Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/173

 ETHICS OF THE COMPETITIVE PROCESS I 59

dangerous work shall be performed. This legislative effort is also supplemented by the endeavors of school and church the one seeking so to develop the minds, the other so to stimulate and direct the motives and emotions of the members of the lower classes, that they may secure through their own efforts an ame- lioration and moralization of their life-conditions.

Even in those cases, however, in which the moralization of human efforts seems to necessitate a checking of the struggle for simple survival, a deeper insight discloses that in many instances this is not the case. Struggle for existence means nothing more than a striving for adaptation to environment. It is thus possible to show that, even upon a purely utilitarian basis, many of our most common altruistic acts are socially self- serving ; that, though they call for temporary sacrifices, they serve ultimately to excite emotions and to create habits which are socially beneficial. Thus, for example, Professor Dewey points out that in caring for the sick and helpless

we develop habits of foresight and forethought, powers of looking before and after, tendencies to husband our means, which ultimately make us the most skillful in warfare. We foster habits of group-loyalty, feelings of solidarity, which bind us together by such close ties that no social group which has not cultivated like feelings, through caring for all its members, will be able to understand us. In a word, such conduct would pay in the struggle for exist- ence as well as be morally commendable. 1

Finally, upon this point, it is to be observed, as exhibiting from still another standpoint the essential similarity between social and animal methods of development, that these so-called altruistic elements which characterize human civilization are by no means absent from the sub-human world. Not to speak of that dependence of offspring upon parent which exists among almost, if not, all orders of life, there is, at least among the members of the higher animal species, an interdependence that often implies self-sacrifice, and leads to substantial cooperation. It may be that such actions are not due to conscious ethical motives, but they result at any rate in de facto altruism and cooperation. As Mr. Leslie Stephen has said :

l Loc. cit.