminated. The spectacle of magazined grain beside starving thousands may stir one's indignation ; but if the burst of feeling cause us to lay aside the dis- tinction between the property rights of the prudent, industrious citizen for the benefit of the idle, improvident man, then so much the worse for the idle and improvident in the long run, as well as for society as a whole. It is best for all that the control of property be left with those who have shown themselves best able to control it, by getting it in the competitive struggle. Nations no more than individuals can afford to neglect this law. It may be best that the American nation should intervene in the Cuban war, but we should not let sentiment urge us on if reason and facts show that such intervention is contrary to this principle. So long as force settles things in this world, this principle cannot be safely ignored for mere ideals. WINTHROP MORE DANIELS, International Journal of Ethics, January, 1898.

The Ultimate Law of Social Evolution. To discover the fundamental law of life and society is the highest problem of sociology. I affirm that this law is adapta- tion, but I mean a process much more complicated than is generally understood by biologists and sociologists. In the book, Le Basi del Diritto e dello Stato, I have unfolded my theory, which explains better than any other the facts of human society. 1 compare here my theory with others: (i) Lamarck perceived the two chief factors in adaptation, the influence of surroundings as cause of modifications, and the trans- mission by heredity of modifications. He overlooked a third factor, natural selection. (2) Darwin believed natural selection to be the only one. The true theory includes both these processes, the direct and the indirect, Lamarckism and Darwinism. Besides, Darwinian sociologists have overlooked such other factors as the degenerat- ing process, important in social evolution since, in the struggle for life among men, the vanquished are not exterminated, but spared by the victors, who try to make use of them and to live at their expense. So an artificial selection has been at work. (3) I accept the Spencerian formula of evolution, but it expresses only the external fact of becoming, never the specific cause by which things become. Spencer fell into a grave error in supposing that the nature of groups must be that of their individual elements. Again, forgetting that mechanical and biological processes cannot guide us in the richer and more complex social processes, Spencer, instead of studying directly human groups, affirms that society is an entity with phenomena of growth, structure, and function analogous' to those of an animal, and that, therefore, the latter are the key to the former, lie confuses human organizations with biological organisms. (4) Comte starts from mankind, not, like Spencer, from the individual, but makes the mistake of considering mankind as a single man who lives and learns continually. Hence Comte sees but one side of tbejmmense social process. But history and observation