Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/670

650 such as the cutting of the Suez canal, social facts; yet both undoubtedly deserve recognition in a philosophical statement of all the determining conditions in these two branches of knowledge.

The sort of conditions which I mean by the phrase "extra-social" will appear from the enumeration below. It does not claim to be complete, however. Their full discussion does not come within our province, seeing that they are extra-psychological.

1. Group-selection (described above. Sec. 120). — In group-selection we have a condition of enormous importance in the development of social aggregations, especially in the instinctive and spontaneous periods ; that is, of so-called "companies." It holds, however, for all societies when the conditions are such that groups as groups come into competition. Not only real war, but commercial and social wars of all kinds, illustrate group-selection. The working of the principle is strictly analogous, indeed identical, with that of natural selection in biology, an analogy excellently worked out by Bagehot in his remarkable work, Physics and Politics. It is one of the foundation stones also of S. Alexander's work. Moral Order and Progress. Bagehot acutely recognizes the distinction, without explicitly drawing it, between group-selection as a condition of evolution in the earlier stages of human aggregation and the operation of the real social force of "discussion" (described above under the heading "generalization") in the higher forms. It is, moreover, an additional proof that group-selection is a condition, and not a social force, that there is this difference between the lower and the higher ; for the lower are determined, as we have seen, very largely by biological principles, such as instinct and physical heredity, and do not involve the social progress which the operation of the psychological forces brings in later on. Yet it is just there that group-selection is all-important.